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Mapping the Godzone
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Mapping the Godzone
A Primer on New Zealand Literature and Culture
William J. Schafer
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
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For Martha—little blue penguins, pukeko, tuatara & all
© 1998 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
03 02 01 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schafer, William John, 1937–
Mapping the Godzone : a primer on New Zealand literature and
culture / William J. Schafer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8248–2016–9 (alk. paper)
1. New Zealand literature—History and criticism. 2. New Zealand—
Civilization. I. Title.
PR9624.3.S33 1998
820.9’993—dc21 98–10181
820.9’993—dc21 98–1CIP1
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and
meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on
Library Resources
Designed by Jennifer Lum
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Their town, called Waimaru, was small as
the world and halfway between the South
Pole and the equator, that is, forty-five
degrees exactly. There was a stone monu-
ment just north of the town, to mark the
spot, in gold lettering.
—Traveller, the writing said, Stop here. You
are now standing between the South Pole
and the equator.
What did it feel like to be standing at forty-
five degrees?
It felt no different.
—Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry
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Contents
Preface ix
Fishing with Maui: Beginning the Voyage 1
1 Where on Earth Is Aotearoa? 14
2 Whalers, Sailors, Sealers 37
3 The Last Big Islands 56
4 Once Were Crusaders 93
5 The Bildungsroman at the End of the World 116
6 The Necessity of Ghosts: Aotearoa Gothic 137
7 Falling through the Hole in the Godzone 160
8 Aotearoa at the Movies 175
Bibliography 187
Index 191
vii
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Preface:
Sailing to Aotearoa
I wrote this book in a sustained burst of enthusiasm for New Zealand,
its people, places, culture, and literature. My feelings came from read-
ing and dreaming about New Zealand, followed by a five-month visit
in 1995, during which my wife and I tried to see, understand, and
absorb as much of this remarkable place as possible in the months
from midwinter to early summer of the antipodean year.
We traveled to New Zealand in a romantic, anachronistic fashion
—sailing on a Blue Star Line container ship from Long Beach to
Auckland, with an afternoon stop at Suva, Fiji. The experience of the
huge, sullenly stable cargo ship, the vastness of the Pacific, calm seas,
and the restful ennui of a two-week voyage with few enforced amen-
ities or mandatory pleasures prepared us for landfall at the North
Island.
Nothing, not even the tourist brochures, travel guides, and video-
taped glossies on the attractions of the land, prepared us for the diver-
sity, the temperate climate (even in the midst of an unusually cold and
protracted winter, by local standards), and the sheer physical beauty.
We disembarked at Auckland, after sailing along the east coast of
Northland and observing the diorama of small islands and coastal
villages, took a taxi ride across the city from the harbor to the airport,
and examined all the streets of simple, colorful villas and bungalows,
the gardens glowing with flowers and fruits in midwinter. It was wet
and chilly, like an average winter’s day on the mild south coast of
England.
Then we flew across Cook Strait, down the spine of the South
Island, with the grandeur of the Southern Alps and Mount Cook under
our wings as we turned across the Canterbury Plains and landed at
Christchurch. The weather was colder, more a real winter of the mid-
ix
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x Preface
western U.S. variety. We had left Los Angeles in early summer, as the
heat and haze set in, and now we were in a land of ice and snow,
however ephemeral. South of us was Antarctica. South were several
species of New Zealand penguins—Little Blue, Yellow-eyed, Crested
—and albatrosses that patrol the endless cold at the southern end of
the earth.
The last hop was down the coast, still southerly, to Dunedin, a
Scots-settled city that was the first major nineteenth-century metrop-
olis for New Zealand, capital of the early gold rushes, with Port
Chalmers on the Otago Harbor where thousands of the earliest set-
tlers disembarked. Whalers, I knew, had worked out of this long
harbor, and at its very end, on Taiaroa Head overlooking the empty
ocean, was the only mainland colony of the Royal Albatross, king of
pelagic wanderers.
We settled in Dunedin, a sprawling and friendly place of villas
and bungalows, focused on the Octagon, a nexus of streets with names
like Princes, Great King, and George, for “Dunedin” is the ancient
Scots’ name for Edinburgh. On a chair atop a tall pedestal in the Octa-
gon sits Robbie Burns, tutelary spirit of the Scots settlers, who included
his nephew. We worked at the University of Otago, the oldest estab-
lished university and the major medical center for the country.
Dunedin is an archetypal university town, shaped by the schedule
and culture of the Varsity, and in term time it fills with students from
all over the country—from deep Southland, still sprawling pampas of
sheep stations and forestry plantations, and from remote Northland,
the old high-timber country and home of the earliest whalers and
transient traders. The city rises on seven hills, like all classic-minded
conurbations, the center a bowl, with the long harbor to the east and a
beach coast rambling to the south.
From Dunedin, my wife and I drove all around the South Island
for several months, then spent a final two weeks in a circuit of the
North Island. We avoided cities and aimed for mountains, lakes,
beaches, small towns and hamlets, the empty backcountry of sheep
stations, cattle farms, the revenants of the old lumbering days, deserted
mining towns, the long wild west coast, the serrated and hilly country
of the northern South Island, from Golden Bay east past Nelson and
on to Marlborough.
I read books and viewed films, talked with ordinary folks and
