Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  What was the use of a girl…who could play the piano most brilliantly, who could speak French, German, Italian, or even Chinese (laughter)… but could not cook a mutton chop…Very many of the great and good men that had lived, and almost every one of the great women that had lived—he did not know that there were very many great women (renewed laughter)—owed a large part of their success in life…to lessons inculcated in their father’s house and at a mother’s knee…

  —Mr. Richardson Rae,

  a member of the Westland Education Board

  Forty years later, Ridge’s depiction of the female students in this milieu is particularly telling:

  Little girls sit there

  dressed in white

  and the dolls in their arms

  all have white handkerchiefs over their faces.

  Their shadows cannot play with them…

  their shadows lie down at their feet…

  for the little girls sit stiff as stones

  with their backs to the mouth of the cave

  where a little light falls off

  the wings of the silence

  when it comes down out of the sun. (Sun-up 24-25)

  Ridge’s education as a radical began early. When she was 10, politician Richard Seddon (1845-1906) announced to Parliament: “It is the rich and the poor; it is the wealthy and the landowners against the middle and labouring classes. That, Sir, shows the real political position of New Zealand.” By the time she was 20, Seddon was premier of the country and ruled for the next 13 years. He got his start in Hokitika, where a statue of the youthful “King Dick” still stands in front of the town’s government buildings. A populist without any tie to an ideology that would check his freedom or that of the miners, he was a kind of anarchist-without-portfolio, only “partially civilised.” His class-war approach appealed to the Irish and Scotch pioneers who had left countries where the wealthy controlled both the land and the capital. In the goldmines of the West Coast, theoretically at least, everyone was equal and anybody with a pick and a shovel could get rich. “There’s no masters here to oppress a poor devil/But out in New Zealand we’re all on the level” went the popular mining song, “London and The Digging.”

  Throughout Ridge’s twenties, whole platforms of leftist politics were debated and passed. Seddon approved legislation for old age pensions, minimum wage, and a system for settling trade union disputes, making New Zealand at the forefront of workers’ rights. Americans praised his work and proclaimed the country as an idyll of social progress. “American reformers…held up the Australiasian colonies as examples of what the United States could become if only it had the wit and the will to work along similar legislative lines,” writes historian Peter J. Coleman. Seddon did not, however, support women’s suffrage, although women had been clamoring for it for decades, and he had six daughters of his own. Like his friends in the liquor trade, he was afraid that women would vote in Prohibition. In 1893, suffrage supporters in Parliament wore white camellias in their buttonholes while Kate Sheppard (1847-1934), head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, presented the signatures of nearly a quarter of the female population, some 32,000 New Zealanders. She pasted the sheets together and rolled the petition onto a broom handle and, with great drama, had it unrolled through the center of Parliament “until it hit the end wall with a thud.” Feeling cornered, Seddon ordered a Liberal Party member to change his vote to defeat the issue. His meddling so annoyed two other members that they reversed their vote. The issue passed, making New Zealand the first country in the world to allow women the vote.

  Over the mountains in Christchurch, librarian Wilhemina Bain hosted the first meeting of the National Council of Women of New Zealand in 1896. The council demanded legal equality for men and women in marriage and employment, and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1869, which required medical inspection of those women suspected of being “common prostitutes,” but not men. It also called for women to be elected to Parliament, and appointed to the police and to juries, free and longer education for children, and better care and training of those orphaned or neglected, universal old age pensions, prison reform, and the abolition of capital punishment.

  With such a heady heritage, Ridge’s exposure to these progressive measures must have encouraged an innate belief that she could control her own destiny, and that others deserved that power too. Her first published poem, “On Zelanda,” appearing in The Canterbury Times when she was just 18, reflected a serious interest in social justice.

  Her sons shall toil at that furnace,

  Where the fuel is thoughts and deeds,

  And follow the heroes of ages,

  Where the light of their glory leads.

  Injustice shall fall by the sword of the brave.

  With the fetters of class in an honourless grave;

  O’er the ruins, let Freedom and Brotherhood wave—

  On Zelanda!

  At the time of its publication, newspapers on New Zealand’s West Coast—and most of the rest of the world—carried poems side by side with national and international news. Sometimes the poems were just filler, but often they reflected the concerns of the readership, many of whom were questioning the worker’s wage and his working conditions and the nascent nationalism echoed in Ridge’s poem. The country would soon “assert itself in the political sphere”—New Zealand declining to join Australia in 1901—and writers were hoping to incite “a dawning of national pride.” Pember Reeves, Parliament member and occasional poet, author of The Long White Cloud (1898), the country’s first history, was part of that movement. “No art?” he wrote. “Who serve an art more great/Than we, rough architects of State.” Much of Ridge’s poetry of that period reflected these debates, as did her efforts as an editor decades later to find the true voice of the American people. When the nationalistic New Zealand Illustrated was founded in 1899, proclaiming a mission of “the Encouragement of the best Literary and Artistic Talent which we have in our midst,” it began featuring Ridge’s poems just three years later. In 1940, critic E.H. McCormick assessed the literary efforts of the new nation in his Letters and Art in New Zealand: “In all the work of the ‘Young New Zealanders’…there are signs of prematurity, as of people urgently striving to say something but without adequate means of self-expression.” This would best sum up Ridge’s earliest poems.

  By 1894 miners who stayed late at the Hokitika gold fields had become despondent. Decades spent searching for gold in the rock, and where was the wealth? The physical hardships of mining and its terrible disappointments—and drink—broke many of them. Ridge’s stepfather was driven mad, diagnosed with mania, and admitted to Hokitika’s Seaview Mental Hospital on December 4, 1894.

  He glanced up at me, shrewd blue glance of blue very blue, ever-ready-to-be-angry-eyes[sic]. An irascible look as of a small angry thing erecting itself before the door of its covert—of the snug hole it has industriously hollowed for itself and that it is prepared to defend at whatever cost…

  Although Ridge seemed to have felt an affection for MacFarlane, her home life must have been bleak during the many years before he was admitted. Her mother may have exacerbated the tension, if Ridge’s own uncompromising tendencies with regard to men later are any indication. Ridge reframed her stepfather’s breakdown to her own ends, publishing “The Insane” 13 years later. The poem conflates his situation with the poet’s, suggesting that the only true freedom is in the insane asylum.

  Oh! we are the merry and glad men,

  Ye crazed, irresponsible things,

  Who brand us and bind us as madmen,

  And pose as our rulers and kings.

  Ye—wandering blind through the ages,

  And dazed with your schisms and schools—

  Know we are the wise men and sages,

  And ye are the children and fools.

  New Zealand doctors believed then that the best therapy for insanity was good food, rest, tending the kitchen gardens, and recreation. The Seaview
Asylum shared grounds with the Westland Hospital and the Hokitika jail, all with a fabulous view of the ocean and “a never failing supply of ozone from the sea,” according to an interview with Superintendent Mr. Downey in 1906. The asylum also had chess tables and a billiards room, a large theater, and dances every two weeks with music from instruments played by the staff. A tennis court remains on what’s left of the grounds, and only one of its villas still has a cage bolted to it for unruly patients. The treatment was a far cry from what New Zealand novelist Janet Frame endured some 50 years later, when she was saved from a lobotomy only after a hospital official noticed she had received a literary prize. MacFarlane, on leave from the asylum in 1895, somehow fell 50 feet over a cliff. Emma signed a paper saying he was suicidal, and he was readmitted. Six years later, Emma reported that he was still contemplating suicide if released.

  By the end of 1895, Emma and her daughter had moved to Hokitika, a big step up from living in the bush, and Ridge married Peter Webster (1870-1946) in the family home. The marriage certificate shows “painter” as her occupation, which could have been a point of pride for Webster—but it should have been a warning as to his wife’s priorities. Three years older than Ridge, Webster was a handsome young man in his Cyclopedia of New Zealand photo, which shows off his high forehead, dark hair, thick mustache, slight dimple and large ears. He had money because the Cyclopedia, a six-volume series of books aiming to “place on record plain facts regarding the settlement and progress of the Colony,” charged for its entries. A pioneer in the Kanieri area when he was still in his teens, he worked the same goldfield as Ridge’s stepfather. Ridge was gambling on the luck her mother had hoped for: at their marriage Peter owned a share of a mine, and his father owned a nearby pub. Her dreams were not unjustified. In ten years, “precious rubies [were] found in the drift…at Kanieri Forks,” and the largest chunk of gold ever discovered in New Zealand would be unearthed only 23 miles away. The newlyweds moved back to Kanieri Forks closer to his stake. At least the Forks was no longer a tent town. Its 46 souls had one store/post office that also housed visitors, but it was without regular coach service, with mail only on Mondays and Fridays, delivered by a postman who walked a four-day trail. For Ridge, claustrophobia descended.

  Radiant notes

  piercing my narrow-chested room,

  beating down through my ceiling—

  smeared with unshapen

  belly-prints of dreams

  drifted out of old smokes—

  trillions of icily

  peltering notes

  out of just one canary,

  all grown to song

  as a plant to its stalk,

  from too long craning at a sky-light

  and a square of second-hand blue.

  Silvery-strident throat—

  so assiduously serenading my brain,

  flinching under

  the glittering hail of your notes—

  were you not safe behind…rats know what thickness of…plastered wall…

  I might fathom

  your golden delirium

  with throttle of finger and thumb

  shutting valve of bright song. (Sun-up 47)

  The town of Kanieri is pronounced “canary,” ostensibly because the neighboring bush once harbored a large number of yellow birds. If this excerpt refers to Ridge’s response to life in Kanieri, her rage is palpable. The canary is throttled, its song extinguished. Or is it the canary that warns miners of imminent danger? The Hokitika Library or the local literary society would very likely have had a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft insists that women must be more than pretty canaries. A copy of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda would have shown a mother who marries twice for money, both times unhappily—like Ridge’s mother—and a stepchild who strangles her sister’s canary when it interrupts her training for a career in music. For Ridge, the strangling is a kind of self-extinguishing too, since the poet is doing the singing as well as the bird. It has even more autobiographical import with the fork of Kanieri Forks inserted in the lines immediately after: “But if…away off…on a fork of grassed earth…/Somewhere…away off…” Further on, Ridge posits that this far-off place is where a canary could “bloom” out of a cactus, a rather surreal, desperate miracle. “Cactus…why cactus?” she herself asks.

  Claustrophobia-thick bush surrounds the Cyclopedia’s photo of Peter Webster’s sluicing claim. Inside this bush the photo shows a hole, and inside the hole sits a hut. A hose is positioned beside the hut, shooting jets of water “strong enough to kill a person” aimed at the gravel face, washing whatever gold-bearing gravel down through sluice boxes not included in the picture. Dynamiting from hard-rock mining shook the area at regular intervals. Smoke from the steam-powered engines of the mining apparatus lay thick to the ground on cold days, and wherever the lumber had been cleared or burned for power all that was left was the desolate vision of tree stumps.

  Like lepers, sad, forsaken

  Of their kind,

  The pine trees’ naked trunks

  Arise, & from the stagnant

  Swamp behind,

  Bereft and bare of branches,

  Reach up their withered stumps. (Verses 63)

  A buggy ride from the Websters’ new home lies Lake Kanieri, an Ansel Adams-beautiful platter of water surrounded by the snow-capped mountains of the Southern Alps. In a period photo, visitors to the lake sit stiffly in their Victoriana: clothing buttoned to the neck and wrists and ankles, the women bound at all entrances except the bloom of the skirt. The photo’s sepia has faded, the faces are indistinguishable, blending into the color of the world around them: mud. One of the wettest places on earth, Hokitika and its environs receive more than 100 inches of rain a year. When the New Zealand Alps thaw, the hills in front of them become waterfalls, mud covers the buildings where paint dries slowly and peels quickly. Women’s heavy long skirts would be always stained. Imagine Ridge scrubbing them, pulling one wet from the washtub and wringing its 30 pounds of fabric through the mangle over and over, the water finally running clear. The chill held in all that wet mud could be lethal, even in summer. In 1896 Ridge’s first child, Paul Webster, was born into that world on December 9, and died two weeks later of bronchitis. His birth wasn’t recorded until after his death.

  Due to the difficulties of childbirth and childhood disease, dead children were a major subject of Victorian women poets. Ridge did not address the tragedy directly. In her poem “The Magic Island,” immigrants mourn children lured into the sea by a wizard, but it sounds more like a cautionary tale than a personal lament, similar to the effect of her poem “The Three Little Children,” about children who wander into the bush never to be seen again, and an early story, “The Returned Hero,” in which a Chinese bogeyman so terrifies a child she jumps from a train. In the poem “Baby’s Sick,” the father or a brother is summoned from the track when a little boy falls sick at home.

  I’ve laid it all on shamrock—

  Ten to one;

  The knowing ones are backing

  Up old Sun.

  I got a wire this morning—

  “Come home quick,

  Mumma badly wants you—

  Baby’s sick!” (Verses 54)

  Kanieri and Hokitika held regular horse races. It is likely that Ridge’s stepfather and husband would have attended. In the poem, the horse named “The Sun” wins the steeple but the man appears remorseful at the end: “The Cup may go to—pieces!/Baby’s sick.” In general, however, the poem paints the husband as culpable, having been gambling while the mother is coping with the sick child.

  For most parents, the death of a child is an indelible loss, especially for the mother. She has failed in her most basic adult role. Some scholars feel that the high infant mortality rates in those years lessened the impact of the death of a child, but in the 17th century, with much worse rates, Ben Jonson’s moving elegy “On My First Son” suggests that even fathers were
devastated by such a death. New Zealand poet Robin Hyde’s attempted suicide in 1933 is linked to mourning a stillborn out-of-wedlock child. Perhaps Ridge’s fierce ambition to make something of herself was sublimated to that strong maternal sorrow, and eventually channeled into the intensity of the persona of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in her fourth book, Firehead. But in Kanieri, mortality pressed on the living. Ridge was tortured by the knowledge of the shortness of her life, trapped in a tiny town at the edge of the known world.

  I smelled the raw sweet essences of things,

  and heard spiders in the leaves

  and ticking of little feet,

  as tiny creatures came out of their doors

  To see God pouring light into his star…

  …It seemed life held

  No future and no past but this… (Ghetto 73)

  The price of gold dropped drastically, making striking it rich less likely for everyone. The miners had to work twice as hard to make the same money. Kanieri Forks organized all kinds of entertainments to counteract despair—balls, cycling clubs, carnivals, more horse races, and excursions to beautiful Lake Kanieri. In 1898 the Kanieri Dramatic Club presented “a sparkling comedietta” called “I’ve Written to Browne,” which included Mrs. P. Webster [Lola] in the cast. She starred as the rich widow Mrs. Walsingham and must have done a good job since she was remembered by relatives as an actress, not a poet. At the conclusion of the entertainment, the floor was cleared and dancing kept up till the “we sma’ hoors.” Two years later, on January 21, 1900, Ridge bore another son, Keith, who survived despite the difficult climate.