Speech by Sir Paul Reeves at the opening of the exhibition ‘Dance of the Peacocks,’ National Library Gallery, 18 November 2003

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 37, 1 January 2004, Page 87

Speech by Sir Paul Reeves at the opening of the exhibition ‘Dance of the Peacocks,’ National Library Gallery, 18 November 2003

In 1954 Bill Oliver returned to New Zealand on the Wanganella, and as the old tub crept down the coast a group of passengers huddled on the deck and watched with mixed feelings of gloom and recognition. ‘The gloom has never quite gone away,’ said Oliver. ‘The recognition has grown in depth from that time to the present. Within a decade or so, with the allowance for all that was yet to be learned, I had found my country.’

Did John Mulgan find his country? I doubt it. At the very beginning of his Reflections on Experience, he describes New Zealand’s isolation as oppressive and New Zealanders as wanderers who ‘roam the world looking not for adventure but for satisfaction.’

Contrast that with Rex Fairburn, who, from his sojourn in England, told his friend Ronald Mason that, ‘This natural scene in England is lovely - stately and beautiful, calm and sedate. But I have no sympathy with it - none whatever. I had rather be beside a smelly New Zealand tidal creek.’

Davin was somewhere in the middle. lan Milner wrote that, ‘Dan was definite in his attitude. England ... had become his home ground. New Zealand was remote: ancestral but not the soil of contemporary living .Yet, in spite of himself, his New Zealand roots and loyalties were plain to see.’

And James Bertram seemed to return to New Zealand almost because there was nowhere else to go. He got rebuffed, and seemingly retired to the hills of Belmont above the Hutt Valley where he rode horses, grew roses and read.

It is hard not to see these men as a privileged elite. At Oxford, and in England, they had entree to people and events. They had patrons, friendly people of influence, who kept an eye on them. They were talented and they fought bravely in war.

I too studied at Oxford. I did a poor degree in New Zealand, went to England and repeated the experience. I feel the force of an inscription in Ely Cathedral to a certain bishop: ‘He did nothing in particular but he did it very well.’

It is not that I feel impatient with this crop of brilliant New Zealanders. But in their own way they are products of the social cauldron which was New Zealand of the early 1930 s and we have to put them in context. If we are talking about significant people of the time, my list would include Jim Edwards, John A. Lee, Colin Scrimgeour, Sir Apirana Ngata, Gordon Coates, Ettie Rout, the Queen Street rioters. There is a lovely little cameo, in Ormond Wilson’s autobiography, of the pompous Lord Bledisloe, Lord Bloody Slow they called him, our Governor-General for much of this period.

These five men, the subjects of James McNeish’s study, each experienced the exquisite pain of exile, where the temptation is to think of your country as it may have been but not necessarily as it is. In April of this year I sat down with thirty New Zealand students in New College, Oxford (Bertram’s college), and we talked about a range of issues. Inevitably the question arose, ‘Do I have to live in New Zealand to be a New Zealander?’ The answer surely is no. To be a New Zealander is to be a citizen of the world. I do not think Mulgan, Bertram, Cox, Davin or Milner saw it as clearly and as confidently as that.

In the 1950 s I studied English at Victoria University College, as it then was. I want to pay tribute to James Bertram as a man and as a teacher. The Rhodes Trustees described him as mincing; but he was the man who carried a Browning automatic pistol on his person, and in a saddle bag the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and the collected works of Shakespeare, as he rode a small Chinese pony into the interior of China.

To a student there was something undefinable about Bertram, something almost out of reach. I was slightly in awe of him as I was of his colleague Joan Stevens. Bertram’s lectures in the cavernous lecture room C 3 at 8 am must have been a chore, but he held my attention, whether it was introducing James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson, telling us they were on a poetry reading tour, that sounded to me like an extended pub crawl, or whether it was his delicate commentary on the sexual appetite of Freda the wife of D H Lawrence. I am grateful that he introduced me to the pre-Raphaelites and to the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

Bertram was the one who espoused a radical socialism, and at the end of his life returned to the full communion of the plain Scottish church that he and his wife had been brought up in, saying that the only consolations of religion that really matter are those that are hardest to take. James Bertram’s autobiography quotes, and takes its title from, a poem by W. H. Auden: Now through night’s caressing grip Earth and all her oceans slip. Capes of China slide away From her fingers into day.

There was no doubt where Bertram’s heart lay.