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1 During his budget speech Grant Robertson quoted William Blake, & called NZ a 'green & pleasant land'. Robertson & his supporters noted that Peter Fraser used the same quote in some speeches back in the '30s. The line was a bad idea then, & it's a bad idea now. (thread)
2 The line Robertson & Fraser quoted comes originally from 'And did those feet in ancient time', a short verse preface to Blake's 'Milton: a poem in two books', which was published in 1808. Blake's preface has had a long, strange, & sometimes sinister journey.
3 Blake's poem imagines Jesus visiting England's 'clouded hills' & 'dark satanic mills'. Christ's presence momentarily redeems a troubled, unjust society. Blake was writing amidst the chaos & fear created by the Industrial Revolution, the Clearances & the Napoleonic Wars.
4 In the second half of his poem Blake calls for the building of Jerusalem in 'England's green & pleasant land'. Blake may have been thinking of the prophet Richard Brothers, who is remembered today as the founder of the peculiar ideology known as British Israelism.
5 At the end of the 18th C, Brothers rallied thousands of London's poor, & even briefly won support in the House of Commons, by proclaiming that the English people were a lost tribe of Israel, who needed either to return to the Holy Land & or else to recreate it on their island.
6 Brothers' messianic pretensions & calls for the overthrow of earthly authority saw him locked up. But his influenced lingered. As the 19th C went on, more & more Britons decided they were part of a lost tribe of Israel.
7 As the 19th C went on, & the British Empire expanded through Africa, Asia, & the Pacific, the notion of the Britons as a divinely guided race became popular amongst the middle & upper classes that Brothers had railed against. A rebel ideology was recuperated.
8 Blake's work was disregarded in his lifetime, & grew only slowly in popularity. His poem about a new Jerusalem was little-known until World War One, when it was included in a volume of patriotic poetry given to British soldiers.
9 By 1916 the suicidal patriotism of 1914 had given way to fatigue & despair, as losses mounted on the Western front of the war. In an attempt to raise morale, the government commissioned Sir Hubert Parry to put Blake's words to music. The hymn known as 'Jerusalem' was born.
10 Parry's hymn quickly became an unofficial anthem of Britain & the British Empire. It communicated the sense of Britain as a divinely favoured land, a New Jerusalem in the making.
11 William Massey was NZ's PM during World War One. He was a British Israelite, & he saw the slaughter in Europe not as meaningless but as part of the work of god's empire. Tens of thousands of NZers shared Massey's beliefs.
12 British Israelism continued after the war. The Brian Tamaki of the '30s was Arthur Dallimore, a faith healer who often filled Auckland's town hall. Dallimore built his own church, using proportions he derived from the Giza pyramid, & proclaimed Edward VIII the bride of Christ.
13 During the '35 & '38 election campaigns, Peter Fraser used Blake's image of a 'green & pleasant land' in speeches. The line would likely have had a very strong & very specific resonance. It would have appealed to pan-British sentiment, & to notions of British exceptionalism.
14 Some of Fraser's defenders on twitter have suggested that because he was a Scot he would not have sympathised with Britain, & that he was using Blake to evoke an autarkic South Seas socialist utopia. But by the '30s Fraser was far more pro-Britain than many of his colleagues.
15 As I noted in a piece for the Spinoff earlier this year, senior figures in Labour, notably Walter Nash, were surprisingly friendly, in the '30s, with Nazi Germany, & hostile to notions of an armed confrontation b/n the empire & Hitler. Fraser was not amongst this group.
16 Fraser was also out of sympathy, in the late '30s, with the group of nationalist Labour MPs led by John A Lee, who wanted to take a hard line with the British banks who were owed huge sums by NZ. & as PM during World War Two Fraser again defied nationalist colleagues.
17 When Japan entered the war & NZ seemed in existential danger, many NZers felt that the country's armed forces should be recalled from the northern hemisphere, where they were doing Britain's bidding. Fraser refused these calls.
18 All in all, I think Grant Robertson could have found a better line to quote. P'haps, if he wanted to evoke some local pride, he could have turned to Split Enz's famous lyric, in which these islands 'glisten like a pearl/ at the bottom of the world'?
