The Old Place

Looking back at my teaching days I realise I always had a sprinkling of rural kids in my classes. That meant a poem like this one would have some in the group who would understand the described event.

THE OLD PLACE
So the last day's come at last, the close of my fifteen year-
The end of the hope, an' the struggles, an' messes I've put in here.
All of the shearings over, the final mustering done,-
Eleven hundred an' fifty for the incoming man, near on.
Over five thousand I drove 'em, mob by mob, down the coast;
Eleven-fifty in fifteen year ... it isn't much of a boast.

Oh, it's a bad old place! Blown out o' your bed half the nights,
And in summer the grass burnt shiny an' bare as your hand, on the heights:
The creek dried up by November, and in May a thundering roar
That carries down toll o' your stock to salt 'em whole on the shore.
Clear'd I have, and I've clear'd an' clear'd, yet everywhere, slap in your face,
Briar, tauhinu, an' ruin!-God! it's a brute of a place.
... An' the house got burnt which I built, myself, with all that worry and pride;
Where the Missus was always homesick, and where she took fever, and died.

Yes well! I'm leaving the place. Apples look red on that bough.
I set the slips with my own hand. Well - they're the other man's now.
The breezy bluff: an' the clover that smells so over the land,
Drowning the reek o' the rubbish, that plucks the profit out o' your hand:
That bit o' Bush paddock I fall'd myself, an' watched, each year, come clean
(Don't it look fresh in the tawny? A scrap of Old-Country green):
This air, all healthy with sun an' salt, an' bright with purity:
An' the glossy karakas there, twinkling to the big blue twinkling sea:
Ay, the broad blue sea beyond an' the gem-clear cove below,
Where the boat I'll never handle again, sits rocking to and fro:
There's the last look to it all! an' now for the last upon
This room where Hetty was born, an' my Mary died, an' John ...

Well, I'm leaving the poor old place, and it cuts as keen as a knife;
The place that's broken my heart - the place where I've lived my life.

Blanche Baughan

This is one of my well-loved poems. When I boarded in Akaroa to go to the secondary school there I was fascinated to learn that the old lady slowly pedaling around on a creaky bicycle was Blanche Baughan. To my school mates she seemed a figure of fun but I knew better. Poets were flesh and blood, not just something in a book. On my grandfather’s death I’d inherited his copy of her poems, Shingle Short.

He had at the time for a farmer a large library – Dickens, Sapper, Buchan, Haggard, Left Club books and one poetry book, Blanche Baughan’s Shingle Short. I devoured them all, Oliver Twist side by side with Bulldog Drummond. I'd looked at the Baughan. With few reference points I found the poems hard to understand for at that stage my reading was almost entirely narrative. One long poem about burnt logs scattered all over the new land intrigued me. The rotting remnants of such logs remained on Banks Peninsula - my first connection between New Zealand and the world of books.

We studied The Old Place at the District High School. It struck a chord. I’d seen retiring farmers with tears in their eyes, heart-broken, as they said goodbye to the land they’ve worked for decades. Later, I taught the poem myself. Several times I set an essay topic, ‘what happened to John’. While there were always fantasies – captured by pirates or flying saucers - a considerable number wrote about a father’s grief, a testament to Baughan’s capacity to evoke a feeling.

Indeed, I harbour a secret heresy, that our poetry began not just with Bethell but began to shift from Old Country imitative with Baughan, especially her two longer poems Maui’s Fish and A Bush Selection. But then she wrote about Banks Peninsula my homeland and I can hardly be called impartial. An anthology I was pleased to do I titled The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand 1952-1914. The last poem in it is The Old Place. When the new place has become the old place, settlement has taken effect.

I know roughly the life history of most New Zealand poets but I little about Baughan. Researching the internet I found an story of gothic dimensions. She was aged 10 when her mother murdered her father, insane homicide. Baughan resolved never to marry, which she stuck to, though at a finishing school in Switzerland she fell in love with and ran away with a bear trainer from a travelling circus. Family members quickly intervened to bring her home and to her senses. To run away with a bear-tamer - heroic as well as foolish.

Baughan graduated from university with first class honours in classics. While nursing her sick mother she worked in the London slums and was active in the suffragist movement. In 1900 on her mother’s death she migrated to New Zealand, living on Banks Peninsula. In the brief period before the First World War she wrote her poems and travel essays.

She had inherited from her father a modest private income, but heaven knows why with her abilities she felt impelled to live a virtual recluse. Her poems suggest she saw hope of a better life in the energetic new world. But she stopped writing saying that her “poetic muse” had departed. She devoted the rest of her life to good works, penal reform and an exploration of Indian spirituality.