Bill Manhire
Professor, School of English, Film and Theatre
Director, Creative Writing Programme Victoria University Wellington

I will start and end with a particular poem. It is probably the best known New Zealand poem. It is as near as New Zealand literature has come to producing a classic, in other words, a poem which has escaped the classroom and has some sort of life on the tongues and in the memories of a whole range of New Zealanders. It has been adapted into a play, which was a prizewinner at the Edinburgh Festival. It has been set to music by people as different as Douglas Lilburn and the contemporary music group Six Volts. It has been adapted as a children's picture book by Dick Frizzell. The poem is Denis Glover's The Magpies. I will play you a reading of it as recorded by its author. I think he has had one or two gins on the way to the recording studio but he does the poem's famous chorus very well indeed.

The Magpies
When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Tom's hand was strong to the plough
Elizabeth's lips were red,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Year in year out they worked
While the pines grew overhead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

But all the beautiful crops soon went
To the mortgage-man instead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

Elizabeth is dead now (it's years ago)
Old Tom went light in the head:
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.

The farm's still there. Mortgage corporations
Couldn't give it away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies say.

That's a poem about the Depression, about how precarious our purchase on things can be and how relentless and implacable the natural world is. What fascinates me most about The Magpies chorus is that it is easily the best known and the most misquoted line in New Zealand literature: 'Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle'.

I don't know if it is deeply worrying or deeply encouraging that this line above all others should have so fixed itself in the national psyche. It certainly goes against our received sense of poetry, with the capital 'P' and also against our rather romantic notions about birdsong. You can hear the word warble with a 'b' in it just ghosting those lines but failing to articulate itself. You can certainly hear the word 'doodle' coming in right at the end, underlining that whole sense of anticlimax. In other words The Magpies chorus mocks the world of human endeavour but it also mocks the pure idea of birdsong itself. The noise 'Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle' is as wonderfully accurate as a sound photograph of that noise - as if someone is trying to yodel under water.

The sad truth is that New Zealand's most famous line of poetry as an attempt to be beautiful and lyrical falls disastrously short. In its falling short it also teases and reprimands all the received warblings of English poetry: Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, Keats' Ode to a Nightingale and Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush. So Glover's lines stand as an awkward, muddled, down to earth reproof to English ideas of lyrical purity. It seems to me that it obviously suits New Zealanders very well. It is a mixed performance. It is a sort of do it yourself adaptability. It is part of our national character in that respect, part of the idealising image we have of ourselves. We are certainly far more mixed, more diverse, more improvised, more impure than some of our founding fathers and maybe mothers imagined we might be. Like Glover's magpies we gargle and we doodle and we warble all at once.

Through force of circumstance Maori learned to be mixed and various long before pakeha in this country. Patricia Grace was once asked about the influence of oral tradition on her work and presumably she was being prompted as a Maori writer to supply a particular sort of solemn answer about belonging to an oral culture. What she said was a great deal more mischievous and true. She said that she is influenced by everything including all forms of speech whether it is conversation, stories, waiata, whai korero, tauparapara, haka, karanga, chanting, Latin plain song, radio and television commercials and programmes, news bulletins, talks, readings, lectures, sermons, it doesn't matter what. The range of oral forms she lists is very striking. Maori and English, traditional and contemporary forms, high culture, low culture. The only thing missing is a racing commentary. I must write to her and suggest that she revise the statement.

Maori writers have had to put up with this expectation that they ought to be entirely Maori in the work they produce. One of Hone Tuwhare's early poems, Monologue is simply about a factory worker who likes working near a door. He talks at great length about why he likes working near a door, mainly so that he can make a break for it if he has to. When Hone reads this poem aloud some listeners get quite bothered to discover that the poem is in the voice of a character and that the character is an elderly Scotsman with whom Hone once worked in the railway workshop. It takes them a while to work this out because Hone has possibly the least convincing Scottish accent I have ever heard. His guiding principle seems to be to roll every 'r' as long as possible. Maybe because readers bring these very single-minded cultural assumptions to his work Hone Tuwhare has adopted a sort of rhyming Maori Irish greeting, which he uses from time to time. He takes the Maori phrase kia ora and follows it with the Irish word begorrah. So from time to time Hone will say, 'Kia ora begorrah' and it works very well. That phrase sums up for me one imaginative advantage that Maori have over many pakeha New Zealanders. They have been obliged to move to and fro between languages. Many of us pakeha New Zealanders have been vastly impoverished by our belief that we can get by entirely in English, especially in terms of imagining or understanding what it might be like to be another person. In the practical world of commerce I guess this will have affected our ability to trade.

Hone Tuwhare's latest book of poems is called Shape Shifter. He frequently shifts shape himself in the course of his poems. It is as if he is in church in one line but down the pub in the next. He goes to and fro. Pakeha writers have been less good at shape shifting. Certainly, many of them have tended to adopt the big old romantic position of the artist as social outcast fulminating against establishment corruptions. James K Baxter would be a great example of this, and in his case great work, so who would complain. It is a view of the artist that can leave you remote from, and indeed, uninformed about the society you're busy challenging or attacking. It can make you confuse a tedious sermonising with genuine perception. Worst of all it usually means that nobody wants to buy your books, which goes to prove how wicked society is. The artists march off into the distance feeling comfortable and on we go. I won't go on with that because it is one of my small hobby-horses, that grows and grows when I feed it.

I want to talk about the name of the novelist Witi Ihimaera and also my own name. I will also talk about the importance of the imagination. Witi Ihimaera was born Witi Smiler. His family name Ihimaera had been changed to Smiler because local pakeha found it difficult, couldn't pronounce it, couldn't spell it, all those obvious things. As a young man, Witi decided to return to his true original name, which he assumed to be Ihimaera. But, of course, Ihimaera is not a true original authentic name either. Ihimaera was Witi's great-grandfather's name, but it had come courtesy of the missionaries and the Old Testament, and, in fact, is a transliteration into Maori of the name Ishmael. So we could think of a novelist called Witi Ishmael if we wanted. For those of you who know Moby Dick we could think of a novel that begins: 'Call me Ihimaera'.

Witi Ihimaera was a member of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for a while was posted to New York. I remember being in the States on a reading tour in the mid 1980s at a private reception many floors up in mid town Manhattan to which Witi was also coming. The doorman rang up on the intercom and said, 'I have a Mr Witi in the lobby. Shall I send him up?' Witi had given up on his name entirely in the States. It was far too hard. So for his whole posting he became Mr Witi. So Ihimaera, Smiler, Ishmael, the point I am making is that there is nothing pure, there's nothing original or authentic to return to.

My own name Manhire has a less shape shifting history to it, but it does have its own curious life in this country. My wife once worked for a while at Unity Books in Wellington and one day a well groomed elderly pakeha woman came in and said, 'I'm looking for a book and I can't think what the author's name is, but the book is called The New Land. Marian said, 'Oh, Bill Manhire. 'No', said the lady very sweetly, 'Manhira dear.' I have to say that Marian bit her tongue and made the sale. The point obviously is that the customer thought my name was a Maori name. This has been quite a common mistake. Manhire is a very unusual name, to the eye particularly. Many pakeha New Zealanders have solved its apparent foreignness by assuming it to be Polynesian. There is an obvious irony where the categories of native and foreign are getting wonderfully confused. The name would need another vowel obviously to be Maori. But it looks a bit like the Maori word Manuhiri meaning visitors or it sounds a little bit like manaia , which means among other things and I quote from the dictionary: 'a grotesque beaked figure often found in carving.' Manhire is actually a Cornish name and it is a variant of the word menheir, as in standing stones. My name literally means long stone. If I try to think about what I am in terms of my name I can get quite confused, because clearly I don't think of myself as Bill Longstone. I am Bill Manhire. I am this sort of impure noise and inside me there is a grotesque carved figure, a bunch of visitors and some standing stones. I go back to distressing playground jokes that I had to cope with, a gigolo, a man for hire.

I have reason to think that shape shifting rather than the dull fixtures of homogeneity is the thing that marks our society. We're mixed and we're adaptable, far more than some accounts of us would acknowledge. Lady Newall the wife of one of our mid-century Governors-General said of New Zealand women and to New Zealand women: 'You amaze me. You are chars in the morning, executive women in the afternoon and duchesses at night.'

New Zealanders have been multi-tasking for some time. That is also why most successful political leaders, and I would guess most successful public servants, are those who can talk in the morning to a visiting head of State, talk to a checkout operator or a freezing worker in the afternoon, and have dinner with a corporate executive in the evening. Yet they are able to be fully alive, fully articulate, fully present inside each conversation, not false in any of those conversations.That flexibility and adaptability are very deep in the New Zealand psyche and in the assumptions that we make about ourselves and our capacity to do things. We make a fetish about number eight fencing wire and some people even make works of art out of number eight fencing wire. But we are also a nation of shape shifters and I think our writers and artists are learning to be shape shifters rather than lonely angry distant people. They have to do that in order to report us fairly.

I was interested to hear Bill Clinton saying that ideas don't always last the distance either. One works in the spaces around and between ideas. But I'm not convinced by the mantras of ideology. They don't seem to me to be true to the deep structures and assumptions of the culture I inhabit. The belief that the market will decide seems to be to be just as dubious as whatever the current equivalent of a 1950s Eastern European five-year plan might be.

I'd like to make some hesitating noises about one piece of current phrasing. It is a phrase that has been in the air at this conference and that is 'the knowledge economy'. My worry is that the knowledge economy might simply turn out to be a mildly exciting euphemism for an economy which depends on and is subject to other people's technologies, other people's knowledge where we find ourselves sitting at keyboards and using software programmes devised elsewhere. I don't want to look back one day and see that New Zealand's twentieth century history was essentially a journey from being the Empire's farm to being a typing pool for IBM or Hewlett Packard. Indeed, I would want to propose another phrase, which would simply be 'the imagination economy'. This is where shape shiftings occur and are valued, where the box that people have talked about is not the only place one's head lives, the kind of economy which I think has to precede as well as grow alongside the knowledge economy. There would be other phrasings that would do: 'the insight economy', 'the creativity economy', 'the invention economy', even 'the thinking economy'. I would be quite happy with that.

I spent an afternoon recently with a man called Michael D Higgins who is a poet, but is also Ireland's ex Minister for the Arts. He was a member of the Cabinet that presided over Ireland's economic renaissance. His view, which he expressed very strongly, was that the arts were not something a society could afford to wait for or somehow postpone, defer to some ideal day in the future. A thriving economy should not be a prerequisite. He claimed that it was the arts that make a thriving economy possible. He said that the arts were crucial to the turning around and the reinvention of the Irish economy. They weren't the only thing, but they were part of what made the difference. His view was that New Zealand should be putting a lot more money into the arts by whatever means, precisely because they prompt and release the imagination. Imaginative thinking leads to knowledge and that makes an economic difference. I think that those who lead us into the next century will need imagination and they may also need to be alert to opportunities as they present themselves.

A pragmatic magpie opportunism is no bad thing. At its best it is a sign that we are fully alive in the universe. Ideas are wonderful, idealism is even more wonderful, but some of the great discoveries and movements forward come entirely from accident, come from imaginative courage and flexibility, from being able to spot and then seize a passing opportunity. My favourite small story from the world of poetry about accident has to do with the poet W H Auden who once wrote a poem that included the line, 'And the poets have names for the sea'. He must have thought that a splendid line. But it came back in the galley proofs from the publisher with a one letter change: 'And the ports have names for the sea'. He looked at it, scratched his head and finally said, 'That's better than my line,' and took it. He had a very good poem as a consequence.

That's a small tale about chance, about accident, grabbing an opportunity. I will conclude with The Magpies and show you a video clip from the Gibson Group show Skits, which some of you may have been to a few years ago, where they imagined how Denis Glover's poem The Magpies might have been written. We actually know how it was written. Allen Curnow was living in a cottage at Leithfield and Glover drove up to see him from Christchurch and stopped for a pee in the middle of a paddock full of magpies. Curnow opened the door of his cottage and said, 'Hello my dear friend Denis.' Glover said, 'Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle,' and went in and wrote the poem down. We will see what the Skitz programme made of it.

(Video clip shown.)

Brian Sergeant as most people will know is a brilliant actor and the sketch was written by Dave Armstrong who wrote the book during the last election. He followed the politicians around, so he is probably gearing up again. I don't want to say any more. I certainly don't want to suggest that public servants should increase their alcohol consumption, but I do think it is important to be available to opportunity when it occurs.

Thank you for listening to me and kia ora begorrah.

Notes:

Denis Glover's Selected Poems are published by Victoria University Press.

The greeting 'Kia ora begorrah' was first coined, as Hone Tuwhare acknowledges, by the writer Michael O'Leary.

The television programme Skitz was produced by the Gibson Group