Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                                     THERE WAS NO GOLDEN TIME

            How disappointed I was in the 1980s when I made my first real visit back to Panmure, the east Auckland suburb where I grew up as a child! I already knew that the huge macrocarpa, which used to tower over the small Anglican Selwyn church, had already been chopped down. I knew that Pakuranga, on the other side of the Tamaki estuary, had become endless suburbia where once it had been endless green fields. I knew that the shopping centre had expanded, but I wasn’t prepared for how much it had expanded and how many familiar businesses were no longer there. This was not the way it was when I was a boy, in the good old times.

 

            But before my time, the suburb area wasn’t what it had been when an old wooden church still dominated the rise from Panmure, which led to the Tamaki estuary. The church, dated from the 1850s. It had been demolished and replaced by a brick church. At about the same time, a new bridge was built over the Tamaki estuary, replacing an unstable old bridge. And people a little older than me saw that, in the 1950s, as the good old times.

 

            But there were others who said the good old times were the 1940s, when shops began to be built in Panmure  to cope with the many state houses that were being built in Tamaki, adjacent to Panmure, and when a carnival was arranged in 1948 to celebrate the centennial of the foundation of Panmure.

 

            And what about a handful of very, very old people, who could still remember when the old concrete bridge was built in 1916? Would they have thought of that as the good old times?

 

            And before them, at the end of the nineteenth century, surely there would have been people remembering the rope-pull ferry that was the only way to cross the Tamaki estuary, and when there were Irish Fencibles and when wealthy English settlers attempted fox-hunting in the wilderness of Pakuranga. They would have lamented those good old times.

 

            And perhaps, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were elderly Maori who lamented the days when there was no Pakeha settlement and Maungarei had not yet been renamed Mount Wellington and the iwi cultivated gardens on the banks of the estuary.

 

            And so we could track the good old days back and back and back to Eve and Adam, for the “good old times” were always an illusion, perpetuated only because nostalgia allows us to expunge the negative things from the past. We remember the genuinely good things from the past and delete the rest.

 

            All these are well-worn truisms. I apologise to you for stating the dead obvious. Yet I do connect one unrealistic current trend with the illusion of there being “good old days”. Not too long ago, I read in a New Zealand magazine about an artist who was upset that the broad valley in which he lived was being spoiled by development. His views were being marred by new houses in sight, power lines etc.  It’s understandable that somebody will be upset by losing a great view; but lying beneath this sentiment there is often a refusal to accept that other people also have a right to settle in an area (unless it’s a national park of course); that populations grow; and that landscapes change. Often refusal to accept these facts is related to the snobbery of the well-to-do. “This is MY valley and I don’t like hoi-polloi butting in on it.” Regrettably, too, these sentiments are also sometimes connected with the conservation movement. A desire to keep as much landscape as pristine as possible can mean ignoring the necessity for housing, amenities and general infrastructure. In these circumstances, longing for “the good old days” is simply a fantasy.

 

Footnote : For the record, on this blog I have broached a very similar topic before, under the title Babbling of Green Fields . Elsewhere, comparing Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris with Rene Clair’s earlier film Les Belles de Nuit, I noted how both films played on the idea of people constantly deluded with the thought that past times were better times.

 

Further footnote: In the 1950s, the British poet Charles Causley decided to take a crack at the poet John Betjeman, who was often going on about how wonderful and beautiful the artefacts and art of the Victorian age were. Causley’s poem is called “Betjeman 1984”. It wickedly mimics Betjeman’s style, having him living in the dystopia of 1984, ending with him saying “Lord, but how much beauty was there / Back in 1955.” Causley’s point was that Betjeman and others of his ilk praised, as beautiful, things that were merely old. Of course the point in blunted now that Causley’s poem itself is nearly 70 years old and there are doubtless old duffers now who imagine that time was wonderful. Causley’s poem can be found in many collections of satirical verse.