Bloody....like Macbeth....

11 Jan 12

The strangely disused gateway to the Napier Prison which, like all overgrown entrances, has an improbable romance. 

It is weirdly narrow - yet shows some signs of careful construction. Was it an alternative path from the Parade up to the Napier prison (and asylum which for tidiness sake was put right next door?)

Neither of them is used now for its original function, hence the pleasing decay...

 I looked at the sign advertising 'historic' prison tours. 

The run of words 'hear stories of Crime, Punishment, Executions, Escapes, Victims & Villains' seemed breezy, aimed at the tourist market. (When I looked it up online www.getnicked@napierprison.com I found this image advertising late night tours of the prison...)

'INFORMATIVE, SCARY & FUN,' the ad tacked to a Norfolk Pine said... 

I know when I do guided tours of the Napier Hill Cemetery some people feel shortchanged when I talk realist social history (lack of penicillin, death in childbirth) instead of clanking chains and that old cliche of the graveyard - ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. 

However I do believe in - presences. 

This is maybe what sends me off to look at 'original sites' - places where things happened.

I looked carefully at the stonework which seemed neat and old. Inside the gate posts, which obviously had a gate at one point, there were some beautiful almost classically oblong blocks of stone. Were they made by prison labour? And was this labour used to creating the required stone shape for classical buildings in prison-cities like Sydney or Hobart?

And then there was the track….

It skirted a business premise and I felt a bit wierd just walking up an unused track. It was the usually the mark of

someone up to no good. I decided instantly I would return tomorrow with my camera. It would authenticate me.

Instantly I would become 'a tourist' - one of those strange people entitled to photograph things which locals regard as banal and not even worthy of a second glance....

….

When asked in social situations 'what is your next project' I fumble it. 

If pushed I say the word 'Volkner' to see if that creates any glimmer of recognition. 

Occasionally I will say 'Kereopa Te Rau'. Usually there is no return of interest.

Today I thought I need to set the scene. 'Have you heard of the Rev Carl Volkner who was hanged in Opotiki in 1865 then beheaded and his blood drunk from his skull. A Hau Hau warrior prophet called Kereopa Te Rau ate his eyes and became the most notorious man in (Pakeha) New Zealand….'

But when I try and minimise the narrative to my real interest - two Pakeha of sensibility, essentially dissidents, standing up for him and trying to offer comfort to him in his last hours - it becomes even more difficult to soundbite.

I usually end up apologetically mumbling in a downcast way - 'it's a little bit blood stained'….'it's like Macbeth'..

Partly this is the writer's inability to believe that the project he or she is starting out on will ever eventuate. But it is also the desire to keep in the dark…those first tender shoots. You want to shade them from the harshness of the overhead sun.

....

What I want to write is the 'biography of an event'…

The brace of place...

10 January 2012

I went for a walk along the sea by the Parade. It was pleasurable, the day warm but not hot - early morning with all its promise. I noted two women talking intently by the sunburst - they had brought their thermos along. They weren't nattering, they were engaged in seriously enjoyable dialogue. I strained my ears to listen and thought I caught a foreign accent - either French or Italian. 

Few NZers would do this - the sea and a notion of civilised behaviour beside it in an urban setting - means something different to us.

Later by the fountain I came across two unlikely pilgrims - elderly - a woman in a sort of Chinese hat, a face mask almost over her lower face. The man appeared European but he was equally weather-beaten and also covered. He wore gloves. I wondered if he too had carpal tunnel syndrome. I thought not. Something about their singularity.

They had just looked at Pania who, in the early morning light, seemed to leer with her polished breasts and strange almost Hollywood conception of a Maori face.

I thought of how my last book, 'The Hungry Heart' , a biography of William Colenso, was held together by the brace of place. This place. I was conscious of the sea being the same sea (in some form) that William Colenso had seen and which he also meditated by.

Once I used to think of my Napier grandparents but now I saw they were probably busy working - and they actually related more to the (now vanished) inner harbour and port. 

But walking back I faced Bluff Hill and my eyes almost accidentally found the cleat in the Hill where the Napier prison was.

This was where the Hau Hau proophet/warrior - or alternatively terrorist -  Te Rau Kereopa was hanged in 1872. This is the core of my next writing project.

I was shocked into thinking again of place, and how place is what drove me to this new story.

The mystery and power and particularity of place.

Once I was home I suddenly thought of something else. It was almost exactly at this time of year, Kereopa Te Rau was executed. (Such a light holiday feeling time of year…when time no longer feels heavy but becomes cellophane thin…)

Colenso was a rare being - he was one of the defenders of Te Rau Kereopa, an astonishing act of bravery - amounting almost to the foolhardy. But seen from Colenso's pov this was the time of year in which he himself had faced rock bottom. It was the time of catastrophe for him: January was the month he had been ejected from his religious calling, his children taken from him and his mission house burnt to the ground (was burnt to the ground?): it was when he went into court to face a terrible public humiliation. So for him too January was not…a light month, an easy month.

A time of stirring, painful memories.

Lying fallow...and Lady Gaga

Lying fallow. Needing to lie fallow for a while. In December I realised I needed to just stop writing. But the fact was I felt miserable not writing. As usual my personality fell apart. I was overwhelmed by discontents. 

So I began a small project: a riff of a kind on the 'Clive Memorial' on Napier's main boulevard. The words 'Clive' and 'memorial' of course act as a negative here. One expects something stiff and archaic, about a best-forgotten imperialism. As for the word 'memorial' you can sense peoples' eyes glaze over.

Somehow I shook a story out of the handsome - ignored - memorial and totally enjoyed myself. (Memorials are always ignored - for most of the year anyway. But this is their purpose: to hold a story fast, to embed a narrative in stone. Will the story mean the same thing to future generations? Aren't you running the risk of the story being interpreted entirely differently? Yes. This is the risk. A huge risk. Monuments sit face to face with hubris, really. Put it this way. Hubris is the invisible shadow.)

In the end I managed to write a piece which referenced both Lady Gaga and 'a man named Flo'. (See this atVolume I No 8. http://napierathenaeum.com/)

Note: I developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand just before Christmas - obviously I should have stopped writing - so these blogs will be scarce for a while, until I sort this out. I guess one could call this….enforced rest.

Who was Miss Colenso?

Before Christmas I posed a mystery question: who was the Miss Colenso whose botanical drawing appeared in the album of Sarah Mathews, the wife of NZ's first surveyor general?

(See last blog dated 22 Dec 2011 for more information and a link to images of the actual album - it's worth checking out…)

Initally I wondered if the mystery botanical painter was Fanny, William Colenso's daughter, but by the date in the album, she would have been married and no longer a Colenso. Then I wondered if it was by the daughters of Bishop Colenso, William Colenso's first cousin. (The thing which interests me, if the latter, is it implies that Bishop Colenso's family had relatively close connections with William Colenso - although there is very little evidence to support this.)

Fortunately fellow Colensophiles came to the party and supplied this information.

(Below is from Ann Collins, a Colenso relative (through WC's brother) who talked the matter over with fellow Colenso family members Gillian Bell and Gwilym Colenso. This conversation spanned Australia, NZ and Britain….)

Ann Collins writes...

The most likely contender, given that WC’s daughter was married and that the Bishop’s daughters were in South Africa at the time is the Bishop’s sister Frances Emily Colenso (1815-1879).

She lived (probably kept house for them) with her father and uncle until her father died in 1860. She was a schoolmistress in East Stonehouse Devon in 1861, with her niece Mary Kendall (daughter of Sophia Colenso and Nicholas Kendall). In 1871 she was living in Seaford Sussex on an annuity.  

It is possible that she travelled to Italy, possibly with the Butlers – Mary married Spencer Perceval Butler in 1863. I think this is what the reference to San Remo is about. Some information on the Butler’s is on the following link.

http://www.colensostudy.id.au/Kendall%20Butler%20Connections1.htm

The Bishop’s wife and daughters were also botanical painters. The Bishop’s wife maintained a long correspondence and exchange of information with Katherine Lyell. Katherine Lyell was the wife of Henry Lyell, brother of the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who had married her sister Mary as well. The two sisters’ father was Leonard Horner, an educationalist and  geologist. Both sisters were considered notable botanists.

The Bishop’s female family were all in South Africa for the 1870s. His daughter Fanny had travelled to England with her brothers in 1869 but returned in 1870. The brothers were then being educated at Oxford and Cambridge.

......

So it appears that the likely contender is Bishop Colenso's maiden sister, Frances Emily Colenso. She was William's first cousin and a contemporary. How she came to meet Sarah Mathews we do not know. Albums were a bit like facebook - a kind of collection of connections, both random and at times deeply meaningful. Maiden women often spent a lot of time looking very carefully at plants and, in a way, acknowledging the beauty of creation by copying them in paint or even embroidery.

The paintings of the botanical subjects are quite lovely and skilled. Ian St George has supplied the information that they are an arum, called delightfully 'striped jack-in-the-pulpit' (a suitable name for William Colenso one might think) and secondly, the berries of a pepper tree - a common enough tree in many older New Zealand gardens.

In the next few weeks I will meet with some people who lived in the 'Colenso cottage' which was transported to Hohepa Farm which is right beside Colenso's one-time mission. The question is: is this a building once owned by Colenso from the 1844-1862 period? If so, it would be very significant historically.

 I love these sort of mysteries. 

A small mystery....

Who is "Miss Colenso"?

Today a friend got in touch and asked me whether I knew who the 'Miss Colenso' was in a lovely Victorian album which is on display in the Sir George Grey Room in the Auckland Public Library in Lorne Street.

I was very excited as one always wants to see more pictures of past historical characters, as if one can somehow
bring them alive again. Take away the chilly aura of the dead. (They live in our imaginations and somehow seeing a photo or a new drawing means they leap alive again, wonderfully. One reads them with a special kind of urgency, looking at all the information of 'nose' 'eyes' 'expression'.)

I know this is a hectic and distractingly busy time of year but the second link is the whole album digitised and is a lovely thing to look through when you have a quiet moment and want to forget about the present.

The link immediately below is an easy-to-read essay about Sarah Mathew's album contextualising it. (She was the wife of the first surveyor-general in New Zealand. She was not a starched shirt but one of those typically insightful
wives of a colonial adventurer, adept with the pen. She also stayed with the Fairburns when Elizabeth (later Colenso) was unmarried.

It is definitely worth a gander.

So who was......'Miss Colenso'?

http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/virt-exhib/NZMS81/essay.htm

 

http://www.aucklandcitylibraries.com/DigitalLibrary/resourcepages/Sarah-Mathew-s-album.aspx?RD=~/DigitalLibrary/topicpages/virtualexhibitions.aspx

Good adjectives...

I have been incredibly lucky. Or something. But  - so far - touch wood - I have had excellent reviews for ‘The Hungry Heart’. This began with Geoffrey Vine in The Otago Daily Times giving me the best review I’ll probably ever have in my life. I wasn’t sure if this was the one ‘good review’ so held my breath. But the positive reviews just kept on coming.

I said to a writer friend the other day it is amazing - the ability of the writer’s eye to sprint down a column of print - in a review - to pick out the adjectives.

   

This is fine when the adjectives are good, but in a writer’s life, you’re unique if you don’t have bad reviews or indifferent reviews or even, at times, malicious reviews by people who hold a grudge against you on some other ground (their career isn’t going so well, you didn’t smile at them when they said hello. It can be anything.) Or maybe even your work that time wasn’t so coherent - despite all your best efforts, it doesn’t quite work.

   

Like some miser I have tidied away the good adjectives and in private I caress them. They seem some kind of incredible luck - because the truth is I haven’t worked any harder or more carefully on this book than other books I’ve written. 

  

Some things hit the zeitgeist. As I saw on the back of a van the other day ‘timing is everything’ (I didn’t notice what it was advertising.) It was at the lights. The van drove away. 

   

But here’s the thing. If I am going to accept these good adjectives - ‘warm’ ‘exhilerating’ - ‘gripping’ - I have to accept the truth of the bad adjectives. 

Isn’t that a fair deal?

   

But the fact is to survive as a writer, as an ‘artist’ (I hate this word - ever since rock stars became artists it seems the wank factor went through the roof) - but as a working writer you need some sort of defence system to sustain you through the hard and lonely grind of producing work. In the past when a bad adjective arrived I always thought: they just didn’t get it. Or: the book isn’t for them. It takes a long time for me to accept some of the truth of the criticisms. Besides, the fact is during the writing, there is almost nothing you haven’t berated yourself with at times. Self doubt. Exhaustion. Moments when you turn off the project.

   

So when the bad adjectives come you feel curiously exposed. Publicly exposed.

  

As for the good adjectives...well, this is sort of like a dream universe in which suddenly ‘everyone likes you’.

Caution.

  

 I’ve seen ‘Carrie’, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film...I know one minute you think you’re the prom queen and the next.....

How to read a book....

I've been reading a lot lately on libraries and whether in fact a personal library does reflect someone's mind or only their aspirations (call that delusions.) I'm not sure, really. But this is a book from R. Coupland Harding's library. 

People who have read 'The Hungry Heart' know Coupland Harding as a kind man who did much to make Colenso's later life pleasurable. He was a remarkable typographer - internationally outstanding really - and it was one of those strange historical combination of circumstances that he lived in Napier. (See D.F.McKenzie's sympathetic biography of Coupland Harding on www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h13).

Needless to say life in Napier was not easy for such an intellectual giant. He must have felt pleased to know someone like Colenso - 'New Zealand's first printer' as he was known. The two men often talked about the history of printing in New Zealand. But they also talked laterally and emotionally and in depth. In many ways Coupland Harding was the kind son Colenso never had.

I bought the book at a Bethune's auction purely because of its bookplate - and its subject matter.

Only later did I learn that the old man in the plate is meant to be Colenso himself (although bald which Colenso never was....) Like all writers I cursed the missed opportunity of having it as an illustration in my book, especially as it seems to epitomise that aspect of Colenso which was so important to him: the collector. (I love the way the image is bedecked with such wonderfully decadent end-of-the century imagery - the skull, the flowers, the seeming drift of a opiate….)

But I also loved the subject matterof the book - the life of the circus.

I have an extremely vivid memory of a circus at Western Springs in Auckland when I was a child. It was one of my great formative experiences, along with seeing my first film - a b&w Mickey Mouse short.

These are some of the beautiful fin de siecle images from the book, sort of Degas in print form, I think. They are done by Jules Garnier.

It thrills me to think that Coupland Harding once had this in his library. But did he ever look at it? It appears well worn, with a line on the beautiful cover which would seem to intimate something had been spilled on it.

But did he read it? Or was it just a vanity production, an impulse purchase?

In fact I know he read this book. Because on page 305  there is a small note, in almost chaste pencil. It says (In Wellington, N.Z. 28 II 1902)    

In other words he was recording in the margin that "the Craggs, gentlemen acrobats" who performed at the Folies Bergere and had a mad success in New York before 1890 had visited Wellington in 1902, in perhaps a slightly less electrifying moment in their career.

But wait, there's more!

Coupland Harding (and I believe it must be him since it is done so professionally) has 'customised' the book by adding two choice photographs of female performers. Whether he had seen them or whether they had pin-up value I leave to your judgement...

So this is my kind of Christmas present really - the beauty of these images.

I like to think the characters on the pages came to life in Coupland Harding's fertile brain and the acrobats swung off into a beautiful infinite space….where they revolve still, every time the book is opened...