The Scone in New Zealand Literature and Other Essays 1990 – 2020 : Tony Simpson
Quentin Findlay reviews Tony Simpson's collection of essays for The Commonweal Volume Four (October 2023).
I must admit to some bias in this review. I have admired Tony’s previous work for some time. His earlier books, The Sugarbag Years and The Slump are very familiar to me and were the standard ‘go to’ books for my university essays, and later my PhD. I also own a rather battered copy of Shame and Disgrace - A History of Lost Scandals. As its title suggests, it contains several scandalous tales and activities that both time and polite society ‘forgot’. It is an excellent read. Additionally, I have occasionally shared some beers with him, particularly in the old Bodega Bar in Wellington during his Alliance and Progressive party years. Tony makes for interesting and stimulating intellectual conversation. When I heard that he had a new book out that needed to be reviewed I had no hesitation in doing so.
Firstly, this book is not about scones, although the named food is dealt with in both a political and postmodern sense. Instead, The Scone in New Zealand Literature is very much a book about New Zealand’s politics, history and society in the late 20th and very early 21st Centuries. It is also a book about Tony Simpson. The Scone allows us not only to see Tony Simpson, the historian, but also Tony Simpson the policy maker and political adviser, and lastly, Tony Simpson the human being.
The book’s essays, many of which were originally presentations to various groups, and in some cases, policy papers (on behalf of the Alliance or Jim Anderton, as Tony was the chief policy advisor for Jim during the late 1990s and early 2000), cover an assortment of topics and themes. Although a number deal with the changing nuances of New Zealand’s political and economic environment from the late 1980s and 1990s Tony Simpson, as one would expect from a person who worked for the Alliance and the PSA previously, is critical of those changes. His central thesis, that they systematically alienated both individuals and society as a collective whole, form the underlying theme of several essays.
The Scone also proved to be a bit of a memory jogger for people like me, particularly his essays on the defence force review of the late 1990s, and the ‘croak and stagger’ organisation that was the SIS. I do remember the political heat that had resulted from the review of the New Zealand navy at that time. The various questions that arose as part of that review were about the ongoing role of the navy, the suitability of its fleet, and the best use of the country’s naval resources in the South Pacific given ongoing security concerns.
Likewise, there was also considerable discussion about the future and operation of New Zealand’s security organisations at the same time. These concerns emphasised bungled raids, overspending, and security breaches such as the leaving of brief cases containing top secret documents, cold meat pies, and (if I remember correctly) a Playboy magazine on reporters’ fences in Wellington. Central to these questions was the role played by New Zealand’s security intelligence forces internally and their relationships with external international agencies, especially those of the US. Tony’s excellent essays show that despite the passing of twenty years these issues remain extremely valid and largely unresolved.
However, The Scone demonstrates very clearly that Tony Simpson remains very much a historian at heart. He relates that he took political studies at Canterbury University in the 1960s, as that was really the only way that you could learn about New Zealand history at the time. New Zealand history, as such, was not taught in schools or at universities and, if it was, it was glossed over. History, as I am reminded from my own High School experiences in the early 1980s, consisted mostly of English dates and events (and these tended not to be working class or popular events).
Consequently, Pākehā New Zealanders, as Tony reminds us, mostly existed in a historical and cultural bubble. Britain, and principally England, were at the centre of modern civilisation and, were surrounded by its various colonies and dominions. The exploitation of the colonies and dominions generated the goods and the wealth that the Empire existed on. This view of the world lasted for a considerable period. Even in the 1970s school atlases still showed large parts of the planet as being coloured British red.
In his note to me, Tony drew my attention to the chapter ‘Dr Marx and Mr Wakefield’, which deals with the introduction, impact and development of capitalism in early New Zealand by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Company. As Tony explains the popular conception, of Gibbon setting up the company and then bravely establishing sites in New Zealand, is largely fictitious. It is the creation of an Empire that sought to expand its presence and introduce capitalism, and it used people like Wakefield to do so. Wakefield was not opposed to his use in that regard. He was a con man, but a willing servant of the Empire.
Tony references Marx’s critiques of Wakefield’s dubious (and similar) scheme in Swan River in Australia. Marx pointed out that the success of the Swan River scheme rested in Wakefield’s being able to adopt two strategies. The first was to become the sole owner of land, and the second was to ensure that your workers remained broke enough never to be able to buy land and thus always remain workers. This was done through the appropriation of some of the value of their work which limited their ability to abandon their roles. While this approach had failed in Swan River, it had succeeded in New Zealand. Wakefield had envisaged the New Zealand Company being the sole buyer, owner and seller of Māori land, but this role was taken over by the Government after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Consequently the Government, which had the same or coincident objectives as those of the directors of the New Zealand Company, was able to dictate land ownership in the new colony. Consequently, the country was the result of a rather ‘elegant rort’ as Tony puts it.
However, while the principal export of the Empire was capitalism, the key component was hegemonic with the creation of a distinctly ‘British’ history and culture. In the essay on ‘Identity and History, Tony refers to this notion of a distinctly British culture which influenced the differing perspectives of Pākehā New Zealanders in the mid Twentieth Century, as against those of Māori. In his interviews as a student and later for his books in the 1970s, he interviewed people and noted the differences of perspective. For Pākehā, the starting points were The First World War, the Depression, the Second World War etc. While Māori emphasised the same events the frame of reference was different. Additionally, Māori emphasised issues such as immigration and the effect of this on their culture and the relationship between them and Pakeha.
One can get a distinct understanding of the strength of this belief in ‘Britishness’ amongst Pākehā by reading the newspapers available on Papers Past. Pākehā referred to their unique ‘Britishness’ constantly and consistently. From their perspective New Zealand (not Aotearoa) was a part of the mightiest empire that the world had ever seen. It had provided stability, government, literacy, and civilisation. This belief was prevalent everywhere, from the pages of books and newspapers to magazines. It was broadcast on the newly invented wireless and it was on the news reels shown at the movies. Children were taught it at school.
The concept of ‘Britain’ permeated all the strata of society, including the Labour movement. Speaking in Parliament during the First World War, the chair of the parliamentary Labour Party, Alfred Hindmarsh, lined up with the Tories and the Liberals to praise British culture and society at a time when it was seen as being at risk as a result of the War;
[It is…] our traditions, our language, our literature. We are fighting for Shakespeare’s memory, for Milton’s memory, and for other celebrated men who stood out in English history and helped to create the present for us. Everyone who reads Shakespeare must after he has read a little, become imbued with patriotism .... the common feeling of the people is always higher than the feeling of individuals that compose it.
Tony Simpson reminds us that this notion of ‘Britishness’ is a creation. There was no notion of a ‘British’ culture or identity 300 years ago. There were only the different cultures and identities of the independent nations that inhabited the group of islands that would become known as the British Isles. However, after the establishment of the Union in 1707 it was important to the new nation and to the financiers and growing industrialists that backed it, that the concept of ‘Britishness’ (which was really England) was created. It was this concept that drove the Empire and its settlers. The idea of Britain as the central focus point of New Zealand society remained so strong that some elderly people still referred to Britain as ‘Home’ when I was a child in the 1970s.
Lastly, I do want to draw out those sections of The Scone which present Tony Simpson as not only a social historian, but as a person. There are several chapters that deal with the life that he experienced as a child and young adult in a remarkably different and more socially conservative New Zealand in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and which influenced his future behaviour and responses. The past, they say, is a different country and one is reminded of this in those essays dealing with Tony’s experiences growing up.
I was drawn to the essays in the section ‘Growing Up Queer’ as a particular example of how New Zealand has changed. While there were good things about New Zealand society post war, there were a number of things that were not. Society was largely stupefyingly conservative, bland and assimilationist. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s Rugby was the principal game of ‘choice’, those people who lived or acted differently were asking for trouble, women were Sheilas and should be at home, while Māori were seen as brown Pākehā, who should be grateful for the civilising aspects of Pākehā/British society. Keith Holyoake, the National Prime Minister throughout the 1960s, was alleged to have told a school that the country’s race relations were the best in the world. As Austin Mitchell, who was teaching Politics at Canterbury while Tony Simpson was a student, remarked in his book, The Half Gallon Pavlova Paradise,
Don’t think of New Zealand as a nation. It is an accidental collection of places whose inhabitants happen to live in much the same fashion and talk the same language; not so much as a nation as a way of life…
From the perspective of 2023, Prime Minister ‘Rob’ Muldoon was the perfect poster child of that time and attitude.
In his book, Downfall – The Destruction of Charles Mackay, Paul Diamond examines the circumstances of Charles Mackay, a former mayor of Whanganui. Mackay committed murder and was imprisoned for it. The motive for the crimes that MacKay committed was his fear of being openly identified as gay. In McKay’s case both the cause and the outcome were scandalous, and the incidents were supressed by polite Whanganui society and the families involved. Tony opens his essay, ‘Looks Like It’s Open season on Queers’, detailing the murder of Charles Aberhart which happened in Christchurch in 1964. Similarly, Aberhart’s ‘crime’ was that he was gay. Both the crime and the trial were largely overlooked by the papers and the media at the time. The reason for that suppression was because Charles Aberhart was a homosexual, and homosexuality along with other supposedly ‘deviant’ behaviour was seen, as this chapter reminds us, not just as a crime, but as an illness. Although the situation improved for the gay community, it was only in the 1980s that gays gained both legal protection and legal acceptance. This was twenty years after the death of Aberhart and 60 years after the incident involving MacKay.
In his own words, Tony describes this book as a bit of an ‘intellectual knockabout.’ It is certainly that. The various essays provide a challenge to the reader to examine their own perspectives of society from both a modern and historical perspective. Equally, he does not shy away from offering, in his own words, ‘contentious’ opinion, while providing overview and comment from his own broad intellectual perspective. All the essays are characterized by Tony’s own intellectualism and curiosity in areas as diverse as genetic modification, postmodernism, folk tales, death in Venice, salted beef or… scones.