Mythology of Place - Homage to James K Baxter - © 1993-94 - Lloyd Godman - Lawrence Jones

THE MAKING OF 'THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE'

Lawrence Jones
 

This project began as an idea for a brief paper to be given at the James K. Baxter conference in Dunedin in August 1994.  In various walks along the beach and the river road with a friend who had grown up with Baxter, I had noticed how the names she used for places - 'The Giant's Grave', 'Pulpit Rock' -- had chimed in my memory with places named in the Baxter poems.  A picnic at Tunnel Beach established some further connections.  After all, I did live in a house of Bedford Parade across the street from the Baxter family home, and Baxter's Brighton had very much become my adopted home.  Why shouldn't I write about Baxter's use of the place? So I began browsing the Collected Poems for Brighton and other Otago places and realised there was a lot of material there.

     As I worked, I had the thought that it would be good to have some slides and photographs to illustrate these places, and I asked my friend and Brighton neighbour Lloyd Godman if he would be interested in taking the photographs, especially as I remembered the photographs he had done for Frank McKay's life of Baxter.  I envisaged a few Saturday expeditions in and around Brighton, and perhaps to Central Otago.  However, as we got to work on the images, the project became more complex and ambitious.  For one thing, the appropriate places were not always that easy to identify or to reach.  Soon I found myself watching from a less precarious spot on Big Rock as Lloyd gained the 'difficult security' (Baxter's phrase) of the cave overlooking the Bay and took his memorable sequence of photos; or trying out my very uncertain tramping skills inching across the bluff above an East Matukituki River in semi-flood, on the way to the Aspiring Hut where Baxter had written 'Poem in the Matukituki Valley'; or scrambling up a hillside at the head of the Otago Peninsula to get a view across the harbour mouth to Aramoana, as a fog bank gathered outside the harbour but did not yet enter it; or sloshing by a muddy track to Duffy's Farm, led by a long-time resident who used to visit the Duffys, all of us aware that there had been a spectacular murder recently at the shed built on the site of Duffy's old house; or standing in the rain on Scrogg's Hill looking down at the flooded Taieri Plain, just as Baxter must have seen it.  The project was both less simple and more exciting than I had anticipated.

    Something else that I should have anticipated but did not was what happened in the process of taking the pictures.  For soon it became evident to me that these were not going to be mere 'illustrations'.  In searching out Baxter's places and symbols, Lloyd was finding his own symbols in the landscape, complementary to Baxter's.  The images that emerged were not illustrations but rather were works of art inspired by Baxter's works of art, as so much art is in part a response to other art. The fallen pear tree, the bent metal rod in the wild landscape, the broken platform in the foreground with Baxter's feared and respected mountains and glaciers in the background, the cross emerging from the wild river, the shape of the roof of Baxter's upstairs room on Bedford Parade seen as echoing the shape of Scroggs Hill behind it, the discarded crown of thorns of the seaweed on the beach in front of the 'Prometheus' rocks -- these were not symbols from the poems themselves, but they were consonant with them.  As Baxter had done, Lloyd was finding his own symbols in the landscape.  It was a thrill and a pleasure to see the prints emerge from the process, to see these works of art taking shape.

    Thus when it was time for the conference, the slides were there for my talk, but also the meeting room for most of the sessions had screens around the edges bearing the large prints of the Baxter photos that are now in the Hocken Library. We were surrounded by Baxter's Otago, and those images established a tone for the conference.

     The conference was a climax of the process, but for me not the end.  In the month following the conference I explored the unpublished materials in the Baxter papers at the Hocken, looking for a few more poems to fit into the argument, and I found tremendous riches -- poems, talks, essays, reviews, supplying surprising and gratifying confirmation and extension of some of my readings.  The earlier versions and related unpublished poems surrounding 'Tunnel Beach', for example, supported and enriched my  reading of the symbolism of that poem.  And there were symbolic clocks and spires everywhere, as well as a striking definition of Baxter's idea of 'paradise'.  There was fascinating evidence in the juvenilia to show that Baxter was relatively slow in arriving at a specific use of local symbolism, and that it was when he arrived there that the poetry began to come alive.  So the essay expanded into its present form, and an unexpectedly rich learning experience for me came, if not to an end, then to a satisfactory stopping place.