Sport 18: Autumn 1997
Gregory O'Brien
Gregory O'Brien
The Run Off
(a letter to Laurie Duggan, July 1996)
The landscape, Laurie, where does it start and where does it
stop,
how far does it go and what lengths will it go to
to reach us? Aged thirteen at Sacred Heart College, Glen Innes,
a school famous for its rugby (fifty acres devoted largely to that end),
each morning I would stare across the fields
to the mouth of the Tamaki Estuary, the lush
trees and wavering grasses almost Poussinesque, awaiting
the arrival of the groundsman—Dave Dobbyn's father—
who would traverse the property on a high-speed
tractor-mower. This was our idyll, our pastorale: air
and water and light floating above the scene, like a landscape out of Lorrain
from which the muses had only recently fled,
pursued by flying rugby balls
and grunting, heaving scrum machines.
The kind of landscape you could hardly scratch the surface
of, like Jean Dubuffet's 1956 canvas, ‘Run Grass,
Jump Pebbles' or his ‘Paysage metapsychique’. Nor could you slide down it,
like the sloping Taranaki province where, as children,
we would holiday, considering ourselves somehow ‘native’
of that place, our expansive adventures later diminishing,
themselves victim of a kind of instability we observed
in the province as a whole.
What details remain
of that time: a whale with its jaw and teeth chainsawed out,
the de-horning of cattle. Someone—a cousin?—
was always setting fire to the Opunake High School.
A sloping province, as if everyone might, any moment now, be swept
down into the Tasman Sea.
The unpeopled landscape, Barbara tells me,
fulfils, some state of mind. But landscapes are never
without their figures, even if it is only the imagined figure of the
viewer—the painter—standing before them. The Frenchman
Pierre Tal-Coat
said ‘landscape is the great metaphor’. I ran into his paintings
in New York, 1985, at The New Museum. Small, luminous expanses.
I am still walking around that exhibition—
one day I could imagine myself
buried in it. Tal-Coat wrote, ‘One paints
as one takes a step… The earth moves. It is necessary to adjust each
step…b’
realising the world isn't made of permanent materials
except perhaps
subsiding, fading, calming…What else is there—
a tentative industry around the edges
or instead of these things? The pursuit of
sadness or its more seductive allies? Which makes
me think of Erik Satie whose memory ‘registered
everything he read, including his apparently useless studies
at the Bibliotheque Nationale into the liturgy or Gothic
art. In this way he acquired a curious, fragmentary erudition
which had a considerable influence on his mind,’
quoting Pierre-Daniel Templier, ‘and his style’.
The earth moves but it doesn't
move. I'm writing to you on June 17, 1996, the Waitangi Tribunal
has ruled in favour of land claims by the Taranaki Maori.
I recall Lloyd Rees saying he kept returning to paint the Tasmanian
landscape because it obsessed and troubled him.
He said the land had a tremor or human cry underlying it—
something emanating from the extermination
of the Aboriginal population
by the first colonial settlers. You could say we felt
something similarly dark in the Taranaki landscape, also in
the Ireland our forebears left behind, themselves victims
of a botched, violent colonialism (did you know that Catholicism
was outlawed in ‘Great Britain’ until
the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829?), although they were accepting
of the maltreatment of the native population in turn, the only way
forward for them, or so it seemed, a single-minded agriculture— needing an amnesia
to deal with their own past, they adapted a similar
amnesia concerning the dispossession of the local population.
(That said, my mother recalls an elderly aunt's recollection of
the Parihaka siege—her description of a line of women singing,
surrounding the settlement as the troops approached.) What escapes us,
the land, kumara-pitted, remembers—adze heads recovered
from among boulders, the faded shadows that were trenches
around Te Namu pa. The site of the first fighting
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between British infantry—the 50th Regiment,
‘the Dirty Half Hundred’—
and Maori. A subsiding landscape… just as the family's culture subsided,
their Catholicism eroded, as did their Irishness, assimilated
into the run-off. A place
intent on burying its past, which included theirs, replacing it
with a pragmatism and adaptability—these, the most
applicable virtues. How, then, do we inhabit this place?
I still see myself
on a trampoline, jumping up and down, lifting off,
never touching the ground, but moving
between the canvas
of the trampoline and the air above.
No one ever claimed for a moment money had been paid
for the old farm, it was always ‘confiscated’ land—what we inherited,
what we woke up to. So it was
the entire family was handed down an anxiety—
leaning over aerial photographs of
their farms with furrowed brows, as if they had to always explain
their claim on the land. And the Maori, of course, were ‘bad’
farmers, because they didn't buy into a culture of productivity
and profitability—that lessened their claim.
Mostly, the farmers were hard on the land—effective if not brilliant
in the rotating of crops and grazing, it would have
to be said, but also given to the alteration of land for practical
purposes. Their county council would locate rubbish dumps
on the coastline or adjoining Te Namu Stream.
They were known to create artificial lakes in anticipation of
duck-shooting season; dead tractors, farm bikes and
surreal farm implements littered the sides
of tanker tracks, as did shanty towns of dog kennels,
and the odd Ford Prefect, still operational but maroone0d
in an adjoining paddock, its roof cut off, rain and chickens
pouring in. One summer, confined to a non-dairy food diet
on account of asthma, I arrived at Opunake to find
such constraints on nature's bounty met with
complete disbelief, then disdain.(The fact
I was allergic to dairy products, eggs, horses, cows, dogs, bees,
pollen, dust and cats underlined my emerging foreignness
from the place—
I was no longer the ‘native’ I once thought I was.)
Decades later, the morning after my grandmother's funeral, we
are driving down the rolling
sealed road past Parihaka, past the new sewage ponds
overlooking the Tasman Sea and the fortified gang headquarters,
the car rising and
falling on its suspension, floating, drifting
as far back as the trampoline, the mountain
going up and down.
Whatever else the land yields: this rising and falling. Which
ever way you look at it, as my young cousin was forever
saying, you have to ‘get it on the good foot
and take it to the river‘. Whatever that meant.
How much life
gets in, I ask myself,
how we went about
where we lived. And how we wrote ourselves, darkly, into
that place—a cousin crushed under a tractor the day after
my parents’ wedding. Another cousin, younger than me, who had
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her arm all but ripped off by a haybailing machine.
All of these pasts,
none of which can be walked away from. Today, in Auckland,
I visit Rodney Kirk Smith gallery, staring into the black canvases
of his predicament. Cancer. The end of a gallery.
The way he would linger on the ‘o’ in
Hotere whenever he read the painter's surname on the back
of these full, empty expanses. Then he would sleep,
sitting there, where he sat, at his desk with
the ‘Requiem’ drawings around him. I ask you,
he asked me and closed his eyes, dimly—
for the moment, the moment being
all there ever is. We dragged the stretchers
across the floor. Black and blackened windows, a pebble
dropped in a dark pond, light
circling outwards. How much life gets
away. The picture, half painted, awaits its surface, as we await
a particular relationship to time—a permanence—be it an abundance or
a lack, ‘content’ or
an expressive gloom. When the public galleries should have been
buying from him, they wouldn't even step into Rodney's gallery—
preoccupied, again, by less permanent materials.
The picture, an article of faith, will eventually find its surface, he would
have said, something to set its ‘curious,
fragmentary erudition’ to. Returning to Taranaki,
what else am I left with
except, at the funerals of both my grandparents, the heartfelt singing
of the Te Namu Maori for those of us who had gone,
in spite of everything, before—that we could
somehow have remained
in their affection as well as
remaining on their land. What else, then, are we left
to contemplate? The mountain as seen
from a trampoline. Everything we have held on to,
everything we might wish for.
WHITE HORSE BLACK DOG
‘ With Gregory O’Brien as guest editor, Sport 15 takes the form of a succession of visual and written road works, with a collective focus on journeys through childhood and along New Zealand's highways… Visual centrepiece is the series of eerily arresting photographs that make up Peter Black's 1987 portrait of New Zealand from the road, Moving Pictures. It's a portrait whose effect, according to Ian Wedde, goes beyond the vicarious to take us back to the ‘learning-to-see of children” Such a description might also apply to much of the poetry and prose sitting alongside Black's images. Keri Hulme… Elizabeth Knox… Damien Wilkins… Iain Sharp… Bill Manhire… Andrew Johnston… Graham Lindsay… Number 15 in the series is another winner for Sport; a great idea—and a quality of execution that lives up to it.’—Neville Byrt, NZ Herald
Still available! $19.95, or $13.50 to new subscribers
To Have Feet and Not Have Walked on Them
(a letter to Ken Bolton and Cath Kenneally, June 1996)
To have feet and not have walked on them—imagine
our five-month-old son, Felix, moving furtively beneath the furniture.
Walking or crawling free, like our neighbour Mr Apostolakis, who bought a pistol from
an undercover policeman he then tried to hire to shoot his wife's
lover—he was given a suspended sentence and fined $7500, while
his son
spends 18 months in prison for possession of the (inoperative) firearm.
How could a mother do this to her son? the poor man moans,
smoking and gesticulating from the front page—the Greek
population back in the press,
reminding us of the time
a young Angelopoulos choked while trying
to swallow a bag of cocaine
as the police were about to
handcuff him. The Mount Victoria tunnel was graffitied a week later:
Christos Angelopoulos You Can't Have Your Coke and Eat It Too
Strange times, it would seem. Mt Ruapehu has erupted
again, enshrouding half the North Island in smoke…
Even if my position
as New Zealand's pre-eminent surf poet
is unassailable, Ken, I never was much of a surfer. Magazines always
did it better. I was content to watch the waves unfurl,
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rolling poetically past, as I lay patiently on my board, imagining
the perfect trajectory
like the prisoner in Robert Bresson's
‘A Man Escaped’, planning the perfect exit. Which
could only ever happen once. Like love, you only
get one chance (Paul Klee said: ‘everything is best said once
and in the simplest way’) with Bach's Musikalische Opfer
as backing—which proves the point. Since I was a child I have always
been drawn to chamber orchestras—I always thought: I want one.
The perfect escape—like Bach's final composition. I was only‘tubed’
once, at Whangamata, 1977. But no one was watching. The wave
I was riding, like any other wave, disappeard back
inside itself. The longest ride ever—but when it's over
(as they say) it's over. Might as well have been
sitting in a parked car. The world isn't made of
permanent materials—a passing steam train, the steam train's
steam. In the recording of these things and the reflecting
upon them, all we are really recording is our inability
to record them—like David Tremlett's paean to the North Sea
air: a row of cassette recordings of the wind lined up and mounted on
a gallery wall. Here in Wellington, we have our very own smoking
National Museum—insulation inside the walls of the new building having caught fire
last Friday, and various persons around the periphery were supposedly
cheering. While Mr Apostolakis, our smoking neighbour, walks free,
‘welcomes freedom’
as the front page says. Wasn't it one of you who said
that Australian poetry is just like surfing, only
without the wave… or maybe it was a museum of clouds?
I've discovered the perfect metaphor, Ken, but I'm not sure what
it's for: the robust cabbage tree against which early settlers would
build their huts—they would use the hollow treetrunk
as a chimney, small pots boiling on an open fire at the base of it.
The cabbage tress survived this, yielding foliage as well as
smoke and when the settlers moved on the chimneys resumed being
trees—which probably says something about adaptability: well-appointed
place somewhere between the natural and unnatural worlds…
which reminds me of a surf-movie theatre in Mount Eden,
The Crystal Palace,where we would park our volkswagens (by some
good fortune our father had a volkswagen, a variant, which gave us
a credibility far beyond our surfing ability or our vocabulary
to describe these films in which the women were invariably confined
to non-surfing roles, lying naked about beaches, the loose sand
a kind of censorship). Anyhow, Ken and Cath, I hope the reviewers
are treating you well. As Richard Mc Whannell writes
(quoting Georgia O'Keefe): ‘ Praise or blame, throw it down
the same drain.’ You'll be interested to know—Cath
especially—that 99.75% of women
get what they want, or so says Mr Apostolakis.
The pursuit of wisdom, Cath, isn't that what
it boils down to, be it surfing or the Western Canon or
the baby crashing about the home, the morning's mail
blowing across the lawn, and you can't get out there to
retrieve it? Felix finding his feet—
‘an inexperienced surfer
page 170
leaning into the curl’—
with the kind of enthusiasm we once reserved
for losing ours, teenaged and stumbling
from beach party/intent
to beach party, ‘Pet Sounds’ or a local band, Waves, echoing in our
ears, and the oracular pronouncements of Kiwi Surf magazine:
‘Go north, son! …for a late autumn bash. Where the locals are going sickon
a bunch of nice waves.’
It seems only yesterday,
my friend The Legendary Nick ‘popped the fins over a crisp close-out’,
later ‘punching his way through a crumbling Piha lip’—
now there are reports that, after some lean years, there are…
‘a bunch of hot grommets coming up throught the ranks;
each vying for lead soprano in the “Piha Boys Choir”.’
We were in trouble back then—
in all seriousness, in the light-
ness, the levity of our senses…99.75% of parenthood
is finding ways of tricking the baby into falling asleep—
then remembering as far back as the ocean that gathered up our limbs
and reconfigured them, that leapt the road…the ocean that has
preserved 99.75% of Lion Rock
and the flight paths of large, unfriendly
birds… benedixit filius tuis in te…and
has blessed your children
within you…And all the songs of our youth—the Legendary Nick
and I—they were unsung, so I will sing them now.