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Te Aroha town centre (Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0)
Te Aroha town centre (Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0)

SocietyJuly 13, 2024

The place where I grew up

Te Aroha town centre (Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0)
Te Aroha town centre (Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0)

Towns change, but in our minds they stay as we left them. Venetia Sherson revisits her hometown, Te Aroha, nearly 60 years on.

I am walking down Rewi St, past the police station and the library when a memory comes flooding back. It is 1965, I am 17, dressed in the Te Aroha College uniform (grey tunic, maroon blazer) and I am about to tell my mother I may be pregnant.  It’s hard to know how she will take the news.

My mother is a speech and drama teacher. Her studio is a small bleak room behind the Masonic Lodge, darkly shaded by macrocarpa. While she asks her young charges to repeat, “Whose clean knees are these?” and “How now, brown cow”, the grey-suited Masons slip quietly in and out the front door.

In my memory, the day is warm with a smell of freshly mown grass from nearby Herries Park, the scene of some of my early sporting triumphs (third in the Girls Seven and Under 50 yard sprint, according to a clipping from the now defunct Te Aroha News). But at 17, I have given up athletics. I am in my last year at school, a prefect and captain of the debating team, set on a career in journalism. I have a steady boyfriend. My mother likes him or, rather, liked him. I’m not sure how she will take this news.

As it turns out the pregnancy is a false alarm. The doctor puts my symptoms down to exam stress and dieting and prescribes some small green pills. But, even before my period arrives a few days later, my mother is unfazed. She’s a former actress on the London stage who has lived through a war, the death of her beloved only brother and widowhood at 40, and it takes a lot to shake her.

“Home is so sad. It stays as it was left shaped in the comfort of the last to go.”Philip Larkin

It’s a strange thing returning to a home town. So much has changed but everything brims with association. I was six when we fetched up in Te Aroha, part of the diaspora who emigrated from the UK in the early 1950s. Our arrival in the town (then population 2760) reportedly caused a frisson of anticipation. My father was a retired captain in the merchant navy; my mother had acted with Laurence (“Larry”) Olivier and drove a hulking four-door Buick, plus we had an English nanny. To add to the intrigue, my sisters and I all had names beginning with ‘V’.

We chose a modest three-bedroom house. It had a tennis court and grazing for the ponies that Mum hoped we would acquire. More importantly for my father, it was a short walk to the Te Aroha Club, where he spent most nights drinking before he died in 1956.

The old Te Aroha post office (Photo: CC BY SA 3.0)

Today the house is a diminished version of its former self – or at least how I remember it.  The tennis court has been used for infill housing. The lawns, which Mum or Nan mowed every week (a two-hour task) are peppered with paspalum. The fig tree where I carved a boyfriend’s name has gone; the creek that lapped the lawns has dwindled to a trickle. This was the house where I found my first tribe: “Darkie” Sampson (a Māori boy), “Snowy” Wilson (with white-blonde hair) and Raewyn Beguely, whose father trained racehorses. We gathered every afternoon to dam the creek or build a hut until I was summonsed in for tea by Nan. Today, I walk slowly past the house trying not to look as though I’m casing the joint. I haven’t lived here for nearly 60 years. But I still feel I could rock up like it was home.

Walking down the main street is like meeting an old friend one hasn’t seen for decades. There is something dear and familiar about them, but they’ve changed so much it’s hard to pinpoint who they are. The shapes of the shops are familiar but the designations have changed. Some have had a facelift, others look a little worse for wear.

Hetheringtons, where I bought Butterick patterns and fabric by the yard, is now a beautician; the elegant Post and Telegraph office – a Category 2 listed building – houses Mountain Lions Club book sales and will soon feature as a police station in the second series of the TV drama The Gone. Other premises have disappeared. Back in the day there were two cinemas, both owned by Kerridge Odeon. We used to loiter outside in the hope our current crush would swing by. Both have gone. So has Marleen Salon, where one could take a garment home on appro, no ID required.

I learned to drive a car on Te Aroha’s streets, bunny-hopping in mum’s manual station wagon up a towering hill (except it doesn’t seem so now). At Skidmore’s Dairy (owned by the mayor) I bought icecream for three pence on my way home from college (a 3.8km bike ride). St Joseph’s Church was – and still is – the grandest building in town. When it was built in 1957, we kids marvelled at the way it glinted in the sun, the result of pink marble chips embedded in the concrete. We also chanted vulgar rhymes as we cycled past. How clever that seemed then. While I never stepped inside the Catholic church (we were Church of England), the Catholic hall was the hottest place in town. On Saturday nights the Satellites, Larry’s Rebels and the Mighty Mods came to town. I was there when the Satellites with Ivor Fisher played their 1300th performance.

Te Aroha railway station (Photo: CC BY SA 2.0)

Small towns can be lovely places. Te Aroha has charm in spades. The pace of life seems slower, which draws city folk, along with cheaper housing (median price $604,500). But the town I grew up in also had dark corners. There was racism and sexism. Gay men found a safe haven at the local drama club. After my father died, Mum invited them home for parties when we all dressed up in costumes from the theatre.

In a small town people watch your every movement. They see you out walking or talking to a boy. You can’t step out of line without someone ratting on you. I once held a cigarette for my boyfriend while he sank a putt on the golf course. The headmaster (also a golfer) phoned my mother to report. When a traffic cop stopped me for speeding on the outskirts of town (no ticket), Mum knew before I got home. Gossip was rife, especially if a girl got pregnant out of wedlock. Girls who had sex before marriage were “tarts”. So were girls with tatts and pierced ears.

American author Elizabeth Strout, who spent her early life in a small town in Maine, says hometowns are where we learn to look at the world from our own two eyes; where we develop a sense of self. They are filled with formative experiences. Te Aroha was where I found my first best friend and where I had my first sexual experience, which I remember was clumsy and fumbling. It was where an English teacher told me I should write, and a physics teacher made me feel unwelcome in a class of boys.

The maunga – Mt Te Aroha – dominates the town. My father said it reminded him of the peaks in the Lake District in England where he grew up. My mother judged it less brooding than Mt Taranaki (Egmont then), where we rented a beach house for a month. We kids saw it as our backyard playground. Every Boxing Day we would climb to the summit (some 953m) to work off the excesses of a traditional English Christmas feast. The week before Christmas we would creep up the lower slopes under cover of darkness and steal a young pine for our tree. These days there are fewer pines and the goats and pigs that caused pockmarks of erosion have largely disappeared. The mountain looks lush apart from the ugly television transmitting tower built on the summit in 1963.

Te Aroha is the land of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. The maunga represents the symbolic tauihu (prow) of the Hauraki canoe, while Moehau Mountain, at the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula, represents the stern. The mountain’s earliest known name is Puke Kakariki Kaitahi, the place where the kaka parrots flocked to feed. My mother believed a mountain gondola would enhance its appeal and encourage more tourists to visit the town, an idea thankfully rejected. What did encourage tourists was the mineral water that rises from the base of the mountain, erupting in a geyser of hot soda water named Mokena. When I was young, the geyser seemed spectacular, shooting skywards every 20 minutes. Today, it seems unwilling to perform.

When I left this town in 1965 to take up a job in the city, I didn’t look back. In truth, I couldn’t wait to get shot of the place and begin my adult life. I’ve been gone far longer than I lived here. Yet, in my 70s, I find it comforting to walk the streets I knew. Outside the Duck and Cover Bar and Grill (formerly a bank) I pass a woman of my age. She looks hard at me and says, “Were you one of the Edmondson girls?” And, just like that, I’m 17 again.

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Picasso (left), Barthes (middle) and Woody Allen (right).
Picasso (left), Barthes (middle) and Woody Allen (right).

SocietyJuly 12, 2024

Can you ever really separate the art from the artist? An argument with myself

Picasso (left), Barthes (middle) and Woody Allen (right).
Picasso (left), Barthes (middle) and Woody Allen (right).

Books editor Claire Mabey attempts to untangle the age-old problem of good art made by bad people.

Not a year goes by that news of the heinous deeds of a beloved artist doesn’t come to very public light. So far this year writers Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro (cw: please take care with those stories which involve abuse and assault) have made the news, and for many fans it will mark the severance of a relationship with their art. But should it? 

You’ve been squirming on this conundrum for ages. Since you found out that most of the dudes involved in the art history and literary canon land that you studied are somewhere on the spectrum of prickish behaviour. In light of this latest, horrible, news about revered short story writer, Alice Munro, where have you landed? Can you divorce the art from the artist?

Obviously, you can, sometimes. Roland Barthes figured this out for us way back in 1967 when he wrote ‘The death of the author’ which says that the text has got nothing to do with the author but with the reader. His argument is that you can take that Picasso cubism and claim it because it’s your own imagination that makes meaning of it, not old mate misogynist. 

Sorry but that is clearly badly aged bollocks. The Munro allegations are incredibly serious and frankly monstrous. Surely you’re not going to rush out and read her stories now: that would be indulging the work of someone who did an unconscionable thing? And there are so many books to read in this world, why would you choose to support someone like that? 

The thing with Munro is that I’ve hardly read any of her work and so in this case I can happily say I won’t be bothering to catch myself up. I don’t feel the need to separate the art from the artist because I’ve come from the artist first, if you know what I mean? 

Not really, no. Please enlighten? 

Because I don’t have a strong connection with Munro’s work I don’t feel any need to defend or protect her art from her. If I went to Munro now, knowing what I know, I’d find it very hard to appreciate those stories on their own terms because I’d be looking at them through the lens of “how could she have done what she did?” And “I feel guilty for perpetuating this idea of the art idol when we know she’s actually an art monster”. So it’s different to say, Anne of Green Gables books which I read and loved without giving a fig who the writer was. I have a relationship with that art first and foremost. 

And what if you found out that LM Montgomery who wrote Anne of Green Gables was a cretin? 

Honestly? In that case I’d have to apply Barthes because those books have already fused themselves into my brain. They’re mine, not hers. So I think I could successfully make an internal case for continuing to love and own them, despite the subsequent knowledge of shitty personnel in the making of them. I’d protect my relationship with that art born from the period in which I didn’t know about the author: she was already dead to me. 

Right, so you’re saying that it’s a matter of timing and order? If you know the art before you know about the artist, then it’s OK? 

Kind of, yes. Unless … it’s really bad. 

How bad? 

Two words. Michael Jackson. Bill Cosby. Harvey Weinstein. Roman Polanski. Woody Allen… 

Mia Farrow, Woody Allen and two of Farrow’s children. (Photo: Supplied)

That’s a lot more than two words but I see what you were doing there. I know you’d still find it hard not to dance if Thriller came on, right? And you really liked that Woody Allen movie with Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall and Penelope Cruz in it? 

OK look, with MJ I would have to try and control my feet, but I would also find it excruciating and sad and I’d turn it off or moonwalk out of the venue. I did once love that artist but I was steeped in childhood innocence about who he was. As an informed adult I’d now never seek out his music. I can enjoy my innocent memories, but I wouldn’t want to expand on them.  

With the Woody Allen movie, I saw that when I was only vaguely aware that he was controversial. So that movie I can enjoy through the lens of memory and ignorance. But of all the films I could go and watch now, that wouldn’t be one of them. If anything, the crimes of those artists helps eliminate option overwhelm. 

You haven’t seen Annie Hall though and you want to, I know you do. 

That’s because everyone says it’s wonderful! But I can live with a desire to see it and not prioritise it, can’t I? 

You’re being incredibly inconsistent. Sounds to me like you’re a case-by-case operator. Also how do you deal with the idea that if you dig deep enough, probably every artist you love has done something shitty. 

Case-by-case is the only fair way to be. You have to give every circumstance a thorough hearing before you cut yourself off from good art forever. Also sometimes there are allegations that aren’t proven: surely the whole innocence until proven guilty concept must still apply. And to your second point, it’s only logical that nobody is perfect but not everybody is as terrible like the artists you named above: those ones were/are art monsters.

I see what you did there, you’re referring to Claire Dederer’s book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Are you referring to the notion of the privileged audience, then? That only the privileged can afford to go Barthes and kill the author? 

Well actually yes. Pretty much. Have we swapped sides? I think a lot of these men, in particular, existed in the canon for so long because the patriarchy allowed them to get away with grotesque behaviour towards women. Instead of being admonished they were heroised. I have zero interest in perpetuating that adoration. In fact, Gaiman can probably take a hike because there are literally about 100 books in my tbr pile and I have no time for him. And while I have fond memories of reading Harry Potter in my youth, I will never purchase another book by she-who-shall-not-be-named because I am extremely disappointed in her obvious lack of many things, like humanity. 

Aha! So you, Mabey, are in fact incapable of divorcing the art from the artist. Case dismissed. 

No, not quite. I think if you have a strong, existing relationship with the art (pre-knowledge of bad behaviour) to the extent that you’ve poured so much of your own self into that work and made lifelong meaning and memory from it, then I do think the balance of power lies with the reader/viewer/listening. But if that artist is known to you as a cretin and then you seek out their work and pay for it, that’s a whole other matter. I also think there’s a calculation that could be argued around what the art of the monster contributed versus what the monster themselves committed. For example the writer you cannot deny that you love, Virginia Woolf, had some appalling ideas. But it is possible to condemn those aspects of her portfolio and see how progressive other aspects of her art were, for their time. 

Ah OK, so you’re also advocating for engaging with the work but only critically? That’s why you don’t like Hemingway, right? You didn’t really know about him at all but when you read those books you saw misogyny in the texts. 

I’ll never bother much with Hemingway because I don’t like the art. It annoyed me. The words were good and the writing strong but the ideas aggravating. Anyway that’s a sideways step in this argument. Sometimes when the artist is a salty old dog you can see salt and dogs in their work and you can comfortably conclude that their worldview is not for you. That’s a healthy way to consume. With historic texts/art there’s a distance that somehow softens the approach: you can contextualise the work into its time and read critically accordingly. 

It’s important to apply a critical lens to most art (except maybe … no actually can’t think of anything exempt from that) but there is a difference in the nature of that critical lens between contemporary artists and historic ones. It’s much harder, for me, to apply critical distance to contemporary artists who are making from within the same world as we are reading / absorbing them in. It’s harder to separate art from artist when they’re right under our nose and affecting people in real-time.

Still case-by-case then. 

Yep, sorry. Mabey by name, maybe by nature. 

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