Nicholas ReidAfter Everest — Inside the Private World of Edmund Hillary, by Paul Little (Allen and Unwin, 2012) 250 pp., $36:99; Sir Edmund Hillary, An Extraordinary Life — The Authorised Biography, by Alexa Johnston (Penguin, 2008: reprint of biography first published in 2005), 420pp., $35; Stag Spooner, Wild Man From the Bush, by Chris Maclean (Craig Potton Publishing 2012) 240 pp. $49:99.
I am a male heterosexual New Zealander who went to a single-sex Catholic secondary school where rugby was next to God and manly heroes were admired. But a lot of it just didn’t take with me. I prefer a good book to any organised sport. More than once I have proclaimed proudly that, not only have I never played rugby, but I have never even watched a rugby match in its entirety. In other words, like you if you are in the habit of reading this website, I am a bookish, middle-class, would-be intellectual. Not that I’m a snob about devotees of sport – it’s healthy and generally harmless fun and I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment. Nor am I insensitive to the call of the great outdoors. I love wildlife. Tramping has been one of my hobbies and I’ve walked some of New Zealand’s finest tracks. But I’ve never imagined that I could climb a real mountain, even if Search and Rescue did once come looking for my (then) teenage youngest son and me, after we got lost on a snow-swept mountainside.
I just ain’t a blokey bloke.
Pardon this autobiography. But when I have had thrust into my hands two books about Ed Hillary and one about Neville ‘Stag’ Spooner, a deer culler from the 1930s and ‘40s, I know what I’m implicitly being asked to do. I’m meant to measure myself against old-style real blokes and make a sententious statement about blokedom and changing Kiwi ideas of manhood, like an echo of Jock Phillips’ A Man’s Country?
Okay then, here goes.
For better or worse, Ed Hillary and ‘Stag’ Spooner belonged to a New Zealand that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not just that gender roles have changed and the deeds of outdoorsy blokes are not as highly esteemed as they once were. It’s also the fact that the whole configuration of the media has changed. It’s harder for adventurers to be turned into icons in an age when we’re invited to see them in close-up and there’s saturation coverage of any event. If Hillary and Tenzing and the rest of John Hunt’s expedition were doing their Everest feat now, sixty years later, they would have been followed for months by camera crews and interviewers and bloggers and tweeting twits recording their every move to the point where their actual climb became an anti-climax. It would have been much harder for Ed to wind up on the $5 note. On top of this, the general public is now more likely to be aware of how icons are made; more likely to be cynical. So mighty mountaineers and hardy deerstalkers don’t cut it as once they did, except among their professional peers.
And that’s it for my sententious statements. I refuse to make comments about the difference between colonial and post-colonial mindsets, the balance of the sexes in New Zealand, or other weighty matters that usually come into play when old-time blokes are discussed.
Right. Now for the books.
First published eight years ago, when Ed Hillary was still alive and helping to shape it, Alexa Johnston’s Sir Edmund Hillary, An Extraordinary Life is very much the ‘authorised biography’, giving us the public man and playing it according to the legend. The last paragraph of Johnston’s prologue really spells out her approach. We are told ‘[Ed] embodies many of the qualities we most admire – he is strong, determined, adventurous, calm, quietly doing a power of practical good in the world and, despite honours and accolades, remaining approachable, good-humoured and down to earth: an extraordinary ordinary bloke’. Not much of the received iconography is going to be questioned here, then.
A few non-blokey things are admitted. Apparently Ed lost his temper easily when he was at school and cried a bit. There was that matter of his brother Rex being a conshie during the war. Johnston admits there was some controversy about Ed’s dash to the South Pole in 1957-58. Her most negative comment is the admission (at p.273) that Ed didn’t provide much emotional support for his two surviving children after his first wife Louise and his daughter Belinda were killed in a plane crash. These few things apart, though, we are dealing with the public hero. The laconic Kiwi joker who said ‘We knocked the bastard off’ after climbing the world’s tallest mountain. The ingenious joker who took tractors to the pole. The humanitarian who cared for the Sherpas and supported various causes. The grinning, rangy, practical guy on the currency and in the official portrait that hung in the Auckland War Memorial Museum when I was a kid.
By contrast, Paul Little’s recently-published After Everest – Inside the Private World of Edmund Hillary is a touch more critical, but it is not a work of all-out iconoclasm, so comments about the great New Zealand clobbering machine, or the tall poppy syndrome would be quite inappropriate. Little likes and admires Hillary, and so he jolly well should. But he also sees the warts, and he gives a backhander to Johnston’s book when he says (p.193) that it: ‘could claim to be definitive, so far as describing Ed’s achievements in concerned.’ In other words, he is saying that Johnston didn’t really fathom the private man.
In Little’s version, Hillary is the great adventurer, co-conqueror of Everest with Norgay Tenzing, polar explorer and humanitarian. But he is also far more conscious about creating his own legend and he is sometimes inclined to be haughty. Recounting how Hillary responded to a Swiss expedition’s failure to reach the summit of Everest, Little says ‘Ed used the special tone of patronising graciousness that he reserved for people who tried and failed to do something that he achieved.”’(p.23) Little gives a far more negative account of Hillary’s part in the polar expedition and his tense relationship with Vivian Fuchs. He suggests a man whose displays of modesty were designed to enhance his reputation; who knew how to ‘develop his technique of playing down his achievements in order to highlight them.’ (p.69) Most critical are Little’s passages on Ed’s relationship with his surviving children Peter and Sarah. They come close to suggesting the Ed was over-controlling with his daughter (an account on p.55 of his cancelling a party Sarah had planned) and belittling of his son (not showing much interest in Peter’s achievements, p.133). Sarah’s and Peter’s viewpoints are most strongly represented in the book’s account of their differences with their stepmother June, after Ed’s death. Be it noted that Peter and Sarah were extensively interviewed by Little, but June declined to participate.
For all this, Little’s book leaves us with much to admire in old Ed, the best of it being Ed’s realization that if aid to the Sherpas was to mean anything, it had to be given on the Sherpas’ terms and with Sherpas participating in decision-making.
* * * * * * * *
Stag Spooner, Wild Man From the Bush is a work of pure adulation. Neville Spooner was both deer culler and amateur artist. He had a small local reputation when he was a soldier in the Second World War and drew copious decorated envelopes for friends and family — mainly topical cartoons and humorous representations of the Kiwi soldiers’ experiences. After the war he returned to deer culling. He died of pneumonia and exposure in the Fiordland bush in 1946, at the age of 28
Before all this, however, he produced what author-editor Chris Maclean regards as his greatest work. Those Wild Men from the Bush was written and drawn by Spooner in 1939-40 before he went to war. Its 81 pages are the centrepiece of this book. They are a coloured cartoon diary (four frames per page) of the deer cullers’ life – fording rivers, climbing mountains, tracking beasts, camping, boiling the billy, making trips back to town for provisions etc.
In his introductory chapters, Maclean notes that the production of this cartoon diary preceded by two decades Barry Crump’s invention of the Good Keen Man image of deer culling. He suggests that it is a more sober and accurate documentary account of the process than Crump’s colourful yarns are. Indeed it is a significant historical document. With all this I readily agree, and I further note that this sturdy hardback book does the deer culler artist proud.
Is Spooner’s cartoon diary a hitherto-undiscovered masterpiece? Well, maybe. It’s both fascinating and naïve as a child’s drawings, but doubtless there is an argument to be made for the primitive school.
What all this says about blokedom, I do not profess to know.
NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland-based historian, poet and reviewer. He blogs about books online at Reid’s Reader.
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