Acts of Confidence

No matter what age he or she dies at, a poet generally leaves behind unpublished works. Poets are usually less fastidious than publishers, if only because it is publishers who stand to lose money from poetry: even the most successful poet, then, is likely to have a few hundred lines he or she has failed to place in a journal, or sneak between the covers of a collection.

Often a poet leaves a whole book or more of unpublished work - a pile of promising early poems which later became an embarrassment, or a sequence of love lyrics too autobiographical to be published without the threat of lawsuits, or a last testament written in the throes of sickness and old age.

After Kendrick Smithyman died at the end of 1995, many observers would have expected a posthumous publication or two. Few, though, could have predicted the speedy appearance of a poem with a size, scope, and ambition unrivalled in the history of New Zealand literature. A sequence of two hundred and ninety-six pieces that cover two hundred and sixty-one pages and over one hundred and fifty years of history, Atua Wera had taken Smithyman decades to research and write, and still preoccupied him as he lay dying of cancer.

As a young man in the early 1950s, Smithyman had conceived of writing an epic poem set in his native Northland region of New Zealand. In the 1970s he seems to have decided to build his poem around the dramatic but mysterious figure of Papahurihia, the prophet who fused Maori and Christian beliefs and acted as tohunga to Hone Heke during the wars of the 1840s. Atua Wera - the words translate as 'fiery God', which was one of the names for the deity Papahurihia claimed to represent - makes a virtue out of the mystery that surrounds the prophet by supplementing the few reliable facts of his life with excursions into the history and landscapes of Northland, discussions of British imperialism and the complex dialectic between Pakeha and Maori cultures, and investigations into the many prophets who followed the tohunga of the north. The poem begins in 1814, and ends in the late twentieth century.


Anyone who writes an epic poem must have confidence - confidence in their ability to write with grace and with stamina, confidence in the importance of their subject matter, and - perhaps most importantly - confidence in their readers. As anybody who has slogged their way into the interior of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Milton's Satanic masterpiece can attest, an epic poem makes special requirements of its audience, as well as its author. When he wrote Atua Wera, Smithyman was betting that some of us would be prepared to follow him into the hinterland of New Zealand history, through a chaos of violent yet obscure events, fragmentary texts, and contradictory interpretations.

When it was published by Auckland University Press in 1997 Atua Wera received respectful, if slightly bewildered reviews. Writing in Metro, Smithyman's old friend Michael King called the book 'astonishing' and 'without precedent in New Zealand', but refrained from offering any detailed account of its contents; in Landfall, WH Oliver said that he'd enjoyed the text, but wasn't sure whether it constituted a poem or not.

In the last decade several more 'new' Smithyman books have appeared, and the man's reputation has grown steadily, to the point where his name is now invoked along with those of Baxter and Curnow when critics discuss New Zealand's greatest poets. Smithyman's poems and his literary criticism have attracted an increasing amount of academic attention, and a Masters paper based around his work has been taught at the University of Auckland.

Despite the growing renown of its author, Atua Wera has attracted little scrutiny from critics and academics. For all its size, the book is a backwater in the Smithyman oeuvre. It is true that in the late '90s Gregory O'Brien won the Landfall essay prize for a piece with the title 'A Journey Around Kendrick Smithyman's Atua Wera'. O'Brien spent part of his youth in Dargaville, just down the road from Smithyman's old hometown of Te Kopuru, but his exuberant, episodic essay is a nostalgiac road trip with the occasional rather throwaway reference to Smithyman's epic, rather than a close reading of the poem.

Atua Wera may have exerted more influence on visual art than on literature, thanks to the way it has been incorporated into several works by Shane Cotton, the celebrated Nga Puhi painter. In his Blackout Movement sequence, Cotton has brought Papahurihia into a pantheon of heroes that also includes Hone Heke and Hongi Hika.

The tepid response by the New Zealand literary industry to Atua Wera deserves to pondered. In New Zealand's major universities, students can study long poems by foreign English-language poets. Pound's Cantos, TS Eliot's The Wasteland, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth's Prelude can all be found on reading lists. Students can invest in concordances, which remorselessly track the obscure allusions and now-obsolete expressions that haunt these epics, and choose from competing biographies.

Outside the academy, epic works of verse and of poetic prose are also celebrated: professional and amateur actors alike perform Shakespeare in community halls across the country, fans of Joyce gather in an Auckland boozer once a year to celebrate Ulysses, and Tolkien's translations of medieval Norse epics are displayed prominently in mainstreet bookstores like Borders and Whitcoulls. Why is it that we can consume and discuss these epic works by foreign writers, yet ignore a long and masterful poem by one of our own - a poem that surely speaks to our own concerns far more directly than the products of Milton or Pound?

Isn't it time that we justified some of the confidence that Smithyman placed in his readers by producing an introduction and guide to Atua Wera? I have been engaged in researching a book on Smithyman for Titus, but I've come to believe that a separate, complementary project should be set up around Atua Wera.

What is to stop a group being formed to read through Smithyman's epic and produce a sort of concordance to the poem, which could then be published in book form along with a series of essays by a range of contributors about aspects of the work? A collective approach would be well-suited to a poem that demands knowledge of subjects as diverse and complex as nineteenth century history, the evolution of the Maori language, Christian theology, British imperialism, botany, and millenarian religious movements.

Well, my friends - any volunteers? If you're new to Atua Wera, then you can encounter the work online here, as part of Holloway Press' magnificent electronic edition of Smithyman's Collected Poems.

Expanding the map

Fifty years ago it was possible for scholars to disagree about whether prehistoric Polynesians had been capable of long sea voyages. The decline of traditional aquatechnology and colonialist assumptions of racial inferiority had both cast doubt on the veracity of oral histories that described the crossing and colonisation of the Pacific.

Today, the Polynesians are rightly celebrated for their feats of seamanship. The reconstruction of traditional sailing craft and the combined efforts of hundreds of researchers have left no doubt about the broad outlines of the history of the settlement of Polynesia.

In the last couple of years, new research has further expanded our appreciation of the achievements of ancient Polynesian mariners. A team based in the Anthropology Department of the University of Auckland made headlines in the New York Times when they found Polynesian chicken bones in a Chilean cave, and thereby showed that the Polynesians had pushed on beyond Rapa Nui/Easter Island all the way to South America.

The discovery in Chile is already opening up new lines of enquiry for research into human prehistory. For instance, scholars are investigating the possibility of a connection between proto-Polynesian and pre-Columban American cultures by looking at the languages and artefacts of some coastal American peoples.

The subantarctic Auckland Islands have been the scene of some less-publicised discoveries in the last few of years. Digging into the frigid soil of the islands, researchers have discovered middens and fragments of artefacts which were left by Polynesians in or before the fifteenth century. It has been known for some time that the ancestors of the Maori not only quickly explored the whole of New Zealand after arriving here around about the twelfth century, but also journeyed from these shores to the Kermadecs, Norfolk Island, and the Chathams before the end of the fifteenth century. It now appears that the early Maori also made the journey south from Te Wai Pounamu to the inhospitable Auckland Islands. I spent yesterday afternoon in Te Papa, and I was pleased to see that the museum's curators have reacted to the discoveries of the last couple of years by updating the map which they use to explain the exploration and settlement of the Pacific and adjoining areas. New arrows record the Polynesian progress to South America and to the Auckland Islands.

Even if the distance between New Zealand and the Aucklands is relatively short, compared to the gulf between Rapa Nui and South America, the Polynesian foray into subantarctic waters seems as impressive as the journey to the coast of present-day Chile. Although the world's climate was going through a relatively warm period in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries, the seas around the Auckland Islands would still have been enormous, capricious, and icy, and the waka that went south would not have been able to rely on a tailwind for long. The apparent ability of ancient Polynesians to survive for some time on the Auckland Islands is perhaps even more impressive. The islands get an average of one sunny day a year, and their never-ending winds and frosts make even subsistence agriculture a very difficult proposition. The British established a settlement in 1846, but even with the advantages of industrial technology they were unable to make the venture a success, and the colony they had named Hardwicke was evacuated after less than three years. A colony set up by the Ngati Mutunga conquerors of the Chathams and their Moriori slaves lasted a little longer, but only because the colonists had to wait for a boat to take them away from their ill-chosen home. Of the four prehistoric 'colonies' set up by the early Maori, only the settlement in the Chathams survived. Over several centuries, the Maori who settled on those cold but relatively large islands developed their own distinctive culture, and came to call themselves Moriori. Norfolk island and the Kermadecs appear to have been abandoned, and we do not know whether the discoverers of the Auckland Islands perished there or returned to the comparative warmth of Te Wai Pounamu.

If the European whalers and explorers who showed up at the Auckland Islands at the end of the eighteenth century had been greeted by descendants of the island's first settlers, what sort of culture would these people have had? It has generally been considered that the things which make Moriori culture unusual in Polynesia - its pacifism, its egalitarianism, its ingenious but simple technology, and its famous dendroglyphs - were all the product of the unusual environment in which the first settlers of the Chathams found themselves. Pacifism is supposed to have been essential on a small island, egalitarianism is thought to be have been an automatic result of a hunter gatherer economy, low-tech but clever devices like the wash-through raft are supposed to be responses to the absence of big trees, and so on.

I'm all for a bit of functionalism, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that there is only one way that humans can react to a given environment, even an environment as distinctive as the one on the Chathams. There are many examples of small islands which nourished warlike rather than pacifist cultures - consider, for instance, Rapa, a little-known northen neighbour of New Zealand which is covered with earthworks that recall the pa sites up and down the North Island. The Chathams may have been cold, but they were actually far richer in food resources and trees than many other Pacific islands - far richer, for example, than the Kiribatis. The I-Kiribati, who live on the equator and never get cold, built huge common houses, despite the fact that their 'desert islands' had few suitable trees; the Moriori, who must have been cold all the time, slept in rough, temporary shelters.

It also seems somewhat demeaning to suggest that a people's choices are dictated wholly by their environment, and not by beliefs and values. How noble is a pacifism which is wholly pragmatic in origin?

If the prehistoric settlement on the Auckland Islands had persisted, then we might have something compelling with which to compare the Moriori experience. As it is, the Moriori are perhaps the only surviving example of an indigenous subantarctic people.

Unstained air

I came across this sign a few months ago in a remote part of Northland. It stood at the bottom of a hill of dripping punga fern and totara, at least a kilometre from the nearest dwelling, at the edge of a sharp bend in a narrow road.

It's not unusual to see religious messages on hoardings in Auckland, but they tend to be professionally designed advertisements, with eyecatching images and snappy slogans, footnoted by a website address and the name of some organisation. Normally the goal seems to be to attract punters to some pricey devotional event, or to sell some piece of didactic merchandise.

This billboard, though, is quite different: its author hasn't bothered with imagery, or a fancy font, or a web address. He or she doesn't seem to want to sell anything. The billboard does not even partake of the distinction, beloved amongst evangelists of all religious and political stripes, between the Elect and the to-be-converted. Rather than asking its reader to 'Join us' or 'Discover what we know', the billboard affirms the identity of the evangeliser and the evangelised. Christ died for Our sins. There is no elect: we are all sinners in his eyes.

If this billboard fascinates me, in a way that the local Anglican church's performance of Handel's Messiah or the Pontiff's latest encyclical never could, it is because it expresses a religious belief so ferociously ascetic that it seems to call into question the whole pattern of the society within which it exists. I do tend to see a lot of mainstream religion as a sort of elaborate insurance scheme, whereby believers secure a stake in an afterlife which is envisaged as a sort of bourgeois paradise - a Gold Coast where the sun never goes down, or a Las Vegas where the casino is always in your debt. Wasn't it Billy Graham, that perect symbol of the crassness of late American capitalism, who defined heaven as a place where everyone rides a cadillac over streets paved with gold?

For many Westerners, the sternly self-denying side of Christianity is undoubtedly symbolised by John Calvin, the French theologian whose brief rule of the city of Geneva was an early example of the misfortunes that result when bureaucrats are put at the disposal of intellectuals. I'm off to Wellington for the weekend with Skyler, who is attending a conference of women trade unionists there. She won't be wanting my lumbering male presence on Saturday and Sunday, so I may have an opportunity to take part in the celebrations which are being held in the city on those days to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Calvin - celebrations which are being organised by the Rev Nathan Parry, the Presbyterian Minister of Island Bay and an old and dear friend of mine.

Back in the early nineties, Nathan and I used to engage in ruthless philosophical discussions on the edges of the canteen at Rosehill College, but I'd like to think that both of us have moved on a little since then. In the fascinating account of his intellectual development that he wrote to secure his Masters of Theology degree, Nathan revealed that as a teenager he used concepts like the wrath of God and the plane of Hell to comfort himself in the face of bullying from the cooler kids at Rosehill (I wish I had had that sort of self-justification to draw on). Nathan has long since outgrown his Billy Graham phase, and today his worldview combines a mysticism informed by negative theology with a commitment to political activism in support of progressive causes. Nathan thinks nothing of retreating into the bush to meditate on the God who reveals himself by his absence, but he's equally at home running an ecumenical workshop on global warming entitled 'What sort of car would Jesus drive?'

Nathan has never been an uncritical admirer of Calvin, so he won't mind me suggesting that the sort of self-denial associated with the more 'primitive' parts of the Protestant tradition is not without its contradictions. Every ascetic is, in his own way, a sort of hedonist. By rigorously circumscribing his pleasures, he intensifies the meagre enjoyments that remain to him. A cold shower becomes an orgy; a bowl of soup becomes a five-course banquet. The much-celebrated ability of the great Protestant martyrs to endure denunciation and torture probably owes much to this curious self-denial-indulgence. How else can we explain the steady voice that John Hus retained, as he recited his death-prayers on a burning pyre?

Apart from Nathan, my main spiritual advisor is Bill Direen, the lapsed Catholic whose Jesuitical attitude to many aspects of life almost makes him an honourary Calvinist (it was, after all, a Catholic clergyman who remarked that 'the worst sort of Protestants are the Jesuits'). When I stayed with Bill in Dunedin back in September 2007, we visited the city's oldest Presbyterian church, and talked at length about the long shadow that John Knox has cast over the history of Otago. I wrote a poem at the time, in an attempt to express what I see as the double-sidedness of the asceticism that Knox practiced: it hasn't been published anywhere, but I thought I'd post it here as a sort of commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Knox's precursor.

Knox Church Windows (for Bill Direen)

The dove on Christ's brow,
symbolising the Holy Spirit;
a pair of crossed keys,
representing Peter;
Samson, stowed in a bulging ox;
St Paul, pared to a sword.

Knox ignores them all,
looks upward, past the hammer beams
held horizontally, past the curved
rafters, all the way to the top
of the arched timber ceiling,
all the way


to his heaven,
his twelve cubic metres
of unstained air.


I'll let you know how the celebrations go this weekend. I can't imagine there'll be too much boozing.

Against the stream

This blog may have been becalmed in recent days, as its proprietor sees off the flu, but the rest of the blogosphere has buzzed on merrily, I'm sure. I’ve been informed by a reliable source – ie, by the guy who has to come over and repair my computer every time the weight of the music files on my hard drive crashes the whole intricate mechanism - that a new blog is created every second. I know it makes me sound middle-aged and otiose, but I must admit to being pleased by the thought that I will probably never have the time to see, much less read, the vast majority of these sites.

I have never been much of a technophile - it’s hard to follow the lead of Marinetti and Gates and worship at the altar of the machine when you can never even seem to figure out how to use a video player - but I did go through a stage of believing, or at least wanting to believe, that the internet might improve standards of intellectual discussion and political debate. A year or so of trawling through the websites of pseudo-scholars who believe that New Zealand was settled by Celts, that Jews were behind 9/11, and that Hitler was really quite a nice chap has put paid to that fantasy.

Even in the relatively sane sections of the blogosphere, there is a distressing tendency for blogs to become circus arenas where partisans of one opinion are treated to whoops of delight and shouts of encouragement as they endlessly perform the same rhetorical acrobatics in defence of some favoured orthodoxy. (I’ve noted in the past that, in New Zealand at least, the left side of the blogosphere is as afflicted with circus acts as the right.) Occasionally, though, bloggers with an unfashionable commitment to rational, open-minded enquiry and ecumenical discussion appear on my radar.

Tim Bowron must be the worst nightmare of Jared Davidson, the ferocious young anti-art activist who turns up occasionally on this blog to implore those of us foolish enough to look at paintings or read poems to give up our bourgeois ways and dedicate ourselves to political activism. Bowron is no stranger to activism – he has been a delegate for two unions, a national organiser for the far left Workers Party, and a socialist candidate for the office of Mayor of Dunedin – but early this year he announced that he was suspending his political activity, and devoting himself instead to the study of obscure Latin American modernist poets, like the Chilean avant-gardist Vicente Huidobro.

Bowron’s retirement announcement was, it turns out, a little disingenuous: alongside fascinating readings of Huidobro and other exotic scribblers his Fatal Paradox blog has featured some very fine commentary on political affairs in New Zealand and overseas. Bowron’s reflections on the state of the far left in New Zealand are particularly interesting.

Having stepped back from the hurly burly of week-to-week activism, Bowron is able to generalise about the strengths and weaknesses of Kiwi socialism with a detachment that is clear-eyed without ever being piously Olympian. His dissection of the reasons why so many far left outfits in New Zealand end up dissolving into feuding factions – a process famously satirised by the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian – is especially worthwhile, because it avoids cheap shots and focuses on the ways that sociology can shape the behaviour of even those people most determined to reorganise society. As any reader of this blog’s comments boxes will know, Edward Ashby has been an indefatigable fighter against the sort of pseudo-historians who specialise in destroying archaeological sites, stealing ancient bones, and vandalising the internet with websites promoting their bizarre theories. Ashby is a working archaeologist who grew up in Dargaville, and therefore had to put up with the activities of local pseudo-scholar Noel Hilliam, who thought nothing of tearing up ancient urupa in search of non-existent evidence for his theory that white people settled this country thousands of years ago.

After demolishing the pretensions of Hilliam and other pseudo-scholars in the comments boxes of this blog, Ashby has launched two websites of his own that help continue the good fight. With its posts on subjects like Ancient Celtic Supermen and the Round Earth Conspiracy, The Uncritiqued is a savage exercise in satire; Archaeology Aotearoa, on the other hand, is a highly serious explanation of the realities of twenty-first century archaeological research. Both sites deserve to be read.

Bacilli and beer

I must apologise for the lack of action on this blog in recent days: I've been forcibly separated from my keyboard by the flu. If I'd had swine flu then perhaps I'd have felt that the dreary old symptoms - the spluttering, the wheezing, the morbid sensitivity to cheerful healthy friends, the equally morbid desire to revisit the dogeared sci fi novels of my youth - had a certain novelty. With swine flu, I might be the member of a vanguard, a group of humans advancing over the frontiers of illness, fearlessly breathing in strange new bacilli, assimilating them, coughing and snorting them out, and somehow helping to steel the rest of the species against its new microscopic adversary. As things stand, I've just been displaying my own vulnerability to the same old foe that forced me spluttering off the soccer pitch when I was twelve. Hasn't my immune system learnt anything, in the intervening decades?

If my voice has returned, and if I've become non-infectious, then I shall be returning to the world of healthy humans tomorrow, by attending the launch of Jen Crawford's new chapbook Napoleon Swings at Fordes Bar from three o'clock onwards. Most writers treat their book launches as opportunities for monologuing: there's the obligatory thankyou speech, which can often morph into an elaborate exercise in autobiography, and then the equally obligatory reading of excerpts from the book. Jen, though, has turned tradition on its head by inviting some of her many friends to read their own work at her launch. It's a characteristically generous gesture from a person who has distinguished herself as a creative writing teacher and a critic of her peers' work. Napoleon Swings is being coaxed through the printers by Michael Steven's Soapbox Press, which seems to be going from strength to strength.

If the bacilli have been vanquished, then I'll be reading tomorrow at Fordes (that's 122 Anzac Avenue, in the city), along with Jack Ross, Sarah Broom, Tony Green, Olivia Macassey, Therese Lloyd, and Lee Posna. After the success of the recent Titus Books event, Fordes is developing into a real redoubt of culture. The beer is remarkably cheap by inner-city standards, too, though I'll probably be mixing my Waikato Draught with Lem Sip.

Two senior academics speak about the the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Dr Martin Hirst, Associate Professor of Journalism at AUT, and Margaret Trawick, Professor of Social Anthropology at Massey University, will be presenting talks tomorrow night highlighting the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Dr Hirst's talk is entitled "Journalism, Human Rights and Terrorism in Sri Lanka" and Professor Trawick's is entitled "Slow Genocide".

Date: Thursday 2 July 2009

Time: 6.30pm

Venue: Lecture Room WA220, AUT Wellesley Campus,
55 Wellesley Street, Auckland

Instead of silence

The curators of the National Army Museum might want us all to ignore the Kiwi connection to the Spanish Civil War, even as they sanitise the fascist general who started that war: Mark Derby, however, has other ideas. Derby's new book Kiwi Companeros tells the stories of the New Zealand soldiers, doctors, nurses, and journalists who took part in the 1936-39 war, as well as the stories of the foreign veterans of the war who settled in this country after the guns fell silent.

Derby discussed Kiwi Companeros on National Radio's Ideas programme last Sunday morning, and this week the Scoop Review of Books has published responses to the text by Simon Nathan and yours truly. Neither review is intended as a definitive treatment of Kiwi Companeros, and I hope that the comments box at the Scoop Review of Books will see other readers express their opinions. A vigorous, serious discussion would make a nice contrast to the mixture of revisionism and forgetfulness that has so far marked the National Army Museum's treatment of the Spanish conflict.