Dialogue: Lessons on ourselves, taught by a master of the subject

By BRIAN RUDMAN

I have only the vaguest recollections of Allen Curnow the lecturer, and perhaps that's for the best.

A contemporary at Auckland University, who spent rather more time than I did at his English tutorials, recalled yesterday of feeling rather like a lesser form of pond life in his presence.

But if he made no impact on me as a person, his verse surely did, exploring as it did our place in this country.

The mid-1960s were heady times at Auckland University. The cold warriors of the National Government were busy going all the way with LBJ to Vietnam.

To the more excitable and ill-educated of politicians and newspapermen, universities were hot-beds of subversion.

In these days of much freer speech, it's easy to forget the atmosphere. When Outspoke, the student paper I worked for, unmasked a bungling SIS spy trying to recruit the student association president, Parliament erupted with allegations of treachery - not by the spy, but by various staff and we students.

Instead of laughing it off, as would hopefully happen now, a royal commission was set up and staff feared for their careers.

I guess in a way the cold warriors were right. Subversion of a sort was taking place within Auckland University.

But not of the sort they most feared. What was happening was that students like myself were being introduced by teachers like Keith Sinclair, Bob Chapman and Allen Curnow to the fact that New Zealand had its own history, its own politics, its own literature and, by extension, a road of its own to take in world events.

This wasn't a unique happening, in time or place, to Auckland University in the mid-60s but that's where I first encountered it. And for someone whose mother still referred at times to Britain as "home," even though she'd been born in Perth, it was heady stuff.

Throughout my schooling, history had been British kings and queens, and the corn laws and other irrelevancies. Wall maps dominated by the pink of the British Empire still ruled classrooms. As for poetry, it was about hosts of golden British daffodils.

At university another truth was revealed. A more relevant, New Zealand-centred truth. It was that we were a nation with a history and a will of our own.

It was a lesson given much greater urgency and relevance by the pressure being exerted by the United States for us to swap one set of imperial allegiances for another.

It was in this context that Curnow's verses struck such a chord. His memorable lines, written after visiting the skeleton of the great moa at Canterbury Museum, about the bird being "an interesting failure to adapt on islands" seemed to encapsulate the struggle between the old generation and the new so well.

The final couplet offered hope:

"Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year, Will learn the trick of standing upright here."

These were words written long before the struggles we were involved in. But they seemed so relevant at the time and still do, with the United States once more seeking allies for a new crusade.

Curnow was later to suggest a parallel between his place in New Zealand poetry and Colin McCahon's in painting.

"People are saying now - they didn't say it at first about Colin's painting - that he showed us the landscape so that in a way we saw it for the very first time.

"In his language, the language of paint and the forms of painting, he was doing just that ... although there was nothing ... nationalist, no island chauvinism, in him."

As others have said, self-effacement was not one of Curnow's failings.

But as a suitable epitaph, what words could be better. They certainly sum up for me, what he and teachers like Chapman and Sinclair taught my generation about standing upright here. Reading them anew, they're still as fresh, and relevant.