On David Ballantyne

Jackson McCarthy (he/him; Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāti Hako) 

Driving through beautiful tree-lined Tāhuna streets this March, in the rough, off-season spittle, I turned the final, trilling page of David Ballantyne’s 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down. I closed the back cover: a black-and-white headshot of Ballantyne, thick-framed glasses, just a hint of jowls, unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Cool cucumber. Did he realise what he’d done to me? I said to my parents, talking among themselves in the front seat, “Oh my God. I didn’t think we wrote novels like that in this country!” 

Raving about Sydney Bridge is a well-documented phenomenon; I think because the praise is tied up with a need to defend the novel, which was under-read and often mis-read by critics in the author’s lifetime. Kate de Goldi raves in her introduction to the latest edition, and so does Hamish Clayton in his incisive 2017 essay. The novel’s become a kind of cult classic; out of print for a number of years, it was reissued in 2010 and 2012 by the Australian company Text Publishing. Fans of the novel feel as though they’ve been let in on a secret. 

Perhaps this is because Sydney Bridge is largely a novel about secrets. It’s narrated by Harry Baird, a boy of around twelve or thirteen, as he explains, often in an extravagant and unreliable style, his long, final summer in Calliope Bay, during which two townspeople mysteriously die. Even the novel’s setting remains ambiguous: though the fictional town of Calliope Bay is likely based on Ballantyne’s childhood home of Hicks Bay, there are enough vagaries that it could plausibly be set anywhere in Aotearoa. Post-colonial markers are what abound: an economically-struggling rural township, an abandoned meatworks, a barely-functioning wharf, absent parents... 

Written in an age of Aotearoa literature characterised by the dominance of Social Realism (that is, literature which depicts gritty, proletarian, working-class lives), Ballantyne’s novel is remarkable for its humour, dark undercurrent, interest in psychoanalysis, and just honest-to-God genuine weirdness. It does deal with Social Realist interests, but in a rather idiosyncratic way; the author himself called it “a Gothic joke”. 

But Ballantyne is remarkable for another reason: he is, as far as we are currently aware, the first Māori writer to publish a novel: his debut, The Cunninghams, was published in 1948. For a while, this title was held by Witi Ihimaera, who importantly and explicitly dealt with Māori themes, characters, and settings in his novels in the 1970s. While we shouldn’t undermine the achievement of Ihimaera and his generation (including such magisterial figures as Patricia Grace and Hone Tuwhare, whose work is sometimes loosely grouped as part of a “Māori Renaissance”), it’s important to realise that Ballantyne had Māori whakapapa, too. This included a rather famous tīpuna, Hēni Te Kiri Karamū, a wāhine toa known for her involvement in the Battle of Gate Pā. Jordan Tricklebank, writing for Newsroom, sums it up well: “[Ballantyne] was operating in an era where someone with Māori ‘ancestry’ was not necessarily considered ‘Māori’.” 

How can we recover Ballantyne’s ‘Māoriness’, which his cultural and historical moment made invisible?; and how can we bring Māori perspectives to bear on our readings of his texts? This is, broadly, the question that we’re asking in a course I’m currently taking, taught by Dr Tru Paraha, called ‘Dark Unknowing in Māori Literature’. Paraha is the perfect

teacher for this course: a sunglass-wearing smooth-talker, teetering on the edge between a laugh and a hardcore epistemological formulation, she seems to embody the ideas she lectures about. And while I can’t speak for her, my sense is that one of the course’s claims is that ideas from te ao Māori and pūrākau storytelling traditions flavour the particular ‘darkness’ of Sydney Bridge Upside Down. 

Harry is a character whose tapu is violated by his family; his resulting trauma responses are likened to “black thoughts” and “black times” (te Kore, te Pō?; Hinetītama, anyone?). Meanwhile, Harry’s narration of the novel often falls into a fairytale style (a kind of pūrākau, perhaps?). 

But of course the obvious aspect is that, though no characters in the novel are explicitly racialised as either Māori or Pākeha, the name ‘Harry Baird’ is just as plausibly Māori as the names ‘David Ballantyne’ and ‘Jackson McCarthy’. Aotearoa’s history is a complicated one, and we mustn’t make the mistake of reading novels as Pākeha just because their characters aren’t rendered in explicitly racial terms. Reading the novel that way seems, at its most innocent, a disservice to its complexities, and at its worst, a subtle reinforcement of colonial dominance: the idea that Pākeha is the default. 

Well, I can’t tell you too much more about Sydney Bridge Upside Down, as much as I’d love to. But I can tell you that I feel as though I’ve been let in on a secret. Ballantyne has been lucky to have critics like de Goldi and Clayton champion his novel years after his death. And these critics are right to have paid close attention to the ways that the novel throws us off-kilter, deceives and misdirects us, and is shot-through with an undercurrent of utter, irreconcilable sadness. (Now I feel as though I’m writing tasting notes for a pinot noir.) 

We can also talk, though, about the other secret: Balantyne’s Māori whakapapa, ignored by early readers and critics of his work. In thinking about Ballantyne as a Māori writer, we might be able to read further local specificities into the novel, and interpret the novel’s style as a reflection of Māori ideas about pūrākau. We also get to reclaim one of the great, forgotten Aotearoa novels as ours; that’s a taonga beyond description. Here is its astounding opening: 

There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world, and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down. He was a scar-faced old man and his horse was a slow-moving bag of bones, and I start with this man and his horse because they were there for all the terrible happenings up the coast that summer, always somewhere around. 

I start with Sam Phelps and Sydney Bridge Upside Down, but now I go to a cliff-top on a January day, a sunny afternoon, mid-afternoon. I was there with Dibs Kelly.