We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“BEGINNINGS IN AOTEAROA AND ABROAD” by Michael Jackson (published by Ugly Hill Press, distributed by Bateman Books, $NZ 39:90 )
Michael Jackson – academic, anthropologist, poet and traveller – is now 84 years old. Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is the nearest he has yet come to a full autobiography, although he has dipped into personal things in others of his books. [I admit that back in 2019 I wrote a not-very-positive review on this blog of his The Paper Nautilus,which had many personal asides.] In his preface to Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad he explains what he means by “beginnings”. In his view, we are always changing. We say goodbye to one phase of our life and a new one emerges – a new beginning. It can simply be growing up, but it can also mean understanding new things, meeting new people or going to other countries and immersing in different cultures, which is, of course, Jackson’s profession.
Jackson divides Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad into two halves.
Part One is headed “A Taranaki Childhood Around 1950”. Born in 1940, Jackson grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank-clerk. The family was not exactly poor but they sometimes had to struggle to make ends meet. Mount Taranaki dominated the countryside. By 1945, the little boy was aware of uncles coming home from war. It was also in 1945 that he first went to school, feeling deprived of his mother. Although he was never good at games and sports, he still pitched in, even if he often found himself practising all on his own. He did begin to understand that there were separate social classes in their small town, with working classes on the other side of the railway track from the side where the Jacksons dwelled. Still when he was very young, he learnt some lessons about farming, which was not his family’s metier. He once fell into a pit if cow dung to the great amusement of farming kids. [Jackson insists that “dung” is really a euphemism and the correct word should be “shit”]. His family did sometimes go on holidays at the beach, but at first he saw the sea as a daunting, frightening thing. [On this I sympathise with him – when I was very young I felt overwhelmed and frightened when I first holidayed at the sea.] He says the experience of the sea at first shook him, and in a way shaped much of his early thinking, as in this reaction: “Was this the first inkling that I could manipulate my dreams and, by extension, use my imagination to gain some mastery over things that threatened to overwhelm me? Certainly, I have never given up on the fantasy that I can travel through time and forewarn my childhood self of the perils lying ahead of him, and perhaps advise him on how to face them. Although most of us are destined to have children of our own and worry about their vulnerability; it is also true that we become the parents of the children we once were, and sometimes wish we could retrospective show them an easier path through life than the one we took so blindly.” (pg. 34).
Jackson tells us that his parents had different interests. His mother had great fortitude, though she was often sick. One of his most vivid memories is of how onerous it then was for a woman – his mother - to shoulder all the housework that had to be done before there were refrigerators or washing machines. He remembers his mother boiling clothes in a hopper, wringing clothes by hand and then struggling with a clothes line. Mother was interested in painting and worked in a Toss Woollaston style. His father, as a hobby, was interested in technical things. Jackson says it was “an uneasy relationship between the technical and aesthetic”.
Together with his older sister Gabrielle, young Jackson slowly came to terms with the presence of Maori in Taranaki and gradually began to understand how nearly all the Maori land had been “confiscated” [i.e. stolen] in the 19th century. Later, when he got a bicycle, he roved around parts of Taranaki, acquainting himself with Maori settlements and Maori art… perhaps being the origin of his life as an anthropologist. Countering this, there was the fact that as a youngster he was brought up on English comics and books and often thought of England as the promised land. Like many young people, he did have a sort of religious crisis, wondering if God could help him. Once, when he lost a cricket ball, he asked God to help him find it… and he found it… so maybe God could help him further… though that was not the direction he went. In his solitary rambles, however, he took to admiring plants and trees and the wind and did come close to the quasi-religious attitudes of Wordsworthian romantic poets. But this attitude did not last for his life. He writes: “In the English romantics, I would, years later, discover my spiritual forebears, though I would discover also that nature was a poor substitute for the company of friends, and that the writers who made a religion of nature were often conflicted rather than enviable figures.” (pg. 65) Becoming a young teenager, he also inevitably wondered about sex (the chapter dealing with this is called “Sexual Awakening”) and often heard the more uncouth lads of Inglewood speculating on what “rooting” involved.
Turning the spotlight away from himself, he considers some of the eccentrics who lived in Inglewood and environs, also noting that the area was known for having a higher rate of murders than most country towns. Two eccentrics behaved in very different ways – one ultimately violent. Their different behaviour led him to wonder if he himself had to “choose between withdrawal and engagement, changing myself or changing the world”. This really leads to crossing into young adulthood. But before he moves into adulthood, he gives some background to his family. His grandfather was the sole police officer of the town, mainly having to deal with rowdy drunks but sometimes dealing with more weighty things. He remembered how, in the First World War, exiles (European foreigners) were targeted by thugs regarding themselves as patriots.
Jackson did almost broke from his father when he believed that his father was making things hard for his mother. His father had him inducted into the local Masonic Lodge but young Jackson quickly broke from it and in fact denounced Mason-ism. Oddly enough, his father came to agree. All of which brings us to the end of the first part of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad.
Now here is a very odd thing whenever I read an autobiography. I always find that the first part – the childhood and adolescent part – is more vivid and engaging that the second part – the adult part. Could it be that childhood and adolescence are remembered better than adulthood? Are memories branded in our minds when we are seeing things for the first time? And to revert to Wordsworth, “the child is father of the man” – that what happens in childhood is likely to form what we become as adults. I am not here suggesting that the rest of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is less interesting than the first part, but I found Michael Jackson’s account of his childhood something I could identify with – and he has great skill in describing his youth, though he does sometimes interpose at length psychological theories he cherishes.
Which brings us to the Part Two, called “The Startling Unexpectedness of New Beginnings ”.
After childhood, in adolescence Jackson was sent to a dull secondary school. He gained some relief in visits to his sister in Wellington and the bohemian crowd she dwelt with. Starting in a new way after some time at university, he travelled for five years. He went to India experiencing a new culture and in London he helped homeless people. He also volunteered for work in the Congo. As a welfare worker in Australia, he was disgusted by the way Aboringinals were being forces into assimilation. What really gave him a new perspective, however, was when he met Petra Hawarden, who became his wife. He says “Just as every beginning is foreshadowed by false starts and tantalising glimpses, so too is love. In my attachment to my mother, or the two teachers at my primary school, or my infatuation with the high school French teacher, or the several short-lived affairs in my early twenties, I can retrospectively trace the lineaments of the love that finally flowered in my relationship with Petra Hawarden. Falling in love is like being born again. Instantly the past is eclipsed by the present, and even the future is not given a second thought. But just as every traveller on the threshold of a new departure may get cold feet, even so romantic love is accompanied by doubt, hesitancy, and a sense of loss.” (pg.122)
There followed when Jackson and his wife Petra lived in various parts of New Zealand. He gives a very affectionate account of husband and wife spending time with Sam Hunt, sometimes sharing Hunt’s shack…. But some years later, he says, Sam Hunt had coarsened as he gained fame: “I was … dismayed that Sam’s acclaim seemed to encourage in him a vulgar popularism that consisted of trashing married couples and academics…” (pg. 143)
Jackson and his pregnant wife Petra went to Sierra Leone where he blossomed as an anthropologist. Petra had a very hard and painful birth, but their daughter Heidi was born safely. Jackson studied initiation rites. This included clitoridectomy. Jackson sees this as essential to the tribal people in preparing for hardship and becoming stoic. He writes: “By construing clitoridectomy as ‘genital mutilation’ we lose sight of the transfigurative power of the rite of passage in which girls are prepared for the hardships of childbearing, child-ready, and marriage.” (pg. 156) Doubtless this was how the tribes saw it, but not everyone will agree. Frankly, I am glad that Jackson notes widely in Sierra Leone now the ritual is no longer practised.
Upon returning to New Zealand he took up a university role. Petra and Jackson sought a rural house in Manawatu and settled there. He studied with Te Pakaka and made himself more aware of Maori cosmology and Maori beginning beliefs. But Petra was inflicted with cancer. Calming herself, she took to Zen as her health declined. Eventually she died. Like so many in this narrative, there are beginnings – one being Jackson’s turning to Yoga. He discusses how he deals with it and what different perceptions he had. In the longest chapter in the book, called “Epiphany”, he visited a self-sufficient family in a remote part of Coromandel. The visit changed his view of the world – simplicity and fellowship being most important. He returns to overseas research, going back to Sierra Leone which he sees as having declined since her was last there. The visit gives him the opportunity to talk about the slave trade that once sailed from Sierra Leone, with side comments on how former imperial nations still benefit from what was plundered. Later he spends time helping refugees in New Zealand. He marries again to a woman called Emma – yet another beginning in his life… and where his final chapters he has a sense that life is an eternal cycle, and that our true home is the people we love.
For anyone who reads Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad will be outraged that I have simplified what Michael Jackson has written. I have given the outward chronicle of his life, with only passing comments on his ideas and theories about the nature of human thought. Often his detailed comments require close scrutiny and can be thorny to read. These things are to be respected… but it is the chronicle that is most readable.
