Encounters by Paul Moon

Author:Paul Moon [Moon, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742539188
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Marvelling at His Moderation

Less rarefied impressions of New Zealand flowered sporadically in the first half of the twentieth century, and were usually self-contained, literal descriptions of places that particular authors were familiar with, written in a style that would have been accessible to the general reader (as opposed to those with a special interest in literature). While many such works were never consciously placed in the stream of nationalistic New Zealand literature by their creators, their contribution to this cause was possibly just as significant. In some instances, it is almost as though being happily oblivious to the deep deliberations over the definition and form of an indigenous New Zealand writing enabled some authors to utilise what they instinctively found to be an authentic New Zealand voice to convey an equally authentic sense of place. There was no need for the creators of this literature to audition it first to see if they had sufficiently rejected the staid Old World conventions. They just wrote about what they saw, and allowed themes associated with the landscape to encroach on their narratives in an almost innate way.

William Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s 1926 book Tutira,1 about a Hawke’s Bay sheep station, was one of the realisations of this approach to writing about the country’s terrain. This detailed and influential portrait of life in rural New Zealand2 was less concerned with jostling for position on some scale of cultural autonomy than with informing readers about the background and character of farming life in the nation. It was an especially detailed description, delving into how the land had been cleared of trees and scrub, and the subsequent founding of the farm. The creation of the sheep station also seems to signify the end of change to the landscape – as though this is its final purpose, and that what will henceforth be New Zealand’s eternal shape is found in this kind of setting. This became a popular metaphor for the country’s national identity at the time (and for decades afterwards).3 Europeans had arrived in New Zealand, transformed the land, and now it was in its optimum form.

Such triumphalism in the rural landscape, which flowed throughout the book, echoed loudly with the belief that the shape of New Zealand society was also some sort of civil ideal. Egalitarianism, economic growth, affordable housing, a healthy outdoor lifestyle, and a generally happy population were supposedly the traits that characterised New Zealand life, and which had all been nourished in some manner by the land itself:

New Zealand, if unlikely to produce a world poet or a world musician, – brains do not emigrate, no intellect of the highest order has yet arisen anywhere outside Europe, – can lay claim, in her founders, to courage and character; in her present population, to the saving virtue of simplicity. Her children arise and call their little country blessed in its absence of great cities, in its riches absorbed by none but shared by all, in its ideal of life measured in happiness rather than

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