Bankers, business owners, coal mine owners, managers, farmers and landowners are trying hard to talk up the economy. New Zealand, along with Japan, the United States and a few other states that made money out of the First World War, are beginning to go into sharp economic recession. Britain and other Allied countries impoverished by the war are also going into recession. The voices of the political right in New Zealand say what they have said since the early days of colonisation: that the economy will grow so long as working class people work harder and longer for their pay. And take a pay cut. The Manawatu Evening Standard editorialises about it today. ‘New Zealand is in the happy position of being possibly the one country that has come through the war with the minimum of disturbance, commercially and politically.’ The country is ‘wonderfully prosperous.’ Responsibility for prosperity now ‘rests largely with the workers themselves,’ since the most likely cause of a slump is ‘waning confidence in the ability of the worker to make good, by increased effort and production.’
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Manawatu Evening Standard, 30 November 1920

New Zealand Truth today tears strips off Winston Churchill, British Secretary of State for War and Air. ‘Whinstone,’ as the very popular weekly calls him, has just published an article in which he claims that Jews are ‘supreme manifestations’ of ‘the diabolical.’ Churchill writes especially harshly about what he, along with many other conservatives. now call ‘the international Jew.’ A coldhearted cabal of Jewish capitalists supposedly have a grip on world banking and are working to undermine western civilisation. At the same time, oddly enough, these rapacious capitalists are also the leaders of world communism; ‘the strongest group among the Bolsheviks in Russia.’ New Zealand Truth backs the Liberal Party and to a lesser extent the Labour Party. Churchill is unpopular among Liberals and very unpopular among those who vote Labour. At the same time, anti-semitism is probably as common in New Zealand as in most of Europe.
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New Zealand Truth, 27 November 1920

‘War is the one remaining relic of barbarism in modern society which is regarded with any approval or is explained away by any excuse,’ editorialises the conservative newspaper Otago Daily Times. ‘The modern practice of war is in dark contrast with the progress of the world — on the one hand everything in life is becoming more and more humanised, while in war alone the most devilish and destructive devices are employed foi the annihilation of mankind.’ The editorial has been written in response to a resolution passed by the New Zealand Presbyterian Assembly. James Gibb, the leading minister who brought the resolution before the assembly, is typical of many interwar clergy. He strongly backed the British Empire in the early days of the First World War. As the war went on, his support started flagging and he has now become an active opponent of militarism. God today calls on the faithful, he tells the assembly, ‘to do all in their power to repress the spirit of militarism.’ The Otago Daily Times speaks in favour and also lends its support to a scheme some people are now proposing for ‘a federation of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples, free and enlightened and hating war, as a necessity for the very existence of civilisation and free Christianity.’
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Otago Daily Times, 25 November 1920

I've just started a personal reading project - or rereading project. I plan to read all of Fiona's novels in chronological sequence. Just finished The Skinny Louie Book. My reason for doing this is that I love and admire Fiona's writing. I:ve always felt that we're akin in many ways. We share the same interest in family, in society, in history, in the magical in the middle of the workaday, in class and gender and region and generation. We're both southern novelists. We're realists but not realists - in Fiona's case she's more magic realist, in my case I'm more surrealist. We're both satirists. We both hear words. We both see story. We both borrow a lot of our phrases - and then play around with them - from the banal language of the day, especially the languages of folk, religious, commercial, mass cultures. Ordinary speech. Pop songs. The jingles of quotidian ads. And the quality of our work to date is about equal. Or at least I think? - I reckon! And because we're so similar, while naturally having our crucial differences in how we see the universe, what meanings we might think we can infer, not to mention mechanical things like technique, structure etc etc, I know I can learn a lot from reading her novels over again. This time a lot more closely. I'm rereading Fiona because I know that while I'll be learning a lot by being at the feet of a beloved peer I'll be enjoying her words world immensely!

Stevan Eldred-Grigg
Charleston

A case in the Dannevirke magistrate’s court has set people talking about the way school teachers whip or beat students. David Cullinane, a high school student, has taken legal action against his ‘master,’ Donald Kennedy. David and a student friend ran into their teacher in town one day. Neither lifted his cap to show deference and obedience. ‘Next day at school they were called out by the master for punishment.’ David refused ‘to bend into a position to receive punishment, and it was alleged that, when he was attempting to leave the room, he was seized by Kennedy and given 10 strokes in all with a supplejack. A doctor called in for the complainant said examination showed several bruises, which were, he considered, unduly severe, and on an improper part of the body.’ The magistrate, after hearing the evidence, says that a teacher has ‘the right to punish a pupil for offences against the rules’ so long as the punishment is ‘reasonable.’ He dismisses the case because he thinks that ‘under the circumstances’ the punishment was not ‘excessive.’ All school students are liable under law to be beaten by their teachers. Leather straps are wielded in primary schools. Canes are used in high schools. Boys are beaten far more often than girls since society is very gendered and a widespread view is that boys need to learn to be ‘manly.’ The practice is common everywhere in the world. Coporal punishment of school students will still be lawful fifty years from now in every country other than Japan, Italy and Mauritius.
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New Zealand Herald, 20 November 1920

The New Zealand Herald reports today that many North Island Māori are experiencing a ‘good deal of excitement’ over the ‘alleged marvellous success’ of a new prophet who is healing the sick. The prophet is Tahupōtiki Rātana. He has become so famous that ‘hundreds of natives with ailments of various kinds have, during the past few months,’ made pilgrimages to the Rātana village between Turakina and Wangaehu. One group of formerly disabled people from the King Country and Hawkes Bay say they are ‘gladdened’ to have ‘the free use of their limbs again.’ Two years ago the prophet saw a heavenly vision. He believes that he must now preach the gospel to all Māori and heal their bodies, minds and hearts. He sees himself as working within Christianity. At the same time, he and his followers are beginning to move towards a wholly new religion that will be set up a few years from now as Te Haahi Rātana (the Rātana church). Pākehā in surrounding districts are uneasy. They feel ‘much perturbed over the coming and going of so many natives.’
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New Zealand Herald, 19 November 1920

Hi everyone. I’m going to be interviewed at 11 am tomorrow on Plains FM, Christchurch. I’ll be chatting with the Ruth Todd about what I’ve been up to lately in my writing, above all my new novel, Pru Goes Troppo.

This is a link: https://plainsfm.org.nz/Live.html

‘In these days ... the turbulent spirit of Bolshevism permeates the world,’ editorialises one of many conservative country dailies, the Rangitikei Advocate. Late last century the government legalised working-class unions. What has been the upshot? ‘It gave legal standing to combinations of men, nominally to safeguard the interests of workers, but really to enable them to be exploited by agitators and used to influence politics. The power thus given has frequently been used arrogantly, and to the detriment of the interests of the people.’ Unions have become ‘a power that threatens the very existence of Government while in the meantime defying it.’ The Rangitikei Advocate, like many conservative voices, wants workers to be denied the right to go on strike. A law should be passed ‘making an outlaw of every striker whose action in holding up industry or commerce is equivalent to an attack on the public interests.’
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Rangitikei Advocate, 17 November 1920

‘An epoch-making event’ took place yesterday when the New Zealand Aero Transport Company, ‘leapt into the air’ for the first time, says the Timaru Herald. The company will be the first to offer intercity passenger services in New Zealand. Transport as a whole is being revolutionised during these postwar years. Cars, trucks and buses are quickly changing the way people get about on land. Ocean liners and cargo ships are being converted from coal power to oil. Flying seems the most futuristic of all new types of transport. The New Zealand Aero Transport Company has acquired three planes to begin its regular air service. The first, a De Havilland 9, can carry or four three passengers and caused ‘quite a stir’ yesterday as it flew over Timaru. The company is an imaginative investment by a wealthy landowning family, the Wigleys. Passengers will now be able to be ‘transported to any part of the South Island at the shortest notice and in the shortest possible time, an arrangement which will no doubt appeal to business men. In order that the Company’s machines may be known in any part of the Dominion there will be a red and yellow wave colour effect along the fusilage.’
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Timaru Herald, 16 November 1920

The Free Lance editorialises today about the landslide victory just won by Warren Harding, leader of the Republican Party, in the presidential election in the United States. The editorial says that this outcome is dismaying. The new president is so strongly isolationist that he calls for a foreign policy based on the principle of ‘America First.’ The United States, says the editorial, will ‘be a quitter so far as her post-war responsibilities ... are concerned.’ France and Britain by themselves ‘cannot possibly undertake the duty of acting the part of policemen to the whole of Europe, to say nothing of a large party of Asia — of the world, in fact.’ American foreign policy will become ‘a self-contained self-centred policy of “Number One”.’
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Free Lance, 10 November 1920

The end of the war has brought a sudden surge of newcomers from Gujarat and Guangdong. Although wealthy ‘whites’ are not worried, shopkeepers and market gardeners are anxious about intensifying competition from incoming Chinese and Indians. The conservative Massey government hopes that a new law will take the tiresome ‘Asiatic Question’ out of politics. The Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920 will allow nobody entry into the country unless they have explicitly been granted a permit by the state. Massey says that while there is ‘no injustice intended to the people of any other country who come here,’ the government has ‘a perfect right’ to make its own immigration policy.[i] ‘Clearly, we want to keep the race as pure ... as it is possible to keep it.’[ii] The Labour Party is in two minds about the new law. Socialist internationalism is growing yet a lot of working people look askance at Chinese and Indians as a threat to wages and jobs. Harry Holland, compositor, boyish and emotional, is leader of the Labour Party. He chooses his words carefully. On one hand he wants to safeguard the white working class. On the other hand he wants to uphold international socialism and its commitment to racial equality. The ‘same red blood of humanity flows in the veins of all of us,’ he tells parliament. The door, though, must not be opened too wide to workers whose standards of living are low. The employer, not the worker, wants cheap workers to come into the country.[iii]

[i] PD, vol. 187, 14 September 1920, 905, 908.
[ii] Ibid., 908.
[iii] PD, vol. 187, 14 September 1920, 912–3.

​Apparently nearly all of us are a wee bit astigmatic. My astigmatism has never been surgically corrected, though my contact lenses are a partial fix. I’ve just worked out — I think! — that an astigmatic angle is part of what I’ve always tried to do with my writing and more lately have been trying to do my photography.
     All my life I’ve seen the world slightly skewwiff. Astigmatics send photons from the world into their cerebral cortex, just like anastigmatics, but differently. At least if I understand the science. The photons picked up by the eyes and sent to the cortex are ‘flawed.’ Afterwards, as the cerebral cortex works its socks off trying to make meaningful pattern out of constantly shifting hazy tessellations, doing its best to shape photons into something useful, adaptive, something that can be used to negotiate 'reality,' the socks are getting interestingly yet potentially wrongly among us astigmatics.
     Going from seeing to writing: might astigmatism have some relevance not only to the way us astigmatics see and shape the world but also the way we write the world? And might that not lead us on to lots of promising ideas what this means about astigmatics’ writing? Or, to go from the wide to the narrow, about my writing? And does it mean I need to move further away from an anastigmatic way of writing?
     Should I try to refine astigmaticography?
     And let me also deal the cackhanded card out on top of the astigmatic joker. Or dud. I think about this quite a lot because I clip my fingernails and struggle with scissors and throw balls — and write my words — cackhanded. Or lefthanded, if you like that word.
     A lot of cackhanded types think we look at the world differently from the ‘right’ handed. I kind of think so too.
     So my writing is astigmatic cackhanded writing. I think! Which is all to our common good because writing voices are perhaps a bell curve: do most of us when we write tend to converge around an anastigmatic righthand way of writing? A way of writing which is the dominant way, at least nowadays. I think we need that good strong centre of anastigmatic righthandness. At the same time I think we must also need a few wacko writers going in for wordplay out on the flattening flanges of the bell curve.
     One flange, maybe, consists of what we might call very lateral / intuitive / open / provisional / surreal / astigmatic / cackhanded / risk taking writing.
     One other flange could perhaps be very linear / logical / cellular / fixed/ ‘real’ / anastigmatic / righthanded / safety seeking writing.
     Or is this all nonsense, a needlessly roundabout roundelay of overlong metaphors, when what I mean is no more than that my very first spoken and written words came out of my mouth and fingertips while I was living as a little boy in a township which could stand, I reckon, as a weirdly working definition of the astigmatic cackhanded?
     Blackball!

The death of a workman is reported in Otago newspapers today. Joseph Durham, a tiler, fell from a scaffold onto a concrete floor in a dairy factory at Henley. A fellow worker ‘heard a sharp cry, turned immediately’ and saw Joseph falling. ‘The fall was a very heavy one.’ After falling, Joseph lay on the floor ‘with blood oozing from mouth and nose.’ He was in his early thirties, single, and a returned soldier. Deaths caused by unsafe work are very common everywhere in New Zealand. Although official statistics do not show exactly how many ‘accidental’ deaths among working people are caused by slipshod employers, they clearly number more than one hundred every year. Factory work, although a lot safer today than in the nineteenth century, thanks to stricter control by the state, can be dangerous. Forestry, mining, quarrying, wharf work, ship work, farm work and work on roads and railways are all serious killers. Men are the ones killed by work, mostly. A total of 193 men and 27 women are killed this year by accidents in mines and quarries, by cutting or piercing instruments, by falls, by crushing and by machinery. Are these workmen’s deaths the most numerous avoidable deaths, after war deaths, in our population during these early decades of the twentieth century?

Otago Daily Times, 03 November 1920
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‘Deaths from violence,’ https://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1921-22/NZOYB_1921-22.html#idsect2_1_41318

‘All is changing, all is wavering, all is in the melting pot,’ writes the distinguished elder poet Jessie Mackay. The ‘very basis of society is so fiercely debated in these days that the norm of society, the family, cannot be regarded as outside the sphere of change.’ The family, she says, ‘has been profaned, straitened, deflected, stultified by two malign factors — the industrial system and the subjection of women.’ Mackay goes on to say that communism and feminism are two ways of tackling the problem. Communism understands ‘the misery and frustration of the working mother’s life, compelled to let her children lack for early tendance, and go from her untrained and immature to the same competitive mill in which she herself is being ground to death.’ Feminism understands things even more deeply. ‘The feminist, while equally aware of the economic failure of the man-made world, puts the child’s main loss on higher and more general grounds — the grounds of a stunted life and a distorted vision of the world.’
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Otago Witness, 26 October 1920