The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune

Description

Title: The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune
Author: John Newton
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2009
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent — unread, tiny mark on outer edge.

Description:

In 1969 James K. Baxter walked barefoot to Jerusalem on the Whanganui River, adopted the name Hemi, and began building a community under the mana of the local hapū, Ngāti Hau. What followed became the most famous commune in New Zealand history: part spiritual experiment, part refuge for the dispossessed, part media spectacle and the setting for the poems — Jerusalem Sonnets, Jerusalem Daybook, Autumn Testament — that many consider the finest work of his life.

The standard story puts Baxter at the centre of it. John Newton’s book is something else: a reconstruction of Jerusalem from the inside out, built from the testimonies of those who were actually there. Baxter’s followers. The people of Ngāti Hau who lived beside the commune, under whose mana it operated, and whose lives were complicated and sometimes overwhelmed by the constant stream of damaged young Pakeha arriving from the cities. The story of what it meant to them — not just to the poet — is what makes this book genuinely new.

Newton’s argument is that Jerusalem was not a dead end or a footnote. It was an early prototype, built ten years before biculturalism became official policy, of what it might actually look like for Māori and Pakeha to do something together on Māori terms. “When Māori and Pakeha do these things together,” Baxter wrote, “the double rainbow begins to shine.”

The book contains photographs of the commune and of Baxter’s tangi by Ans Westra — one of New Zealand’s most important documentary photographers, whose camera had already turned its unsentimental eye on Māori life in Washday at the Pa (1964). Her photographs here are the visual record of a moment that would otherwise exist only in memory and myth.

Gordon Campbell, writing in Metro, called it “an early prototype of the bicultural struggles New Zealand society is still engaged in.” Peter Simpson in the NZ Herald called it “an important book.” Alex Calder in the Journal of New Zealand Literature called it “a book of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.”

Why We Stock It:

Baxter is one of the central figures in New Zealand literature and this is the book that shines more light on the myth of Jerusalem — from the river, from the hapū, from the people who were cold and hungry and trying to build something without a blueprint. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand either the poet or the place.