Narrations Of Displacement 3

Out In The Sticks

“At 6am we weigh’d and stood out of the Bay which I have named Poverty Bay because it afforded us no one thing we wanted.” (1)

We were mostly deposited in New Zealand by varied forebears. Some of us have been here longer than others. Significant others among us even have a claim of residence dating back possibly millennia. A lot has happened since European arrival in New Zealand, largely technological. A rough shod explanation would be that our early modern colonization and global isolation lasted for a while and then rapidly grew less within a few short years of explosive Calvinist (i.e. Protestant) inspired economic growth. And so it goes.

Amongst the advances (for better or worse) the modern period has given us, possibly the most solely remedial of these is the phenomenon commonly known as The Grand Tour. We have after all possessed a desire to travel somewhere new as a primary form of education since the days of Aristotle. Most obviously to us now however, it was the Enlightenment period of the 18th century which disseminated this by now well pegged out Eurocentrism.

To paraphrase Thoreau, the aesthetic intention of the enlightenment was to open channels of thought more so than of trade. More recently the late Hugh Kenner coined this literate desire for discovery; The Elsewhere Community. In his essay, originally delivered as a Massey Lecture in 1998, Kenner outlined the history of the Grand Tour. The resulting truncated history lesson summarized the (ultimately) invisible nature of such endeavors:

“The elsewhere community we’ve been talking about is not so much an ideal we can define, as it is a set of instances we can point to. They are instances of human collaboration, which can sometimes even be unconscious, or else as simple and sustaining as the knowledge that we’re not alone.” (2)

Like the post-apocalyptic effect upon a city just after Christmas when the masses have bailed out, nowadays most of us occasionally (if not often) wish for an antithesis to our fast moving evolution into material idealism. In a similar vein (as illustrated by Kenner et al) one of the issues facing recent generations of cultural content providers in New Zealand, as elsewhere, is one of transparency, provenance and as always, signification. Perhaps a reason in part for our trepidation lies in how the relatively recent founding of New Zealand as “immigrant nation” has necessitated some possibly divisive anthropology? For example, to Maori colonization has meant a jump from ancient spiritual practices to “couch based” meta narratives, such as Freud probing the prohibitive nature of Maori superstitions (3). All this and much more in just one hundred or so years.

The recent series of shows constituting Narrations of Displacement can be viewed as a form of discourse closely meshed to Kenner’s concept of the elsewhere community; i.e. individual perspectives addressing past, present and future from various viewpoints and hypotheses. The series has in this way functioned succinctly through collectively addressing several of the histories which have led us to how we presently view New Zealand.

M.J. Kjarr (catalogue text)

1. Shirley Maddock, Far as a man may go, Collins, Auckland, 1969, pp47 (Captain James Cook & quot).
2. Hugh Kenner, The Elsewhere Community, Allen and Unwin, New South Wales, 1998, pp87.
3. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Routledge, London, 2001 (orig 1913; English trans. James Strachey 1950), pp32,33.