“Substances by Which We
Sense Ourselves”
Nicholas Birns
For years, this journal and organization hesitated to
include New Zealand in our coverage. Most of the founders of AAALS had been
drawn to Australia out of a specific Australian set of literary interests or
personal connections, and even those that read more broadly in what is now
called “global Anglophone” literature emphasized, say, South Asia over New
Zealand. Moreover, understanding New Zealand means understanding Māori writers
and to specifically engage with Polynesian languages and cultures, and this
linguistic aptitude—not relevant to Australia in the same way with Aboriginal
languages being so many and so different from each other—is, most likely,
another element that scared off scholars.
A few years ago, gladly, we finally made the move. But
what then? Are we simply now monitoring a parallel stream of literary
production? There are writers who have shared both contexts: Eve Langley, Ruth
Park, Henry Lawson, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Jean Devanny, Douglas Stewart. But
this list merely sets off the many Australians and New Zealanders who have not
gone to the other Antipodean country, who instead have sought out London or New
York or Paris or even, as the experiences of George Johnston remind us, Hydra
in Greece.
Australians and New Zealanders rightfully resent the
tendency of outsiders to see them as two peas in a pod, to ignore the vastly
different landscapes, Indigenous histories, immigration patterns, and political
cultures of the two Anglophone nations. A person once asked me if one could
take a ferry from Australia to New Zealand—totally ignorant of the distance
across the Tasman Strait, which would make such a ride far longer than say
Newcastle to Bergen in Europe. New Zealand and Australia are not just like two
adjoining US states in the Pacific—although if one looks at the enormous
differences between adjacent US states such as New Hampshire and Vermont,
Nevada and Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, even here the peas-in-a-pod generalization
would fail.
And yet Australianists and New Zealanders are going to
have to get used to out- siders making these connections, even if they are
judged misprisions or follies. Part of globalization is misunderstanding; just
as misunderstanding, as Freud and Marx taught us, operate in the area of sex
and economics, so, if we are to take the global seriously as an affective
state, misunderstanding must be quasi-constitutive there.
In this light, we should look for the genuine
commonalities between Australia and New Zealand rather than reinforce existing
distinctions.
It is here that I find the poetry and prose of Stephen
Oliver so valuable. A “transtasman”—all lowercase—poet born in New Zealand,
resident in Australia for many years, and now returned to New Zealand, Oliver
has been a mainstay of the Antipodes creative nonfiction section for
many years. His winsome, rueful, self-effacing, and above all inventive essays
manifest at once an acrid irony toward all overweening aspirations and yet
still cherish a hope for personal and even social transformation. The current
issue of the New Zealand poetry journal broadsheet contains a feature,
edited by the veteran New Zealand poet and anthologist Mark Pirie, on Oliver’s
work, including tributes by fellow poets as well as selections from Oliver’s
own verse:
In the fossil record is found no remnant
of the body’s soft tissues, these things
melt
away, substances by which we sense
ourselves; petrified bone and the
catacombs
that riddle bone remain. The rest melted
away.
Oliver has juxtaposed hard and soft, the adamant and
the emollient, superbly in his career. Broadsheet can be ordered by
writing to: The Editor, Flat 4c/19 Castleville Terrace, Thorndon, Wellington
6011, New Zealand; or going to http:// broadhseetnz.wordpress.com. Antipodes
is truly grateful to Stephen Oliver for how his transtasman (again,
lowercase) exactions have broadened our literary field.
Antipodes
29.2
(December 2015), pp. 249–250 © Wayne State University Press
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