I must do a final roundup of the last two sessions of ‘In Context’ at the Auckland Art Gallery – my inaugural attempt at event organisation, inspired by the ‘Art & the 60s’ exhibition from Tate Britain which is still on at the moment. It's magnificent, but it's all about the UK and US, with nothing to tell us what was going on here in good old Godzone at the same time. Hence.

A picture has emerged of Auckland in the sixties, especially of Grafton, with its Elam flatmates on the pill and shagging despairingly or delightedly, thinking of their next painting. Or of the wild art and poetry of the Barry Lett gallery, and some of the other hangouts of that bad decade, when students learned more from the ‘university of life’, from talking and reading their poetry in bars and from going on protest marches, than they did from the curriculum. Some were pure as the driven snow, motivated only by concern for their fellow man and the planet, others were keen to take as many mind-altering substances as they could and chart the results on the bodies of others or on canvases or in crazy stanzas bashed out on old typewriters in cold bare rooms.

Our last four readers have been a treat. Kevin Ireland was debonair and eloquent – he’s as relaxing as as a punt on the Thames with a large wicker hamper at your feet – a Ratty to everyone else’s Mole. Once he’s settled in, you know that all is well with the world.

His stories of extraordinary good fortune in swinging sixties London made me yearn for the dirty old town. He arrived there from Sydney with ten shillings in his pocket – seven and thruppence once he’d bought his A-Z – but within a few hours he had a job and board at the most cutting-edge gallery in Soho (Gallery One) and was out on the town with the bringer of all good fortune, John Kay (otherwise known as Kasmin).

He’d met Kasmin whilst he was over here in NZ, in the late 50s, on a boat to Waiheke. When he got to London the Gallery One job Kasmin sorted out for Kevin really changed the course of his life. And others’ lives – when Kevin moved on he passed the job to Michael Illingsworth, who was never the same again. Rubbing shoulders and exercising elbows with the likes of Yves Klein, Bridget Riley and Frances Bacon will do that to you. Kevin was in heaven. ‘The weather was glorious and Britain was just about to join the twentieth century’ was how he put it.

At one point Kasmin offered Kevin a painting by a one of his new young artists by the name of David Hockney. Kevin was a bit skint at the time and the £45 it was offered for was just too much. To say he kicked himself not long after, when the Tate bought it for £30,000 – this was when a very reasonable house in inner London was £5,000 – was a bit of an understatement.

Anyway, the good times ran out eventually and at a low point Kevin wrote this:

Spring 1971

for much of the year
I have had no new poems
to post away

it was a time
of feeling dried out
of being unable to find

from myself
what I most wished
I could manage to say

but now it is spring
and part of the day
I have walked through the trees

which all winter long
have stood wasted
and idle and drained

and have seen them awake
no more than to manage
what they are able to do

Riemke Ensing was in the same session as Kevin. Sparks flew when she took the mike. She’d just been to a funeral and was in high dudgeon at the gall of the priest who had dared to suggest that we should be satisfied with threescore years and ten. I imagine someone’ll have to hit Riemke over the head with a brick when she’s 120 and still looking for intellectual challenges - and a laugh. She’s not likely to go quietly.

Riemke’s 60s in Auckland was remembered as extremely conservative, where cutting-edge new plays produced by Ronald Barker such as Waiting for Godot and Happy Days as well as local lad Allen Curnow's The Overseas Expert were met with baffled incomprehension if not downright hostility. She also remembers her long-time partner, Bill Trussell, returning here from Paris to stage recitals with a piano and two tape recorders (Hans Otte's Tropismen), and meeting with a similar response – work that in Paris was already considered mainstream, and well past the 'experimental' stage it was seen as here. Not to mention Pat Hanly's depressed state returning from London to encounter NZ's parochial attitudes ...

Riemke’s MA class was taken by Allan Curnow who 'got down to work on Yeats and Baudelaire without any social chatter or passing the time of day', but instilled in Riemke a lasting delight of the former. Bill Pearson was one of the other tutors. There were often only four or five students in tutorials – Riemke said 'one could concentrate on the work in hand in detail, spend time and be given attention. It was extending and fascinating and exciting - the learning process in such a privileged situation - and this is something that present day students miss out on because everything is 'mass'.

However, there was also lots of fun – Riemke remembers going, in her skin tight Levis (‘you put them on, got into a very hot bath and then let them dry on you’) and bulky fisherman’s jersey – to the Lautrec and the Montmartre bars off Queen Street, where she and her friends would talk for hours about the woes of the world and the beauty of words. A fair part of the unofficial curriculum at university at the time was staged in cafes and bars, on protest marches and in theatres.

Riemke was, at the time (the early to mid-sixties), working as a 'psyche nurse' at Oakley (later Carrington) hospital. She says ‘That's what one did. [University] fees were paid and one had an allowance, but in the Christmas holidays work was available either at a psychiatric institute or the telephone exchange. The men tended to work in wool-stores. My several stints at Oakley left an indelible impression, which still sometimes haunts me today – 40 years later. It was an appalling place most of the time and the most horrific things went on there. We had to sign confidentiality agreements not to divulge anything and the reasons for that were obvious after a day's work there.’ This accounts, no doubt, for her pre-occupation at the time with ‘strangeness and being locked up’.

Voices in a Locked Room

An unseen voice inhabits this room.
Perhaps it is the bird
hunched on the branch outside
the grilled window without glass.
The snow in the sun's arm
threw it inside
to fly invisible
within the limits of the cage
where I am chained
tormented by multiplicity.
Tomorrow I may have another voice
for company;
A lion or the sea-grass
or a watch ticking exhausted time
or a stone
to pelt this bird voice with.

This poem was published in 1968 in a litmag called Arena which was edited, set and printed by Noel Farr Hoggard on his Handcraft Press and sold for 20 cents. Riemke says ‘it must have been an exceedingly labourious effort on his part, but he did it for many years and it was always a thrill to be accepted. The issue in which the poem appeared (No. 69) also showed work by Kendrick Smithyman, Louis Johnson, Michael Harlow, Gloria Rawlinson, Jack Lasenby and Helen Shaw, among others.’

The final show, just last Saturday, was Vanya Lowry and Frances Edmond. Vanya started out as an illustrator – to date she’s illustrated over 20 books. The week before Kevin Ireland showed a cover she did of one of his books, Orchids, Hummingbirds & Other Poems (Auckland/Oxford University Press, 1974). She dabbled fairly constantly in poetry however; she’s in Big Smoke – but she was a late bloomer in the field of prose writing, publishing her memoirs a couple of years ago with AUP, under the name From the Wisteria Bush. Vanya looked witchy (in a good way) in a squashy hat and laced boots, and sounded like she’d been smoking a few too many Gauloises – perfect for reading us the first chapter of her new novel, Fibs and Lovers. It’s about the aforementioned Grafton and Elam in the sixties. Here is a portion of it: Landscape with Guitar.

Wild night over Flat 9 Brockenhurst Mansions. Absently turning the pages of the book in my lap, I sit staring into the grate where blue-gold flames crackle. Across from me Angie, with eyes closed, smiles at nothing, her perfectly smooth hands cupped around her mug of tea. Through the huge bay window, neon sighs gasp fitful warnings, flashing blood-red through the leaves of the copper beech tree that shelters this decadent warren of students, layabouts, budding entrepreneurs, bakers, candle-makers, singing star Loose, blonde Angie and me.

I am waiting for something, the sound of footsteps along George Street as it turns out. Thump thump thump, someone is coming up the stairs to our door. And crash, without knocking, the shadowy man carrying a guitar-case enters this flickering silence. My Rambler has come, but already he ignores me, although my heart goes thud, blood pulsing for him and I know I shall bleed for him always.

‘Where is she?’ he cries.

‘If you mean Loose…’ Angie gestures forwards the bathroom. The man barges in there squealing with delight to see Loose in her bath and perhaps glimpse the famous long scar on her belly.

There’s uproar as the man leaps around gleefully, while Loose, shrieking with laughter, tries to cover up her nakedness and Spliff rescues his sketches from the sopping floor spluttering ‘Blast you, Ram!’

Beside the fire I look questioningly at Angie.

She tells me this Ram is a busker and folksinger newly arrived from Christchurch which is where he met Loose and Spliff, and before that from San Francisco and before that from London and before that from Amsterdam where his father is a marmalade millionaire.

‘If it’s the last thing you do Violet, steer clear of him,’ Angie warns me, too late.

‘He reminds me of someone, something, long ago, maybe he devoured me in my last life when I was a grasshopper or something?’ Then, like a lord, Ram comes to sit before our fire. And the plucked strings of his guitar play ‘me and my baby Silver City bound’.

*

Christmastime and here in this noon garden it is ram, dear bat-blind Ram, beside me in the grass, moving lazily to open another frosty brown bottle. Angie, Loose, Spliff and uselfess Feebs are lolling here and in the still air, a lazy blackbird. My hands linger near Ram’s, plucking leaves to tear apart as if to solve their green secret. How drunk we are getting, how very sloshed. Sssh goes the wing of the bird, sssh. Help, cries the little black caterpillar crawling up a grassblade, help.

Under the pear-tree, Angie’s fair hair catches the spinning sun, Loose’s eyes shine deep amber. Yet it is to me Ram turns, laughing, to set alight my ciggie and his, almost like a real lover. I’m in love with the caterpillar too and all things sweet and lazy here.

‘Sometimes you make me glad to be alive,’ I tell Ram boldly.

‘Sometimes… sometimes you are beautiful,’ Ram replies, amused, tracing my cheekbone with one of his heavily insured, guitar-caressing fingers.

But the blackbird swoops on the caterpillar and in one gulp, it’s gone.

Vanya read more of this, it was funny and poetic and tragic. Interested publishers please apply...

Then it was the turn of Frances Edmond to read her mother’s poetry. This was a whole different angle on the sixties. Lauris was tied to home and hearth in the decade of free love. Six children kept her chained to the house, and the poems she wrote later told of the bittersweet demands of having a big family in small-town NZ, with no time for her precious writing. It was a flood of beautiful, visual, evocative poetry, about the landscape, about her beloved children, and sometimes about her quiet despair. This is stuff that will strike a chord with most mothers. It did with me.

In the Grain
(p106 Selected Poems 1975-2000)

Watch me: I am a spider
industrious and clever, the eye
of my instinct bright,
I can tell you of porridge and quarrels
I do not ruminate.
I know matai wood smokes in the stove
manuka too; maire is grey and dense
and burns like coal.
I am adroit with iron lids
that cover flame
while considering serious questions
‘What is a ghost?’ ‘Is dead a place?’

Pregnant I was sleepy and fractious
remembered my iron and calcium tablets
did not smoke: when a child is learning
to read I examine symbols
together we frown at a page where
he writes with a fierce
scrupulous pressure – runes on a rock
scratched at a world’s beginning
a web pegged out on a fence
making diamonds of dew.

Time stretches and thickens
I discover boys’ pants are shorter
and tighter this year; by lamplight
I read of the Heffalump…
I am spider, silkworm, magpie
my nest full of glittering accidental
treasures. I neither ask nor judge
I tell, I guess, I take note –
there are storm clouds over the mountain?
bitterness in another house? News from the south?
I have no time to look, to wonder
beyond the enduring confusion.

The world waits at the door
while a child ties her laces for school.
Do not pity me. This
is a dense sufficiency.

I love that ‘dense sufficiency’. Oh yes, we know all about that...

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile series. There may well be another, but for now I will be taking a back seat on that and indeed on LeafSalon. I’ve just said yes to a job! Doing pretty much what I’m doing now: supporting NZ writers and writing, but getting paid for it. I’ll be helping to write the content for the NZ Book Month website, starting in a week or so. But never fear: LeafSalon will be kept up by Chris, and it’s only for a few months. So there you go. More about that later. I think that’s quite enough to be going on with.