Great New Zealand Argument by Various Artists

Bill Pearson's Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist has had a kind of academic cult status ever since its original publication in Landfall in 1952. In his introduction to the 1974 collection Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays, from which this version of the title essay has been retyped, Pearson notes that it had been "clandestinely photocopied" for teaching use. It provides a sometimes stinging insight into both contemporary and enduring elements of New Zealand's collective identity.

The essay is published with the permission of Donald Stenhouse. It is preceded by a biographical note by Paul Millar, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, who is currently researching and writing a biography of Bill Pearson, assisted by an award from Copyright Licensing Limited.

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William Harrison (Bill) Pearson was born on 18 January 1922 in Greymouth, where his father was the Stationmaster. He attended Greymouth Main School and Greymouth Technical High School. In a society dominated by the New Zealand working man it wasn’t an easy childhood or adolescence for a boy who was unusually sensitive and preferred intellectual pursuits to sports. His mother died when he was sixteen, but with his father’s support he went on to study at Canterbury University College (1939), Dunedin Training College and the University of Otago (1940-1941). February to July 1942 was a particularly crucial six-month period during which he was a Probationary Assistant teacher at Blackball School, Grey Valley. This experience later provided the setting and many of the characters for his acclaimed social realist novel Coal Flat (1963).

When he was called up to fight in the Second World War, his pacifist beliefs saw him serving initially as an assistant in the New Zealand Dental Corps. Eventually he decided that it was ‘less hypocritical to go off to war and be killed than fix other men’s teeth so they could be killed’. Accordingly, in 1945, he accepted a posting to the Infantry’s 15th Reinforcement, bound for Egypt. He arrived in Egypt to find the war ended, and so volunteered to join the British Commonwealth Occupation ‘J Force’ in Japan. Demobilised in July 1946, he returned to Canterbury University College, graduating M.A. in English in 1948. In 1949, under a scholarship scheme for returned servicemen, he enrolled as a doctoral candidate at Kings College, University of London, receiving his PhD in 1952.

This brief sketch of Bill Pearson’s background is helpful in fully appreciating the impulse behind the writing of ‘Fretful Sleepers’. While Pearson’s brief note at the essay’s conclusion locates him in ‘London, 1952’, this is only an accurate guide to the point at which the essay was ready for publication. In fact ‘Fretful Sleepers’ was begun, and largely completed, during the captivating summer of the preceding year—1951. Pearson, then aged 29, and in his second year of Doctoral studies was, for the first time in his life, free of all sustained contact with other New Zealanders. It was a liberation of sorts that provided space for him to think about his relationship with his home-land and its people. The essay is a recognition of the fact that for the first time in his life the option of ‘escaping’ New Zealand seemed both viable and desirable. As Pearson explained it:

…after two springs in London with such pleasures as open-air Shakespeare in the long summer evenings, Margot Fonteyn in Swan Lake, French films at the Everyman, the New Statesman at any bookstall on the day of publication, the distinct procession of seasons and flowers, the generally expansive mood of those post-war years and the freedom from all the kiwi obsessions, I began to have doubts about wanting to return home at all. ('Beginnings and Endings.' Sport 5: 3-21 Spring 1990.)

And yet he did return home, in 1954, to a successful academic career at the University of Auckland, from where he retired in 1986 as an Associate Professor. Why was this, when 1950s London appeared so attractive to an individual of artistic and intellectual inclinations? It was a problem, Pearson explained, that ‘drove me to look into myself and analyse what was different in my personal experience of New Zealanders and the English and in my own outlook and habits of thought from those of the English, and so I wrote 'Fretful Sleepers', at the end of which I knew that I would go back to New Zealand’ (‘Beginnings and Endings’).

‘Fretful Sleepers’ is not, as it has been so often read, an attack on New Zealand as a nation of philistines. Certainly there are elements of that, just as there are aspects of the essay that now seem dated. Yet the substance of the essay’s criticism of New Zealanders represents Pearson’s own, often brutal, self-awareness, and many of his conclusions and observations are remarkable for their political and social relevance in present-day New Zealand. Pearson recalls that he began writing the essay,

…aware of the difference between English and New Zealand assumptions and habits of thought, and in particular my own. My constant reference point, if I didn’t have some anecdote or memory to fall back on, was my own thinking or habits of thought. And it was based not just on recent years in New Zealand, but on the time I spent in the forces where you were alongside the ordinary working bloke all the time, and you were quite used to the mores and ethos, and assumptions, and the very distinct ideas of what was permissable and what wasn’t permissible…. It was that I was analysing. (Alex Calder, 'An interview with Bill Pearson', Landfall 47: 51-77; April 1993)

It is in this context that ‘Fretful Sleepers’ needs to be understood: as Pearson’s active engagement with his own feelings about his country, backed up by a commitment to return there and make a meaningful contribution to it.

[I realised] I wanted to go back to New Zealand, that was where I belonged. So that people who see this as a kind of complaint or whinge are misinterpreting it. I think I was really trying to describe what our habits and assumptions were, but there was an implied plea and protest. A plea that there should be much greater variety and tolerance and sensitivity. (Calder, 'An interview with Bill Pearson')

Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist

Bill Pearson
This essay was first published in Landfall, September 1952; reprinted with corrections in Landfall Country, ed. Charles Brasch (Caxton Press, 1960); and further revised for Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Heinemann Educational Books, 1974)

In this article I have to steer between two dangers, each represented by previous assessments of ‘the New Zealand character’. The first is to use the first person plural as in Oliver Duff’s New Zealand Now. When I read it my impression was that I’d been listening to a rotarian, the two of us puffing pipes by the fire, picking our noses, having a man-to-man talk over the whisky fumes. Like a conversation I overheard at New Zealand House: two middle-aged women: ‘Everybody like the New Zealanders. Oh yes, wherever you go, we’re very popular.’ The other said, six times at three-second intervals: ‘Ye-es’, then, ‘M’m, I suppose we are, when you come to think of it … Yes.’ Mr Fairburn in We New Zealanders tickled and teased us in odd places without anyone feeling the worse for it. The other danger is to use a deadly or hostile third person plural as if we were the object of an anthropologist’s research, as D’Arcy Cresswell did. Anna Kavan (‘New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry’, Horizon, September 1943) tried hard to understand us; she was penetrating but she saw us from the outside looking on and a slight hysteria blinded her too. In this article I shall veer, saying we when I praise, they when I blame. The real difficulty, though, is to distinguish between what accidental or temporary adaptations, whether these are general, whether they belong to the West Coast where I grew up, whether I am only projecting my own faults. If I do this I am sticking my neck out and will take the consequences. Again I shall have to keep clear class backgrounds – whether I am talking of miners, clerks or businessmen. But since New Zealand is as homogenous in its patterns of conduct as (I think) any other country, this is less important. By the time anyone has read this article, he will have objected a dozen times that I am not talking of New Zealanders but of men: these virtues and failings you will find the whole world over. That is true, but I am trying to sketch a character faithful in its emphases. To abstract what might be peculiar to New Zealanders would be to talk of a fiction.

I

It is a funny place to start – but writing away from New Zealand, I have no check on far-fetched deductions but a subjective one: what it felt like to grow up at home. When I was seven my mother told me if I was ever playing on the hill or in the paddocks at the bottom I was to watch out for miners’ shafts hidden under long grass and blackberries. I was awed, partly at the prospect of disappearing, as it seemed, without hope of recovery, twelve feet into the earth, but as well at the blandness with which a responsible adult could tolerate the continuance of such dangers. I felt they should have done something about it. Who is they? It could be argued that to me as a child they simply meant adults; and at that time I did impute infallibility to adults. But it is not only in me: they crops up again and again unnoticed in the talk of New Zealanders, a convenient fiction that covers a gap in their thought or illustrates a dimly-felt need – for what? Whenever you pin down the they, you will find it is in one case the borough council, in another ‘the government’, in another the drainage board; but the speaker will have to think before he can identify them: he will probably say ‘the authorities’ or ‘the powers that be’. They is the symbol for authority, protective an unquestioned and only noticed when something goes wrong.

The New Zealander delegates authority, then forgets it. He has shrugged off responsibility and wants to be left alone. There is no one more docile in the face of authority. He pleads rationalizations, ‘doesn’t want to make a fuss’ or ‘make a fool of himself’, but generally he does what he is told, partly because everyone else is doing it, partly because he wants to be sociable and co-operate in a wishfully untroubled world. Only when things go visibly wrong does he recall his right to question the authority and change it. When he complains half his bitterness is that he has been made to complain because he hates complaint and can’t complain with dignity. Anyone who questions too often is a ‘moaner’, yet in new Zealand the moaner is common. Things never run so smoothly as the New Zealander pretends. So he is suspicious of politics – the anti-conscription campaign and the Stockholm peace petition were suspect not out of fear of communism but because the man who tries to stop the drive to war is reminding everyone of the moral responsibility he gave away with his vote.

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Most New Zealanders watched David Lange contest and win the 1985 Oxford Union debate, arguing the proposition that "nuclear weapons are morally indefensible" with a mixture of pride and astonishment. After decades of knowing our place, and several years of government by homunculus, suddenly we had a Prime Minister who could stride the international stage with insouciance. And briefly, we seemed to matter.

Although New Zealand's nuclear-free policy did not become law until 1987, it was integral to early years of the fourth Labour government. The 1984 snap election that made Lange Prime Minister was called by Robert Muldoon when National MP Marilyn Waring withdrew her support for her party over the issue of nuclear ship visits. Labour won the election with a nuclear ban as a flagship policy.

The policy was popular among New Zealanders, but not without cost. Our relationship with the US deteriorated in the early weeks of 1985. On the same journey that took him to Oxford, Lange, four days before the debate, met with a US State Department official who outlined the retaliatory measures that the US would be taking against New Zealand. The ANZUS alliance of which New Zealand had been part since 1951 was effectively cancelled at that meeting.

New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance had long been infused with, as Jock Philips has put it, "a postcolonial yearning for a new nationalism". So that was at stake as Lange prepared for the debate. The recording of his speech, in opposition to a team led by Moral Majority founder and Reagan confidant the Rev. Jerry Falwell, remains a remarkable document.

Lange was accorded a standing ovation - almost unprecedented, apparently - from both sides of the house as he approached the dispatch box. His booming voice and idiosyncratic, commanding phrasing, cannot be captured here, except through best efforts with punctuation.

The basis of this transcript is the official speech notes kept by the Parliamentary library, which we have retyped and archived here. But while the notes ran to 2000 words, the transcript below is well over 4000. In the speech, Lange is at his best sailing back after occasional interjections, impassioned and lucid. We believe this is the first published transcript of this important speech.

Update: the audio of this speech has now been made available with the kind permission of TVNZ.

Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible
(Argument for the affirmative, Oxford Union, 1 March 1985)
Rt Hon David Lange
Prime Minister

Mr President, honourable members of the union, ladies and gentlemen … in fact if I could greet straight away - because I understand there is a direct feed to the White House tonight - if I could greet the President of the United States, who is of course of the very genesis of the proposition we are debating tonight.

A quote in Time magazine last year, an assertion by the President of the United States that nuclear weapons were immoral; his avowal reiterated in January this year in a statement over the space initiative known as SDI. And there again, he asserted that this system of the nuclear stare-out can not be sustained morally.

May I say to the honourable gentleman who preceded me, there is nothing of what I am about to say which has been conditioned in any way by my meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom yesterday …

[Laughter]

I did not meet her yesterday …

[Laughter and applause]

I am meeting her on Monday. But I know the apprehension that he feels at his constant fear of being summoned to that carpet …

[Laughter]

I also feel a considerable sympathy for the members of the opposite side, who have this extraordinary sense of destabilisation at the imminent prospect of peace breaking out.

The character of the argument, sir, is something which I find regrettable. So I can say very simply that it is my conviction that there is no moral case for nuclear weapons. That the best defence which can be made of their existence and the threat of their use is, as we have heard tonight, that they are a necessary evil; an abhorrent means to a desirable end.

I hold that the character of nuclear weapons is such that their very existence corrupts the best of intentions; that the means in fact perverts the end. And I hold that their character is such that they have brought us to the greatest of all perversions: the belief that this evil is necessary - as it has been stated tonight - when in fact it is not.

And I make my case against nuclear weapons the more vigorously because I distinguish between them and all other forms of coercive or deterrent power. I've got no case to make against the policeman’s truncheon. And the people tonight who have argued that you must go to the ultimate in force every time you seek to embark upon it, is of course a surrender to the worst of morality.

I accept, and do not wish to be heard arguing here against any proposition that the state must arm itself with military force to protect its citizens against aggression or to defend the weak and the helpless against aggression.

But I do not accept that the state must for those reasons arm itself with nuclear weapons. That is a case I do not easily or lightly make in Europe where governments have held it their duty to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. I do not doubt for one moment the quality of the intention which led to that decision or that series of decisions.

And I freely acknowledge that that decision is pursued in good conscience with the honourable intention of preserving the life and freedom of the people of Western Europe. Because those governments are faced with the close presence of an alien and relentlessly oppressive regime and obviously feel it their duty to prepare for their own defence by membership in what for most governments' policy now is straightforwardly a nuclear alliance. That is an assessment I understand and I do not come here to argue for any proposition in favour of unilateral disarmament.

And if I make that acknowledgement, I must then deal with the argument that it is the intention which determines the moral character of the action. My contention is very simply that the character of nuclear weapons is such that it is demonstrably the case that they subvert the best of intentions. And the snuggling up to the nuclear arsenal which has gone on with my friends on the opposite side tonight shows at what level of sophistication and refinement that subversion takes place.

There is, Mr President, a quality of irrationality about nuclear weapons which does not sit well with good intentions. A system of defence serves its purpose if it guarantees the security of those it protects. A system of nuclear defence guarantees only insecurity. The means of defence terrorise as much as the threat of attack. In Europe, it is impossible to be unaware of the intensity of military preparedness. In New Zealand, the visitor must make an effort to find a military installation or indeed any sign of military activity, although it does exist. There is no imperative in New Zealand to prepare for war; the result is that I feel safer in Wellington than I ever could in London or New York or Oxford.

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive. The President of the United States has acknowledged that, notwithstanding that my honourable friend opposite does not, and the weapon has installed mass destruction as the objective of the best-intentioned.

The weapon simply has its own relentless logic, and it is inhuman. It is the logic of escalation, the logic of the arms race. Nuclear weapons make us insecure, and to compensate for our insecurity we build and deploy more nuclear weapons. We know that we are seized by irrationality - and every now and then some new generation technology comes in, the argument for which is that it will cause us to draw back from the nuclear precipice. And we are seeing right now another initiative, under a new title: the title of course in dispute as much as its efficiency will be. And that, Mr President, is the story of the whole saga of the nuclear escalation.

We know, all of us, that it is wholly without logic or reason, any sense at all, to have the means at the disposal of two particular sets of powers to turn this world into rubble time and time again. And yet in spite of that awareness, the world watches as two enormous machines enhance, refine their capacity to inflict destruction on each other and on all of us.

Every nuclear development, whatever its strategic or tactical significance, has only one result, and that is to add to an arsenal which is already quite beyond reason.

There is an argument in defence of the possession of nuclear weapons which holds that the terror created by the existence of those weapons is in itself the fulfilment of a peaceful purpose: the argument advanced here tonight that that 50 million killed over four years by concerted war in a conventional sense in Europe, and the argument that somehow the existence of this mutually assured destruction phenomenon has since that time preserved this planet from destruction.

It is I think probably an example of northern hemisphere or European arrogance that we overlook now the 30 million people in this world who have died in wars since then - while we are apparently beset from the two super-powers by a system designed to have people stop killing each other.

I believe that the fear they inspire is not a justification for their existence.

INTERJECTION: Sir, the one area of the world do you refer to then? How have those casualties in that area defended by nuclear deterrence? Namely Europe. Not one of those 30 million lived in Europe.

Have you considered the proposition for one moment that that war, that cost those casualties might have entrenched within people the yearning for peace, the growth of democratic institutions, the accountability of political representatives, so that none wishes to wage in conventional or nuclear terms, any war? Why attribute to the presence of that awesome potential clash of firepower a stability which your politicians have been arguing they created?

You can't have it both ways! Either you are hailing a new, United Europe, matching to glory and to the exclusion of certain primary production from other countries …

[Laughter]

Or you have it there simply because you have counterpoised this terrible means of destruction … I'm want to pass over ... yeah?

[Laughter]

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