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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Notes on the Country I Live In

Notes on the Country I Live In

1

In the long autumn days at Jerusalem, here beside the Wanganui River, I live as I wish to live. The sky is blue, the wind is gentle, my shirt sticks to my back with the heat, but I can come inside the house to cool off. Yesterday I dug a new drain, lining it with broken bricks, so that the water from the washing tubs would not make a bog beside the verandah. The Maori people gave us this house rent free to live in. From the pakehas I would expect a cup of tea and some good words, but not a gift of this magnitude: the gift of adoptive kinship, the gift of peace itself proceeding from the tribal love.

We get hot water from the cylinder in the bathroom, and the water itself comes in a black alkathene pipe from a spring a quarter of a mile up the road. Last year the young men of the community dug the ditch for the pipe, taking turns, while the girls took them out cake and cups of coffee. Later on the community was dissolved, because the local farmers were unhappy about our presence in the district. But the Maoris told me I could come back with my ‘family’, that is, with a limited group. That is what I have done. We have clothes to wear. The roof keeps the rain out. There is an electric stove to cook on. Food, clothing, dry shelter – what more does anybody need?

page 463

Human beings also require company. That is true. At the moment there are four other people living here with me – a married couple, Don and Kat, and two girls, Sian and Francie. They each have their reasons for wanting to be here, away from the city. We do not quarrel. Since we share our possessions, there is really nothing for us to quarrel about.

This morning I started a quarrel. I told one of the girls that I was going to drop the kitten down the pit privy because it made too much noise. She in turn accused me of being a monster of cruelty. This refreshing charade lasted us for half an hour.

2

Now we are short of meat, but up the path
Don comes carrying a goat on his shoulders,

And I am astonished. ‘Do you know, he asks me,
‘Anything about butchering?’ ‘Not a bloody thing!’

Yet tonight I read a book by Debray the revolutionary
At the table where two candles burn

In front of the heavy crucifix Father Theodore gave us,
While Don plays the guitar and Kat is talking

And Francie takes a bath in the tub in the other room,
And the dinner was good – half a goat’s heart, a kidney and one testicle,

With cabbage and soya beans. Out on the hills
The moreporks are calling like human voices,

As the Maoris say, for someone about to die,
But that could be any death. Tonight we have our peace.
(Draft of ‘Autumn Testament’ 3, CP 542)

3

Sometimes Don will shoot a goat, or Toro Poutini may send us down some mutton from his farm on top of the hill. Other food comes on the transport. I have an account with a firm in Wanganui. Sometimes I worry about money, but so far God has always paid our bills. I tell my friends He doesn’t have a mint in the sky, but if we share our money we will not starve.

Some of us feel the need for an altar. Being a Catholic, I prefer to be able to go to Mass from time to time. Francie too came into the Church recently. page 464 At five o’clock in the afternoon Father Te Awhitu, the first Maori priest in the country, rings the bell down at the church alongside the convent where two nuns have their base for catechising in the district. We go down there to Mass. I know that many people do not require a visible altar, and this is certainly no problem as long as the Spirit of Love stays alive in one’s heart. But for a long time now visible religious observance has been part of my life.

4

It is possible to live peacefully here. It can be very hard to do this in the towns. Not long ago, when I was away from Jerusalem for nearly four months, I was staying at my wife’s house in Wellington. Each day the telephone would ring interminably. And when I picked it up, the voices of the drowning would come to my ears –

‘I think I’m going mad again, Hemi. Up in Jerusalem I could believe in God. But down here . . .’.

‘They won’t let me keep my baby . . .’.

‘I’ve got a habit on smack, man. I want to get off, but I don’t want to go into the bin . . .’.

‘Last night I cried for hours. And then I slashed my wrists . . .’.

‘Money, money – that’s all my people can talk about . . .’.

I began to twist the arm of the City Council to make an old house available at a cheap rent for a crash pad for those who were in trouble. There were, and still are, many old houses lying empty in the path of the projected Motorway. The discussions with the Council members were friendly enough but nothing came of them.

The voices were like a rope tugging me back into the rough water of the city. I said to my wife, ‘I can’t bring thirty people here. And you can’t shift into a crash pad.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘But I can always put up one or two when they’re sick and need a rest.’

Some of the tribe began to squat in an old house near the centre of town. It was full of rubbish and inhabited by rats. I moved in with them. We cleared the rubbish out and cooked our meals on an open fireplace.

The pub was just down the road. There was no problem in this house with illegal drugs, but the booze was quite a difficulty on its own. Many of our people had no work. If they had left their last job voluntarily, they were not eligible for an Unemployment Benefit. It is a hard thing to be asked to live on air. After a week of it, you may break into a dairy and steal five packets of breakfast cereal and a tin of baked beans. And beer, if you can get it, fills an empty stomach and deadens the pains of the mind.

page 465

A good many of them were in and out of Mount Crawford Gaol on small charges – being idle and disorderly, resisting arrest, obscene language, or stealing food from shops. These were young people, most of them between seventeen and twenty-five, though I do remember one Maori boy of fourteen who took refuge with us. The police tended to harass them, whether or not they committed any crime. There was no road for them to walk on in the towns, except towards the jails or the mental hospitals.

Yet they were good to one another and shared whatever money or food they could get. I made a pact with the police not to arrest them from the house itself, simply for being out of work, and the police did honour the pact while we were there. The girls in their long dresses, the boys with tattooed arms – pakeha, Island and Maori – I can remember each of them, thrown out from their homes to sink or swim, holding on to the raft of the crash pad, never fighting one another, full of gentleness and good humour under the mask of their humiliations. Most of them had some religious belief. Perhaps they were not as spiritually destitute as the bureaucrats who refused them the dole or the factory bosses who refused them jobs.

5

Oh early in the morning
I wake up in Firetrap Castle
Where the rats run free and the grots are smashed
And the leaves grow thick at the window,

And first I light myself a smoke
With a mouth like old leather,
Then I put on my strides and a belt and a coat
To hold myself together,

And I go down to the Courtroom
To watch old Skully there
Riding with an iron saddle
On the backs of the poor,

For the fate of a boobhead is
That men do him bind
And plant him in the digger
Till he goes out of his mind,

And if you want to know more about it
Go and ask my friends
At the Duke or the George or the Bistro,
page 466 For the story never ends,

The rich men pay the fuzz
And the fuzz arrest the poor,
And it’s nothing new I’m saying to you,
It’s all been said before,

And if you come by Firetrap Castle
Pay us a visit there,
But mind your heads on the golden chandeliers
And watch out for the loose boards on the stairs.
(‘Oh early in the morning’, CP 526)

6

Up here in Jerusalem the scene is different. Here one can be at peace. Yet there are other problems. Where the river people once had their hunting grounds, the pakeha farmers have erected fences and signs that say in red letters – ‘Private Property. Keep Out.’

I remember one Maori elder’s words to me – ‘The sin is to say – “It is mine.”’ I am inclined to agree with him.

Many, young and old, have had to look at the Medusa’s head which present-day urban civilisation turns towards them: depersonalisation, centralisation, desacralisation. Some are turned to stone by it. What looks like complacency in them is instead a trance of fear. Some, rebelling first against the culture, begin to revolt against all transcendence. Some bury themselves in trivialities.

Where does one’s hope lie? Not, I think, in the mental or material engines of technology. My own hope lies in the hearts of the people, especially the young. In each of them you can see the buried power of relationship struggling to come to the surface, though often, as Martin Buber says, an active ghost tramples on the ruins. Again and again I have seen those faces lit from within, as if by a lamp, when somebody required compassion, or there was food to be shared, or some word of love and truth struck an answering chord. But this happened always in an atmosphere of freely accepted poverty.

When I think of my own country, I think of the cloud of pain that presses down on the spirits of her people. She has not yet come to understand herself. Perhaps some of the young, in their heavy tribulations, may be able to become her eyes. When the people have learnt to share their possessions freely, they may then be able to say from their hearts the Maori blessing – ‘Kia tau te rangimarie’ – ‘May peace be strong among us!’

1972 (686)