CARRYING MYTHS TO EREWHON

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 17

CARRYING MYTHS TO EREWHON

The Road to Erewhon. By Tony Simpson. Beaux-Arts. 155 pp. $8.95. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley) If we do not know where we have been, says Tony Simpson in this provocative survey of the formative years of New Zealand society, we do not know where we are; and if we do not know where we are. we cannot tell there we are going. True enough; but Mr Simpson takes such a singleminded view of where we have been, where we are now and where we are going if we don’t watch out that most New Zealanders will find his book more exasperating than enlightening. The trouble is Mr Simpson’s method. He has dived deep into the New Zealand subconscious and surfaced ■with a theory that he then uses to explain our social history, our current shortcomings and our dark and troublous future. The trouble with theories, as so many scientists have discovered, is that even the Tnost beautiful of them can be sunk by one awkward fact. And awkward facts proliferate as Mr Simpson develops his belief that our troubles spring from the way we live a myth — the myth of being an h isolated, simple, moralistic society, F with the archetype New Zealander being a sun-bronzed man in an opennecked shirt and an old felt hat working sheep or cattle on his own land. Farmers, in that view, are not only the backbone of the country, but the wishbone of the national mythology. The myth, frozen round 1910. persists, he says, but is no longer relevant in an economy which has switched from the predatory agriculture of the pioneering period to the industrial-agricultural economy of today; and it is from embracing this myth, to switch a metaphor, that our sea of troubles flow. But do we and do they? The myth took a battering in the confrontations between Farmer Bill Massey’s specials and organised labour, retreated during the depression of the thirties, and has dwindled in importance ever since as the country

has become increasingly urbanised and industrialised. The declining profitability of agriculture is widely recognised and today a Government in which farming interests are strongly represented provides handsome incentives to manufacturers to export their products, although, as some of them have found recently, it is just as difficult to sell clothing in Australia as it is to sell butter in Europe.

This inexorable movement is largely ignored, although Mr Simpson muddies his own argument by declaring that our society is a very difficult (sic) animal now from the one it used to be; and in a curious sort of epilogue he claims that the last two landslide elections entirely vindicate his thesis. This reviewer tried but could not understand how. It seemed rather like covering the field at a race meeting and then claiming amazing perspicacity when the outsider romps home.

It is not surprising that the general theory is suspect for Mr Simpson offers some original versions of particular incidents in New Zealand history to support it. William Pember Reeves, for instance, the man responsible for much of New Zealand’s distinctive social legislation, was, says Mr Simpson, “a reactionary aiming not to encourage the growth of a strong urban working class, but to prevent it ever being bom.” New Zealand’s initial mismanagement of Western Samoa is blamed on Government policy rather than on administrative independenceand incompetence. And lack of research leads him to misinterpret other incidents. He says, for instance, that in 1906 Canterbury College turned down the offer of a Canterbury farmer, John Studholme, to establish a chair in home science at the college and claims the incident as proof that the community did not want women to have social equality. The facts are quite different. Studholme offered only a third of the cost of the chair and the college council was dubious about making up the other two-thirds from its own slender resources. But it did

offer the chair finally to Miss Anna Gilchrist, of the University of Tennessee. She accepted initially, but subsequently declined the position because, as she coyly put it, she was entering upon a more individual practice of home economics — a reference to her marriage. As Professor A. G. Strong she later had a notable career in the faculty of home science at the University of Otago. The incident is of little importance, but to use a totally incorrect version to bolster an argument is to play fast and loose with the facts and to cast doubts on many of Mr Simpson’s assertions. Similarly, the expression of ideas is at times extremely obscure. What is one to make of the following? It (the period after the Second World War) was a period which also established firmly the mind set which was the key to an understanding of what had gone before, that is, the rural mythology, although there was also a new mind set coming into being, a set more appropriate to the sort of society we were becoming but still not ready to cope with twentieth century New Zealand, a valedictory to the old rather than a welcome to the new, although to recognise and delineate the old was an achievement and an advance. Nor is the book helped by a rash of printer’s errors, some of them merely irritating, some of them ludicrous — there is a “cola miners’ strike” and Samoa fell without a “short” being fired — and some that seriously detract from the value of the book. Is this the penalty, one wonders, for having a book on radical politics printed in South Korea? The book abounds in historic photographs, many of them, unfortunately, very old friends. More care in their selection would have added interest. Indeed there is a general air of carelessness about the publication. But that being said, it should provoke argument; and if we talk about where we are going, we just might choose the right direction.