Dialogue: We're regressing to artistic infancy

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Oh dear, cultural cringe is back in earnest. It's not only that we haven't grown up, we've actually regressed to a state I recognise from my childhood.

The litmus test of our national infancy then was the question journalists asked every famous visitor five minutes after he or she arrived: "What do you think of New Zealand then?"

If the answer wasn't a glowing tribute to our amazing scenery, wonderfully kind and practical people and singularly just society, the newcomer was just another dumb, rude foreigner.

We thus sought definition by what others thought of us.

For a decade or two I thought we'd grown out of that.

But no. During the hoo-ha over the The Lord of the Rings, television reporters asked every actor who'd spent time here: "What do you think of New Zealand, then?"

Well, how do you answer that when you're at a party?

Another sign of cringe is treating dissension by one of our own as treasonable - Greg Turner, for example.

Take the case of journalist, novelist and Jill of all literary trades Sue McCauley. Last year she delivered the Fiona Kidman Vintage Lecture.

It was an amusing, beautifully written discussion on what she sees as the plight of literature and writers in New Zealand. She made a wide-ranging case for better support, along the way criticising Creative New Zealand policies not so much by making extreme statements as by asking questions.

Among many other things, McCauley mentioned the salaries of people involved in arts administration and compared them by implication with the irregular and low returns for writers.

She named two well-known New Zealand novelists who have long scraped a bare living from writing while the second violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra earned a regular salary of $50,000.

Now let's consider the response of the chairman of Creative New Zealand, Peter Biggs, and note how he doesn't take up these issues but moves from the particular to the general and from the concrete to the abstract, an old trick at the heart of political dissembling.

He wrote that McCauley's speech "devoted a considerable amount of effort to sideswiping other arts forms and the salaries of some people who work in them." McCauley, accordingly, "diminished" herself as a writer. He cited another unnamed person "who attacked other art forms to plead the case of literature" and this "diminished the credibility of the arts and arts practitioners at a time when the country is in desperate need of their insights, talents and gifts". This was, to Biggs, "destructive behaviour".

What claptrap! What pompous nonsense! Whether you agree with McCauley or not is irrelevant. Who the hell does Biggs think he is that he can fence off legitimate areas of debate and tell a mature, experienced writer to hold her tongue?

He's lucky he wasn't around at the same time as Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Denis Glover, James K. Baxter, Colin McCahon and others of the dissenting, rebellious, morally and intellectually subversive ingrates we've produced in New Zealand. They'd have chewed him up and spat him out with his genteel, middle-class sensibilities.

I've long argued that the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra playing Mahler is to New Zealand culture the same as a new edition of Great Expectations from a New Zealand publisher would be. Maybe they have an argument against that. I'll never know because, in the glib and vacuous way the arts are debated in this country, they dismiss tough questions as not nice.

Creative individuals have always had a tendency to be stroppy, and the world's a better place for that - not Creative NZ's little eyrie in Wellington, the real world.

So how did a guy with such a strong distaste for dissension get to be head of the nation's controlling arts organisation? Perhaps he's just another symptom of our regression into cultural cringe.

When you come to think of it, where are the questioning rebels and mavericks of yesteryear; the artists who stirred up the national conscience; the young who wanted to change the world for the better? Has Creative NZ smothered them?

Biggs this week defended the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultation during the development of the Maori arts logo. Interesting when you consider that twice over the past few years he has told me face to face that he thought it a good idea for him to meet senior writers to discuss what they see as literature's problems. Once out of sight, he reneged on both occasions.

I'm going to suggest to the New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN NZ) that it changes its name to Aotearoa Writers Iwi and uses the Treaty of Waitangi which, like the Bible, can now be construed to mean whatever you want it to mean, to arrange a series of writers' hui with Creative NZ. (Now that destructive behaviour might make Biggs faint.)

Well, maybe it would be a waste of time. If the shut-up-and-be-grateful waffle Biggs used against McCauley is the measure of his talent for robust debate he wouldn't last five minutes with a couple of feisty writers.