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SRB: Colonial Culture?
Facing the Music: Charles Baeyertz and the Triad, by
Joanna Woods
Jane
Blaikie is a Wellington writer and
reviewer
Published by Otago University Press, $45.
Reviewed by JANE BLAIKIE for the Scoop Review of
Books
This thoroughly enjoyable biography
springs from a period of New Zealand cultural history
that’s been regarded with unease: colonial
times.
Charles Baeyertz – musician, critic, writer and
publisher of the Triad arts magazine – drives the
narrative of Facing the Music in a vivid and engaging
portrait of European New Zealand in the late 1800s into the
twentieth century.
For all sorts of reasons,
this era has often been shunned by literary types. New
Zealand’s brilliant but nationalistic writers of the 30s
and 40s dismissed colonial culture as derivative and twee,
and Victorian ideas of white supremacy and the ghastly land
grab are particularly unattractive.
But Facing the Music
cheerfully embarks where others haven’t. Perhaps it’s
part of a revision of colonial cultural history, a growing
acceptance and integration of the various parts of the story
– a necessary rewriting, as so lucidly and intelligently
canvassed in Jane Stafford and Mark Williams’ 2006 book
Maoriland.
For one thing, Facing the
Music conveys the idea that colonialists (especially
urbanites) were far more sophisticated than they have been
credited with, particularly in music and performance.
At
the same time, there’s a taint of desperation as the
settlers try to establish themselves a long way from home.
Charles Baeyertz illustrates a manic search for cultural
identity – and there’s something utterly mesmerising in
this ebullient and unstoppable character.
He was born in
rural Australia in 1866 to an English (probably of German
descent) father and a Jewish mother, both of whom suffered
their families’ severe disapproval of the match for
breaking the line over religion.
Charles’ father, a
banker, unfortunately combined two traits – a love of guns
and a certain clumsiness. These culminated in a fatal
self-inflicted wound as he leant over a fence to shake the
hand of a neighbour. Charles was just four and his mother, a
gifted musician, coped by converting to a fiery form of
evangelical Methodism.
By age nine, Charles was at
boarding school as his mother began her local, and later
international career, as a hugely popular public speaker. At
20, he married the “devout and homely” Bella, eight
years his senior, and set up in business in Melbourne.
A
property slump propelled Charles to Dunedin where he
scratched around making a living by teaching and performing
music, and writing reviews. His critical skills were
undoubtedly helped by a near photographic memory.
After a
year or two, and with a growing family to support, he
plunged into publishing with the Triad – A Monthly
Magazine of Music, Science & Art, which was to stay in
print in one form or another, in New Zealand and Australia,
for nearly 50 years.
Charles’ extraordinary energy,
phenomenal networking, business bravado, and voracious
intellect all make for a spirited account of how to make it
in publishing. It’s amazing really that simply as a
business story, it’s not better known.
To his credit,
Charles taught himself Maori and urged others to do so. He
was so annoyed at poor pronunciation of te reo (as well as
being horrified by the emerging Australian accent), that he
published a two-page feature on correct Maori pronunciation.
He was also aware of the need to protect the bush and
native animals – though that’s about it as far as his
progressive views went. He might have been a cosmopolitan
Edwardian, rather than a Victorian, but he didn’t stray
too far from the norms of the time.
Not too surprisingly,
Charles’ marriage suffered under the strain of success,
and the ups and downs of his later love life, along with
libel suits and World War One, came to mirror his business
difficulties. The endings – for him and the Triad – are
as gripping as the story’s opening chapters.
Author Dr
Joanna Woods doesn’t miss a step. An Irish woman now based
in New Zealand, she earned her doctorate on Katherine
Mansfield from Moscow State University, while living in
Russia with her diplomat husband. There’s a delightful
frothiness in her style overlying a rich scholarship.
That said, something slightly ghoulish attaches to the
book, rather like watching a predatory wasp sting a
caterpillar and lay an egg that will hatch and eat the
living but paralysed body.
But it’s our story. Perhaps
it’s time to get over the squeamishness and face our own
music – it’s not all bad.
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