Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914
9. The Maori Writer in Maoriland
9. The Maori Writer in Maoriland
In June 1901, five months after the death of Queen Victoria, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, the future King George V and Queen Mary, visited New Zealand. Their journey around the colony, including their visit to the dying John McKenzie (see chapter 2), is recorded in minute detail by R. A. Loughnan in Royalty in New Zealand: The Visit of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York to New Zealand, 10th–27th June 1901: A Descriptive Narrative. Particular prominence is given in his account to a visit to Rotorua where a 'great Hui' of various Maori tribes was staged, a kind of miniature Delhi Durbar,1 in which exciting versions of the past were displayed to the royal guests. As Loughnan puts it:
Once more the Maori lived in the past. For a brief space the edge of the heavy curtain that screened it was raised, old memories revived, old chords were touched anew, and hearts thrilled and vibrated to the weird music of the dead ages.2
Visiting Rotorua six years later, the young Katherine Mansfield (whose father had welcomed the royal visitors to Wellington, and whose sister, Jeanne, had presented them with a bouquet) would express disdain in her diary for its tourist attractions.3 Here it is described in Longfellow-like terms as 'the Wonderland, where sacred fires burn which no man lighted'.4 Its commercialism is put to one side for an imperial occasion in which the august guests are welcomed by punctilious ceremony: '[f]or generosity, thoroughness, and detailed courtesy, for martial bearing and graceful womanliness, it was "Old New Zealand" at its best.'5 Yet the Maori cultural panorama offered to the royal view by the hui is not page 257seen by Loughnan simply as a recreation of faded antiquity; it signals, he feels, both the impressive traditions of the New Zealand native race and their successful adaptation to modernity. Loughnan is at pains to emphasise both the attachment of Maori to an exotic past, marked in his account by passages of elevated prose, and their place in the present. He writes:
There was a curious mingling of the old and new. Deeply tattooed warriors some of whom had witnessed a cannibal feast, rubbed noses with young men who rode bicycles and pounded the big drum in the brass band…. It was one huge fancy ball, full of fantastic anachronisms characteristic of a time of transition.6
Displays of conquered and tamed savagery are, of course, familiar features of empire. The 1906–7 national exhibition in Christchurch contained, among the halls boasting marvellous agricultural production and technological advancement, a Maori pa. Here the Maori participants were required to present themselves in traditional dress and to offer only authentic renditions of their traditional cultural practice. No contamination was allowed to disturb the pristine image of the colonised presented to the colonisers. An inquiry whether the choral groups might use mouth organs as accompaniment was met with disapproval.7 Loughnan's account of 'the great Hui', for all its imperial fawning, exhibits a more complex sense of the situation of Maori in late colonial New Zealand when Maori were situated uneasily between a traditional past, to which no ready means of return was possible, and a modernity in which they were excluded from full participation.
Perhaps no figure of the period so illustrates the capacity to inhabit simultaneously the worlds of the archaic and the modern as Apirana Ngata, who had an important role in the organisation of the hui staged for the Duke and Duchess. Ngata, of Ngati Porou, was born in 1874 on the East Coast. His father was a storekeeper, a farmer and a Native Land Court Assessor; his great uncle had led Ngati Porou troops on the side of the Crown in the wars of the 1860s. His maternal grandfather was a Scot. When he was nine Ngata was sent to Te Aute College where under the headmastership of John Thornton he was educated for university matriculation and a professional career. He won a scholarship page 258to Canterbury College where he completed a B.A. in political science in 1893, the first Maori to gain a degree at a New Zealand university. He subsequently completed a law degree. In 1905 Ngata won the Eastern Maori parliamentary seat, which he held until 1943. He served on the Native Affairs Committee and the Native Land Commission, assisted in drafting the Native Land Act 1909, and was Maori representative on the Executive Council until 1912. In 1928 he became Native Minister in the United Government, ranked third, and served occasionally as deputy prime minister.
As well as being, along with his Maori colleague James Carroll, one of the organisers of the Rotorua hui, Ngata contributed a poem, A Scene from the Past', which, in Loughnan's account, 'the reader will find a great help to the right understanding of the proceedings at the great Hui'.8 Ngata's poem had been written in 1892 when the poet was a student at Canterbury College, Christchurch, and was the winner of a poetry competition of the Canterbury College Dialectic Society. In A Short History of the Canterbury College, Ngata is noted in 1892–3 for a 'Prize Poem, "Olla Podrida"', in the Register of Students.9 ('Olla Podrida', meaning mixture or melange, refers to the occasion rather than the poem.)10 Charles Chilton suggests the mixed nature of the society's offerings when he remarks that the range included 'serious debate, or a humorous sketch for the Olla Podrida night'.11 Founded in 1878, the purpose of the Dialectic Society was 'to promote the fellowship and mental culture of the students'.12 It offered a programme of songs, music, recitations and readings as well as debates on topics such as 'Free Trade and Protection', 'Is town or country life the more conducive to the development of genius', and 'Should women be admitted to the learned professions' (which the affirmative won eight to six). Of particular interest is the topic, 'That this society deprecates the idea that barbarous nations may be dispossessed of their lands because more civilised nations may make use of them', which was lost nine to three.13
[t]he ideal in those days was that the native schools bring civilisation to the native villages; that the boarding schools should take [the boys] out of their environment, train them, and return them to the kainga [home, village, settlement] as leaders of civilisation within the tribe.14
Under Thornton's headmastership this role was modified, as Thornton, who had worked for the Church Missionary Society in India for eleven years, conceived of an education that would prepare some boys for university. Using the English Grammar School curriculum, including Latin, selected boys were given what a not entirely sympathetic commentator called 'a classical and clerical education'.15 The Prime Minister, Richard Seddon, described the system as teaching the pupils 'how to go to heaven' and 'to become gentlemen without means'.16 A 1906 Royal Commission criticised Thornton, advising that he '[d]rop Latin, Euclid, and algebra', and urging him to increase manual and agricultural training.17
How much English literature was part of Thornton's Te Aute is hard to judge. The curriculum states that the boys learnt English, mathematics, elementary science and history and an official report described English as 'a most difficult subject' but one that was 'now seen to be improving as a result of careful training, although the boys still persisted in translating'.18 By the time Ngata reached Canterbury College in the 1890s, the dominant intellectual figure there was the charismatic professor of English, classics and later history and political economy, John Macmillan Brown, who helped establish the Dialectic Society, and keenly promoted Polynesian ethnological studies. His grandson, the poet, James K. Baxter, described himself as 'haunted by this ancestral voice which insists that the intellectual and moral betterment of mankind is achievable'.19
Ngata's poem displays the contradictions in the 'transitional' situation of the Maori mentioned by Loughnan: written in English, replete with classical references, invoking the dying race topos, it is nevertheless a stirring description of Maori cultural practice that is celebratory as well as nostalgic. Loughnan's account of 'the great Hui' is couched as both an historical account of a world that has gone and a celebration of present-day Maori society's ability to reproduce at least the formal aspects — songs and dances — of that world as art and performance page 260'with which Royalty were entertained'.20 In a passage of empurpled Orientalism, Loughnan is keen to emphasise the authentic and archaic aspects of the performance, collapsing, by his use of the perfect tense where the pluperfect is implied, traditional usages and present day re-enactments:
[c]hants that emphasized the points of a weighty speech in the runanga-house, short ditties that dusky maidens carolled blithely forth about the pa, war-songs that fired the hearts of warriors on the march — these were heard through the length and breadth of Te Ika-a-Maui, Maori poets vying one with another to compose songs suitable for the occasion.21
None of these activities is actually described. Loughnan alludes vaguely to the traditional nature of the material prepared for the royal performance, yet what he actually sets before his reader in Royalty in New Zealand as evidence of Maori performative art is 'A Scene from the Past', a Victorian poem, written for an academic society, albeit composed by a Maori.
Ngata himself was painfully aware of the distance between modern Maori and their heroic forebears and the role of Pakeha as archivists and interpreters of this past. In a foreword to Johannes Andersen's Maori Life in Ao-tea (1907) he lists the virtues of the pre-Pakeha days found there and concludes dejectedly:
As a Maori, albeit degenerate and contaminated, I have to acknowledge my appreciation of the conscientious, painstaking and interesting effort of the author to reconstruct for us the scenes of the past.22
Ngata's poem begins with an elegiac lament for the Maori past, which also invokes a familiar theme of the inability of Maori to relate to the modern world:
We reck not that the day is past;
That Death and Time, the cruel Fates,
Have torn us from the scenes we loved,
And brought us to this unknown world.23
The poem's tone is very conventional, charged with what Ngata's contemporary, Jessie Mackay, calls 'Ossianic melancholy'. Yet Ngata is highly aware of this conventionality and of the difficulties of negotiating between Maori and English, as though he is still affected by the Te Aute proscription against 'translating'. He acknowledges that the available poetic language is not quite adequate to the articulation of his position between cultures. The language he must use is a barrier to the authentic expression of his subject, the Maori past:
…Language doth but
Clothe in artifice our passion,
Doth but to the world proclaim
We are traitors to the past.24
This awareness of the limits of language, coupled with a kind of exaggerated conventionality of expression, oddly echoes the practice of white colonial writers, also caught between worlds not easily accommodated to each other and aware of the distance. As Thomas Bracken wrote of Te Rauparaha: 'Rauparaha's story / Told on the harp strings, / Pakeha harp chords / Tuned by the stranger'.25
It is tempting, but dangerous, to discover analogies rather than the familiar binaries in the situations of coloniser and colonised; the processes are neither analogous nor opposed, but fluid and complicated. The disputes within Maoridom over the issues of separatism or assimilation, traditionalism or modernism, were vigorous. As Ngata's reference to 'traitors' in his poem suggests, his own modernising and engaged position was a matter of debate. Separatism had been advanced in the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries both by militant nationalists like Te Kooti and by proponents of passive resistance like the prophets Te Whiti and Tohu attempting to establish a self-contained community at Parihaka. Rua Kenana established a separatist community in the early twentieth century in the Urewera District. Ngata, the Te Aute-educated Anglican, disliked separatism as much for its religious enthusiasms as for its recidivist politics. In 'A Scene from the Past' he counters the accusation that he is 'traitor to the past':
…when our hearts are beating,
Thrilling, stirred by recollections?27
Curiously, given Ngata's career of social improvement and despite his chastisement here of its enemies, modernity appears only by implication in the poem. It figures as 'life's rough stream' on which 'your sturdy oak' (effectively, Pakeha society) competes with 'our flaxen bark', 'your ironclad' with 'our humble reed', metaphors reminiscent of Domett's 'stately ship of Western thought'. The outcome of this clash is inevitably unequal: 'You glided, / Well equipped, the whilst we trembled…. / / You crush the life you wished to save'.
What, then, is the solution?
…leave us with the past;
In mem'ry let us wander back
Amid the scenes we loved of yore.
There let us roam, untrammell'd, free.
For mem'ry, like that herb, embalms,
Preserves, endears our recollections.28
The remainder of the poem presents vignettes of that past, which are overlaid with the knowledge of its transience, a stream beside the pa becoming an '[e]mblem of a race that's speeding / Sadly onwards to oblivion'. How literally are we to take this appearance of the dying race topic? In New Zealand by the beginning of the twentieth century it was more likely to be used to represent a dying culture than a dying people. This is demonstrated in Loughnan's Royalty in New Zealand by his contempt for an 1859 work which predicted that '[i]n 1990 there will not be Maori left alive in New Zealand'.29 Citing the 1901 census, page 263Loughnan shows a small decline in the Maori population since 1874, but concludes that 'the decadence has ceased…. They [the results of Loughnan's own observations] prove the strong probability of a prosperous future for the noble race we saw in its pride, generosity, and attractiveness at Rotorua'.30
'A Scene from the Past' employs the dying race theme to figure the past as 'endear[ing]' memory and as aesthetic performance. The body of the poem enacts a sequence of ceremonies: entry onto the marae, the hui, the assembly of the tribes, the maidens' welcome, the haka. Here the traditions of the past are consciously rendered into art. The poem adopts the formal structure of a powhiri. First, the women approach, 'softly and gently chanting most sweetly':
Dressed in mats of finest fibre,
Cheeks with takou [red ochre] gaily hued,
Plumed with quills of rarest huia.31
This is followed by the men's welcome, the haka (curiously rendered in Gilbert and Sullivan rhythms):
Heads erect and bodies stately,
Proud, imperious, yet be graceful;
Arms and limbs in rhythm moving,
Mars, Apollo, are reviewing.32
Despite the poem's italicised Maori phrases ('Ko te iwi Maori e ngunguru nei! Au, au, au e ha!'), the context is that of European classicism and Rousseau's noble savage. Here what are presented as the simple beauties of ancient Maori culture compete as material suitable for poetic treatment with the denizens of Greek myth:
Ye nymphs and ye naiads, beware of your laurels!
These children untutored, by Nature endowed,
May charm yet Apollo, the god of all graces.33
The elaborately conventional style of the writing is a function of Ngata's education at Te Aute and Canterbury College, but the poem page 264also conveys his affiliation to conventions that are neither literary nor European — those of Maori cultural forms:
"Tena i whiua!" With motion majestic, their arms now wide sweeping,
Now circles describing, then to heaven uplifted;
Their bodies set firmly, yet limbs in mid-air.
…. with eyebrows contracting,
With eyes glowing fiercely…34
The question is how we understand the relation between the two worlds represented in the poem. 'A Scene from the Past' is a curious colonial artefact. The product of a colonised person writing in the elevated conventions of a classical education, it might seem to recall the Augustan poetry of slave, Phyllis Wheatley (1753–84). In 1773 a collection of Wheatley's poems was published, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Like Ngata's poem, Wheatley's are shaped by the classical influences of the education she received in New England. Yet Ngata's situation and that of his people is very different from that of eighteenth-century American slaves. Wheatley's poems display her ownership of the forms of eighteenth-century literary discourse; Ngata owns the corresponding Victorian forms, but is able to insert into them indigenous content. In doing so, Ngata is adopting the role of a Victorian scholar, performing acts of high-minded preservationism.
Imperial racism, sharpened in the late nineteenth century by Darwinian theory, placed Maori at the very apex of the non-white peoples, the most advanced race of natives in the world. Loughnan describes the Maori race as 'the finest people that British colonisation has ever come in contact with'.35 A number of colonial scholars and amateur ethnologists, Macmillan Brown among them, collected and recorded compendious bodies of material on Maori culture, many of them using that material as sources for their own literary efforts, the most ambitious of which is Ranolf and Amohia.
Domett's chief source for Ranolf and Amohia is Governor Grey's 1855 work Polynesian Mythology. Grey's source was Wiremu Te Rangikaheke whose baptismal name was Wiremu Maihi, William Marsh, or Wi page 265Maihi. He was born around 1815 and educated at the mission at Te Koutu by Thomas and Anne Chapman, members of the very Church Missionary Society for which Te Aute's John Thornton had worked in India. Te Rangikaheke worked closely with Grey from 1849. In a letter to Queen Victoria, Te Rangikaheke wrote: 'the governor had the task of looking after both Maori and Pakeha. Maori had been neglected by the government, perhaps because the governor did not know the language and the customs of the Maori. Te Rangikaheke was living with the governor in order to teach him.'36
Grey's difficulties recorded in his preface to Polynesian Mythology in governing a people with 'whose language, manners, customs, religion, and modes of thought [he] was quite unacquainted' were compounded by the fact that 'the most important parts of their communications were embodied in … figurative forms'.37 'Language', 'customs', 'modes of thought' and 'figurative forms' — all are intermingled in the colonial collection of knowledge and the production of meaning. The relations of affinity among Te Rangikaheke, Grey and Domett at the mid-century in acquiring and translating cultural knowledge and adapting literary forms looks forward to that of Thornton, Macmillan Brown, Loughnan and Ngata fifty years later. But Domett as the coloniser and defender of empire against the recalcitrance of the Maori, for all the passages of romanticised description, lacks the celebratory agenda of Ngata.
It is tempting and not unreasonable to speculate that Ngata read Domett. Domett's depiction of the haka in Ranolf and Amohia emphasises the savage but not, as with Ngata, the grace that lies within the stylised gestures. For all his efforts to relate primitive Maori cosmology to ancient myth, Domett declines to infuse his Maori subjects with dignifying reference. Instead, they are configured 'in rank virulence of savagery' as almost bestial:
…each naked speaker as he shrieked
In hoarse harsh tones of mad complaint and rage,
Impatient, like a wild-beast in its cage,
To and fro fretting at a sort of quick run …38
The haka is a 'formal frenzy' in which participants are 'a mob of maniacs, swayed / By one insane volition'. Where Ngata praises the decorum and discipline of his dancers, Domett sees only ' [f]rantic uniformity':page 266
Five hundred hideous faces …
Five hundred tongues like one …
… the cold glitter of a thousand eyes …39
Instead of using classical metaphors, Domett compares the dancers to military machinery:
… like the crash
When regiments their returning ramrods dash
Sharp down the barrel-grooves with quivering clang
In myriad-ringing unison — they lash
Their maddened Souls to madder desperation! —40
Domett is describing the haka as the immediate prelude to real acts of warfare; Ngata's poem, as Loughnan describes it, is 'a fit prelude to the great carnival of poi, haka, and peruperu, with which Royalty were entertained on this never-to-be-forgotten day'.41 Ngata, in a note attached to the 1908 published version of the poem, says that the effect of witnessing these ceremonies is 'entrancing'. He describes the poi dance: 'the deliciously soft voices, the perfectly ordered motion, the bright colours of dress and mat and piupiu, moving with brilliant beauty, together with the white kotuku feather against the dark hair, complete a singularly graceful and delicate example of the poetry of motion.'42
The 1908 version of Ngata's poem was published in a small book entitled Souvenir of Maori Congress, July, 1908: Scenes from the Past with Maori Versions of Popular English Songs. What this congress was is unclear. It was probably associated with the system of Maori councils with which Ngata, now a member of Parliament, was involved. The poem exists, then, in different contexts and was presented to different audiences. To the Dialectic Society, a consciously cultured Pakeha learned society at Canterbury College, the most anglophile community in New Zealand, it was part of a mixture, or olla podrida, recited along with papers on Polynesian ethnology, the Ruskinian sublime and the latest historical theory of Carlyle; the poem's hybridity mirrors the eclectic nature of the society's interests. At the 'great Hui' the poem was part of a display of an advanced native race presented to visiting royalty. The colonised are being exhibited by their self-satisfied colonisers. The page 267Maori Congress, given its relation to the Maori councils, was involved in efforts to promote 'health and welfare and moral well-being' among Maori.43 In this context both the poem's celebration of the ancient past and its living enactment of that past licences its audience's reforming, assimilationist agenda. The inclusion in the 1908 Souvenir of Maori translations of a number of popular English and American popular songs, including 'Home Sweet Home', 'Soldiers of the Queen', and 'The Old Folks at Home', along with 'A Scene from the Past' and Ngata's description of poi dance taken from Loughnan, suggests a less than purist agenda.44
A Scene from the Past' has a particular relation to Maoriland writing. It is neither parodic nor merely imitative. Its hybridity lacks anxiety and is imbued with Ngata's confidence in his status in both Maori and Pakeha societies. In the process of inventing themselves coloniser and colonised in late colonial New Zealand continually borrowed from each other. Self-invention in colonial societies always involves reference to another, but the process is far more complicated and nuanced than the truism suggests. For Loughnan, the poem 'attempts to show how hard the modern Maori holds to his past, amid the rapidly changing environment of the present. The scenes of the past are what he loves, for they awake chords in his heart so unresponsive to the present'.45 For Ngata, however, 'A Scene from the Past' displays not only Maori self-imagining, not only the redactions of memory through Pakeha literary forms, and not only the difficult transactions between present and past. By giving the past exemplary presence, the poem realigns it — rendering it as art. As cultural performance, tradition is not memorialised or revisited but is given celebratory force in the present.
1 The Delhi Durbars were held in 1877, 1903 and 1911.
2 R.A. Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand: The Visit of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York to New Zealand, 10th-27th June 1901: A Descriptive Narrative (Wellington: John Mackay, Government Printing Office, 1902), p. 63. John McKenzie is described on pp.280–1. Loughnan ends his account, 'A few weeks more, and these hills saw — but that is a chronicle for another chronicler', perhaps a reference to Mackay's poem.
4 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 63.
5 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 104. 'Old New Zealand' here refers to F. E. Maning's 1863 narrative of the days before civilization and its repressions arrived in New Zealand in his Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times.
6 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 74.
7 Kernot, 'Maoriland Metaphors and the Model Pa', p. 74. Kernot mentions Ngata's 'epic poem, A Scene from the Past' as ' [a] n example of a Maori version' of the romantic renditions of Maori life popular at the time, p. 61.
8 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. v.
9 Hight and Candy, A Short History of the Canterbury College, p. 204.
10 Robert N. Erwin in his Sir Apirana Ngata: A Preliminary Bibliography of his Printed Work (Wellington: Library School, 1964), p. 5 cites only the one publication for 1892, 'A Scene from the Past', noting that the poem appeared in the Auckland Star, 25 October 1894, p. 57. Eric Ramsden in Sir Apirana Ngata and Maori Culture (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1948) refers to it as his first published poem and 'one of the best descriptions of the haka ever written in verse', p. 31.
12 Chilton, Early History of the Canterbury College Dialectic Society, p. 4.
13 Topics for 1879, listed in Chilton, Early History of the Canterbury College Dialectic Society, p. 7.
15 Alexander, The Story of Te Aute College, p. 93.
16 Alexander, The Story of Te Aute College, p. 93.
18 Alexander, The Story of Te Aute College, p. 96.
20 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 101.
21 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 63.
23 Apirana Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 102. Below the title Loughnan adds the parenthetical description: '(A Description of the Maori Haka, by Apirana T. Ngata)'.
24 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 102.
26 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 102.
27 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 102.
28 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 102.
29 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 144.
30 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 145.
31 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 103.
32 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 104.
33 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 103.
34 Ngata, 'A Scene from the Past', p. 104.
35 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 145.
38 Domett, Ranolf and Amohia: A South-Sea Day-Dream, Canto XX, p. 372.
41 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 101.
42 A. T. Ngata, 'The Poi-Dance', Hone Heke and A. T. Ngata, Souvenir of Maori Congress, July, 1908: Scenes from the Past with Maori Versions of Popular English Songs (Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1908), p. 12.
43 Richard S. Hill, 'The Maori Quest for Rangatiratanga/Autonomy, 1840-2000', TOWRU Occasional Paper no. 4, 2000. See also Richard S. Hill, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa 1910–1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004).
44 Heke and Ngata's introductory note says of the translations that 'they catch the spirit of the original fairly well, while maintaining the purity of our mother language and its poetical qualities', Souvenir of Maori Congress, 'Note', n.p.
45 Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand, p. 101.