"If We Cannot Discuss the Future or the Past, Then There Is Only the Present"

The New Zealanders by Maurice Shadbolt (1959)

Mid-century New Zealand was a country still becoming itself. Most of its people considered themselves Britons abroad, and Britain home. The sentiment was natural enough that Premier Michael Joseph Savage, on declaring war with Nazi Germany, stated: “Where [Britain] goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand. We are only a small and young nation, but we are one and all a band of brothers and we march forward with union of hearts and wills to a common destiny.”

After the war New Zealand became a truly independent country, and New Zealanders a truly independent people. The search was on for those stories and symbols that would constitute the new national myth. It is against this backdrop that Maurice Shadbolt’s first collection of stories, The New Zealanders, was published. The book is divided into three sections corresponding roughly to the past, the present as seen from within, and the present as seen from abroad.

Shadbolt has an obvious love of history, and his writing—rich in natural and physical description—benefits from the strong sense of historical place, as in The Strangers. It is depression-era New Zealand; swaggermen are trudging the roads in search of work, and Ned Livingstone, a widowed farmer, is struggling to keep afloat. The only person he can rely upon is Tim, his thoughtful and sensitive son. They celebrate an austere Christmas together: a burnt chook is eaten in silence. Ned knocks back a dusty bottle of beer and pours a few drops into an egg-cup for Tim. Out come the party hats:

… he watched with a smile as I put it on my head. Then he lowered his eyes and the smile slowly went from his face as he separated the two others in his hands. He took one for himself, then seemed to become rigid as he looked at the other. With a queer expression, he crumpled it in one hand, and threw it away. (61-2)

One day a Māori drifter, Tui, comes to take a job at the farm. He has a pleasant, carefree nature. Despite the initial mismatch of personalities, he is hardworking and reliable, and Ned is pleased with his work. In his spare time, Tui takes Tim into the countryside, teaching him how to fish and forage for food, and captivating him with stories from the Land Wars.

After a single season, Tui decides to hit the road again. Ned, for whom work and thrift are everything, cannot comprehend his motives. He assumes there must be a girl involved, but Tui explains that he just wanted to make enough money to see him through the summer. It’s a goodbye on uncertain terms, but they shake hands nonetheless. Tim relates their mutual confusion: “There were the two of them neither understanding the other, and I stood between, only knowing that of all the strange and terrible things in life the strangest and most terrible was that of two people not understanding each other. “ (72)

The Woman’s Story is about a teenager, Bridget, born in England but raised in New Zealand. The first few pages—pitch perfect examples of Shadbolt’s best writing—chronicle her family background. Her mother, an Englishwoman summoned to New Zealand by a tanned, exotic colonial suitor, is a bit gullible about the reality of life in the backblocks. She laments the cultural wasteland in which she finds herself. Unable to forgive her new home, she habitually implores her daughter to recall her first few memories of life: “summer wind stroking the long grass of a yellow field… a skin of ice on a puddle.” (9) These scenes are ostensibly English, but Bridget cannot be sure. Over time, they become “inextricable from the elaborate fictions I created and recited like catechism, for mother’s peace of mind.” (10) Despite her mother’s assurances that they’ll go back one day for a visit, the family situation never allows for it. England is an impossible dream.

Bridget’s friend Ruia makes a similar mistake. She conflates earnest wish for stark reality in believing that her boyfriend, the Pākehā Ed Larkin, will remain loyal during his time away at university. When he comes back for a visit, Ruia confronts him at a moonlit new years party, and discovers that he is betrothed to someone else. She and Bridget end the night crying in each other’s arms. “I should never go to England,” declares Bridget. “I should never go to England, and I was glad.” (38)

There is a lot to take out of how this story ends. We could view it, on the one hand, as mere affection: two girls, having had their world shattered, take psychological refuge in one other. But there’s also a lesbian subtext here, reinforced by the fact that other stories—including Play the Fife Lowly—have characters that are as gay as you can get for 1959. The ending, in which Bridget kisses Ruia on the cheek the next morning, suggests that the two have slept together. By linking that moment to Bridget’s conflicted feelings towards Britain, the discovery of a new sexuality also becomes the discovery of a new identity.

This is the story which best explains the historical progression that begins with Britain and ends with New Zealand. Between Bridget’s infant memories and her mother’s hopeless nostalgia, Britain is reduced to an ideal, more a symbol than an actual place. There is a symmetry here with Hawaiiki, the origin of Māori before their settlement in New Zealand: both are inaccessible homelands; both retain cultural and emotional significance; both give way to the primary and overriding sense of belonging to New Zealand.

Though Shadbolt never makes that connection himself, his stories (which are first and foremost stories of Pākehā New Zealand) contain several Māori characters who figure as the ciphers necessary for Pākehā society to understand itself. Bridget makes the decisive transfer of loyalties to New Zealand in her sexual union with Ruia. In The Strangers, it is the uncomprehending yet entrusting handshake between Ned and Tui which confirms the necessity of each man to the other and binds them together. Only together can they survive the desperations of the depression, and only the boy, who has grown up in one world and spent some time (however briefly) in the other, holds out on the possibility of seeing and reconciling the true intentions of both sides.

Many of these stories involve an attempt to see and depict life accurately. This is always a limitation of art: it has an ultimate inability to directly “say the thing”, thereby preventing understanding and action. That is the subject of Thank You Goodbye. Two anonymous lovers meet at a cafe in an unnamed Slavic country under communist occupation. It is evidently their last meeting. The man, a New Zealander, is to move on to London, while the woman, a local, will stay put. Though she hopes to persuade him otherwise, the man, unable to articulate his conflicted feelings, obstinately refuses to talk about it:

‘You are very difficult,’ she repeated. ‘If we cannot discuss the future or the past, then there is only the present’… '‘And the present,’ she said, is always so difficult to fix. It always escapes before you can discuss it.’ (197)

The story has a resemblance to Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, in which a couple discuss the possibility of getting an abortion without ever saying it outright. The reader has to infer what’s going on. The secondary implication in that story—as in this one—is that words can exhaust their meaning. Whereas Hemingway’s laconicity evokes a certain weariness or resignation, Shadbolt’s characters remain impassioned. They turn and writhe and wrestle with the conflict, seeking the inspiration through which they might see life truthfully, might frame it clearly.

The Waters of the Moon is about Douglas Fail, a journalist convalescing in a small town in Northland. He becomes enamoured with a local teacher, whose quiet, authentic dedication to her pupils seems to him worth more than all the possibilities that fame and success might bring. It is one of Shadbolt’s lesser stories, recycling a bunch of themes and motifs that appear in other, better pieces. The tone is overall too tendentious, the story ultimately a victim of the same kind of intellectual paralysis it cautions against. Nevertheless, there are occasional redolent passages, bits of which are appreciable in themselves, like the nature they describe:

The lines were measured, cautious, and exact; almost entirely without artifice. Even the images had a kind of brittle austerity. He sensed, behind the cool words, the supple intelligence lacing them together; and something else, which entirely eluded him… the thing, whatever it was, escaped him with the ease of a tiny whirring-winged fantail in the thick sunlit depths of the bush; when he seemed able to reach out for it, it darted away and left him empty-handed and alone in a profound silence. (213-4)

The Paua Gatherers covers similar ground, but more skilfully. Tim is a painter, gifted and passionate, though a bit hopeless at life in general. He moves to Wellington with girlfriend Ann, but neglects her in his artistic pursuits. Both are happy when Ted, an old itinerant friend, comes to stay with them. To Tim, he is support and inspiration; to Ann, a friend and companion. Yet as the weeks roll on, Ted never moves on from Wellington, staying put out of a vague longing for Ann. Arriving after a bad argument, Ted invites Ann to come paua hunting. They catch the “rumbling tram” down to the beach. Unbeknown to them, Tim, having rejected their initial offer to join, follows behind. He watches them walk down the beach, framing the two “paua gatherers” in his mind so that he might later paint them:

He saw them come together, the two distant figures in the fading light, to become motionless, silhouetted singly on the dark rocks against the light lines of surf. Presently, still the one silhouette, they moved along the beach, becoming indistinct against the darkened sand. Then they were lost to sight behind a finger of land. (123)

The brilliance of this image is in its mimicry of the teasing, fragmentary nature of Tim’s inspiration. Two figures merge and split, come into and out of sight. The scene which transfixes him has the fragile beauty of a flickering match. It plays out from two perspectives. First we have Ann and Ted. Ann is steadfast to her man, and explains straightforwardly her concerns that he may not truly love her. Ted, meanwhile, is behaving awkwardly. He is weird and oblique, which betrays the tension between his desire for Ann and his loyalty to Tim. The other perspective is Tim’s in his attempt to frame and capture the moment. Despite the intuition which guides him, we—the audience—know, in a kind of dramatic irony, that he is oblivious to the true feelings involved. He can only suggest. He can never explain.

The literal distance of the painter recalls the figurative distance between art and subject, but we also see, in the paragraphs with Ted and Anne, that even the people involved in the moment can be unsure about how they feel. Ann is loyal to Tim, but Ted is uncertain. What does he expect to happen? What does he hope will happen? The only thing which unifies and fixes their understanding of the moment is the painting itself: two paua gatherers, dark and indistinct, fossicking beneath an unguessably dim Wellington sky.