Ian Wedde’s ‘forbidden history’

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 23

Ian Wedde’s ‘forbidden history’

Symmes Hole. By lan Wedde. Penguin, 1986. 324 pp. $21.99. (Reviewed by Tom Weston) Tory Channel is one of two seaentrances to the Queen Charlotte Sounds. It is a narrow, twisting route that eventually emerges into the main sound for the home run into Picton. At its other extremity the outlet to Cook Strait is a bitter one, a collage of huge cliffs, seagulls, and strong currents. The Maori explorer, Kupe, made the first “recorded” entry into the channel about 950 AD. At the time, the discovery of land was purely incidental to the slaughter of a giant octopus that Kupe had chased across the seas. The octopus met its end just inside the mouth of the channel at a place where, 900 years later, the slaughter of a different sea creature was orchestrated from shore-based whaling stations. Captain John Guard (formerly a convict in N.S.W.) is credited with bringing the channel into European consciousness. In 1827, while fighting a storm in his schooner, the Waterloo, he was swept into the calm waters of the Sounds. A year or so later he set up a whaling station at Te Awaiti (Tar ’white, as it became known). One hundred and thirty-five years later, in 1964, the Perano family caught their last whale and closed the station down. lan Wedde has written of Guard before. In the mid-70s he saw it this way: In 1827 John Guard blew into the Straits. There were black headlands white water. The rocks opened. They ran through Tory Channel beached at Te Awaiti ... The Sounds still echo to the name. Guards Bay is to the north, just around from the now infamous Gore Bay. We can then sight from a different angle. James “Worser” Heberley landed at Te Awaiti in the 1830 s. He soon established himself as something of an eccentric as well as a mariner of ability.

Heberley was later to become Wellington’s harbour master and with the naturalist Dieffenbach was the first to climb Mt Egmont. Also, and more important for present purposes, he kept an extensive diary. lan Wedde has made exhilarating use of this. It is his "forbidden history,” the unofficial or submerged story of New Zealand. But Heberley is only one thread in a story that cuts and dives, weaving its complex fabric from surprisingly few separate pieces. I suggest Wedde would have liked to make it just the one, but his failure to do so is of little moment. Even as it stands this is sophisticated stuff, highly imaginative and punctuated with an unpredictable sense of humour. It also does no harm to wrestle with the other threads. The second is a more modern turn; the third, a literary balancing trick. Modern, in this case, is circa 1980, and involves the person of an unnamed "researcher” who might be lan Wedde himself, or even a reincarnation of Worser Heberley. We first see him heading home at a midnight incline from a literary function at the Beehive. Stopping on Oriental Parade he flings one of his shoes high into the air, only to find that the (then) police launch Lady Elizabeth is passing in close proximity to its silent trajectory. And that is only the start of his travails.

This researcher is obsessed by whales (as is Wedde). He also knows of Herman Melville, the' American novelist responsible for introducing Moby Dick to our cultural grab-bag. And it is this literary/historic link that provides the final pattern in the novel. Melville’s inspiration for "Moby Dick” came from several directions. In 1821 a sperm whale sank the Nantucket whaleship, Essex. There were other stories of giant killer whales. And then there was Charles Wilkes who fondly believed the Earth was hollow. In 1839 he set out to prove it so. He sought Symmes Hole, the illusory entrance to the Hollow Mountain. Wilkes became a model for Captain Ahab, one story of obsession

fitting neatly into another. The novel takes a slight turning on this last theme. Wedde proposes that the same form of entrepreneurial colonisation that drove Wilkes (or a whaling expedition for that matter) is not dissimilar to the motivation behind a modern fast-food chain such as McDonalds. Wedde draws McDonalds as our modern Hollow Mountain, a chimera, but also a strategic capitalist site. Readers of Wedde’s “Fast History” (in "Islands 33”) will have already met Courtenay Place’s Phantom Rollerskater. It is indeed a pleasure to report that he glides the asphalt once again, as much a delight as he was in the earlier short story. It is in his subversive approach to the capitalist system that lan Wedde most clearly signals his independence from the literary flood-stream. Postmodernist theory adopts the market place by ritualising its excesses. Wedde, while making use of its mannerisms (borrowing from his own earlier texts and from those of others), refuses the final jump. In fact, in his treatment of the Cook Strait whalers he could almost be said to be a Romantic. As a consequence this novel is very idiosyncratic. I find it slightly unbalanced for the first half, superb for the second. But always intriguing. And, finally, the novel provides more than an insight into Wedde the writer. I have reviewed two earlier collections of his poetry. Both displayed his undoubted talent. In both I failed to come to terms with his apparent inaccuracies and irrelevancies.

To pin him down is difficult, but Wedde is dealing in some complicated aesthetic of failure. This is tied in with popular art, but tends to view things from the underside. In an earlier poem he has spoken of “the trashy muzak” and it is this he tends to celebrate.

In doing so he can disappoint and frustrate. He wants to confuse us. It is a risky game but “Symmes Hole” shows it can be done.