NEW ZEALAND ATMOSPHERE

Evening Star, Issue 22442, 12 September 1936, Page 2

NEW ZEALAND ATMOSPHERE

f Written by Panache for the ‘ Evening Star.’] A judge in a recent play-writing competition complained, in making his awards, that none of the plays had a distinctive New Zealand setting. He deplored the lack of local colour and the passing over of New Zealand history, where there is so much that is fascinating and romantic. Nationalists applaud such sentiments, but the criticism is valuable only if there is such a thing as definite. New Zealand atmosphere, if we have planted, so to speak, a cherry orchard of our own. Nationalists will point to the distinctive New Zealand apenery, the mountains, the hot lakes - and the cold. But Mount Cook, with its cosmopolitan guides, its sports, and its costumes, has become standardised, and except from the point of view. of the Tourist Department, might as well bo in Switzerland. Rotorua is merely a spa, with a few natural and many commercialised Maoris, and novels and plays centring round invalids taking the waters are usually depressing. Our southern lakes are not so spoiled, and it is possible to hear on their shores the still sad music of humanity; hut the beauty of the southern lakes, other than .their purely guide book beauty, is not independent of the lake poets and the awareness of things that is inherited from the Old World.

Historical plays are popular just now, but it would be an inspired patriot who could make a play out of Te Rauparaha without turning it into a revue. Though school children dramatise the story of Hone Heke and the flagstaff that he persistently cut down, it, is scarcely the subject for an adult play. A ballad can be made out of the story of the Maori maiden Hinemoa, but not a drama. (There are Maori wars, but the most fervent nationalist will admit that they have not the historical importance of the Crusades. The abolition of the provinces was the cause of much bitter feeling, but it had neither the importance nor the story value of the abolition of England’s rotten" and pocket boroughs. New Zealand, the patriot persists, was the pioneer in social legislation. There have been political novels written in England. Why should not the great New Zealand novel take for its theme politics, and show this country leading the world? But a novel of which the hero was the first Plunket baby, recording his subconscious impressions of a Karitane hospital, his earliest reactions to orange juice and to sugar of milk, would be of purely clinical interest. And a novel in which the heroine was the first of New Zealand women to record her painless vote would be fame compared with the true story of Mrs Pankhurst. Even the novel in which hero and heroine were awarded, on the last page, their old age pensions, might not be great art.

. Local colour is not atmosphere, any more than,New Zealand is a South Sea island in the magazine story sense of the word. Our maidens do not stick kowhai in their dusky tresses, and comparatively few of us spend our days under the shadow of a geyser or even sticking toi-toi in the vases. In Japan geishas coloured the life of the traveller, and in India mosques or minarets or sahibs and polo ponies were important in the' daily lives of the people. But it is an accident, not an essential, to New .Zealanders that they sit under a pohutukawa rather than an elm, and listen to a tui rather than a nightingale. We do not wander through scrub whitened, by the bleached bones of the moa, nor do we, in abandoned l moments, execute poi dances. The Maoris themselves are a disappointment. Though of the races sometimes called native, they offer no sanctuary to men suffering from over-civilisation. Intellectuals do not turn tor the Maoris for an explanation of the riddle of the universe, as the heroes of Lawrence and Aldous Huxley go down among the Mexicans to be made whole.

When people complain of the lack of New Zealand atmosphere they forget that they sigh for something that has had only a hundred years to develop, while for 18 centuries earlier the atmosphere of New Zealand was that of England. American civilisation, not very much older than ours, founded in more spacious days, spiced with Mayflower ideals, had the advantage of not being bound by close imitative ties to England. In some of the quieter and more lady-like States, where domestic life does not differ much from that of England, lesser novelists achieve local colour by piling the tables at Thanksgiving with much food, buckwheat cakes, maple syrup, and strawberry shortcake. But we are none the less English because we eat for Christmas dinner not plum pudding, but fruit salad.

New Zealand is a suburb of England, or one of the farther provinces, differing in speech as the provinces differ. The ideals of tho people are the same, their clothes, their books; their daughters, if there is £l5O to spare, are presented at the English Court; their most brilliant sons go to English universities. The New Zealand novel , can but reflect facets of English life, emphasising local freedom and local restrictions. It can show democracy in a women’s institute, where mistress and maid swap recipes; or tyranny in an enlightened city, where it is illegal to sell cigarettes in the evening. To strive after a distinctive New Zealand setting for a work of imagination in drama or novel is to forget that in art local restrictions cease. When tho name of Invercargill was spoken on the stage during the performance of a New Zealand play there was a spontaneous burst of amusement from the audience. The voice of the people was the voice of the gods that decree that are is universal, that laugh at attempts to fix tho Forest of Arden within a particular country, or to find tho latitude and longitude of Shakespeare’s “island at sea.” a