New Zealand “gothic”

From Kate De Goldi’s 2010 introduction the Text Classics edition of David Ballantyne’s novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968):

New Zealand literature began in 1882 with the introduction of refrigerated shipping. This was the inimitable opening line of the New Zealand Lit course offered at Canterbury University in 1981. It was delivered by Dr Patrick Evans whose undergrad fame preceded him: his jokes were so good people actually wrote them down in lectures. Evans’ thesis, as it unfolded, was mesmerising – and deeply unsettling … something like this:

Refrigerated shipping – the vehicle for the frozen meat trade – entrenched the basis of the nascent New Zealand economy: the farming and slaughter of animals. The consequent despoliation and industrialisation of the landscape, and the transformation of the New Zealand colonist into a “systematic and calculating” butcher, described the progress of the “New Zealand Dream” from an imagined South Pacific eden (a “better Britain”) to a fallen society with, literally, blood on its collective hands. New Zealand became, not the pastoral paradise envisioned by British utopians, but a society in which industrialised violence was merely the sanctioned version of other widespread malignancies.

New Zealand literature, Evans argued, oscillated between work that danced around the “truth” of this national mythology, and work that confronted it in various compelling ways. Using short fiction and novels from the mid nineteenth century to the late 1960s he laid out the evidence for a “slaughterhouse” fiction …

Then, a list. I don’t know a lot of New Zealand authors, but most of those I’m aware of, down to the present day, are on Evans’s/​De Goldi’s list or should be. Even Katherine Mansfield. Ngaio Marsh, for all her murder-writing, would barely qualify – she’s one who “dances around” the slaughterhouse theme, preferring to write about theatre-killings and such – but I presume she’d make the cut for Died in the Wool.

(I don’t mean the philosophers – certainly not A. N. Prior. But Jonathan Bennett isn’t so far off, thematically.)

Think of moviemakers, too. “Systematic and calculating butcher” describes Peter Jackson rather well. And Jane Campion has her moments (e.g., In the Cut; the fascinating Top of the Lake). Think, also, of the documentarian David Farrier (Tickled; Dark Tourist; Mister Organ).

Anyway, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a piece of work.

People are always saying how civilized New Zealanders are, how exemplarily democratic, and maybe so, but New Zealanders do appear to relish churning out stories of brutality. As do the Swedes.