Summer reading: Nine lives that made history

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Vaughan Yarwood: The History Makers

Random House

$34.95


Their images are around us all the time: the man who knocked Everest off and is still knocking around, Edmund Hillary, adorns the $5 note.

Adventurous aviator Jean Batten is memorialised at Auckland's international airport and in eponymous schools and streets.

But memory is a notoriously faulty instrument and time smothers detail; so often our famous forebears become, in our minds, people of stature but no personality.

And that's where Yarwood's book is valuable. It offers a realistic, palatably pithy glimpse of nine people whose achievements, famous and infamous, have shaped New Zealand and how we see ourselves.

Rotorua-born Jean Batten (1909-1982) was a supremely talented navigator in the golden age of adventure flight in the 1920s and 30s, but her obsession left little room for self-awareness or other people, apart from her strong-willed, anti-man mother, Ellen.

"Even as a mature woman with a string of achievements to her name," writes Yarwood, "Jean often gave the impression of being in the lee of her formidable mother - sheltered yet stifled, overprotected. In a state of permanent surrender."

Jean tended to be cold, ego-driven and mercenary, especially towards the men who, dazzled by her allure, often financed her record attempts - and hoped marriage would be their reward.

Batten said seaplanes skimming Auckland harbour first gave her the desire to fly: "The little seaplane would skim across the water throwing up a curtain of spray and rose like a seabird into the blue sky. At such moments as I watched spellbound I experienced such a surge of exhilaration that I felt quite sick with longing to be up there in it."

Her first attempt to be the first woman to fly from England to Australia, in a Gypsy Moth biplane, ended with a crash in India. A crash in Italy ended the second.

By then dubbed the "Try-Again Girl" by the press, Batten reached Darwin on her third attempt, her 16-stop, 14-day trip wiping four days off the record. She cabled Ellen in England: "DARLING, WE'VE DONE IT. THE AEROPLANE, YOU, ME."

Batten continued to smash records, gaining the high-society adulation she so craved.

But as flight became more commonplace - World War II accelerated its development - the adventure flyer in goggles and scarf became an anachronism.

Batten disappeared off the radar, sharing her domestic life with only her mother in various parts of the world.

She would eventually die aged 73, alone and forgotten on the Spanish island of Majorca, to be buried in a concrete-walled pauper's pit with 149 other bodies.

Her fate was discovered four years later by her biographer, Ian Mackersey.

Batten had stubbornly refused to seek treatment for a dogbite, whose consequences became fatal.

BATTEN is not the only flyer in Yarwood's book, or the only local hero whose life ended ignominiously.

Eccentric inventor Richard Pearse (1877-1953), the first person in the British Empire to make a powered takeoff, also died alone and forgotten - in Christchurch's Sunnyside psychiatric hospital.

But the book isn't just about New Zealanders - alongside Hillary, Batten, Pearse, 19th century Governor George Grey, dinosaur-hunter Joan Wiffen, poet James K. Baxter and naturalist Herbert Guthrie-Smith are French nun Suzanne Aubert and World War I German "sea-devil" Count Felix von Luckner (1881-1965), the Hauraki Gulf's most famous prisoner of war.

Von Luckner's tale reads like something out of a boys' action adventure - which explains why he became something of a dashing international celebrity afterwards.

He captained the steel-hulled square-rigger Seeadler (sea eagle), which raided Allied merchant shipping while disguised as a Norwegian timber vessel.

Seeadler and her crew sank 86,000 tonnes of shipping, mostly off the coast of South America; von Luckner boasted that he never caused a death. But his raiding came to an end when the boat was destroyed near the uninhabited island of Mopelia in the Society Islands.

Luckner and 48 American prisoners, marooned in paradise, salvaged what they could. "The Americans," writes Yarwood, "who proved adept as castaways, built a separate town for themselves, naming its streets Broadway, The Bowery, Pennsylvania Ave. The imperial German flag flew from the highest palm over this, the last German colony in history."

Von Luckner soon grew impatient. The Seeadler's whaleboat was prepared for action, his plan to take a crew of five, capture a vessel, return for the others and resume a life of buccaneering.

But they were snared after making an arduous trip to Wakaya Island, 18km from Levuka in Fiji.

A 33-year-old New Zealand customs officer serving with the Fijian police in Levuka, Harry Hills, was tipped off that an odd-looking boat had arrived, its occupants' English strangely accented.

Hills sailed out and bluffed von Luckner into giving up, saying that another boat in the harbour had its guns trained on him.

In reality, it had no guns; Hills, sounding more confident than he felt, had his hand on an empty service revolver, backed by Fijians wielding bayonets.

Von Luckner had a hidden cache of a machinegun, 5000 rounds of ammunition, six pistols, six rifles and hand grenades. And he was thoroughly indignant when he found he had been duped.

He next washed up at Motuihe's internment camp, full of German nationals living in New Zealand at the outbreak of war and others captured in the Pacific.

It was a "happy little camp", according to a guard of the time: the war never seemed to enter that kind of place.

Yarwood writes that the Germans had their own cookhouse, and would offer coffee and freshly baked cake to the sentry each morning. The prisoners were allowed visitors from the mainland, and were readily granted permission to stroll around the island.

Von Luckner's escape, just weeks after he arrived, was aided by laughable purchasing systems at the camp, writes Yarwood.

"Whenever the prisoners needed something from Auckland, they filled out a requisition form, leaving a space at the bottom. Once the commandant had signed it, they added copper wire, fine canvas, solder or whatever else was wanted.

"The commandant's launch, the fulcrum of the escape plan, had for weeks plied the waters of Auckland harbour with all manner of munitions and spare engine parts concealed in its bulkheads."

The end of the year was approaching. Von Luckner suggested the inmates stage a Christmas play, the busy preparations for which were to be used as an effective smokescreen.

A fire broke out in a barracks one night. Von Luckner was seen in the thick of it. As the dust settled, it was discovered that he and 10 others had got away in the camp's own launch, cutting the telephone line to Auckland on their way.

The boat held a home-made sextant made from an old launch steering wheel. Bombs had been fabricated from a cache of explosives left over from roadworks on the island. Camp chickens had been surreptitiously despatched and canned.

After five days at sea and four days before Christmas, the boat was captured in the Kermadecs. Von Luckner was interned at Mt Eden Prison, then Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour, before returning to Motuihe.

When the war ended on November 18, 1918, he was on the verge of yet another escape attempt. Before heading back to Germany, he showed guards a camouflaged dugout in the side of a dry riverbed stocked with clothes, food and weapons. His Hun foxiness, as one report of the time put it, was undimmed.

HOWEVER, not all of the book's profiles deliver such ripping yarns, or on their promise. The History Makers is essentially a home for various personal forays Yarwood, a history MA, has written over the past decade or so for the magazine New Zealand Geographic, some of which are more about place rather than person.

Hence, no doubt, the subtitle Adventures in New Zealand Biography. To call each piece biography would be misleading.

Yarwood's piece about dinosaur-hunter Joan Wiffen's years of romancing the bone, for example, is less about her than palaeontology in New Zealand. If there were ever obstacles in her way, we never hear. In biography we want to know the humdrum, the ordinary, as well as what makes people extraordinary.

Yarwood also commits a sin against biography and journalism by not giving us an update on Wiffen, given that the piece about her was written in 1993. Is Wiffen alive or dead? For the record, she's still alive and in her 80s.

There are other irritations: why are captions for the pictures scattered throughout the text wodged together at the end of the piece? Flipping pages to match pictures and captions distracts and detracts.

This sort of recycling might make for fast-turn-around publishing, but in some ways it deprives the reader. It's an eclectic rather than representative collection; there are no Maori history-makers, for example.

However, Yarwood writes thoughtfully and entertainingly, and his take on these people and their achievements offers a grab-bag way to get a grip on New Zealand's history without resorting to sometimes-daunting full-length biographies.

We need to know about these people and their times. After all, how do we know where we're going if we don't know where we've been?