Heading Home

Actor Peter Bland came back to New Zealand to play the lead role in Came a Hot Friday. But there were other reasons.

by Chris Bourke (NZ Listener, 1985)

The same year Peter Bland returned to New Zealand, the Ronald Hugh Morrieson industry hit its stride. The Scarecrow was on television, all four of Morrieson’s books were back in print, and this week a film of his novel Came a Hot Friday was released around the country, with actor/poet Bland in his first major film role. The film brings together Bland and director Ian Mune 20 years after they first worked together at Wellington’s Downstage.

Bland plays Wes Pennington, a likeable conman who cruises into a small New Zealand town with his accomplice. They plan to make easy money out of the locals, but there are others in the town with grander and nastier schemes under way.

Set in 1949, Came a Hot Friday is a rollicking yarn which – judging by preview screenings – takes its audience back to a simpler age. Adults return to Saturday matinees at their local Deluxe, when they walked home acting out the heroics of Errol Flynn or the antics of the Marx Brothers. They boo the baddies and cheer when the hero arrives – just like their children, who are too busy revelling in its slapstick humour to notice the film lacks space-age special effects, visitors from other galaxies, or hidden messages from the Moral Majority.

The New Zealand portrayed in Came a Hot Friday is similar to the country to which Bland emigrated in the early 1950s. In a way, it was a movie which brought him here the first time as well. Bland was looking in a newspaper for a film to go to when he noticed an advertisement on the film page. “It said, ‘Come to New Zealand’,” recalls Bland. “I thought it was a film and I’d seen all the others.”

Although World War II had ended nearly a decade before, Britain was still feeling the effects. Bland was 18 and both his parents were dead, so he paid his £10 and sailed for New Zealand. “I suppose that was the last period of immigration on that scale,” he says. A lot of people were escaping the post-war hardship in Britain. I mean, they still had ration books in ’54 and they were coming out here to enjoy their Pacific dream.”

As part of the deal – and to repay the cheap fare – the immigrants agreed to work for the Government for two years. So when he arrived in Wellington, Bland was given a job with the Social Security Department – sitting alone in a huge room full of filing cabinets. “But I told the immigration official back in Britain I was interested in ‘working with people’,” says Bland. His departmental supervisor waved an arm at the files. “You’ve got everybody in New Zealand in this room with you.” At least Bland was better off than his ship-board friend who wanted to work in “communications”. “He was given a job in Invercargill digging holes for telephone poles!”

Having told the tale of his first meeting with New Zealand bureaucracy, Bland laughs as loud as his audience. He is a born raconteur, with a droll Yorkshire accent and a mobile face that can play any part.

But it was only after his arrival in New Zealand that Bland began to act and write. “My creative roots are here,” he says. “I placed on a New Zealand hat firmly and swiftly.” Newly married, and exiled to the state housing area of the Hutt Valley, Bland began to write about the “barren deserts of wooden tents”.

By the late ’50s, Bland and his wife Beryl had three children; he had a diploma in social sciences from Victoria University – going to university would have been impossible in Britain – and had started to receive awards for his poetry. Bland quotes from “the Nose” – a study of a bigot on a bus, controversial for its use of a four-letter word – and “Four Poems from Plunket Street”, which, with its social comment and suburban imagery, is reminiscent of James K Baxter’s “Calvary Street”. The comparison is acknowledged. “We were all writing similar things at the time – ‘Barney Flanagan’ and Louis Johnson.”

With Baxter and Johnson, Bland edited the literary magazine Numbers in the early ’60s. A war of words began between the Auckland and Wellington literary circles. “We had different approaches to the way we felt New Zealand writing should develop,” says Bland. Auckland went in for “flag-waving, writing which proclaimed its New Zealand character with large gestures. While Wellington thought the writing should be localised and the greater view of New Zealand would come naturally.”

For 18 months Bland was a journalist on the Listener – “Everyone new Bland started his week’s stories on Thursday, and the rest of the week there’d be a sonnet in progress on the typewriter,” he grins. Then in 1964 he left for the world of the theatre.

With Tim Eliot, Martyn Sanderson and Harry Seresin, Bland co-founded Downstage. Once again, there were opportunities in New Zealand his background would have prevented in Britain (he had left before the “kitchen sink” school of drama emerged). Bland began writing for the theatre – for him it was a stimulating period, when the old rules were abandoned: “Suddenly there were open stages, open poetry ... I saw the production of Jim Baxter’s Wide Open Cage at Unity and I found it very exciting. It was the first time I had seen New Zealanders talking their own language on stage.”

Bland would occasionally go on stage to fill out the cast, “found I had an appetite for it and gradually ended up playing a lot of leading roles”. Among them was Claudius in Hamlet. In this production, the Downstage rats stole the show. Poison had been laid, and the rats kept coming out on stage to die. “They’d wander out on centre stage and turn around and around. One had a death scene of five minutes! The audience would immediately take their eyes off the actors, push their dinner plates to one side, and watch the rats.”

Trying to support a family on the income of a professional actor was proving impossible – Bland tells of raiding apple trees for dinner – so he applied to the Arts Council for a grant to spend a year full-time at Downstage, “which in those years was a fairly revolutionary thing”. Once again, Bland encountered the absurd thinking of the bureaucrat. “We couldn’t get a grant to stay alive here, but they said, “Now if you apply to go overseas, you might succeed.’”

In 1968 Bland returned to England with his wife and children. Trying to make a living as an actor mean his writing went on “hold” but, unusually for British actors, he was rarely out of work. He was not a star, but a “jobbing actor”. “I was one of the people producers would think of first after they had cast the lead roles.” Over the next 15 yeras Bland played in many West End plays and television shows, in dramatic and comic parts.

Bland was offered the part in Came a Hot Friday by Mune; 20 years ago, Mune was offered his first theatre job by Bland, when he was at Downstage. Bland’s West End comedy experience was very useful in the film – many of his scenes are improvised, and were shot in only one take.

Bland is pleased the film emphasises the sense of life in the novelist. “It picks out the life-loving qualities rather than the black side of Morrieson.” Why was Morrieson ignored when his books were first published in the early 1960s? “He threw people – they didn’t know how to react. He was a colloquial writer like Dickens, and totally uninhibited about literary expectations. The literary world didn’t know how to handle Morrieson, though he had some champions, like Monte Holcroft, Louis Johnson and Maurice Shadbolt.” Meanwhile, others were still waiting for the “great New Zealand novel”, “which was expected to be an intellectual thing, using the mandarin language of a Janet Frame or Allen Curnow.”

Bland agrees the New Zealand of the 1980s seems more aware of itself. “Poeple don’t apologise for it so much; they are much more conscious of the benefits of the place. And there’s been that whole switch away from dependence on Mother England to a gradual awareness of New Zealand’s place in the Pacific.” He says it is noticeable in recent literature, especially in plays. “People like Greg McGee and Dean Parker are writing plays now which are really using the place. They’re not pretending to be new Zealand plays – they are not self-consciously New Zealand plays like early Bruce Mason was or even Jim Baxter was – they actually are, and not because somebody is waving a big banner saying ‘New Zealand play’. This is absolutely great, but my one qualification is one does see the ghost of a new isolationism appearing.”

Bland is now back in this country to live, and says he should have returned years ago. “I hung on too long.” In 1982 he was filming commercials in Australia and came here for a month’s holiday. “It was almost a visionary thing for me,” he says. “Emotionally it was tremendous coming back, because all the old feelings returned. The place itself – the elemental qualities, the smell of fennel, the lights and the hills – all those things which I’d given up by going to England. Suddenly they started to mean a hell of a lot to me and then when I came back to do the movie, that reinforced the feeling, so I just had to make the move.”

Perhaps the sense of homelessness spotted by reviewers of his poetry will now be resolved. Bland and his wife have settled in an elegant Herne Bay villa 200m from Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. Their three children, now grown up, also decided to return.

“How am I going to make a living? That’s a thought ... I earn my living as an actor and I’ll have to just keep on working as an actor. It buys me time for my writing.” Bland is editing a selection of his poems for publication, having just completed shooting a television series in Auckland, called Heart of the High Country.

“It’s lovely in the mornings here – I open up the french doors and the sun comes straight in. I’ve got a lemon tree and the tallest ponga in captivity.”

Outside, there is a howling gale and torrential rain. The photographer [William West] wants a portrait on the Herne Bay jetty. A coincidence makes it worth it. “Did you know the Listener has just accepted a poem of mine about this very bay?” [“Home Bay ...”]

The rain is now horizontal. Standing in the window in his overcoat, Bland hesitates. “You’ve probably got enough photos haven’t you? Yerr.” But, we protest, the choppy seas, the mist, the poem, the drama ...”

Bland decisively puts down his mug of tea. “Okay,” he says, “Let’s do it.”

First published as “Mr Mobile” in the NZ Listener, 24 August 1985. Peter Bland’s 2004 memoir is Sorry, I’m a Stranger Here Myself; Came a Hot Friday was recently released on DVD.

Small Town Talk

Home towns are often ungenerous places. I was reminded of this at a Wellington preview of Predicament, Jason Stutter’s debut feature made from Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s novel, published posthumously. Slow moving at first, it became engrossing and finished satisfyingly entertaining. It was beautifully shot (Simon Raby), with witty, careful art direction (John Harding; set dresser Amber Richards) and haunting, subtle music (Plan 9). The performances also benefitted from being underplayed (above, from left: Hayden Frost as the naive Cedric, bullied by Heath Franklin as Mervyn, and Jemaine Clement as the sinister, deeply bent Spook).

The audience – film industry types at different levels of involvement, degrees of separation, and envy – were cautious in their response. No, this wasn’t the premiere of The Rite of Spring: riotous enthusiasm or even anger would have been inappropriate. But a reluctance to be caught saying anything positive dominated the apres-fin atmosphere. Clement, they could bravely agree, was excellent. But the gothic element should have been cranked up, some said; the director was too faithful to Morrieson’s novel, mused others. And Predicament is Morrieson’s weakest, bluffed a few in response. While not a rollicking, flawless success like the lost-in-legal-space Came a Hot Friday, the film festival’s scheduler stuck his neck out giving Predicament such a prominent spot. It isn’t too hard to predict a long domestic tail for the film, and a fast-track future for its director.

One who doesn’t have to bluff about his knowledge of Predicament is Ian Richards, New Zealand literature’s expatriate essayist. Richards, the author of the moving biography of Maurice Duggan, To Bed at Noon, has been quietly working away on his scholarly passions in Japan: deeply researched papers on New Zealand lit, and his short stories. The results can be read on his aptly named website No Frills New Zealand Literature. Like Walker Percy in his essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land, Richards has the knack of an irresistible title: ‘On Being a Provincial’, ‘Cycling for Safety: a Memoir’, and in fiction, ‘You Don’t Need to Be Married to Have Fun’, and – referencing Fairburn – ‘The Squalid Tea of Mercer’.

With no deadline, no set word lengths, and seeking little attention, Richards can take the time to get it right. He recently completed an epic essay on the novels of Ronald Hugh Morrieson and Ian Cross. The title isn’t up to his usual standard – ‘Two New Zealand Books: The God Boy and The Scarecrow’ – but perhaps he was tired. The essay stretches to 40,000 words, and is packed with riches. A risk-free prediction is that it will become a one stop shop for students, who are likely to be more generous than the gatekeepers of the past. (Even Morrieson’s academic champion, C K Stead, barbs his praise – as he does in Sam Hunt documentary, Purple Balloon and Other Stories. Richards quotes Stead: [Morrieson] “enjoys telling a story and tells one at least as grippingly as any novelist we have had. I suspect, even, that he is only fitfully conscious of doing more, and that all the rest happens largely by instinct”. He then follows up to describe the rich cultural background of Morrieson, suggesting his talents were no accident.)

Be it Morrieson or Manhire, Richards is always readable, sharing his keen intelligence and insights without pretension. But if life seems too short to wallow in full-bodied essays occasionally longer then the original texts, light relief is offered at No Frills NZ Lit by Richards’s own short stories. On the website he features updated versions of several stories from his 1991 collection, Everyday Life in Paradise. Like Morrieson’s novels, they suffer from two unfashionable traits: humour and accessibility. The stories sparkle like well-cut, polished gems.

Predicaments

1. Double feature

The Ronald Hugh Morrieson celebration that his champions – Sargeson, Stead, Shadbolt – had hoped for took place in the 1980s. After Goodbye Pork Pie, the fledgling New Zealand film industry knew what it needed in its scripts: humour, locally based. The 1982 film of The Scarecrow was disappointing, despite the cadaverous presence of John Carradine and the cute-as-a-button Tracy Mann. Three years later, Came a Hot Friday perfectly encapsulated Morrieson’s world, mainly thanks to bravura performances by Billy T James and expatriate-immigrant Peter Bland. Sadly, because of the production company Mirage going bust, Came a Hot Friday as a DVD reissue is lost somewhere in legal limbo. But its trailer can be viewed on the NZ Film Archive site, as well as The Scarecrow’s trailer.

2. Time, Gentlemen

In his 1971 Landfall essay, CK Stead did make a link between Morrieson and David Ballantyne, and he expanded on this in the introduction to his 2002 essay collection Kin of Place. The complete introduction is on-line, but this is the relevant passage, in which Stead looks back with no false modesty:

Both were writers whose work deserved serious attention and had not had it. In the case of Morrieson it needed only the double assault Frank Sargeson and I made in Landfall 98 (June 1971) to turn everything around in his favour. Morrieson the man was a ‘character’; his life story was picturesque; he was wild in his youth yet also frightened, home-bound, and soon a sad drunk; and his books were marvellously entertaining with flashes of genius. No threat to anyone, hugely talented but also manifestly flawed, he was, one might say unkindly, made for New Zealand, and has become (the more so because there is added piquancy in the recognition that it happened too late for the man himself to enjoy it) another of our literary icons.

Ballantyne also became a disappointed drunk, but one who kept up appearances, stayed employed as a journalist, and kept writing. No one (least of all Ballantyne himself) thought of his Maori grandmother as a ‘feature’ to be exploited. There was nothing to attract public attention except the novels themselves, whose only appeal was their peculiar honest homespun excellence - like the ragamuffin poor kid who wins the sprints almost unnoticed because he doesn’t have the gear and never behaves like a champion. Patrick Evans made a brave case for Ballantyne in Islands 31-32, even arguing (beyond anything I would have claimed for him) that his contribution to New Zealand literature was ‘at least the equal of Frame’s’; and Peter Simpson, who also wrote enthusiastically about Morrieson, has argued for more attention to Ballantyne’s work. But these appeals, it seems, have been ineffective, and the novels, unlike Morrieson’s, at the present date (2001) are long since out of print. It is to be hoped that a biography currently being written by Bryan Reid may bring at least Sydney Bridge Upside Down out of retirement.

3. Wild Westies

Another passage in Stead's 1971 essay leapt out, about the character Billy T James later played in the film Came a Hot Friday:

“The Te Whakinga Kid is a grotesque. He wears a cowboy suit, carries a cap gun, lives by the fantasy that he is a Mexican bandit, and speaks accordingly … (Can one dismiss the Kid simply as an unreal comic device? After completing this note I read of a young Maori convicted of armed robbery who, it was explained to the Court, lived by the fantasy that he was New Zealand’s Ned Kelly.)”

This reminded me of a couple of things. Years ago in the Rotorua paper I read a court report of a young Maori up before a magistrate in Ohakune. His first name was Elvis, and he was getting busted for pot. Where, the judge asked, did he get the marijuana? Elvis replied: “I was walking along the street and came across these ski turkeys. They said, Do you want some pot? So these ski turkeys gave it to me.”

I hadn't thought of the stoned, Ohakune Elvis for a while, but the Te Whakinga Kid has crossed my mind a lot recently, as I've explored early country music here. He is the archetype of the country-and-western obsessed provincial youths who, inspired by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies, went down to their small town haberdashers, got Mum to sew on some fringes, grabbed a guitar and started yodelling. Not just Johnny Cooper, our first prominent rock’n’roller, whose original incarnation was as “the Maori Cowboy”. But a whole posse of them, all Pakeha. And, the evidence suggests, the dressing up was more important than the singing: there's something beyond fantasy going on here. Cooper of course is one exception; there are others, but more who made better photographs.

4. Desolation Throat

A couple of albums back I wrote that Dylan – his trademark whine reduced to a gargle – was singing like Bing Crosby with throat cancer. Attending a concert this week in London, Fraser Lewry says it now sounds like he’s trying to cough up his own blood. Listening to the new album Together Through Life, that’s about right. The album is an entertaining throwaway, and all the better for it: like an EP that Al Swearengen and some cohorts out of Deadwood have knocked off in the back room of a brothel. The funniest line so far is in the song with the tune borrowed from Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters: “I just want to say that Hell’s my wife’s home town.”

A friend has mentioned that he finds Dylan’s interviews gnomic. That’s true: the interviews are a rarefied level of Dylanology, inhabited by ageing academics and people on day-release. There’s even a whole webpage devoted to the subject: “The 10 most incomprehensible Bob Dylan interviews.”

And he has long since turned into the Duluth Kid.

Yesterday’s Papers

1. Sliver of hope

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compares this gloomy era in journalism to the film Sunset Boulevard, rewriting the famous quote of aging actress Norma Desmond: “Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.” She asks Phil Bronstein, editor of the troubled San Francisco Chronicle, to take her on a “justify your existence” tour. Bronstein drives her past the journalists’ bar, now empty, the police headquarters where they uncovered corruption, the SF General Hospital, once teeming with Aids patients. In magazines, when the circulation department receives its returns marked “Subscriber deceased: please cancel,” it’s a stark reminder that one’s readership is aging. But this is now a good thing, reasons Bronstein:

His tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer,” he said. “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

The reference to crusading journalist I.F. Stone (pictured above) was heartening - the Seymour Hersh of his day, for years he ran his own I.F. Stone's Weekly - and intriguing. I don't think he was a relative of Bronstein's short-term wife, Sharon Stone.

2. Cold beer, hot type

There are few books written about New Zealand novelists, but even fewer about its journalists. After the Fireworks is both, a biography of novelist and Auckland Star leader writer David Ballantyne, who died in 1986. It’s an evocative portrait of the loneliness of a writer in a hostile culture, diverted by the hard-drinking, hard-bitten but strongly bonded world of newspapermen in the 1940s and 1950s. Ballantyne’s first novel The Cunninghams was written when he was just 23, in 1947, and published in the US; it would be another 15 years before he published another.

Long sessions at the Occidental in Vulcan Lane were part of the reason, but he managed to get off the bottle in 1973 and produce a late flurry of work. After the Fireworks captures the smoky newsrooms, the pride and wisdom of the long-serving reporters and sub-editors, the daily post-deadline binges, the hidden subcultures such as the rundown flat at 301 Willis Street, Wellington, where journalists, poets, novelists (and even Douglas Lilburn) would come and go, knowing they could get a beer after six o’clock closing. Under the circumstances, the Aucklanders’ productivity is extraordinary:

“… visits to Willis Street were sporadic and impulsive excursions, usually involving drinking in Auckland on a Friday after work, catching the overnight train to Wellington, drinking at various Wellington watering-holes … partying on at 301, then catching the Sunday night train back to Auckland in time for work at the Star on Monday morning.”

The biography was written by Ballantyne’s friend Bryan Reid; the pair started at the Star on the same day in 1943. The book slipped under my radar when it came out in 2004 but – like Ballantyne’s best, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, from 1968 – is recommended.

3. Quality of Mercer

The Dominion Post runs the country’s best obituaries, but didn't quite get the tone right with a recent tribute to the former Dominion editor, Jack Kelleher. Portraying him as a cardigan-wearing conservative – and concentrating on the brief tabloid folly of Rupert Murdoch – doesn’t tell the whole story. A quick glance at Kelleher's journalism suggests he moved in a broad circle. His ghost-writing of forensic pathologist PP Lynch’s memoir No Remedy For Death is mentioned; erudite, stubborn, patrician, Lynch did not suffer fools. Kelleher could work the public bar as well: he was close enough to the “hermit of Hawera,” novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson, to be a key source for Julia Millen’s biography. His history of Upper Hutt reveals a rapport with Wellington’s hippest post-war bandleader, Fred Gore. And his sensitive obituary of Ruru Karaitiana in 1970 – the only one the ‘Blue Smoke’ songwriter received – indicates a newspaperman who never stopped working his beat (in this case, Wellington’s inner-city music precinct of the late 1940s: Mercer, Willis, Manners and Bond streets). Maybe not Clark Kent, but a very effective mild-mannered reporter.

4. A comic sign of health

The same week of Kelleher's death, I found Ballantyne's biography in a small town sale bin. Both reminded me of Julia Millen's biography of Morrieson, from 1996, which also hasn't reached the audience it deserves. The pair had quite a bit in common: their era, their profession, their obscurity, and their alcoholism. Unlike Ballantyne, Morrieson didn't leave a swag of diaries, letters and manuscripts, which made Millen's task more difficult. But by weaving in anecdotes from his fiction, and putting in plenty of leg work, she captured his drive and his demons, in that closed Taranaki world.

“Herbert had told me on the quiet that he reckoned Uncle Athol had got his teeth from Mr Dabney, the undertaker.” (The Scarecrow)

“What is this thing called gothic?” asked Morrieson, after a rare literary review during his lifetime. Just months before Morrieson died - yes, “another one of those buggers” who only became famous afterwards - Robin Dudding published two “appreciations” in Landfall 98 (June, 1971). Morrieson's champions were Frank Sargeson and CK Stead, and the issue had a cover design by Pat Hanly. Sargeson wrote:

We hear sometimes of somebody who intends a march on Parliament in order to emphasise some fact of human nature or human society. It would be a comic sign of health in the community (not to mention an immense compliment to Mr Morrieson, and his skill in revealing to us much about the inner nature of human life in our country), if Parliament were to march upon him and his home town.