Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“TO FREE THE WORLD – Harry Holland ”  by James Robb (Steele Roberts, $50)  

[The full title of To Free the World is To Free the World – Harry Holland and the rise of the labour movement in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific]

 

There is no doubt that Henry Edmund (“Harry”) Holland was a formidable figure in both Australian and New Zealand politics, finally becoming the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. A fervent socialist, he championed many things that are now taken for granted. Holland died two years before the Labour Party first came into power in 1935, and while some reviled him (even in his own party), many have speculated that he could have been an astute Prime Minister. James Robb writes from a very socialist viewpoint, meaning there is a certain bias. But this is not a major flaw, given that all biographies are written from a certain point of view. Only very, very rarely does one find a biographer who is entirely impartial. So a socialist biography it is. To Free the World is a very detailed biography taking Holland (born 1868 – died 1933) from cradle to grave, and illustrated with many photographs and other images. After 425 pages of text there are over fifty pages of notes, sources and index. This is a very thorough work and I admit that it took me the best part of a week to read.

Holland was born in the hinterland of New South Wales. His parents were religious and as a young man Holland was a member of the Salvation Army. Although in young manhood he parted with organised religion, he always regarded himself as a non-denomination Christian. Some credited him which having learnt how to be an orator from his street-corner speeches when he was in the Sallies [or Salvos as the Aussies say]. When he was twenty he married his life-long spouse Annie and they were to have three boys and five girls. James Robb mentions Holland’s family only very occasionally, being more focussed on causes and politics which absorbed Holland. Holland’s left-tendency was first influenced by such Utopian works as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Back. He trained as a type-setter which was to be important in that he himself was later to set up and run various socialist newspapers and broadsheets.

In the 1890s Australia was suffering a severe economic depression which lead to the rise of radical socialism. There were riots over workers’ wages and the conditions in which they had to work, not to mention an economy in which prices made it difficult for workers to feed their families. Such unions as there were engaged in strikes, but there were many different types of socialism. The big rift in Australian socialism, which was to last for decades, was the rift between socialists who called for direct unionist action including strikes; and socialists who said that they should seek to win power by becoming a political party and entering parliament. The SFA (Socialist Federation of Australasia) was torn apart. Says James Robb - in very socialist terms - “The political separation between the class-struggle socialists and the class-collaborationist Labor Party was complete.” (p.55) Billy Hughes and William Holman became the best-known members of the parliamentary Labor Party, regarded by Holland and others as traitors to the socialist cause. There were many matters that concerned Australian socialists. Most opposed the separate states becoming, in 1901, the federation of Australia. At the same time the Socialist League and most unions endorsed the “White Australia” policy [which was abolished only in the 1960s] when unions feared that Asian workers would undercut them by accepting shorter wages.

Harry Holland was by now well-known for his lectures, his street oratory, and the radical socialist newspapers he published such as “The Socialist” and later “The International Socialist”. Like many of his comrades, he hailed the [abortive] 1905 Russian Revolution, believing it could create a genuinely democratic worker’s state once the autocratic Tsar was gone.

The biggest test for Australian socialists came in 1909, with first a strike on a large scale, then a lock-out, at the Broken Hill mine and in the coal-fields in northern New South Wales. There was a major stand-off, pitting unionists against armed police and “scabs”. The English socialist Tom Mann spoke about the exploitation of workers and was prosecuted for sedition. So was Holland, who was jailed for five months. Billy Hughes, now head of the Parliamentary Labor Party, managed to break up the striking unionists. In the federal elections of 1910, it was Billy Hughes’s party which made great gains in parliament, while the Socialist Federation of Australasia got nowhere. Holland wrote in 1910 “The great majority of the workers here are not prepared to accept the revolutionary working-class objective and tactics which mark the fighting of the workers’ movements in other counties. By more than 20 to 1 in West Sydney the Socialist candidate was turned down in favour of middle-class interests as represented by the Labor party… the only explanation is that the workers of Australia are as yet economically uneducated – as yet so unconscious of their class position and interests as to be easily tossed along in the whirlwind of political happenings.” ( quoted p.101) The fact is that increasingly many unionists were suggesting it would be wise to vote for the parliamentary Labor party even if they did not endorse all their policies. [Probably to Holland’s chagrin, the “ traitor” Billy Hughes went on to be Australia’s prime minister from 1915 to 1923.]

Holland now made it his business to write and lecture about accidents and lethal conditions that crippled many workers in factories. At about the same time, he himself suffered with knee problems. Although he had surgery, he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

His next fervent crusade was to oppose Australia’s Compulsory Military Act, which conscripted young men to take part in military drill and prepare for war. Holland wasn’t a thorough pacifist, but in the years before the First World War, he saw wars as the work of capitalists and imperialists who wanted to grab land and resources. War, in his view, was designed to crush the proletariat. When one of his sons was called up, Holland banned him from joining military drill. He was prosecuted and fined. 

 

                                                           Harry Holand in 1920

And it is at this point that To Free the World moves its narrative to New Zealand. There was a growing Socialist Party in New Zealand, and Harry Holland was invited to come over and deliver socialist lectures. Holland was 43 when he first landed in New Zealand in 1912 and walked straight into the issue of the day - the major strike at the gold-mining town Waihi. Under the New Zealand Liberal party, an Arbitration and Conciliation system had been set up to deal with worker’s grievances and determine what were fair wages. This system appeared to work well. There were no strikes for twelve years. But gradually the awards given by Arbitration failed to keep up with the rising cost of living. Holland, still favouring direct workers’ action, wrote that the arbitration system was Labour’s “Leg-iron”, and said workers should “strive for our revolutionary objective: the overthrow of capitalism, the uprearing of the Socialist Republic. So organised – and with our organisation built on a solid foundation of working-class knowledge – with no divisions of race or creed, colour or sex, we might well laugh our exploiters to scorn, smash through the awards and penalties of their Arbitration Courts, tear down the superstructure if their legal power to oppress, and swiftly plant the Red Flag… on the world’s citadel of industrialism.” [quoted p. 154]

At this time Bill Massey’s Reform party was building in strength, mostly focussed on the farming sector and more conservative than the ailing Liberal party. There was the strike at the Blackball coal mine. Socialists set up the Federation of Labour (later nicknamed the “Red Feds”), some of their leaders having, like Harry Holland, come from Australia – Bob Semple, Paddy Webb etc. And then there was the major strike at Waihi. The striking workers were driven out of town, the police used force (one striker was killed) and what the strikers called “scabs” took their place. Holland wrote a book about the tragedy of Waihi which was reprinted a number of times and had a wide readership. After the breaking of the Waihi strike, Holland remained steadfastly militant, suggesting that workers should “along the lines of the [American] IWW [“Wobblies”] … fight uncompromisingly, with never a section of workers scabbing on any other section, together with unity in the political field, in one big revolutionary socialist political party.” [p.170] James Robb says that after the formation of the Red Feds “the achievement of the One Big Union, and of the one big revolutionary Socialist Party, was to be Holland’s chief preoccupation for the remainder of his life, and in the next few years in New Zealand its achievement would appear to him to come tantalisingly close.” [p. 154] But in 1913 there was the coordinated strike on the waterfronts of New Zealand’s major cities, with exports and imports being held up. This was too much for the farmers [whom the socialists had tended to overlook] and the strikes were broken up, in part by farmers on horseback nicknamed “Massey’s Cossacks” by the strikers and their allies. Socialists who had supported the strike in speeches and pamphlets were prosecuted for sedition. Peter Fraser and Bob Semple were jailed. Holland offer a detailed defence, but Robert Stout gave him 12 months.

There was another problem that worried him. A major war seemed to be coming, and like Australia, New Zealand now had a Defence Act. Holland saw this as sheer militarism because it included compulsory military service. Holland had believed idealistically that the workers of the world would not go to war against their fellow proletarians. For years he had touted the German Social Democratic Party as the model for any socialist party… so he had a rude awakening when, at the beginning of the First World War, the GSDP joined all other German parties and voted for war. Painfully he came to understand that even in New Zealand, for most of the proletariat, patriotism trumped socialism. There was a plan for all parties to join together for the duration of the war. The Liberal and Reform parties united and formed a combined cabinet headed by Massey (Reform) and Joseph Ward (Liberal); but the socialists stood aloof. In 1916, the New Zealand Labour Party was formed, welcoming nearly all socialist factions. In 1918 Holland, Bob Semple and Peter Fraser entered parliament and Holland became the leader of the party, a role he kept up to his death. Later, there were six Labour MP’s and by 1920 there were nine. Perhaps ruefully, James Robb tells us “The waning of the class struggle movement after 1919 was as rapid as its rise.” (p.281) Later he says “By the time of the 1922 general election, the course of Holland, Fraser, Semple, Parry, Hickey, Webb, Savage and all the other former Red Fed class-struggle leaders accepting the framework of capitalist electoral politics had become irreversible.” (pp. 304-305) Holland clung to many of his radical ideas, believing that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution would herald a new era of proletarian freedom… or if not them, then the botched uprisings in Germany after the First World War. But the fact was he was now a respectable parliamentarian leading a respectable party, even if radical words were sometimes spoken. Naturally the tiny New Zealand Communist Party accused the Labour Party of not being truly socialist.

 

The nine Labour members of Parliament in 1922. Harry Holland seated 2nd from left. Peter Fraser next to him and Michael Joseph Savage at the end of the top row.

            In the 1920s, as well as steering a parliamentary socialist party, Holland can be credited with championing two major causes.

Near the end of the First World War there was formed in New Zealand a Protestant Political Association which preached that all the ills in the nation could be blamed on Catholics. The major non-Catholic denominations (Anglicans, Presbyterians) thought this was nonsense, but the PPA gained traction from the smaller and more marginal churches, had influence with some MPs, and managed to stir up much bigotry. Holland frequently spoke against this and made it clear that the Labour Party welcomed people of any religion or no religion, men or women, Maori or Pakeha. The PPA faded away by the early 1930s.

More momentously, Holland (and his party) condemned the way New Zealand officials were treating the Samoan people. The League of Nations had “Mandated” Western Samoa to New Zealand but Samoa was being treated like a colony. The Mau, a Samoan party seeking independence, was formed and made peaceful demonstrations. They pledged to use no violence. But the occupying forces did use violence, finally shooting into a crowd and killing protestors. It wasn’t only these events that Holland saw as an outrage, but also the dishonest way official dispatches and newspapers reported the situation. He spoke frequently about this in public and in parliament. Regrettably, his campaign fell on deaf ears. Samoa continued to be controlled by New Zealand until 1961.

As he reaches the later years of Holland’s life, James Robb reminds us that Holland did have interests outside current politics. He read poetry and wrote verses of his own. He wrote a book about Scotland’s most esteemed poet Robert Burns… but of course he admired Burns in part because he was  a revolutionary and a radical.

By the 1930s, some members of the Labour Party began to see Holland as past his prime, and thought that a new leader was needed for the parliamentary party. The discussion didn’t last for long, however. Holland died of a heart attack in October 1933 while attending the funeral of an old friend , the Maori King, Kingi Te Rata Mahuta. The Labour Party became the government in 1935 and remained there until 1949, first under Michael Joseph Savage then under Peter Fraser. James Robb speculates that, had he survived to be prime-minister, “There can be little doubt that as a leader of a Labour government, Holland would have pursued a course much like that of Savage and Fraser in leading the working class into World War II – albeit perhaps with deep personal regret.” (p. 381) I myself speculate here that the “regret” Robb refers to is the fact that socialists who had opposed going to war in 1914 and been jailed for it (Bob Semple etc.) were only too eager to fight a war in 1939. Remember Michael Joseph Savage was the first prime-minister, in what was then still the British Empire, to pledge allegiance to Britain once war broke out. Fighting a war with Hitler was different from fighting the Kaiser.

In his last chapter, before he comes to appendices, notes and index, Robb criticises other writers who have written more negative biographies of Harry Holland than To Free the World . As I have not read these other biographies I cannot pass judgment on them. Robb writes clearly, his socialist views are honest ones, the book is thorough and the images are a great help. I can, however, dissent on one thing – although Robb doesn’t say it, it is clear to me that in the end Holland backed away from his original fire-brand variety of socialism, and came to understand that the parliamentary way was both more efficient and more genuinely democratic. And after all, in a generally stable society, who wants a revolution?

Footnote: In case you were wondering, I was not misspelling the Australian Labor Party as opposed to the New Zealand Labour Party. That is how the Aussies spell it.

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 year or two ago.

     “OLD NEW ZEALAND – A Tale of the Good Old Times” by “A Pakeha Maori” [F. E. Maning] (first published in 1863)

 

            In the 1960s, the publishers Wilson and Horton (then proprietors if the New Zealand Herald) printed a series of facsimiles of New Zealand books that had first been published in the 19^th century. I have seven of these facsimiles sitting on my shelves. They are very interesting at least because they show what attitudes European (British) writers had when it came to Maori. Some of these books would not be criticised now, but some display very dated or even bigoted ideas about race. One book in particular is well known, F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand – A Tale of the Good Old Times.

Fredrick Edward Maning (1812-1883) was a Protestant Irishman who was a robust man very happy to fight and brawl when it suited him. He was apparently 6 feet 3 inches tall. In 1833, Maning came over to New Zealand from Tasmania and set himself up as a trader in Hokianga, the north of New Zealand. He lived with the Ngapui iwi, married a Maori woman (the sister of a chief) and had four children by her. He also, apparently, sometimes joined Ngapui war parties fighting other iwi. Years later he became a judge of the Native Land Court, but in his early years he was known to have clashed with British laws. He opposed the Treaty of Waitangi and formal colonisation of New Zealand. In his brief Preface to Old New Zealand, Maning says he “thought it might be worthwhile to place a few sketches of old Maori life before the remembrance of them had passed away.” He adds “I first saw them as they were still unlike a civilised people of British subjects”. Remember, Maning wrote his book in the 1860s. When he referred to “ the good old times” he was referring to the 1830s, before the Treaty of Waitangi existed. The 1830s were not all that far away from the 1860s. Old New Zealand was a very popular book and was reprinted many times in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But by the late 20^th century, it was being criticised by historians. In 1975, the historian Professor M. P. K. Sorrenson wrote an essay (ironically called “How to Civilise Savages”) in which he said that Old New Zealand had “undeservedly become a local classic”. More recently Maori writers have criticised the book.

I finally got around to reading Old New Zealand this year, and here is how I see it. [Page numbers given according to the original facsimile.] Maning does not write about events in sequence. His narrative – such as it is – jumps hither and thither. He has the maddening habit of not giving dates and not giving names of the people he meets and works with. Although he is a “trader” he never specifies what he trades in.  He often attempts to be jocular (and sometimes succeeds) but his attempts at oratory are flat. Take the gushy words with which he opens his book: “Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this, now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and every thing seems ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’. But those were the times! – ‘the good old times’ – before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. When every one did as he liked – except when his neighbours would not let him, (the more shame for them) – when there were no taxes, or duties, or public works, who public to require them…” and so on (Chapter I, pp,1-2)

In all of his narrative, such as it is, we have to remember that in the 1830s, Maori tended to welcome Pakeha, this being long before Pakeha became the majority population. Maori rangatira looked forward to getting iron ploughs, knives, axes, European clothing and, of course, firearms – muskets and tupara (double-barrelled shotguns). For this reason, many Pakeha traders were held in high esteem and were protected by rangatira.

 

Maning begins (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) with a not-particularly-hilarious account of how he first stepped foot on Hokianga. He notes Maori took goods without paying for them and were particularly interested in the tupara. The chief welcomes Maning as “his” Pakeha. Maning speaks of how one senior of the iwi is a fine fellow who revels in the fact that, when he was younger, he ate many people. Yes, cannibalism was still practiced in some parts of Aotearoa and Maning  appears to find this fact amusing. After wrestling with a Maori champion, he says: “My vis-à-vis in the operation [of bringing goods to shore] was a respectable old warrior of great experience and approved valour, whose name being turned into English meant ‘the eater of his own relations’… This was quite a different diet from ‘melons’, and he did not bear his name for nothing… I will only say that my comrade was a most bloodthirsty, ferocious, athletic savage, and his character was depicted in every line of his tattooed face.” (Chapter 3, pp,41-42) He makes it clear that there was a big trade on the selling of [Maori] heads, who have been killed and cured by Maori and sold to traders. “The skippers of many of the colonial trading schooners were always ready to deal with a man who had ‘a real good head’, and used to commission such men as my companion of the morning to ‘pick up heads’ for them. It is a positive fact that some time after this the head of a live man was sold and paid for beforehand, and afterwards honestly delivered ‘as per arrangement’ ”  (Chapter 3, p.63)

There are still “small” wars between iwi and some against British settlers. He says (Chapter 4) a renegade, and members of the team that help him ashore, made a raid against one settlement and were driven away by cannon fire. He builds a modest house for himself (Chapter 5), but of course has to pay, in axes, muskets etc., to competing people who claim his plot of land is theirs. At which point, delving into the future, he curses official Land Commissioners who, years later, make him prove that he acquired his plot legitimately. He freely admits (Chapter 6) that he has Maori “retainers” and servants whom he pays. And naturally he loves to spin sensational tales even if they are true, as in the following: “He killed several men in fair fight, and had also – as was well known – committed two most diabolical murders, one of which was on his own wife, a fine young woman, whose brains he blew out at half a second’s notice for no further provocation than this: - he was sitting on the verandah of his house, and told her to bring a light for his pipe. She, being occupied in domestic affairs, said ‘Can’t you fetch it yourself, I am going for water’. She had the calibash in her hand and their infant child on her back. He snatched up his gun and instantly shot her dead on the spot; and I have heard hm afterwards describing quite coolly the comical way in which her brains had been knocked out by the shot with which the gun was loaded. He also had, for some trifling provocation, lopped off the arms of his own brother or cousin. I forget which, and was altogether, from his tremendous bodily strength and utter insensibility to danger, about as ‘ugly a customer’ as one would care to meet.” (Chapter 6, pp. 89-90). This is very much as in the tone of his boastful tale of wrestling with a formidable Maori warrior and catching a tomahawk thrown at him by the said warrior (Chapter 6, pp. 92-93)

Often he emphasises that Maori crave for European tools because they had previously had to work with more primitive tools which made for very laborious toil thus: “As for the Maori people in general, they are neither so good or so bad as their friends and enemies have painted them, and I suspect are pretty much what almost every other people would have become, if subjected for ages to the same external circumstances. For ages they have struggles against necessity in all its shapes. This has given them a remarkable greediness for gain in every visible and immediate tangible form. It has even left its mark on their language. Without the aid of iron the most trifling tool or utensil could only be purchased by an enormously disproportionate outlay of labour in its construction, and, in consequence, became precious to a degree scarcely conceivable by people of civilised and wealthy countries. This great value attached to personal property of all kinds, increased proportionately the temptation to plunder; and where no law existed, or could exist, of  sufficient force to repress the inclination, every man, as a natural consequence, became a soldier, if it were only for the defence of his own property and that of those who were banded with him – his tribe, or family….”                             (Chapter 6, pp. 99-100)

From Chapters 7 on, he discusses what he sees as traditional Maori codes and laws that were almost universally respected. Muru (Chapter 7) is regarded by Pakeha as sheer robbery or plunder, but Maning suggests muru was really a means of dividing up goods equitably, often under the pretext of punishing somebody who owned too much. But in Maning’s time it is rarely used. Tapu (Chapter 8) however is quite different, still widely used as a means of keeping order. A tohunga really could, by his mana, stop people in their tracks by declaring a person or thing was tapu. Maning tells a tale of how he himself was chastised by a tohunga when he accidentally slept in a hill where the bones of an earlier tohunga were buried. He says he was put through a long ceremony by the tohunga in which he was divested of all his clothes and kitchen utensils. He also notes (Chapter 9) that a tohunga was in effect a soothsayer, claiming to be able the predict the future. Maning says this was very much the same technique the ancient Greeks used – giving a prediction that was ambiguous enough to mean almost anything. One tohunga (Chapter 10) was credited with raising up the dead. In what is, oddly, one of Maning’s best anecdotes, he tells the story of a botched such “resurrection” which ended in tragedy. There is still some fear of the taniwha (Chapter 11) and other cases of the use of tapu.

In Chapters 12 and 13, he speculates what Maori warfare was like, prior to the entry of firearms. He regards most of them had been real but on a small scale. He speculates on why so many earth fortifications had been abandoned by iwi and concludes that the nature of war has changed since muskets came along. Muskets massively depleted Maori numbers [he doesn’t use the term, but he is here referring to what some historians now call the Musket Wars]. Later he also suggests that another factor was the introduction of European diseases. In his own time he has seen iwi becoming fewer and fewer… He circles us back to his first chapters, reminding us that “A chief possessing a pakeha was much envied by his neighbours, who, in consequence, took every opportunity of scandalising him and blaming him for any rough plucking process he might submit the said pakeha to;… pakehas being, in those glorious times, considered to be geese who laid golden eggs, and it would beheld to be the very extreme of foolishness and bad policy to kill them, or, by too rough handling, to cause them to fly away.” (Chapter 13 p. 184) And in Chapter 14 he moves into different territory by telling us abput an old warrior, a Rangatira who lamented the days of the spear and axe and mere that had been taken over by the muskets. When the old warrior dies, two old women of his age hang themselves.

And then (Chapter 15) Maning proceeds to tell us the meaning of a number of Maori words. He intends to write a Maori lexicon. He asserts how difficult it is to explain many Maori words, and declares “It will be a tough word [a Maori word with many nuances which he has been analysing] disposed of to my hand, when I come to write my Maori dictionary, in a hundred volumes, which, if I begin soon, I hope to have finished before the Maori is a dead language.”  (Chapter 15 p. 224)

As I said at the beginning of this review, Old New Zealand jumps all over the place “hither and thither”. Maning is by no means a stylist and his book often has odd absents. Though he was a “Pakeha Maori”, he never mentions the many British he would have met in the 1830s. He overlooks such things as Maori crafts, Maori forms of marriage, and major Maori people who took important roles in iwi. Also there is that element of boastfulness (his skill as a wrestler etc.). Sometimes, too, there are statements that we could now regard as patronising. Consider this, written with regard to Maori: “for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments and information, - whom we must either civilise or by our mere contact exterminate.”(Chapter 6, pp. 99-102) The last word might seem shocking – though it is not suggesting genocide, but rather that contact with Pakeha is dangerous. Like it or not, distasteful though some people will now find it, much [perhaps most] of what Maning writes about Maori customs are true and provable. Not a great book, but still one worth reading as a primer.

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 NEVER WAS A PARADISE

            No race, ethnicity, nation, people, tribe or human group is free of gross flaws, bad behaviour, violence and what could reasonably be called sin. Poor Rousseau and others of his naïve ilk thought that somewhere in the world there were “noble savages” with better moral codes that Europeans had. There weren’t… and let us remember that Rousseau had never visited the lands he thought were blessed.

In saying this I am not damning all individual people in the world. Yes, there have been decent, thoughtful and even pacifistic people in the world, but all such have existed in environments where there was the potential for violence and where violence often broke out. Every large group of people in the world has at some time been aggressive and violent. I say this because there is a tendency nowadays – especially in the USA and among “woke” people everywhere - to believe that only European colonisers ever caused havoc, up-ended societies or attempted committing genocide.

This is both ridiculous and untrue.

Search the history of any country in the world and you will find wars, coups, attempts to expunge foreign peoples etc. Shaka Zulu attempted to wipe out all other tribes in Southern Africa; African tribes further north were frequently at war with their neighbours; some tribes were perfectly happy to round up their enemies and sell them to European slave-traders. Indigenous American tribes  (so-called “Indians”) fought wars with other tribes before Europeans arrived and started fighting them and taking their land. Taking slaves after defeating enemies was common in Aztec, Inca and (to a lesser degree) Mayan culture. Mohammed’s forces fought those who did not accept their religion and, under the name of jihad, rampaged through northern Africa enforcing their order at pain of death.  Over the many centuries, China expanded by war, fighting with Mongols, expropriating foreign land [e.g. Tibet] and destroying many cultures. India, made of many different states [and languages], expanded through war. Japan had a refined code of warfare; and they used it. Over the centuries, people in all parts of the world overtook and destroyed other cultures. And please note I include European peoples in this endless tale.

            But what I am often now aware of is the tendency of some apologists to pretend that, before large scale European colonisation began, the world was idyllic… and if this can’t be proved, then there will be apologists to say there were reasons for violence by the indigenes.

            I have recently finished reading F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand, his account of relating with Maori in the 1830s, a book that is now much contested. The day after I finished reading it, while taking my morning walk, I happened to listen though my earplugs to a New Zealand podcast in the “Black Sheep” series. It was about Hongi Hika. This ferocious and skilful warrior triggered off what are now called the Musket Wars. 20,000 Maori were killed by his forces and his enemies. This was the most lethal war that Aotearoa / New Zealand ever suffered. The number killed was greater than New Zealand deaths in the First and the Second World Wars (and far, far more deaths than in the “New Zealand Wars” in the 1860s). There is no doubt that those Pakeha who traded in firearms were partly to blame. But, after all, it was Hongi Hika and the Ngapuhi who mustered troops and ravaged the northern part of the North Island, killing and despoiling those who lived in what it now Auckland.

            What I found interesting (and a little questionable) was the way two people in the pod cast – the historian Paul Moon and a distant descendant of Hongi Hika – both acknowledged the carnage made by Hongi Hika, but both also found excuses for Hongi Hika’s deadly rampage. It was the fault of the traders with muskets [partly true]. There was a tradition of much smaller “wars”, often involving very few Maori warriors, before Europeans brought in the means of expanding war. Hongi Hika was a great diplomat when he visited England, looked carefully at the nature of  the British army and how it was used, and helped Professor Lee to create a Maori lexicon etc. etc.  But meritorious though this may sound, it was still Hongi Hika himself who unleashed warfare in a grand and deadly way. The carnage was his… and the warrior tradition was already is place long before Pakeha came along.

            If you tell me that Maori land was stolen on a grand scale by the British; if you say there were cruel attempts to wipe out the Maori language; if you note that poverty in New Zealand is still worse for Maori and Pasifika than for most Pakeha, then I would whole-heartedly agree with you. If you point out that Europeans waged deadly wars on a large scale and stole many lands, I would also agree. But if you believe the rest of the world was perfect, peaceful, just and harmonious before Europeans came, then I would say you’re deluding yourself.  

Don’t pretend there was once a peaceful paradise. There never was.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

     “ABOUT NOW”  by Richard Reeve (Maungatua Press, $25);  “DEPARTURES” by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press $NZ30); David Gregory’s "Based on a True Story"; Leonard Lambert’s "Slow Fires – New Poems"; Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga’s "Tsunami With Mushrooms"

A personal note. I first encountered the poetry of Richard Reeve with his first two collections Dialectic of Mud (2001) and The Life and the Dark (2004), followed by his long-form poem The Among (2008) and In Continents (2008). Some years passed before his next collection came my way, Generation Kitchen (2015), after which I heard no more. About Now brings us up to date after what had to me seemed like a long silence, apart from the sequence Horse and Sheep (2019). Reeve has always been concerned with ecology and the preservation of indigenous flora and fauna, but [unlike too many New Zealand poets now] he rarely preaches or hectors us. He looks closely at what nature is for good or ill, and frequently presents nature as a metaphor for human behaviour. As he is based in Dunedin, his imagery often refers to the South Island. He can be ironic and/or satirical but not to excess. About Now is dedicated “For departed friends” and opens with a reminder from the ancient epic Gilgamesh that life is fleeting and ultimately we all die. Reeve, now in mature early middle-age, has seen some friends die and writes elegies. I note that this book declares it was “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”.

Reeve has a very distinct style. Some years ago I wrote “Reeve’s own engagement with the raw matter of the world is evident… Another is his awareness of form – not a slavish adherence to traditional poetic forms, but an ability to reference them as he presents his own worldview. In this he is almost unique among his New Zealand contemporaries.” I stand by this statement. Reeve does use orderly stanzas meaningfully and in a standard and traditional form. Sometimes he uses rhyme as in his poem “End of Days”. “Ancestors” is a sonnet in pure form, while “Canto the First” is a long poem heroically written throughout in crossed rhymes [a. b. a. b. / c. d. c. d. etc.]. “Second Thought” makes use of repetition and rhyme in imagining the relentlessness of the rain. This does not mean that Reeve is working only in traditional forms. He also uses blank verse and modernist styles, but he certainly shows prosodic skills that are now alien to too many poets.

About Now is divided into six sections. As they often overlap in their ideas, I’ll simply look at Reeve’s main interests.

There is of course his concern for flora and fauna. He opens with a reflection on “Recycled Rimu” – how this wood has been used, perhaps abused, placed in different environments, admired, carrying a history of its own in Dunedin. He is not a sentimentalist but a realist in regarding a blackbird trapped in a nearby flu, but aware that we human beings often unwittingly torture animals, noting  “There it is, / the coming of death for that poor soul, / hopelessly caught up in a human world / of devices and contraptions, not built for birds.” The same sort of empathy with animals appears in “Dog with its Head out a Window” about the joy a dog feels in a speeding car while watching the scenery rush past. Similarly “Dogs on Beaches” celebrates the anarchic pleasure dogs feel running freely around a beach and barking at one another. The capping salute to animals comes in the final section of this collection  “And the Pukeko Shall Rule”. It is a sequence of eleven poems in which, despite the rain and other obstacles, the resilient bird become almost a symbol of poetry re-encoding itself. Water is another image that interests Reeve. “Judicial Notice” suggests a poetic metaphor wherein the actions of a judge in court are seen as thinking in terms of fly-fishing… perhaps with an ironic tone. Is the judge day-dreaming? “Our Patch” uses the image of water clogged with junk to suggest the endeavours of human attempts at immortality.

Most of the elegies are very personal. “Westies Camp” is an unvarnished eulogy for an old trapper with his flaws and eccentric behaviour. “Last Days” begins “Old friend, my heart breaks. / Witnessing you, shrunken / in a hospital bed, beautiful smile / anticipating an end…” but goes on to suggest that there will be remembrance of him. “Postcard to Mr Clare” salutes mainly forgotten poets whom he remembers. And there is a special elegy for the South Island poet Peter Hooper, who died when Reeve was still a child. [There is a review on this blog of Hooper’s collected works Rejoice Instead] Moving to a wider version of elegy is “Ancestors”, a sonnet dealing with the idea that we carry the marks and ways inherited from our forebears. “Living and Dying in Taranaki” comes close to being an elegy, dealing with an old woman who remembers much of her province, who knows the past well and who eventually, in death, becomes a part of the land. “The Dead” in effect salutes those who fought in wars but admits that most were for pointless causes. In all this, Reeve is drawing on the idea of mortality and how we should approach it.

In the realm of the present age we meet satire and much pessimism. “Unsustainable Preservation” basically damns many categories of people from “derivative poet” to bureaucrat to investor to liberal hypocrite. The collection’s title poem “About Now” does indeed deal with the present moment, part of it hinged on a group discussing (or arguing over) the rights and wrongs of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine… but this is part of a greater question. How right or wrong are our perspectives of our own era when weighted against all of history? “When it is so clear now our times are on the way out, / what to write, what to say, to the civilization in denial? / There are ways yet to live. They are not your ways.” And once again, some of Reeves’ images call into question the nature of poetry and current reasoning. There follows “Be Happy” which ridicules facile optimism about the future; and “End of Days” begins “Counting down the decades, years or days / till everything we know has turned to ash, / we ask ourselves if there are other ways…”

Yet after Reeve’s forays into nature, elegies and satire, we come to the matter of poetry itself, creating some of the most thoughtful work in this book. “Angling” once again uses the imagery of fishing as the poet understands that with age, poetry come harder for him that it did when he was younger, thus “I cast my line for a word. Wonder at my inability / to call up a suitable specimen. / When first I fished from the pool, shoals of phrases / flickered in the depths, every cast was a strike, / I brought home fat bags of ballads, as though the abundance would never end, / which however it did, a few less each time, / or undersize, scrawny things, belly-hooked sprats of verse / as the stock thinned…”.

The sequence “Horse and Sheep” consists of 13 poems, all having seven lines with a rhyme scheme and a final single line which has the effect of closing the case. “Horse and Sheep” is apparently a sort of allegory with the narrator crossing rough country in cold weather. A horse becomes [as I read it] a figure of life and steadiness, while the sheep are more vulnerable and perishable. The narrator’s way is daunting: “Brilliant and daunting and ignorant, / this intellectual shrub that tears my toe / will penetrate the doubt of pig or ant. //  Near everywhere, it does not cease to know / in guts or steeps; it undermines the air, / the gentle gusts that fill the scree below, // the roar of seasons in the pooling year. / On sun-cut rock, or buried under snow, / it gets in everything, lives everywhere, // infesting so that no new life can grow.”           

And then there is the heroic “Canto the First” clearly inspired by Dante Alighieri and once again presenting a perilous journey by a wanderer – but the wanderer is not seeking Paradise. He is seeking justice for his late friend and poet Corin. He addresses Dante thus: “Master poet, harking from other parts, / nine ages dead, you walk our southern rim, / what brings you to this country of false starts?, / is there a wrong that you were sent to fix, / our culture of administrated arts? / Our leaders thrive in pond-life politics. / What other reason could you have for coming? / Is God caught up in tax avoidance tricks?”  Reeve suggests an idea of Hell different from Dante’s – the torture of a poet who did not achieve what he hoped… and in the process he mocks official arbitration of poetry, as in “our culture of administrated arts”.

If you have read this review to the end, you will note that I have produced a catalogue of About Now rather than a real critique. This is the old problem with reviewing a substantial collection of poems. How does the reviewer make it clear what the collection has to offer without mentioning many poems – unless one is to focus in detail only on a very few poems.

I have one confession to make. I do not understand the poem “The Elite” – it appears to be criticising various types of people who regard themselves as superior, but it presents so many examples that we might as well conclude that we all have such an assumption of superiority. That said, I see About Now as wide-ranging, thoughtful and challenging in the real meaning of the word.

Footnote: In 2018 and 2019, Maungatua Press, edited by Richard Reeve and David Karena-Holmes, produced a set of slim collections written by Nick Ascroft, David Karena-Holmes, Cilla McQueen, Michael Steven, Blair Reeve and Richard Reeve, all of them illustrated with woodcuts by Manu Berry and all of them “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”. Maungatua Press appears to be proud of its independence. I was happy to receive them when they were sent along with About Now and I note that the “Horse and Sheep” sequence of About Now was originally on` of these slim collections.

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            Dunstan Ward, now in his eighties, is an academic who has lived in France for longer than he has lived in New Zealand. Among many other things, he co-edited the collected poetry of Robert Graves,  assisted by Graves’ widow. He does have deep New Zealand roots as well as Catholic roots. And he has been careful when it comes to producing collections of poetry. At an advanced age, he has produced only three collections, Departures being the third. The long [8 pages] opening poem called “Departures” gives a full account of  his forebears. In the 19^th century, the Wards settled in New Zealand, more than once clashing with Maori when it came to the ownership of land. The Ward family produced the prime-minister Joseph Ward and many land-owners, as well as being close to the Redwoods from which came a Catholic archbishop. But many in the family tree decided to return to England. What are departures? Literally leaving a country and friends to go elsewhere, but also departing from things and ideas – in other words changing one’s mind over the years. In a way, this very civilised collection could just as well be called Reminiscences as Departures.

            A gathering of poems recalls Dunstan Ward’s childhood – images of old Dunedin, dreams and nightmares, father’s farm and the occasional loud arguments of father with mother in the hard times – a very clear and vivid account of time and place. And after the account of childhood, there is the awareness of ageing and knowing time is limited… even if one is old. The poem “Swallows” declares “I part the curtains, watch for the first swallows / today, the day of my birth, and my father’s. / Seventy-eight already I’ve outlived him / by six months, the other half of the year / he must at this date have known would be his last: / disfigured by cancer, he refused treatment, / quoting the sergeant at the Great War front, ‘Come on, you bastards – d’you want to live forever?’ ” His terms of reference show a strong awareness of British and [especially] continental European culture, with one family forebear dead at the battle of the Somme. He loves Paris (it’s basically his home of choice) and its opportunities to enjoy high culture… like listening to Otto Klemperer conducting the orchestra.

            There are very personal poems about the sickness and death of his brother. The familiarity with funerals and their rituals leads to poems about Catholicism and his upbringing in the poem “Education” which reads in full “Not to learn the names of birds and flowers, / cities and rivers, or the constellations, / to parse one’s own body, it’s hidden grammar, / sight-read sheet music, translate Latin unseens, / but to repeat the types of sin and grace, / mortal or venial, sanctifying, actual, / Immaculate Conception, hypostatic union, / transubstantiation, the real presence, / to chant ‘tower of ivory’, ‘house of gold’ / ‘mourning and weeping in this valley of tears’ / ‘the hour of our death’ – the most important in life: / beatific vision or tortures of hell, forever.” He chronicles the deaths of acquaintances and gives virtual elegies for such as Frederick Page, the musicologist.

            Then he takes on the difficulty of writing poetry. He claims (in the poem “Failure”) that he took to poetry only after he had failed at so many other things. “Imitation” suggests that you cannot really translate a poem from another language – a view with which I heartily agree. There follow accounts of many poets he admires, such as “In quest of Fernando Pessoa”, the Portuguese poet. And Elizabeth Bishop ; and Robert Graves of course; and most important of all, two poems about his friend Vincent O’Sullivan, “Friendship” and “Fortitude” – the latter being written after O’Sullivan’s death.

            But ultimately he comes back to Paris and Italy. He witnesses the fire that gutted Notre Dame cathedral. He is inspired by Venetian glasses; he dramatizes Renaissance Italian scandals. In “Infected Spring” he paints a portrait of Paris when plague of Covid 9 hit. And finally he gives us “In My Street”, a kind of paean to the Parisian street when he lives. with all its historical culture.

            I hope I have made it clear that this is an erudite collection of poems coming from a civilised man, touching the major issues of ageing, the importance of culture and the joys of friendship. A solid collection.

 

Added Footnote: After I posted this review of Dunstan Ward's Departures, the poet corrected me noting that his poem 'Fortitude' was not written after Vincent O'Sullivan died, but was read to O'Sullivan by his wife.

 

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            To all writers of poetry I apologise for not being able to give full space to every collection that comes my way. Here, then, is a selection of poetry I have recently read and enjoyed, but have to deal with briefly.

 

            David Gregory’s Based on a True Story (Sudden Valley Press, $25) is a collection of [mainly] lean, short poems, many short enough to be aphorisms. Gregory has much irony and wit.  The ironic title reminds us how dishonest so many movies are that claim to be “based on a true story”. Memory cheats us and perhaps memories of childhood cheat us most of all; but there is some place here for joy and a questioning mind as in the poet’s visit to the Chatham Islands. Robust and very readable work.

            Leonard Lambert’s Slow Fires – New Poems (Cold Hub Press, $19.15) is, understandably, the work of an older man who has much experience behind him. The title poem is a warning against extremism and elsewhere he shows awareness that current ideas always fade and are replaced. But these are not his chief preoccupations. Painter as well as poet, he delights in being retired. He is aware that life is short, accepting its fading joys.          Sometimes he expresses a nostalgia for places he once knew, but he is not naïve about it. And in his most impressive poem, Elements, he weds the joy of flying birds with the working of the human mind. 

 

            Am I allowed to speak of fun when I speak of  Tsunami With Mushrooms by Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga (Steele Roberts, $25)? It is a hybrid of poetry and short stories, illustrated by various artists. The poems are mostly (but not exclusively) connected to sea and shore, with mountains. The poet lives in Kaikoura. She can joke, be ironic and be deadly serious. See “A Week of It” for laughter. See “Tsunami Assembly Point” for seriousness. And see a mixture of the two in “Zoom Attenborough”. As for the four short stories, they are closely built on real situations.

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 year or two ago.

“ TUTANKHAMUN – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma” by Prof. Joyce Tyldesley (published in 2022)

 

Sometimes one has to bow down to a whim. A couple of years ago I just happened to see in a bookshop a new book about Tutankhamun, titled Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma written by the formidable English Egyptologist Professor Joyce Tyldesley. She has so far written 17 books about ancient Egypt and she is regarded as an expert in her field. I am no Egyptologist, but I knew at once that this book would not be one of those pot-boiler books that give readers a sensationalist version of an ancient civilisation. So I bought the book… and then I left it on my shelf for two years without reading it. I had so many other books to read and review. Finally, this month, I got around to reading Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma. And how enlightening and informative it was! After all the fantasies we’ve been given about ancient Egypt; after all the nonsense about deadly curses for those who disturb ancient tombs; after Hollywood movies where mummies come back to life and cause havoc [entertaining though they may be] – I found a courteous, matter-of-fact book about Tutankhamun and his times, as best as we can uncover those times. Joyce Tyldesley is a scholar, but she does not condescend to her readership, explaining things when needed, but keeping a clear narrative.

Tyldesley divides her book into two halves. The first deals with Tutankhamun and the world in which he lived. The second deals with how archaeologists found and dealt with Tutankhamun’s tomb and how it was treated 3,000 years later. Her preface and prologue tell us that Tutankhamun reigned from 1336 BC to 1327 BC – that is, he reigned for just under nine years. He died when he was about twenty. But she does not accept the idea that Tutankhamun was a “boy king”. Though his reign might have been short, and though his rule began when he was only about eleven, he grew to maturity and acted as a ruler should. It was quite common then for people to die in their twenties and it was very rare indeed for people to reach the age of fifty or older. In the era when Tutankhamun lived, the 18^th. Dynasty, pyramids were no longer raised to honour pharaohs. Instead, pharaohs were buried in the remote Valley of Kings on the west bank of the Nile, their tombs cut out of hard rock.

So to Tyldesley’s account of Tutankhamun’s life and time.

The pharaoh Akhetaten was a sort of heretic. He moved his capital from the traditional court in Thebes / Luxor to the smaller city Amarna and he set about abolishing many of the gods. Some historians have mistaken him for a monotheist – a believer in one god – but this was not true. Akhetaten was a henotheist – one who believed that there were many lesser gods, but only one really important god. Akhetaten shut down many temples and built his worship around the sun god alone. His consort was Nefertiti. Among Egyptologists there is still much speculation about who were Tutankhamun’s parents. Was his mother Nefertiti? Or [a possibility] one of his older sisters? Or what some Egyptologists call “harem queens”? We do not know because a pharaoh would keep his sons very much in the background and not publicise the birth of a son.

 

What we do know is that after Akhetaten died, young Tutankhamun became a semi-divine pharaoh.  He had grown up with Akhetaten’s henotheist beliefs … but he set about reversing Akhetaten’s “religious experiment”. Tutankhamun brought the court back to Luxor / Thebes, restored the status of the gods, and repaired neglected temples. Why did he do this? It appears that at this time, Egypt was threatened by former vassal states to the East. Egypt was beginning to lose territory, especially to the growing Hittite empire. Temples and places of worship had been allowed to decay when their favoured gods were not revered. Morale had plummeted. Restoring the traditional gods was one way of raising morale in the face of foreign threats. This is not to say that Tutankhamun was not himself a genuine worshipper of the many gods. Indeed he appears to have been devout.

Once again, Joyce Tyldesley emphasises the mental maturity of Tutankhamun and insists “This is not a ‘boy-king’ : it is a thoughtful mature ruler.” She also, using existent forensic evidence, criticises recent attempts to reconstruct what Tutankhamun’s face looked like. She refutes the idea that Tutankhamun had tuberculosis or had been murdered. There is no real evidence for either of these scenarios.

At which point she turns to the matter of how Tutankhamun was preserved and buried in death. She discusses the methods and importance of mummification – the draining of the brain which was the first thing drawn out of the corpse by a hook. Then the removal of the heart and other essential organs… and only then were acres of linen wound tightly around the mummy. Precious masks (often made of gold) covered the young pharaoh’s face. Riches and jars were sealed behind the various chambers that comprised the tomb. Elaborate blessings to the gods were carved into the tomb to help take Tutankhamun to the other world. Archaeology has proven that Tutankhamun was originally going to be entombed at a different site from the one where he was eventually entombed. This meant that the purified mummy had to be dragged on a sled over the bumpy sands to finally be put to rest.

What of Tutankhamun’s consort? His wife was obviously of regal pedigree. But Tyldesley is clear that the pharaoh had the right to marry many women for his harem. It is also clear that royal women could sometimes be used as bargaining chips with foreign countries. There survives a document which some Egyptian bureaucrat wrote, suggesting that an Egyptian princess could marry an important Hittite leader to make an alliance… though it apparently came to nothing.

And after these chapters, Tyldesley turns to burial customs for the commoners and peasants, and then the activities of thieves, who stole precious things from the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Commoners who could afford it had tombs with images of happy lives and partying. This was really a fantasy of a hope-for after-life. At very most, only 10% of the population was literate and had some wealth. Grave robbers would know that that they were violating hopes of an after-life, but were often involved in stealing whatever riches there were in the graves of the impoverished. There were very severe penalties for those who robbed graves, but theft was still an attractive way of life for the poor. There is also the fact that often one tomb would be ransacked to furnish another tomb, even by those were in charge of royal tombs. In this way, undertakers would take shortcuts to furbish an appointed tomb. It is possible that some of the artefacts found in 1922 in Tutankhamun’s tomb had in fact been taken from other tombs. Tutankhamun’s tomb was attacked by grave robbers very shortly after his interment. But then higher security was used, and there is evidence that the robbers had to work quickly and were therefore responsible for the messy way some of the tomb’s artefacts were found 3,000 years later.

Rounding off her account of Tutankhamun’s times, Tyldesley tells us that only after the young pharaoh died, Egypt fell apart in various ways and the Valley of the Kings was no longer used as the burial place of kings. All but the overlooked tomb of Tutankhamun, royal tombs were removed from the valley. At which point Joyce Tyldesley concludes her account of Tutankhamun’s times.

Professor Joyce Tyldesley with ancient Egyptian head of a queen.
 

The second part of Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma brings us to archaeology leading up to the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its aftermath.

Europeans began to be interested in Egyptian antiquity in the 18^th century, with European travellers writing books about what they had seen -  but barely understanding the ancient civilisation. Only when the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion de-coded the “Rosetta Stone” could early Egyptologists understand and read Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the late-19^th century, most of the [ransacked] tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered, but the search went on. Egypt’s Antiquities Service (mostly controlled by the French and the British) said that too many diggers were spoiling the valley. They decreed that only one team at a time could work there, under a legal warrant. In 1902, a wealthy American lawyer Theodore Monroe Davis – who was not an archaeologist – was given the warrant. He was wealthy enough to hire a very large team, American, European and Egyptian (Howard Carter was part of his team), and they made some real finds, including the [empty] tomb of Yula and Thuya. His expedition did not make use of cameras, meaning Theodore Monroe Davis could later not verify where exactly some artefacts had been found. Like many others, Davis wanted to find the tomb of Tutankhamun, not because Tutankhamun was a major figure but because his tomb had not yet been located. In 1914, he gave up his warrant, declaring the valley was exhausted and there were no more tombs to find. The irony was that his team had come very close to the site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but they had overlooked it.

The extremely rich dilletante English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon was in no way an archaeologist, but it 1915 he gained the franchise to resume excavations in the Valley of the Kings. However, work was suspended for much of the [First] World War, and it began again only in 1917. Officially, Howard Carter was Carnarvon’s employee; but in fact it was Carter who led and supervised the whole expedition. Carter adopted the strategy of digging deeply to the bedrock of the valley and, in 1922, he finally found the steps that led down to the entrance of Tutankhamun’s tomb. He did not open the tomb until, one month later, Carnarvon joined him so that Carnarvon could take the credit for  being one of the first to step into the tomb. At this stage, British newspapers gave Carnarvon all the credit for finding the tomb. There followed the long and careful categorising of every artefact in the tomb. This time, photography was used to verify everything – from 1922 to 1930, over 3,000 photographs were taken inside the tomb by members of the expedition. It was soon understood by Carter that in ancient times, some things had been robbed from the tomb and much of what was found was left in disorderly disarray.

The tomb was protected from tourists. Carnarvon withdrew very soon after the discovery of the tomb – but he still had exclusive rights to the tomb and the only journalists he allowed to enter the tomb and report on progress were from the Times of London. This greatly annoyed other newspapers who hungered for information about the great find. So they turned to writers of fiction to pad out what little that they knew about the tomb and its discovery. Enter sensationalist tales about ancient curses that damned anyone entering the tomb. There were no such curses in the tomb, but when Lord Carnarvon died from an accident beginning with a mosquito bite, the sensationalists had a field day. Add to this a report claiming that at the very moment Carnarvon died, all the lights in Cairo went out. This too was fiction. So began the whole tradition of tales about mummy’s curses, occult events etc. etc., leading to entertaining horror movies. Archaeologists could either sigh or shrug their shoulders in the face of such nonsense. Throughout the 1920s there were still fierce quarrels about who had the right to see the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.

There was another attitude brought on by the excavation of ancient tombs. At this time, Egypt was basically ruled by Britain, though it officially had a king of its own. Egyptians were becoming increasingly nationalist in their views, as they often saw archaeologists as intruding on their treasures. They took badly the idea that it was a foreigner who had been the first to discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. So there was concocted the fictitious tale that the steps leading down to Tutankhamun’s tomb had really been discovered by a humble little Egyptian water-boy who had just happened to be doodling around ahead of Carter’s excavators.

There was another, and perhaps more reasonable, controversy. An English bishop raised the question of whether it was ethical to dig up corpses from the tomb. There was also the belief that it was unethical to dismember ancient bodies with autopsies. Inevitably, even the best doctors and pathologists destroyed or maimed part of Tutankhamun’s body, breaking bones in order to discover whether the young pharaoh had suffered from various diseases. Their conclusions were very contradictory. In her epilogue, Professor Tyldesley says that scientists are now using DNA to determine ancient Egyptian aristocratic bloodlines… but given the decay of blood over eons, she believes their efforts are not likely to yield an accurate result.

I think that, as in so many controversies, Tyldesley is right.