New Zealand in the summer of 1953-54 was a riot of empire. At any given time most people were breathlessly anticipating the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II, feverishly following her tour through the country, or basking in the afterglow of it. But one day that summer, far from the monarchist crowd, a young man made his way to Parihaka – then an obscure Taranaki village virtually forgotten by history. Arriving in the late afternoon, unknown and uninvited, he walked past abandoned buildings with sagging verandahs and fallen roofs till he found an occupied house. There he was shown a photograph of Parihaka in Te Whiti’s time, and there he began asking questions.
The young man’s name was Dick Scott, and the answers he got to his questions led to the publication, a year later, of The Parihaka Story – which, revised and reissued in 1975 as Ask That Mountain, has had as profound an influence on our national sense of history as any book ever written. The fact that it was the work of a young Pakeha journalist at a time of intense white-imperialist chauvinism (Maori had strictly walk-on parts for the royal tour) only makes it all the more remarkable. Did he even know the Queen was here? “Probably,” says Scott with a grin. “I wouldn’t have paid much attention.”
Scott today, at 81, can look back on a lifetime of pioneering work in history and journalism. Indeed, he has done just that in his autobiography, published this week*. He was the first to write about the waterfront dispute that split the country in 1951, the first to draw attention to our burgeoning wine industry – long before it became fashionable – and the first to expose historical scandals in Niue and the Cook Islands. But it’s probably as the author of Ask That Mountain that he is best known. He was at least 20 years ahead of his time in spotting the significance of the village’s 1881 invasion by colonial troops and sensing that here was a terrific untold story.
What put him onto it? Ill with the measles in 1953, he had taken up as bedside reading (as you do) a 300,000-word English law report about the libel case pursued 70 years before by Native Minister John Bryce against historian George Rusden, who had accused Bryce of killing Maori women and children “gleefully” during the land wars. The report, says Scott, was full of numbingly repetitious detail, but “in the middle somewhere, there was a long rigmarole about Parihaka. It made it sound something I needed to know.”
Following up, he found plenty of mentions of Parihaka in the history books, but usually in terms that celebrated the invasion. “It was fixed in people’s minds,” he says. “Those [Maori] were just laughable, funny people.” And easy marks, too: on that first trip to the area Scott got talking to a Pakeha farmer in a pub. “Yes, it’s good country,” the farmer said with evident satisfaction, “and we got it for next to nothing.”
Not many books change the way people think but, like its near-contemporaries Silent Spring and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Scott’s did: his dramatic tale of the passive resistance shown by Te Whiti and his followers, and their shameful treatment by the colonial authorities, was eventually to play a key part in radicalising young Maori and raising Pakeha consciousness about the racism inherent in this country’s development. Modestly, though, Scott disclaims personal credit, saying that by the 1970s the country had started to change anyway, and his book just hit the spot: “Some people have told me that it was a book that set them off, yes. I certainly hope I had a bit of a part in it.”
Born in 1923, Scott comes from a generation that never thought it -seemly to bang your own drum: you got on and did your work without fuss. That generation repressed their inner conflicts, and to some extent their children paid the price; but on the plus side they were less ego-tormented, more genuinely committed to social ideals. Much of Scott’s autobiography is written in the third person, as if his life story were happening to someone else. In any case, it’s not so much an autobiography as one man’s history of the past 80 years.
“My publisher wanted to call it a memoir,” says Scott, “but I said it’s not as flimsy as that. I wanted to have actual history apart from myself – stuff that I knew that I thought should be filled in, about events and people that are really solid
history, so I had that obligation to write.”
Actual, solid: like this room we’re sitting in, an airy loft added by Scott himself to the Mt Eden house where he lives with wife Sue. Always practical-minded (“I don’t want to be pinned to the desk, I never write fulltime, I like physical work”), he says he’s just as happy with a paintbrush or a hammer in his hand. In a sense, he carpentered the new book, assembling old scraps of paper and gluing them together with memory. He has never been able to keep a diary going.
“I tried to once, got as far as February. I’m one of those classic hoarders, really – I don’t let a piece of paper go. I don’t have it all regimented, I just stack it and, when I came to do this, I just found stuff. My memory’s not too bad, but I’ve certainly found things I hadn’t remembered … [like] an old bit of tobacco packet with a note from Hone Tuwhare. I’d never have remembered that, but there it was, and I could quote from it.”
So you won’t find much about the private Scott in this book, despite occasional references to sexual relationships and domestic turmoil. Yes, he did have an extramarital affair with a woman called La Rue Storm, and there was “a certain multiplicity of behaviour”, but he nails that kind of talk by saying politely but firmly: “I’ve got the conceit to think I’ve written something that might be useful, and blabbing about private dealings might entertain someone, but I’m not interested. They can find their entertainment somewhere else.”
The reader will, however, be taken on a lively historical ride, particularly through the politically turbulent 1940s and early 50s. Though raised by conservative parents on a farm, and such a loyal son that he even interjected at communist meetings as a schoolboy, Scott swung to the left in late adolescence and joined the Communist Party at the outset of the Cold War. He lived through the thick of the ’51 crisis, and subsequently wrote his first book, 151 Days, about it; but he fell out of love with communism and left the party in 1952 after concluding from personal experience that communism’s shining ideals were based on “totally unreal beliefs about human beings”. And although he retains admiration for those ideals, he no longer tries to put them into practice.
“I mean, I’ve learnt about people. I invented the killer-diller phrase. The dillers were lovely people who had faith in humankind and had the belief that the world could be made so much better. Then there were the killers who were pretty ruthless and who, given the power that the party at that stage ended up giving them, could be as hideous in their behaviour as our enemy.”
Still, there are no regrets about his fiery red youth. “I would hate to have been cynical then. I don’t think it’s good for a young person to be suspicious and holding back from enthusiasm. It was part of who I was and it was a good life. We were on a crest. We were running!”
The books have kept coming over the years, most notably the richly researched Seven Lives on Salt River, a history of early Kaipara families, but Scott has long been content to leave the untold stories for others to tell. “We’re a much freer society now, the daily papers aren’t as stodgy and conservative: they’re ready to blow the whistle on something. Back then it was cover-up, cover-up. The motives of the dailies might not be all that admirable, but they do it. The Listener itself runs extraordinary stuff compared to 50 years ago.”
How right you are, Dick. Our 1955 review of The Parihaka Story was headlined “Parihaka Comedy-Tragedy”.
*A RADICAL WRITER’S LIFE, by Dick Scott (Reed, $49.99).