“THE STAIN OF BLOOD THAT WRITES AN ISLAND STORY…”

Allen Curnow - ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ (1942)

Poetic and artistic tradition establishes the sense of a dark and empty land; sad and desolate, waiting to be named and claimed.

How do we become a nation and bond ourselves to this landscape?

The answer to this question has, in many instances, been through the mythologisation of blood and the process of bleeding. This mingling of blood and soil is an important part of the ‘naturalisation’ of the Pākehā community.

“THE STAIN OF BLOOD THAT WRITES AN ISLAND STORY…”

Peter G. Mewett writes: “What characterises a nation is that the people constituting it believe that they share a sameness with their co-nationals. So, the idea of cultural homogeneity is a myth that breathes life into nationalism: it is a cohering leitmotiv, a predicate of the ‘imagined community’ that can be subscribed to in different ways by people of diverse social locations and of disparate interests.”

“Fragments of a Composite Identity: Aspects of Australian Nationalism in a Sports Setting,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 10:3 (1999): 357

Ceremonial, ritualistic, and recreational violence are important parts of the New Zealand national identity. The battle at Gallipoli and the subsequent Anzac legend have been employed as a source of national identity and maturity in both New Zealand and Australia. This show of strength and sacrifice is ritually echoed in the national sport of rugby, which allows for these same attributes to be acted out in a more playful sense.

A SAD AND EMPTY LANDSCAPE

Colin McCahon - Plain With Winter Landscape (1949)

Colin McCahon - A Poem of Kaipara Flat (1971)

“The plains are nameless and the cities cry for

meaning/The unproved heart still

seeks a vein of speech”

- Charles Brasch, ‘The Silent Land’ (1945)

A SAD AND EMPTY LANDSCAPE

“Awareness of what great gloom

Stands in a land of settlers

With never a soul at home”Allen Curnow - ‘House and Land’ (1941)

oh yes it canbe dark hereand manuka in bloom maybreed despair

Colin McCahon – Northland Panels (1958)

“…God, it is all dark.

The heart beat but there is no answering harkOf a hearer and

no one to speak…”

Van Gogh poems by John Caselberg, etchings by Colin McCahon (1957)

A SHARED CRUCIBLEPaul Morris claims that the modern nation state, such as New Zealand, is an assent group:

“built not out of blood and family ties at all but out of an invention of blood and soil and the shared crucible of pain and the pressure of the past. These new amalgamations are hidden beneath a language of naturalness. We become a ‘natural’ group linked by ‘blood’ and some mystical geography of soil.”

Paul Morris, “Who Are We? New Zealand Identity and Spirituality,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, eds James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh, and Teresia Teaiwa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005), 243.

THE USE OF BLOOD

“Knowing this place I learn to know myselfI survive. The land becomesMy meat and tallow. I light my own lamps.I hold back the dark with the blood of my lambs.”

Peter Bland – “Beginnings” (1885)

“…puddled blood, the outfall gulps, discharges over the rock-face misting all the way to the green bay water, with a noise of waters, where the round stain dilates. An enrichment…”

Allen Curnow – “An Unclosed Door” (1991)

THE MYSTICAL GEOGRAPHY OF SOIL

Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury (1950)

Comic-strip windows correlate to the six days of Biblical creation – shows an empty landscape filled with potential.

The red stripe in the middle of the painting is a stream of blood.

McCahon fell off his bike whilst cycling across the region.

THE MYSTICAL GEOGRAPHY OF SOIL

Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury (1950)

This blood also functions as a symbol of making the earth fertile and sanctified.

This visceral intimacy with the landscape is a necessary tool in the nationalistic narrative process.

VISIBLE MYSTERIES

Visible Mysteries IV and Visible Mysteries VIII (1968)

The blood of Christ becomes the blood of shared nationhood, and the landscape of New Zealand becomes enchanted and vivified by virtue of this symbolic consumption.

The Eucharist that McCahon offers is the consumption of earth in order to, become part of the land. McCahon’s ‘mysteries’ are a bonding exercise that join the Pākehā to the earth in a deeply spiritual manner.

VISIBLE MYSTERIES

Visible Mysteries IV and Visible Mysteries VIII (1968)

McCahon’s symbols also negate the repugnancy of this human sacrifice. The consumption of blood and soil is presented in a ‘clean’ manner that functions on a more palatable, metaphorical level.

ANZAC SACRIFICEThe Anzac mythology of youthful sacrifice is also a creator of national collective memory and identity. The blood of the slaughtered Anzacs connects New Zealand back to Turkey as the historical site of ritual sacrifice for nationhood.

It also represents the maturity of the national character as a result. Renee Lockwood writes,The victim does not represent himself, but is a substitute for an ‘other’. Indeed, the victims of Gallipoli and Masada are viewed by their respective nations to symbolise the ‘group ideal’, the very personification of the desired ‘national character’. 

Renee Lockwood, “Sacrifice and the Creation of Group of Identity: Case Studies of Gallipoli and Masada,” in On a Panegyrical Note: Studies in Honour of Garry W. Trompf, eds Victoria Barker and Frances Di Lauro (Sydney: Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney, 2007),

38.

ANZAC SACRIFICEMichael Billig argues that the willingness for citizens to sacrifice themselves in war is not easily or quickly created by the nation state. Rather, a system of banal preparations is needed for behaviour to be directed in this manner. For example, he suggests that men who read newspaper accounts of valiant sacrifice on the sporting field—with, of course, ultimate loyalty for the team rather than the self—valorises comparable sacrificial behaviour in the populace.

Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, (London: Sage, 1995).

RUGBY

THE ‘BANAL’ SACRIFICE

The athleticism (as demonstrated by violence) of sport can be observed as a national bonding tool, particularly in terms of masculine identity.

Red-blooded males; health and vitality.

In this sense, it becomes what Michael Billig dubs banal nationalism:“A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the

mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds ‘us’ to the homeland—that special place which is more than just a place, more than a mere geophysical area. In all this, the homeland is made to look homely, beyond question and, should the occasion arise, worth the price of sacrifice. And men, in particular, are given their special, pleasure-saturated reminders of the possibilities of sacrifice.”

Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, (London: Sage, 1995), 124.

THE ‘BANAL’ SACRIFICE

It is men who are birthing the nation. Their blood and their pain produce the identity of New Zealand. Billig notes that men are the ones who are primarily targeted by this sport and war blending together. As such, “Above all, it is men who are expected to answer the state’s ultimate call to arms.”

Billig, Banal Nationalism, 175.

THE ‘BANAL’ SACRIFICE

Marilyn Lake’s study of the Australian male solider birthing the nation is comparable to the New Zealand case:

At war, their sons might make the ‘supreme sacrifice’, but their collective death would bring forth immortal life, the birth of a nation. Though women might breed a population, giving birth to babies, only men, it seemed, could give birth to the political entity, the imperishable community, of the nation.

The birth of a nation is a male birth. Its continual renewal through sporting pursuits is also primarily masculine.

War was read as a means of transcending the ‘feminine’ concerns of the private world in order the serve a masculine duty of self-sacrifice. Devotion to the state trumps devotion to one’s domestic comforts and personal safety.

THE ‘BANAL’ SACRIFICE

“History cancels out the story of childbirth, procreation and nurturance and replaces it with the story of the birth of political orders.”

This mythology is the mythology of the primarily-Pākehā male. It is the man who creates New Zealand through war, sport, literature, and art of this period. Not because women are inherently less brutal or sporting or literary, but because their potential contributions have not been given consideration in the birthing and conquest of the nation and land. This discourse is about male blood and the male voice.

Marilyn Lake, “Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation: Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts,” Gender & History 4:3 (1992): 307, 310, 312.

CONCLUSION AND QUESTIONS

When Alfred Buchanan claimed in 1907 that the altar of Australia had not been “stained with crimson as every rallying centre of a nation should be,” he anticipated the need for split blood in the formation of nationhood. Alfred Buchanan, The Real Australia (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co, 1907), archived online at http://www.archive.org/stream/realaustralia00buch/realaustralia00buch_djvu.txt, accessed 22 October 2014.

In New Zealand, this spilling of blood has helped to populate an ‘empty’ landscape, lead the Pakeha nation to cultural maturity, and helped to enchant notions of sacrifice and nationhood. It has also helped to normalise these sacred blood losses into everyday behaviour and social codes. This banal reflection of the sacred is also a defining feature of the national character.

Slides available atsydney.academia.edu/ZoeAlderton