Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART THREE

In my last two postings, I dealt with Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy comprising Maori Girl, Power of Joy, Maori Woman and The Glory and the Dream. My task now is to write about the one other novel he wrote, his short stories, and one remarkably naïve work of non-fiction – which might as well be regarded as fiction.

A Night at Green River was published in 1969, between the two halves of the tetralogy. It is in effect a very schematised parable. Two farmers live side by side in the far north of Northland. One is Maori, Tiwha Morris. The other is Pakeha, Clyde Hastings. Clyde Hastings wants to pay a gang to bring in his hay before the rain sets in. Tiwha Morris agrees to help him out by rounding up such a gang. But when Clyde leaves, Tiwha gets to thinking how much he hates the Pakeha cash nexus which reduces everything to money. So instead of helping Clyde out, he stays at home with his mates and they party and share warm fellowship. Meanwhile the rains do set in, Clyde’s hay is ruined and Clyde fumes and rages about how those lazy Maori have let him down… but then both Tiwha and Clyde have a good think. Tiwha thinks about the limitations of Pakeha culture. Clyde thinks about his frigid wife Edith [Warning ! Referring to women as “frigid” is now regarded as a male invention… but it is here in this novel.]  Clyde also thinks of a sordid sex episode in which some of his drinking companions gang-raped the wife of an invalid. Up to this point, the novel’s values are very much weighted against Pakeha. But a new element is introduced in the person of Tiwha’s friend Tu Nelson, who openly mistreats his very pregnant wife Martha. In the rain, Martha runs away from Tu and takes shelter with Clyde and his wife. The Hastings are beginning to look after Martha when a very drunk Tu bursts in with a rifle to reclaim her. Tu and Clyde fight violently and Tu is finally knocked-out. Clyde somehow feels revivified by this… at which point Martha’s baby begins to come… So Clyde and his wife Edith take Martha down to Tiwha’s house where, in the novel’s climax, the baby is delivered by Tiwha. The umbilical cord is cut by Tiwha in the traditional Maori way, with a pipi shell. And in the accepting atmosphere of life and family, Edith and Clyde begin to reshape their lives and values in terms of neighbourliness and acceptance. And Tu accepts his responsibility as a father.

Even more than the tetralogy (which this novel interrupted) this is very much a parable for Pakeha. Though Tiwha Morris is forced to realise that he has unjustly underrated the neighbouring Pakeha farmer and his willingness to help, the novel is weighted towards telling us that Pakeha are indeed cash-obsessed, class-conscious, sexually repressed (Clyde has never seen his wife naked) and patronising, and therefore much more in need of being taught a lesson than Maori are. At the same time, with the exception of belligerent Tu, the way the warm, familial life of Maori as presented here borders on caricature. In fact, given its first publication date, there’s something oddly retro in its depiction of the rural scene. Television is mentioned, so the story is obviously set in the 1960s, but Tu’s, Clyde’s and Tiwha’s most vivid memories are of serving in the Second World War (which ultimately makes a bond among them). There seems some self-conscious attempt at “balance” in the depiction of the races – we have Tu’s domestic violence balanced with Clyde’s memory of a sordid sexual episode. BUT Hilliard would have us to believe that a man who gets drunk, slaps his pregnant wife about and eventually chases after her with a rifle is going to blossom into a loving father once the child is born. Indeed Hilliard even has Clyde reflect that Tu’s violence towards his wife is a sign of how much he cares for her. Sheesh! The birth of a child, heralding the birth of a new understanding between Maori and Pakeha, is the kind of heavy symbolism in which Hilliard so often indulges. (And the names? Given that Tu is the god of war and Nelson was a warrior on the sea, the name Tu Nelson at once means somebody who fights.) The first half of the novel is more a static situation than a story, again heavily weighted with interior monologue and with Hilliard rarely failing to point a moral.

            One traumatic event and two cultures are suddenly bound in fellowship. Well, it would be nice to think that could happen.

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            Hilliard’s first collection of short-stories A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches was published in 1963. It is trite to say the obvious – that any collection of short stories will be a mixed bag, possibly ranging from the very good to the indifferent. Thus for A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. Many of its tales were previously published in magazines and journals, and the intended audience was apparently broad. Hilliard acknowledges that some stories were written for the old School Journal, which was read in the junior school classes. These are the last ten stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches. They are headed “Bubby and Paikia” and concern two Maori kids living in a rural area and the various scrapes they get into or (more frequently) what they are taught by their elders or when they are taken on outings to places that they enjoy [and that Hillard presents somewhat idyllically]. They would surely make good reading for youngsters.

            The 14 stories that precede these, however, are more hard-headed and more clearly adult.

Of course to the fore are stories about tensions between Maori and Pakeha. The title story “A Piece of Land” has Maori landowners cheated out of owning some acres by complex Pakeha laws. “Young Gent, Quiet, Refined” has a young man turned away when he wants to rent a flat in the city, because he’s Maori. “Man on a Road”, which seems to be autobiographical, has the Pakeha narrator and his Maori wife Kiriwai meeting an old Maori man near the sea who gives a monologue about being dispossessed of his land by Pakeha farmers and holiday-makers building baches. “Erua” concerns a  Maori kid at primary school who admires a Pakeha teacher, but who becomes disillusioned when the teacher turns out to have many flaws. “Doing Pretty Well” is about a branch of the Samuel family (the family that the Maori Girl comes from) in which Kepa Samuel has done well in the Pakeha world as a farmer with a Pakeha wife, so he is embarrassed when his working-class brother Mutu visits him. Is Halliard suggesting that there is a loss of solidarity when Maori adopt Pakeha ways? Perhaps emphasising the ignorance of many Pakeha when it comes to country ways, Hilliard includes two stories about two Pakeha nitwits called Frank and Barry, “Looking the Part” and “Every Man to his Trade”, in which the boys get badly out of their depth. They read something like the “Me and Gus” stories from way-back-when.

Hilliard includes in this collection a number of light anecdotes about family habits when he was a child, or sketches of an old soldier or mean tricks played on a none-too-bright layabout. But the two stories that are most allied with his socialist views both have to do with the 1951 lockdown, that was still a raw memory when these stories were published. One was “New Unionist” about one of the “scabs” [non-unionised workers] who took over work on the wharves when the union workers were locked out. As Hilliard tells it, the soldiers who protect these “new unionists” really despised them. The story is, to say the least, didactic. [This was the story that Dennis McEldowney damned in Landfall as so bad it was “embarrassing”]. The other story, “Friday Nights are Best” has a unionist who has been thrown out of work in the lockdown and has to take up work is a rural area. At first he likes it as a break, but he soon can’t help wanting to go back to the city. It is interesting that Hilliard doesn’t address party-political factions in these two lockdown stories. Perhaps by this stage, while still being left-wing, he had become disenchanted with union politics and he had long since left behind him his two years as a member of the Communist Party.

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            Published in 1976, Hilliard’s second short-story collection Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches has some of the same preoccupations as A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches but there are some major differences. In the 25 stories, concern with Maori matters and racial prejudice is still there, but there is a much franker approach to the matter of sex. Perhaps what could be printed had moved on since 1963.

            On the interest in Maori situations, the story “Absconder” is a first-person monologue by a teenage Maori girl in which she makes it clear that she has been mistreated in Welfare custody. “The Girl from Kaeo” shows the gulf of misunderstanding between the official version of a Maori teenager’s delinquency and her own view of the same matters. “The Tree” demonstrates how a small Maori village removes a tree in the proper, traditional and ceremonial way to make way for some necessary Ministry of Works project. [Thinks – is this a reply to Roderick Finlayson’s better-known story “The Totara Tree”, wherein Maori block “progress”?] “Nothing But the Facts” has a Maori boy in a boarding school having to defend himself from potential blackmail. “Matilda” has a Maori girl falling foul of Pakeha ideas of ownership. “Puti Wants Beer” has Maori women sitting in a kitchen talking about their useless menfolk and contraception, but when the men return they realise how much they need them. “Wendy” has a Pakeha woman telling a teacher that she does not like her daughter playing with a Maori kid… not realising that the teacher is the Maori kid’s mother.

            These are all very familiar tropes from Hilliard’s earlier stories in A Piece of Land – Stories and Sketches, but what about the frank sex now found in Send Somebody Nice – Stories and Sketches? “Corrective Training” has two girls in borstal who, it is implied, have a lesbian attraction. [Hilliard’s point  isn’t clear here. He seems to suggest that incarceration is the cause of homosexuality.] The brief sketch “Anita’s Eyes” is a description of a prostitute’s eyes. The title story “Send Somebody Nice” concerns a young prostitute who doesn’t know how not to be too affectionate with her clients… and in the end she escapes to Australia with one of her customers. “The Telegram” has a homosexual businessman sending a telegram to a soldier he has exploited and thinks of blackmailing him. “Girl in a Corner” shows a girl having an affair with a sailor and hovering on the edge of becoming a prostitute. In “At Angelo’s”, after a prostitute approaches a group of men in a late night diner, the men talk about how tacky whores are but also come to understand that prostitutes are exploited; and male customers are as much exploitative as the prostitutes’ pimps are. Far and away the most awkward and badly organised story in the collection is “Initiation” wherein a boy feels “unclean” when he goes through a rough boarding-school ritual after he has been with a prostitute.

            There are two stories that directly address ideology. “Street Meeting” concerns two Communist speakers on a Wellington street who are being heckled by various people including a drunk; and they are being watched by two policemen who, however, do not intervene. There is something very dispiriting about this story, as if the Communist orators are themselves beginning to lose heart in their cause, aware that most people are indifferent to their words as they go about their ordinary business. [Be it noted that by 1978, when the story was published, the New Zealand CP had diminished to a tiny membership, and had suffered a schism with some allying with Russia and some allying with China – which is referenced in the story.] The other story is the almost unbearably sentimental tale called “The Paper Sellers” – on one side of a Wellington street, a Communist is selling “The People’s Voice”. On the other side of a street a Catholic activist is selling “The Catholic Worker”… but despite their clashing beliefs, the Communist hawker comes to like the Catholic hawker, especially when he gets sick and dies. The Communist admits to himself that the other guy was just another decent human being and ideology isn’t everything. Okay – it’s a humane story and, as so often, Hilliard is on the side of the angels. But it’s as unlikely as the last-minute reformation of Tu at the end of A Night at Green River.

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And so to Hilliard’s “remarkably naïve work of non-fiction” which I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. This is Mahitahi – Work Together: Some Peoples of the Soviet Union, published in 1989 by Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Noel Hilliard and his wife Kiriwai went on a six-week tour through regions such as Uzbekistan, Moldavia and Byelorussia and other outlying parts of the U.S.S.R. Their aim was to see how well-treated the minority ethnicities in the Soviet state were. And - lo and behold – they discovered that everything was absolutely wonderful in the U.S.S.R. My goodness! How well it compared with all the anti-Maori prejudice there was in New Zealand!! …   Except that everything they were told was told by official guides who of course said that everything was wonderful. The Hilliards swallowed it. True, there are one or two negative things that Hilliard mentions. A Siberian physicist mentions the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and how Siberia got some of the fallout. And students are amazed that New Zealanders eat more meat that Russians can afford.

For naivete, consider this when Halliard speaks in a Russian newspaper editorial room. He tells the Russian journalists that in New Zealand “our newspaper are privately owned and have no obligations to the public, only to their shareholders.” Writing of the Russian journalists’ response he says they asked “How can such things be? they wanted to know. What kind of a newspaper is it that opposes your government and also the wishes of the people? Is it not their task to reflect the way your people think?      No, I said, their task is to return profits to the shareholder.” [To which they replied] “And who are these people who set themselves up in opposition to the majority of the people?” Yes folks, a one-party state with much gagging of independent thought will always tell the truth more that those filthy capitalist newspapers. And I believe the moon is made of green cheese.

Later, in Uzbekistan, Hilliard reports “I mentioned the Human Rights Commission in New Zealand and its Race Relations Office which looks into complaints about discrimination in housing and jobs and has power to prosecute offenders. ‘Do you have such a thing here?’    ‘No, we don’t have national chauvinism,’ said the professor. ‘We have national boasting and other such harmless forms. But we have no need of an institution such as you describe.” Actually this answer confirms what I thought of the U.S.S.R. It had no concept of Human Rights.

It is interesting that nowhere in this book is the name of Stalin mentioned as at this time his memory was out of favour. If Stalin had been mentioned, then one would have to admit that under his regime, hundreds of thousand [in fact probably millions] of non-Russian ethnicity were forcibly uprooted from their homelands and sent to distant – and usually impoverished – areas. Many such ethnicities whom Hilliard (briefly) visited were only where they were because Stalin had banished them there. You can verify this if you read Robert Conquest’s Stalin Breaker of Nations or any other reliable history book on the subject.

I could say more on this matter but I am beginning to rant. Suffice it to say that, ironically, the U.S.S.R. was on the brink of collapsing when Hilliard visited it. And once it collapsed there were wars in which various ethnicities broke away from Russian rule. So much for such happy folk under the Soviet regime whom Hilliard reported. Interesting to note that Hilliard was news chief of the Wellington Evening Post when he wrote this book. How he must have suffered under those shareholding private owners.

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            By this time you are probably thinking that I have just systematically trashed the work of Noel Hilliard. Not so. In his days and time he was a compassionate man who took seriously the matter of Pakeha discrimination against Maori and who wrote about it. He may have – like many of his vintage – for a while embraced the delusion that Communism was the cure, but [even if he wrote one silly book about Russia late in his life] he broke with that delusion even while remaining a committed socialist.

            The main problem now is that he has become a back-number. His frames of reference belong to another era. Maori are no longer a rural people rarely seen in cities. Maori no longer leave other people – non-Maori – to write about their experience. There are now many skilled Maori writers who can speak for themselves; and what they write is very different from what Hilliard used to write about them. Hilliard’s work is often seen now as patronising or perpetuating old stereotypes. When I wrote about Roderick Finlayson, I quoted the old quip “No good deed goes unpunished”, remembering how Finlayson, as sympathetic of Maori as Hilliard was, was criticised by the Maori author Patricia Grace for not depicting Maori life accurately. Hillard has fallen into the same category, not helped by his frequent tendency to write sentimentally about Nature, his often awkward prose, and his eagerness to point out morals.

            He is of another age. He belongs to history.