Feature
Ask that philosopher
by Philip Matthews
How did the vice-chancellor of the Auckland University of Technology come to write a novel about the tragedy of Parihaka? Well, it’s a long story …
Great moments in pacifism: when John Bryce led nearly 1700 armed constabulary and volunteers into the Taranaki village of Parihaka, a village that was as much an experiment in human nature as anything else, on November 5, 1881, he and his men were greeted with singing children and freshly baked bread. No one put up a fight – indeed, it was against the rules to have a weapon of war in Parihaka – but the passive gestures had their own power and poetry, as simple yet effective as a Vietnam war protestor sliding a flower’s stem down the barrel of a gun. It has even been said that Gandhi heard the Parihaka story and was suitably inspired.
Seizing land for Pakeha settlers, Bryce’s men laid waste to the village and dragged its reigning prophets, Te Whiti and Tohu, into imprisonment in the South Island. Until the 1970s, this story was barely known in New Zealand, but the 1975 publication of Dick Scott’s landmark history, Ask That Mountain, did much to change that; in the same decade, Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere and Michael Smither took Parihaka as a subject, loving its biblical and mystical themes (Smither’s classic painting of a white feather over Mt Taranaki was on the cover of Scott’s book; Hotere, ever a master of a kind of indigenous, handmade spirituality, took as his image a portentous comet over the mountain). This art was the starting point of a good, encouraging Wellington City Gallery exhibition in 2000.
But is the story still as well-known here as it ought to be? Probably not. John Hinchcliff read Ask That Mountain back in the 1970s and was moved. “The Dick Scott book is excellent, it really inspired me,” he says. “I thought, I want my kids to read about it, but I’m not sure they’re going to read a history book.” His solution was to transmute the available facts of Parihaka history into fiction, and he wrote his novel – titled Parihaka – while living in Melbourne in the late 1970s. Then it sat in a cupboard somewhere for ages.
“I wrote it 25 years ago and I’m not a novelist, so I’m sure it’s going to get panned,” he says. True, parts of it feel a little stodgy, a little heavy with explanatory dialogue, but Te Whiti was one of the great orators and the book does communicate the message. Hinchcliff’s friend Paul Reeves includes a tepid recommendation in his foreword to the book: “I hope that this novel will be available to the wider public for their appreciation and edification.” As of late April, via publisher Steele Roberts, it will be.
Reeves notes, too, that the story of Parihaka can serve as inspiration and warning. The inspiration might seen obvious, but “warning”? A cross-cultural communication breakdown was at the heart of the issue – the military took the Maori word “pakanga” to mean “fight”, when it meant struggle in a passive-resistance sense (in the novel, this is explained by Te Whiti in a courtroom scene that has clear Christ/Pilate connotations). If asked what we can all take away from the Parihaka story now, Hinchcliff – fond of quoting the aphorisms of the great and learned – will remind you that Santayana said that those who fail to learn history’s lesson are doomed to repeat it.
“I saw Te Whiti and Tohu as icons who needed to be revealed to the people of New Zealand as examples,” he says. “I think it’s just the most marvellous story and I think we need to develop, in New Zealand, a set of myths, symbols and metaphors that reflect both our youthfulness and our history.” As a founding myth, it fits very neatly with New Zealand’s proud image as anti-nuclear pioneers. He’s onto something here: “November the fifth is when the big event happened. Why do we celebrate Guy Fawkes Day? Why not have Parihaka day?”
REWIND 30 YEARS. Hinchcliff and his family have returned home from the United States and he has taken up a position as chaplain at Auckland University. In the US, where he had taught philosophy in a college in Virginia, he saw the war machine up close and learnt a lesson in the differences between abstract and applicable knowledge. “I got a research grant to write a paper on the theopolitical logic of Benedict Spinoza. My first career opportunity, to make it in the world of research. I chose, as you do, something that no one else had written about. I could pretend that I was clever and I spent the summer writing it. The Vietnam war was raging. So, I just threw Spinoza in the filing cabinet, didn’t send it in, and started writing on the philosophy of the just war.”
In the same way, he took his religious philosophy into the world when, as a chaplain, he took part in protests against US nuclear ships and submarines in New Zealand harbours in the 1970s. He organised a peace action convention and spoke at similar events internationally. In the Muldoon years, he abandoned the party that he had previously supported – National – and stood as a Labour candidate for the Eden electorate, while also being active in the Citizens for Rowling campaign.
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