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NZ Herald
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Work Of Art: What Goes Into Bringing Historic Art To Tāmaki Makaurau?
With work from some of the world's most famous painters coming to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki this June for new exhibition A Century Of Modern Art, co-ordinating curator Dr Sophie Matthiesson talks to Emma Gleason about what makes this show so special. Monet, Degas, van Gogh and Renoir
Newsroom
26-04-2025
- General
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: The Anzac who terrified his family
On a tattered Red Cross map, four nearly-straight pencil lines track north from Capua, near Naples, to Chavari then Ubine. From here, over the border to Breslau in what was then German-occupied Poland, then on to Lübeck, north-east of Hamburg. Above each line a single handwritten word – 'Train', 'Train', 'Train', 'Walk' The map of World War II prisoner of war camps, a pencilled circle marking Stalag VIII-A, is all we have of my father's whereabouts as a POW between 1941 and 1945, an impersonal graphic for a four-year term of incarceration that would shadow the next 35 years of his life with its unforgettable but largely unspoken memories. At war's end, over 8000 former prisoners of war returned to New Zealand. Many came back to fiancées, wives, old jobs, new families – in 1947, a record number of nearly 50,000 births was registered – but many also returned with their blasted memories, nightmares and flashbacks. Inexplicable to families, frightening for children. Mary Kisler begins her memoir Dark Dad with a story as a child, cowering in her bed with her mother. Her father, Jack Arnott, the 'Dark Dad' of the title, looms in the doorway: 'In my mind, he roars like a bull, but my mother knows he will not come closer while her children are there to protect her … Only once does the dark dad cross the threshold, and in an instant we are out the narrow window, leaving the metal hasp dangling.' Dark Dad roars, gets drunk, throws plates, rips the wig off his daughter's new doll. On one occasion, when he pushes a lit cigarette into her mother's eye: 'We climb over the low fence to our neighbours' house, and they tuck us into bed.' Kisler and her siblings know their father had been hurt in battle – he keeps a shard of shrapnel dug out of his leg. But his psychological injuries are more nebulous. While he tells his children about his time in Egypt, 'he said almost nothing about his time in the camps, apart from describing the death of a fellow prisoner who was shot when trying to make a dash for freedom. His body was left to hang on the wire as a salutary lesson to others.' Kisler is an art historian and curator. For years she brought her indefatigable curiosity, her knowledge, her unashamed delight in discovery to her regular slot on Kim Hill's RNZ Saturday morning programme discussing historic art. After co-editing Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys with Catherine Hammond, Kisler, then senior curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, tracked Hodgkins' peripatetic travels across England, Wales, France, Spain, Morocco and the Netherlands. She must have been around 70 as she negotiated precipitous French trains, precarious pathways and a dodgy Fiat to find the exact cafe, street or bay that Hodgkins used in her art. The resulting book, Finding Frances Hodgkins, is a dedication not only to Hodgkins but also to the author's unrelenting determination to pursue her subject. Here, she brings again this exhaustive curiosity, this determination to put her feet on the ground, to the story of her father, the man who talked little, who fell into dark moods and drunkenness, who, when he died in Auckland's Mercy Hospice 1987 (the date is also given as 1978), was 'propped upright, like a Baroque painting of the death of Saint Jerome.' Kisler is a thorough guide. She traces her father's family from Scotland to Tasmania before grandfather Bill leaves the Plymouth Brethren fold to go to Dunedin, promptly followed by his 'sweetheart' Frances. When Frances became pregnant, Bill knows it is his brother's child she is carrying. They marry, so avoiding a family scandal, but Bill does not forget or forgive: 'Bill never lost any opportunity to beat my father's bastardy into him; he would sit on his chest and strike him across the face, yelling that he was no child of his.' Kisler follows the family to Milton where, at the age of 13, her father leaves school to become a labourer, building roads in Central Otago then the West Coast before finding work with the new Fulton Hogan company back in Milton. He enlists at the outbreak of war and in 1940, a week before his 26th birthday, arrives at the Papakura Military Camp. It's here that he meets Kisler's mother, Margaret Ethelwyn Gray, or 'Ewie', one of five children born into a 'clever, literary family'; an anxious, anorexic teenager; a 'highly sensitive, warm-hearted woman'. In August that year, the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, 33rd Battery, 6th Brigade, including Arnott, gather in Wellington to sail for Egypt. Amongst the well-wishers is his mother's brother, who decides now is the time to tell his nephew who his father was: 'The shocking news that his father was George Arnott can only have added to my father's underlying sense of unworthiness.' Over 80 years later, Kisler tracks her father's journey, from Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal to Cairo and Maadi Camp, where the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF, or 'The Div') is under the command of British-born New Zealander General Bernard Freyberg. Kisler is meticulous in describing the camp layout – bakery, rugby ground, ramshackle cinema – and the egalitarianism insisted by Freyberg within the camp (and the allure of Cairo's red light district outside the camp). But, as she does throughout this book, she also stops to admire the beauty of early-morning light, 'picking out the pleated rock face of the hill behind the camp, and the violet shadows dancing across the dun-coloured dunes at dusk'. There are grainy black and white photos: her father, now a dispatch rider, wearing a full uniform and lemon squeezer hat; her father and an army mate sharing a beer in Cairo, 'A little light refreshment, what', written on the back; a two-pounder gun en portée belonging to the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment. She follows him to Greece where the 6th Infantry Brigade is tasked with defending the coastal portion of the Aliakmon defensive line. The Allies take a pounding. Two hundred and ninety-one men die, 599 are wounded, 1614 are taken prisoner. Arnott's Regiment returns to Egypt where it becomes embroiled in the bloody Battle of Sidi Rezegh during Operation Crusader, part of the Western Desert campaign against the Axis forces in North Africa commanded by Lieutenant-General Rommel. Kisler's father is one of the approximately 2000 men taken prisoner. From here, she uses her father's military record and a rudimentary grasp of Italian to draw her own pencil lines through the Italian camps where her father was held. Campo PG (Prigione de Guerra) 66 in Capua under Lieutenant-Colonel Guglielmo Nicoletti – 'middle-aged, squat, deeply unattractive and a thug'. PG 52 in Chiavari (or Pian di Coreglia), the only Italian camp site Kisler is unable to visit. PG 57 at Gruppignano, a new camp not far from the Austrian border under Commandant Vittorio Calcaterra – a 'short-arsed, fat-gutted little shit'. Then to the Ampezzo work camp, PG 103/6, high in the mountains. Each camp is a variation on lack of running water, food scarcity, overcrowding, disease, punishments for minor offences. Despite the 'gallant slant' adopted by prisoners in their letters home – 'It all seemed jolly hockey sticks, as if they were describing their time at boarding school or holiday camp' – the toll of incarceration is evident. Some prisoners 'crack'. Others play bizarre imaginary games to wish themselves far from the camps. Again, Kisler pauses. She notes the dome of the Church of Santa Maria of the Nuns near Capua, the constant rustling of beech leaves and the burbling rush of the Lumiei river in Ampezzo. In Gruppignano she describes the rust-tinted leaves on the vines, small gardens 'frothy with weeds'. Still, 'I was overwhelmed with grief, for if it is possible for the earth to retain human misery then it does so at Gruppignano.' A telegram to her son from the author's grandmother. The armistice document of September 8, 1943 required all UN prisoners to be turned over to the Allies but only 339 of the approximately 3700 New Zealanders in Italy crossed to the Allied lines. Many more faced the harrowing train journey into Germany. After stopping at an overcrowded transit camp near Hanover, Arnott is sent to Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony. As in other camps, Arnott would have been sent out to nearby work sites. Camp conditions are deteriorating, food supplies dwindling. By October 1944, she writes, many prisoners were on the brink of starvation. From here, Kisler's footsteps falter: 'Almost everything I have gleaned about my father's time in Germany has come from external sources, either official or from other prisoners' recollections. It is as if he simply disappeared, and the man who emerged at liberation was a very different being.' Kisler's father was in Fallingbostel on April 16, 1945 when American forces take the town and the tanks of the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars roll in. The released prisoners, including 8400 New Zealand POWs, are sent to a transit centre in Brussels before being flown to England for a period of recuperation. The men's physical health improves but many are haunted by their experiences. Emotional problems, the British War Office stated, 'are disproportionately severe in men who have been prisoners for more than eighteen months … Planning the rehabilitation of these men demands particular care — Not soft handling, but different handling.' By the time Arnott returns to New Zealand, 'People had been advised not to ask questions and women were expected to make the best of any difficult situation.' On September 29, 1945, he and Ethelwyn Gray are married. But Arnott is unsettled. While war trained you to suppress your fears in the face of the enemy, writes Kisler, 'it didn't train you to deal with the peace that followed'. Without the comradeship of the war or any public acknowledgement of their experiences (some were accused of cowardice), these estranged, silenced men soldier on, 'sometimes creating havoc in their wake'. With a level gaze, an unemotive lens, Kisler reveals the cost of this 'soldiering on'. It is a memorable, plain-speaking book of dogged research, understanding and acceptance. Acceptance of the deep well of unexpressed horror, of the forbearance of their wives and partners, of the child who lay in bed at night whispering, 'Please, please, Mum, don't argue with him.' The Dark Dad by Mary Kisler (Massey University Press, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.
