KEY POINTS:
It is, in so far as such things can be judged, the best-known line in New Zealand poetry; the refrain of Denis Glover's poem The Magpies which repeats the magpies' call: "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle". But the simplicity and sing-song jauntiness of the line - and indeed of the poem - is deceptive.
In six, simple four-line stanzas, Glover evokes the hopeful optimism of a young couple at the start of their life together ("When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm/The bracken made their bed/ and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle/ The magpies said"), then tells of the ongoing financial pressures they struggle under ("But all the beautiful crops soon went/to the mortgage man instead/and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle/the magpies said").
In the penultimate stanza, Glover shows the nihilistic futility of it all since years have passed, Elizabeth has died and Tom has lost his mind, and the final wrench comes from the poem's bleakly unemotional conclusion: "The farm's still there./Mortgage corporations couldn't give it away/and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle/The magpies say."
"That last line always gets me," says New Zealand artist Dick Frizzell, who produced a celebrated illustrated version of the poem, first published in 1987 (The Magpies has also inspired a short film and a play). "When the magpies call goes from 'said' to 'say', that always gives me a lump in my throat.
"I'm not a mad poetry person," he admits. "Not much of it resonates with me. But that one certainly did."
Glover wrote the poem in the 1940s and technically it is the story of a young couple farming during that bleak, financially austere period - but the simplicity of the language and the relevancy of the underlying message, that the land endures, no matter what we do, was still fresh and powerful enough to resonate for Frizzell when he made a pitch to produce his illustrated version in the 1980s. "When it came out, rural booksellers wouldn't even put it on the shelves," explains Frizzell. "There were farmers shooting themselves back then, so they felt it wasn't a good look."
"It sank a bit when it was released actually. I threatened to reprint it myself and eventually the publishers came to the party so it was reprinted and it just kind of hung around by the skin of its teeth until it reached some sort of tipping point in the public consciousness."
It reached such a tipping point that the Frizzell-illustrated The Magpies has just been reprinted again. It's the third well-known New Zealand children's book to be reissued as part of Random House's New Zealand classic series (Gavin Bishop's Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant, first published in 1981, was re-released last June, and David Elliot's The Adventures of Sydney Penguin came out in October).
"Although I have never called it a children's book," the artist says, "a lot of parents have told me their kids wanted it read again and again until the book fell to bits. I just don't know what the kids would be actually hearing."
Maybe the children are attracted by Frizzell's celebratory, almost cartoon images, which, like the words, remain fresh, vivid and timeless, a gorgeously disturbing rendering of Tom and Elizabeth's gradual decline.
"I can't tell you at what point I decided I wanted to illustrate The Magpies," Frizzell says. "But as soon as I thought about it I knew I needed to come up with something more dense than the dip pen and ink style of the school journals, which I was doing a lot of work for at the time.
"It was a struggle to get it right. I worked on it for about a year, trying to come up with the style and the narrative flow. In the end I invented this heavy, oil-painted generic folk-art look."
Back then folk art was almost a pejorative term. "But actually that got me out of something of a rut," Frizzell says.
"Not to hint at any art-political agenda but it made me think why on earth some styles and techniques were seen to 'work' and other things were, for some reason, not permitted."
If you look closely, you'll see the machinery is rusting in grass as the poem progresses, turn the pages and watch the lemon tree go from fertile profusion to dead wood. The observant might notice that the mortgage man who's instrumental in Tom and Elizabeth's downfall bears a striking resemblance to Roger Douglas circa the Rogernomics years.
"I don't think anyone even noticed it back then," Frizzell confesses. "It was a very private joke that one. But now Douglas is back in politics, just in time for the re-release. I couldn't have planned it better."
The Magpies
written by Denis Glover, illustrated by Dick Frizzell,
$24.99, Random House.
