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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extract from ‘Only a Pusher must Push Off’

Extract from ‘Only a Pusher must Push Off’

(by Gillian Shadbolt)

*

. . . between the cottage, where Jim lived, and the Maori pa, with its old houses, rose the antiseptic walls of the convent and Mother Mary Aubert’s church. The pakeha nuns were friendly but, apart from gifts of milk and vegetables, kept their distance. A kind of understanding was beginning to grow between Jim and New Zealand’s first Maori priest, Father Te Awhitu, now living in semi-retirement at Jerusalem. He was teaching Jim a little carpentry and encouraging him with his small garden. Back in the cities, critics were saying Baxter was New Zealand’s oldest drop-out.

Six months later I returned to Jerusalem. Some of Jim’s Grafton friends had been to stay but had drifted back to the cities. Some had finally found good jobs. One had been selected for the cast of Hair and gone to Sydney. Others were doing today’s version of the grand tour – Singapore, South-East Asia, India. Maybe they’d reach England, maybe not – unlike our generation they wouldn’t care too much.

Essentially, Jim was still alone, living in the cottage by the peach tree. If it was possible he was thinner, but something was beginning to stir in him and, in the months that followed, it became obvious that if Baxter had been a drop-out he was busy dropping right back in. He had completed his Jerusalem Sonnets and was travelling up and down the country talking to students and page 259 Church groups. Walking the roads barefoot he looked like the combination of one of those gurus whose pipes he shared in India and a nineteenth century swagman. He relied on the generosity of the motorist and often had to walk long distances.

Looking at his bare feet on the cold concrete of Willis Street when he passed through Wellington. I remembered the beautiful leather sandals Rick, the sandal-maker, had made him in Auckland. I watched them being fitted. I also watched him give them to a girl who was heading south on what he hoped would be a new road. ‘The best gift you can give is something you need yourself,’ he explained.

There were television appearances, articles and radio talks, and money he earned from these was spent on necessities at Jerusalem.

Towards the end of winter the guests Jim was hoping for, preparing for, began to arrive. His son, John, with his Maori blood had helped him scale the wall between the little cottage and the pa. I was told he had been given the use of an old Maori home by a graveyard and there was another house they’d called ‘Bag-End’, after Bilbo Baggins’s home in The Hobbit.

On New Year’s Eve I got home late to Kaiwharawhara to find a mutual friend of Jim’s and mine – a senior mathematics student from Otago. He’d arrived on the afternoon ferry. ‘I’m going to Jerusalem,’ he said and there wasn’t much else I could extract from him. His face had that uptight look and his shoulders were hunched. He looked more like a candidate for the psychiatrist’s couch or mental hospital. By morning he had gone, thumbing his way north, fighting his depression.

I followed a fortnight later. The track to the cottage had widened with the passing of many feet and when I arrived there at dusk the cottage was alive with people – all strangers to me. I suddenly felt lost.

‘Looking for Jim?’ A friendly American voice asked, ‘I’ll take you to him.’

‘A bit later, perhaps,’ I suggested, thinking to talk to a few people first.

‘I’ll take you right now – a bit later and I mightn’t feel like it.’

‘Oh, alright,’ I said and he led me over an unfamiliar but well-worn path over the hill and into a grove of trees where the remains of an old cottage served as ‘Bag-End’. Though it looked dilapidated from the outside, inside there were two clean, candle-lighted weatherproof rooms.

In the inner room of the two I found Jim talking to five or six people sitting cross-legged or reclining on the floor. He greeted me as he does everyone – by standing up, putting his arms around me and hugging me. Soon others followed through the door. Maori farm workers, their wives and children and their guitars. Girls just out of Arohata [Gaol], a woman with a fantastic repertoire of folk songs, whose marriage had just broken up, disturbed adolescents escaping from over-protective parents. Into the midst of all this bounded the student from Otago, his face brown and open, wreathed in smiles. He carried a huge pot, full of boiled potatoes.

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‘Here, have one,’ and he offered them round on the end of a fork. Some declined politely, others accepted. Then he sat cross-legged with the pot in front of him and fed himself great mouthfuls, laughing and joking between each one. In the candle-light and against a background of shadows cast by the huge bunches of hydrangeas, he looked like a huge, happy gnome.

‘How did you achieve that?’ I asked Jim.

‘It’s this place,’ he smiled. ‘It works. They all arrive here like that. It takes some days – weeks with some – but sooner or later it works.

I don’t know how many of us unrolled our sleeping bags in ‘Bag-End’ that night. The Maoris went home to the pa but, even so, the place was crowded. Other visitors were sleeping in the partly reconstructed house further up the hill. No one slept in the cottage any more. It was used purely for cooking.

I found many familiar faces the next morning – a Hungarian postal worker from Wellington, a teacher friend from Auckland and Polytech students. There were also college boys and permanent residents I had not previously met. And round our legs, laughing with delight, ran a naked two-year-old.

They told me about thirty-five people stayed at Jerusalem that night. Most who came only for the night brought enough to eat and a little extra. ‘Yes, it gets a bit crowded,’ Jim observed. ‘I call this the season of the wave. It’s nice for people to come through but it disturbs our normal rhythm. Things will settle down after the holidays.’

Together we went to see the house that had been partially renovated. Its bare boards had been swept clean and the walls of the rooms were lined with neatly rolled sleeping bags. Colourful drawings and nicknames on walls behind the sleeping bags denoted territory carved out by more permanent residents. ‘The walls and floor had collapsed in places and the rain was coming through the roof in parts,’ Jim said. ‘Father Te Awhitu did most of the work with a little help. When things are a bit more organised I intend moving out of the cottage altogether and in here.’

An electric stove stood in the kitchen waiting for the electricians who had already taken over two months to find time to come up the river.

Outside the house the embers of the previous night’s camp fire were still burning. ‘I got upset when they started burning all the wood I’d collected for winter. But then I decided, they really needed that fire for what they were getting out of it. I’ll worry about winter when it comes.’

Up the hill behind the house were sweet corn and haphazard gardens dug mostly by a more permanent Tokelau Island commune member. I think he was one of those who went shearing with the others to get money to help pay the commune grocery bill.

Later in the morning Jim took me for a swim in the Wanganui River. Pieces of soap on the rocks indicated the commune bath room. ‘The people in the pa got a bit upset because some of us like to swim naked so we moved our swimming place down here where they couldn’t see us.’

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As we walked back along the road the milk truck arrived laden with mattresses labelled ‘James K. Baxter, Jerusalem’ – gifts from well-wishers. There was a mailbag full of letters. Some would be sent on. Others, for people who had not arrived, were put on the mantel-shelf in the cottage where the neighbouring farmer joined us for coffee. Jim took only honey and water. He was in the middle of a thirty-day fast which he continued during his trip north for Waitangi Day. Someone complained to me he had walked a group six miles over the hill the previous day and had come back fresher than they had been. As we talked with the farmer and his wife, a Polytech student mixed a batch of scones, two long haired ‘cats’ tackled an impossible pile of dishes and others carried mattresses up to the main sleeping house. There wasn’t a refrigerator the previous time I had visited Jerusalem but yet another friend had made the community yet another gift. Outside the cottage a bluejeaned Canadian sat cross-legged making music on a flute enjoying the sun.

As he said ‘Goodbye’ Jim appealed to me: ‘Why don’t you come and stay? I need help from older people.’

Along the road colourful groups were thumbing their way north. Others had headed south.

There was no sign of crisis the night I stayed at Jerusalem but the commune has had its problems. Probationers who, in an unthinking bid for an imagined extra freedom, head for the bush, and wards of the State who have walked out of situations they believe impossible sometimes turn up at Jerusalem. Jim explains to these people the situation in which they have placed themselves and tries to build into them the courage to face up to it. Mostly they move on – sometimes to report back to Probation or Child Welfare.

Jim has always been concerned with the feelings of other community groups and their attitudes. He explains ways and means of breaking down false barriers and in his arguments opposes any form of violence in achieving this. Accept and learn from experience is the drift of his counsel.

Group meetings have been held to discuss the feelings of people on whom the community depends but there is some difficulty in explaining the views of property-owners to people who have never owned anything worthwhile.

Reports from Wanganui once described a girl going from doctor to doctor with plausible stories of her need for amphetamines and ‘stoppers’. A search-party travelled the forty miles from Jerusalem to get her back. Where possible, pills – even legitimate ones – are thrown into the Wanganui River – ‘You don’t need them. If you don’t sleep tonight you’ll be tired tomorrow night.’ But for those who have lived on artificial kicks, it seems hard to accept that life offers other means. It’s a long, slow, step-by-step process.

And there are other drugs. I heard two versions of the visit of a long-haired ‘cat’ distributing free tastes of Clear Light and the strychnine contaminated Blue Chair tabs of LSD. When I asked Jim about it he said: ‘The man sincerely believed he had a mission to mankind and that was his view. I told page 262 him my view and we agreed to differ. Perhaps he might think about my view sometime.’ And Jim asked him to move on.

‘All the same,’ said Jim, ‘I offered to hold a group meeting on the problem and discussed it with as many as I could but in the end it wasn’t necessary’ – it was not at my wish alone that he moved on.’

Commented the mathematics student: ‘I’ve never seen Jim angry before but, man, he kept his cool.’ So what should he have done – called the authorities and lost the carefully nurtured confidence of everyone who has ever been associated with Jerusalem? No. That is not Jim’s way.

It was essentially a group decision that sent the benevolent dealer on his way – a voluntary decision taken by members of a generation who must face up to both the physical and legal risks of drug taking. That’s the way Jim wants it. A new generation making their own decisions and standing independent and tall together against pettiness and the pusher man alike.

The ideas he has sown in Jerusalem can already be seen in the student pads of Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin and in the country towns where youngsters keep an open door for the stranger.

1971 (640)