Mire deepens
The forgotten soundtrack to New Zealand’s Great War is revealed in a new history, writes Adam Dudding.
When Chris Bourke started work on a book about New Zealand’s World War I music, he immediately hit a speedbump: there are virtually no contemporary recordings of the 200-odd original songs Kiwis composed to celebrate, mourn or (very rarely) protest the Great War.
A century ago recordings were scarce and expensive, so if a New Zealander wanted their own copy of the latest hit song, that usually meant buying the sheet music, sitting down at the piano and playing it – and they did so in droves. Louis Benzoni’s 1914 hit Good Old New Zealand sold more than 50,000 printed copies (for comparison, a modern-day Kiwi recording is considered ‘‘platinum’’ if it sells 15,000 copies).
So Bourke did much the same, though with a minor technological update: after checking out each musical manuscript from the Turnbull Collections at Wellington’s National Library, he’d take a snap on his cellphone, print it out at his home office in Newtown, then bash out the tune on the Bechstein upright that’s been in his family since 1898.
‘‘I play the piano for my own enjoyment and don’t inflict it on others,’’ says Bourke. ‘‘But I can sight-read pretty well.’’
Such efforts were just a small part of Bourke’s five-year journey towards writing Good-Bye Maoriland: The Songs & Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War ,a compendious, meticulously researched survey of the musical life of World War I New Zealand.
In a handsome, image-packed volume, Bourke charts the rise of patriotic songs both imported and homegrown. He looks at military brass bands and the concert parties who toured for the troops. He unearths the subversive, salacious songs that the men in uniform sang to shrug off the miseries of trench war, and considers the legacy of the era’s Ma¯ori composers and performers.
‘‘In the early stages of the war the songs are all quite jingoistic, supporting the Empire or troops,’’ says Bourke. ‘‘They’re songs that are saying ‘where Britain goes, we go’, or ‘support our boys’. Then later in the war they become more reflective. There are songs about the heroes we’ve left over there, reflecting on the loss and the sacrifice. They’re a lot more poignant.’’
It’s a book about music, but always with an eye to how that music reflected and affected the society in which it was embedded.
Writing a history of this kind gives you the response of the people in the street, and in the homes and in the trenches, rather than the campaign history, or the political history, says Bourke. It’s an alternative to the kind of ‘‘great man’’ history that’s based on newspaper proclamations or archived memos of the prominent citizens of the day.
Good-Bye Maoriland is a kind of prequel to Bourke’s awardwinning Blue Smoke, in which he examined the ‘‘lost dawn’’ of New Zealand popular music from 1918 to 1964, though Bourke says the tone is necessarily different. Blue Smoke started with the return of the troops, so it’s about people having fun, where Good-Bye Maoriland ‘‘is about people going through an ordeal’’.
He is pleased to be still telling these stories.
‘‘It was only a generation ago that there was not much New Zealand history and literature taught in our schools and universities. That’s not the case now, but our popular music history wasn’t even considered at universities until recent years. Otago and Auckland are now teaching it.
‘‘I suppose it was always regarded as ephemeral by the academics, while broadcasters and media are always about now: they’re covering the latest releases rather than looking back.’’
T here are still gaps in the record, but they’re getting filled. The end of Blue Smoke overlaps with the beginning of John Dix’s 1988 Stranded in Paradise; books by Gareth Shute pick up the ball from the mid-80s and of course, says Bourke, there’s also a marvellous website called audioculture.co.nz, founded by Simon Grigg and backed by NZ On Air, that ‘‘covers all these gaps that have shown up, the stories that might only get a paragraph in a book’’.
Bourke is probably biased on this, as last year he took over from Grigg as Audioculture’s content director. He says one of his goals is to redress the domination of popular music studies by rock critics ‘‘when it’s so much more broad than that’’. So the site makes room for the likes of folk music, or Ma¯ori popular music.
Internationally ‘‘they talk about the Rolling Stone-ification of popular music history: your usual US baby boomer ‘hegemony’ at work again. Things like musicals are left out, which are really big, but just not hip to that dominant voice of the rock music historian.’’
Somehow, the conversation has digressed far away from World War I. Bourke is knowledgeable about, and keen to share, so many different things. So anyway, back to the book.
Unlike Blue Smoke, where many participants were still alive and interviewable, Good-Bye Maoriland depended almost entirely on archives of one sort or another. A Creative New Zealand stipend and some research fellowships kept the wolf from the door as Bourke fell down the research rabbithole. The internet enabled feats of precision that would have been nearly impossible just a decade earlier, such as tracking individual soldiers’ movements through the war using digitised personnel records.
‘‘It’s essential to show respect to the soldiers by getting the facts right.’’
The book is sprinkled with minibiographies, and Bourke was especially taken with the story of the renowned Dunedin mathematician Alexander Aitken, who smuggled his violin to Gallipoli. In his memoirs, Aitken said ‘‘we had a muted concert in the largest dug-out. My E-string had gone, but a resourceful Aucklander unravelled the strands of a short length of the six-ply field telephone wire’’.
Bourke: ‘‘I think of a guy like this, a brilliant mind and a sensitive character. He’s running through no-man’s land with bullets flying and the fellow on one side has his head taken off, and the fellow on the other side has his body blown apart.
‘‘It’s gruesome. The dryness of those military histories covers a lot of pain.’’
It’s gruesome. The dryness of those military histories covers a lot of pain. Chris Bourke
I n 2015, Bourke’s efforts to hear our homegrown war music were suddenly made much easier when 20 forgotten Kiwi songs from World War I were recorded by singers and a small orchestra for the ‘‘Farewell Zealandia’’ touring exhibition. Those songs can be heard at bit.ly/2hHjax2.
To be blunt, much of the music composed in response to the Great War wasn’t all that great, but that’s OK, says Bourke. They were songs with a purpose, and come Armistice Day that purpose was largely gone. War was over, and it was time for popular music to return to its proper subjects: sex and dancing.
A small number of international hits such as It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary persisted in the public consciousness, and some other soldiers’ songs were resuscitated for World War II. But with few exceptions, New Zealand’s homegrown war songs faded into obscurity.
It was only when Bourke was researching his chapter about Ma¯ori participation in the war that he realised what the surviving songs had in common.
‘‘It suddenly struck me that the songs that have lasted after the war are all Ma¯ori songs. So you’ve got E Pari Ra, and Hoea Ra Te Waka Nei, both by Paraire Tomoana of Hawkes Bay. And there is a subversive, anti-war song written by Princess Te Puea, E Noho Te Rata, which was in response to conscription of Ma¯ori towards the end of the war when Waikato Ma¯ori refused.
‘‘She wrote that song when the police were sent to marae to pull Ma¯ori men away and take them to Mt Eden, where a lot of them died because of the influenza pandemic.’’
E Noho E Rata is still sung today by kapa haka groups, though the lyrics are often updated replacing ‘‘Rata’’, the Maori king of the day, with the name of the current Ma¯ori king, Tuheitia.
It was then, too, that Bourke found his title, Good-Bye
Ma¯ oriland, even though that particular song was written by a Pakeha.
‘‘What were they saying goodbye to? It seems such an innocent period, pre-war New Zealand. It’s not this romanticised South Sea idyll, it’s a global nation taking part in a terrible war.’’