# Tussock Land/Chapter 15

XV
After a day at the huge Hôtel Metropole, King moved to the address of a boarding-house in Darlinghurst. It stood high on a ridge, one of a long, balconied terrace. From his diminutive room on the fourth floor he could see, across the reefs of terraces running down the spurs to the harbour, the spires and domes of the city against the sky, and beyond, the sweep of the harbour crowned by the heights of North Shore.
The street hummed always with life and movement. To King, accustomed to the privacy of his little Maoriland city, this incessant stir of life was at first disconcerting. But soon he felt himself one of the crowd that for ever eddied and surged along the high-walled streets. They were all of his kind, all at work; and though his work lay on a higher plane, yet he had no doubt that to each his little task was equally important. He looked at them aloof; yet a feeling of brotherhood was stirring within him at this sudden descent into the realm of such wide and splendid possibilities.
In the warm evenings—and nearly all the evenings were warm—the people opened their windows and crowded eagerly out on to the wide balconies. There was a faint throbbing of pianos, singers’ voices broke across the heavy hum of the restless city, a band of street musicians played far down the street, the distance tuning their strident tones into a vague har​mony. In the little cool gardens in front of the houses the flowers looked gladly up into the cool rain of the watering-hose. There was an air of reviving, of wakening everywhere. It seemed as if the city were drawing deep breaths. In the street men in light suits and straw hats sauntered slowly past, smoking cigarettes; women in evening-dress, with bare heads and white, uncovered shoulders gleaming vaguely where a silk scarf had been impatiently pushed back, passed on their way to the tram for the theatres. Girls and men, two and two, strolled not on earth, haloed in illusions.... And over all was the dull glow of the city, over all the long, unwearied roar of the distant traffic, over all the heavy, close heat and the lassitude of the Australian night.
It was a new world to King. During that first enchanted week in Sydney he thought that he had strayed into Paradise. The people were so inexplicably, so irresistibly happy, so feverishly joyous, so laughter-loving, so enamoured of the open air. He loved to go to the city in the afternoons and move slowly with the sauntering, listless crowd down the wide-verandahed, crooked, sun-stricken streets, or turn as into an enchanted realm into the strangely unreal shelter of the arcades, that all day gleamed with the cold whiteness of the staring electric lights. He moved slowly, having learnt that his quick stride, engendered of a climate that is always brusque, was unsafe in the sweltering heat.
He noted the listlessness of the men, the furrow of weariness upon their foreheads, their tallness and their pallor, the slight stoop of their shoulders, the slouching walk. He listened to the long drawl of their talk, the sense that underlay it of oldness, of weariness, of dislike to effort. And he had an instant’s vision of the future of this new, untried race. ​He saw its intense self-consciousness, its sensitively irritable skin, its arrogant belief in its destiny. He saw its strength of vigour, its lack of reserve. And despite the pathetic effort this race made to retain the memories of its starting-point in another hemisphere—its retention of the frock-hat of a colder civilisation in this semi-tropical heat, the poor, pitiable attempts to graft upon an out-door people the customs and conventions of a race that loved its warm hearth, its limpet-clinging to a Christmas-tide that in the wreck of the seasons arrived in the middle of a sweltering summer, its surviving passion for the literature of a country now alien to it—despite these secretions of a forgotten past, this race was beginning to stand up and know itself as unique.
This so strangely un-British temperament, that had no respect for precedent, that had forgotten the word “humility,” that loved the sun and fretted within the confines of the home, he saw was due to the sudden and utter change in the race’s environment. Here was a British race that after centuries beneath a gloomy sky had been suddenly emancipated to an atmosphere of sunlight, that after centuries of respect for, and oppression by, precedent and the past, had been suddenly given the broad untrammelled future, that after centuries of imprisonment in a little island-group—geographically a mere appendage of a continent swarming with diverse and contending races—had been suddenly granted the wondrous heritage of a continent lone and unpeopled. The exhilaration of freedom, sun, space, sang in their hearts with a delirious joy. The race was heady with its dazzling possibilities. It scarcely knew what to do first; it tried to do everything.
But behind that lack of reserve that so contradicted ​the British stock from which they had sprung, there was another lack that seemed more serious—a slackening of the fibres of national dignity, a lazy dependence, an easy relinquishing of responsibility. And here he wondered whether that carelessness about the future, that liability of the Australian to gamble upon his hopes, was not due to the indeterminate position in which as a nation he found himself. Practically, he belonged to an independent republic, yet acknowledged himself a subject of a monarch whom he had never seen, who kept his close-guarded state in one small and distant group of islands at the other end of the world. And though an independent nation, he allowed another nation to guard his shores, feeling that he amply repaid that nation by the mere fact of his allegiance. King could see one way out of this slackening of the moral responsibility; and it lay in the recognition on the part of Australia that she was an independent nation, in the gradual emergence of this wide continent from its swaddling bands, in the proclamation of its separate entity as a nation. It would have to show that it was worthy of its nationhood, that it could uphold its dignity, that it could stand alone. Then in the minds of that nation would grow and mightily develop that final pride of race, that supreme dignity of nationhood.
And this glad sense of youth and vigour inherent in the race had not been gained without corresponding loss. The semi-tropic sun had his penalty to exact. The Australian of the future would be capable of gigantic spasms of energy, of heroic fever-fits of creation, of swift and impulsive national sacrifices, of orgies of selfishness and of renunciation. But the ebb would come, the blood would cool.
Yet what high splendours of art, of literature, of ​patriotism, would arise from those swift fevers of national consciousness, of national aspirations and national stresses! Australia would inevitably have her Elizabethan age—but how much wider an age, how much more virile and passionate would be the brief, dazzling culmination of the empire of the South!
But perhaps the women aroused his wonder more than the men. They seemed to him exotics. They had the tropics in their pale faces, their dark, languorous eyes, their quick, sensuous blood. He noted the rich, full lips of passion, the full curve of the bust, the slim, tall figure of litheness, and he condoned the instinct that compelled them to set off the delicate pallid bloom of their skins by a blaze of colour in their dress.
Every afternoon these women of the South drifted up and down the narrow, teeming streets, clustering like flies about the big shop windows, trooping in their hundreds into the crowded, sweltering tea-shops where they languidly gossiped and ate ices.
Or, on an evening, King would go down to Circular Quay and take the Manly ferry steamer. Innumerable girls in white with masses of flowers on their hats, multitudes of young men, white-trousered, straw-hatted, trooped on board; the double screws revolved, and the big boat in the midst of a little flotilla of smaller ferry-boats set out from its wharf. Then at the end of this inner harbour where the big ocean liners were lying in the heart of the city the ferry boats would turn to wider courses, their wakes lying on the water like the white rays of a fan. Then as the big steamer moved swiftly toward the harbour mouth the panting people on board would lie back and breathe reviving draughts of the ocean air.
​King wrote wonderful letters to his mother in those days, letters full of exultation at his escape from the narrow isolation of New Zealand, throbbing with hope and expectation. There was stimulus in the air; this fervid city of the South thrilled with art, was alive with emotional nerves. Life flooded through him in a rich fervour that half intoxicated him. His blood stirred in a fever of eagerness and enthusiasm. All the things in the world were possible and near.
King’s first practical step for the furtherance of his ambition was to join an art-school. He had been recommended to attach himself to the classes of Edward Struve, a genial, middle-aged artist who had no ideals and lived up to them. This artist was a master of technique, a worker who had unsuccessfully flirted with his imagination and fallen back upon the prosaic with a satisfying sense of security. He painted what he saw, though fastidious critics accused him of a tendency towards untruth. Though he was not a successful artist, nor even a good one, he had the faculty of teaching. He knew what should be done, and triumphantly told others to do it.
But, somewhat to his surprise, his pupils did not stop at the limits of his tuition; they had ideas. So somewhat unexpectedly he found his studio the nest for a thriving and noisy school of youthful impressionists.
Australia is a land of sombre beauty, of wide spaces in monotonous tone, of broad shadows, of low colour and sharp contrasts. The hard brilliance of the staring sun in an unfretted sky flattens every tint. The sombreness of the foliage, the vast spaces of sunlight, the lack of shade, make Australia a land unpaintable according to the traditions of an old-​world art. The green of grass, the delicate broidery of the spring, the rich garments of the autumn, the chequered beauty of a windy sky, the varying emotions of an English April, the witchery of the English haze are lacking in this harder, more brilliant, sun-smitten continent. It is too serene, too unchangeable, too vast.
So to paint Australia the artist must be an impressionist. He finds a beauty, ragged and picturesque, in the hard, metallic, glistening foliage of the gum-tree, in the buoyant delicacy of its thinly clothed branches. He learns to look for broad effects, the wide sweeps of the brush that Nature has grandly made. The delicate daintiness of rural England, veiled like a young bride in her blue mist, is unknown and inconceivable under the sparkling brilliance of the aggressively blue Australian sky.
So a school of young Australian artists had unconsciously arisen with the intention of painting Australia in the only way it could be painted. To English eyes this vivid treatment of a vivid landscape might seem crude, unfinished. But Australian eyes saw in the efforts of these Australian artists a panorama that was familiar to them, and Australian patrons bought those pictures. Unfortunately, in a land where art in everyone is instinctive, where human song-birds rise from every back-blocks township, there were ten artists to every patron. Australia has a rough way of evening matters by driving its best artists to England, where the leaven is happily wanted.
So Edward Struve viewed with a cheerful tolerance the break-away in art traditions that his most brilliant pupils made, and, learning that the public and the National Gallery Trustees bought these ​impressionist canvases, he tentatively broadened his own work and found himself hailed as the leader of the little school.
It was among this band that King found himself. These students had all the temerity and audacity of youth in a new land foreign to the idea of tradition. Australia has no galleries of old masters to terrify and bewilder the aspiring student by their flawless supremacy, their despairingly aloof perfection. The Australian youth does not know the reach, the width of the art of the past. The summit of perfection seems to him easily attainable—and he is young and can climb! It is only when he stands before a dozen different supremacies of art, crowded into some small room in a gallery in Florence, Rome, Paris, London, that he wonders vaguely at his presumption and takes to black and white. But in Australia, unhampered by precedent, undeterred by tradition, the Australian artist, fronted by a new, unpainted world, determined with the cheery heart of aggressive youth to paint it in his own way, as it seemed good to him. Sometimes he succeeded.
King had a certain quickness of conception, an aptitude of grasp that soon put him on a level with the best students in the class. His energy, and the swift ease with which he absorbed hints and processes that usually demanded a dreary and painstaking apprenticeship, were to his fellows and to his master remarkable. He found at the outset, between himself and his Australian competitors, an enormous difference in capacity for work and capability for keeping at work. The abiding influence of a temperate climate carried him through the rigours of this semi-tropical one. It was not long before his work began to show signs of distinction. At the end of six months he had acquired recognition as a student who ​did the daring thing in art, and sometimes did it well. Edward Struve liked the suggestiveness, the hint of audacity in the New Zealander’s work, and put King down as clever—perhaps too clever to be a genius. He had the capacity in art that in university life is known as a genius for passing examinations. He made every use of his knowledge; he never wasted himself, he never dared to make a splendid failure. There was a quality of success, a note of brilliant hardness in every stroke of his facile brush. King’s work was always arresting, even if it were not always true. His personality was signed on every sketch. He was immediate, impetuous. Perhaps I can sum up his position at this stage by saying that his originality carried him further than it would have carried a more conscientious student.
But after six months in Sydney, during which King was like a lover infatuated with his art, a cold shock suddenly awakened him. He found that nearly all his money was gone. He had not been able to find an opening for black and white in Sidney. True, he had seen some of his drawings appear (greatly reduced) in the Bulletin, but an income from such a source was impossible. So at the end of six months he found himself face to face with a serious problem.