A colourful mixture

Press, 20 July 1979, Page 13

A colourful mixture

What was von Tempsky? Was he saint or schizophrenic? Artist or adventurer? Martyr or mercenary, a Shane who never rode into the sunset or a nineteenth-century Mad Mike Hoare? The truth, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, is that this flamboyant man. with his flowing curls, his bowie knife and his huge Prussian sword, was probably a little bit of every one of these. The “Melbourne Argus,” said in his obituary on September 25, 1868: “There was an air of dash and bravado about (his appearance) which was apt to give people the idea of a theatrical effect, but which in reality was inseparable from the man.” He was riot a religious man, and it is clear from both his own writings and

from contemporary accounts that in battle he was ruthless. More than once, he was censured for unnecessary killing, and he was criticised for allowing his men to burn and loot. Yet he was renowned f.or his humanitarian treatment of prisoners, and for his kindness to the wounded, even the wounded enemy. This dichotomy was reflected in his writings. “Strange is this bush fighting — mysterious: blue smoke, green leaves, perhaps a black head: cries, defiant, soul-rending, you hear perhaps — yes, you can hear them talking next door to you, coolly, familiarly, but you see nothing — nothing tangible to grasp, to wrestle with.” Two paragraphs after this romantic passage in his description of a Waikato engagement, he was back to earth: “We

returned to Mauku laden with spoil and intoxicated with .our victory.” He scrapped frequently with his superiors about his men’s looting, and on one occasion proudly carried off a coup by stealing back some plunder that had been confiscated by the commanding officer of the Imperial force — and taking with it some of the commander’s own loot. But while he romanticised his victories and exulted over them, just as frequently he demonstrated the humanitarianism that prompted his artistic and musical ventures: “. . . Two shots were rapidly fired at us from its veranda. I did not believe my eyes when I saw there a woman coolly sitting on the veranda and hiding a still smoking double-barrel underneath it . . . She was oldish, and not very fair

to look at. particularly as her time-worn features were bent into one concentrated expression of hatred — such a hatred as Johnson revered and you read of occasionally in old plays. I went up to her and had the gun taken away, looking at her all the time, not knowing whether I should laugh or feel pathetic — the coolness. the ugliness, and the reckless hatred of this specimen of Maoridom puzzled my choice of sentiment exceedingly." After one looting episode, von Tempsky was ordered to be arrested by a colonel of the Imperial force; he treated it as a joke, laughed about it with the commander-in-chief, General Cameron, and added insult to injury by giving Cameron his own prize, “a magnificent longhandled tomahawk.” Later, he wrote: “ft was about as interesting an interlude as could be found amongst the sad realities of higher interests around me.” More often, his clashes with his superiors were over discipline. He got into hot water with his conservative Imperial senior officers over his headstrong behaviour in battle, and over the unruly behaviour of his men. He refused to allow them to be flogged (then a common punishment in the British forces) and fought bitterly against subjecting them to military discipline: “I believe that the crushing discipline of the regulars is unfavourable to the maintenance and development of that selfdependant individuality so necessary in bush and irregular warfare; for the discipline of the regulars enfeebles the mind of the unit by throwing the responsibility of thinking totally on the officers.” Von Tempsky was not a great artist, and his paintings have never acquired either the mystique or the public following of those of his contemporaries, such as Heaphy; but there is probably no other artist who captured so tellingly the events of the Maori Wars. In his primitive, almost Rousseau-like style, in which the New Zealand bush became a brooding jungle and the fighting men mere caricatures, he captured precisely the combination of romance, misunderstanding, and brutality that created this sad chapter in New Zealand s history.