Diagramming the Historical Construction

1. Mateship

"Colonial mateship was founded initially upon the needs of the work situation. From the earliest, Pakeha men formed themselves naturally into groups. Sailors arrived in groups; the whalers unable to capture whales alone organized themselves into parties-at first of five oars to a boat, increasingly of six or seven. These boats would then compete for the final capture. The goldminers were renowned for their "independence," their insistence on calling no man master, but from the first rushes, miners found it to their advantage to combine with one or two mates. It became easier to guard the claim and increased the chance of a lucky find. Subsequently, as the technology became more complex, the building of long aqueducts and tail-races made it even more likely that the miners would combine into parties. The solitary miner was always to be found on the fields but the pressures of work were likely to push him into partnership. In the sheep districts there were lonely jobs, especially boundary-watching, but much of the work depended on collective action-most notably shearing, mustering or droving. In the bush areas the felling of trees and the subsequent pit-sawing demanded a trusting teamwork. Those who lived a more itinerant life on the road found that safety often came with a mate.

"Even if men did not actually work together, frontier conditions often forced them into close comradeship. When living in temporary or make-shift housing, they found it easier to combine accommodation and cooking. Inevitably, isolated from the amusements of town, they were forced to find their relaxation in the companionship of men. Unmarried women were not usually found on the frontier; anyway, before marriage the relations between men and women were distinctly restricted. Most men in colonial New Zealand were unlikely to find much emotional support or friendship from relatives. Usually siblings and parents were left behind in Britain while the itinerant lifestyle and the extreme isolation of frontier New Zealand would have severed any remaining family ties. In this absence, colonial men were forced to look for solace, encouragement and mutual aid to other similarly isolated men.....

"[Mateship] was rarely a passionate and enduring friendship between two men that extended over a lifetime. The unstable and dangerous nature of frontier employment and the itinerant character of the men themselves meant that friendships between men were frequently disrupted. Instead, mateship was a relationship of circumstance. Living and working in the same locality, men would be drawn into comradeship, loyalty and dependence by the situation at that time. The relationship between two men might not last long, but while it did it would be continuous and, therefore, intense in its own way. Yet, mates were somehow interchangeable. When one moved on, another would fill the place." [16]

One couldn't go it alone on the sea, on the frontier, or in the bush. Too many jobs needed more than two hands. Men took mates easily, but mateship had to be limited because it was inherently dangerous (if one assumes that men can't trust their sexuality or emotions), and it was limited in three ways.

Limit #1 was the necessarily transient character of mateship. This is particularly descriptive of Barry Crump's A Good Keen Man.

2. Compulsory Heterosexuality

3. Homophobia

All three of these limits upon mateship come as a package. They form a sort of Australasian Trinitarian Creed (Tacey, 1993, 250). They are also the source of the myth that New Zealand is a classless society, for in theory, mates are unconscious of class distinction. But as a package they are also misogynist, sexist, and repressive, making victims ultimately not only of women and gays, but also of heterosexual men (see Sargeson, 1964, 124ff and 157ff).

4. Anti-intellectualism And Inarticulateness

Education is deemed useless, and useless is feminine, therefore education is feminine (Jensen, 1996, 35). For many of the Men Alone, religion also was seen as effeminate and so to be shunned, in spite of the efforts of Muscular Christianity to draw them in (Belich, 1996, 438).

5. Sexual conquest

6. Siring children

7. Drinking

8. Rugby

9. Risk

The next three characteristics go together, as an extension of the search for a safe place:

10. Aggression

11. Guardedness

12. Siege Mentality

13. Male Abuse I - The Complimentary Insult

14. Male Abuse II - The Demeaning Insult

15. Female Abuse

16. Physique and Self-Esteem

17. Work

18. Shame

19. Alexithymia

To be emotionally literate, then, means being effeminate. Emotional illiteracy is one way of playing The Family Man role without being fully present-"I'm all here except for my feelings." Alexithymia connects to the unresolved grief of the historical primal wound, as well as to inarticulateness and anti-intellectualism, and thus to mateship, compulsory heterosexuality, and homophobia.

So we have come full circle, and we realize how each of the component parts reinforces the other. But this in turn makes deconstruction simpler (though probably not easier): dismantling one part automatically weakens all the other parts. In the long run, however, weakening the structure doesn't necessarily release its grip. We may claim that the construct is crumbling around the edges, but freeing ourselves from its dictates still demands a lot of intentional choices.

Belich and Phillips claim that the traditional construct began to fall apart in the 1970s, due to a variety of causes, including the change in liquor laws, the rise of feminism, growing economic prosperity, increased urban migration, the introduction of sports professionalism, society's response to the soldiers returning from Viet Nam, and the availability of more and more television shows and movies from all over the world, bringing new values and new images of masculinity. It might be claimed, then, that beginning in the 1970s, the Pakeha "mythic masculine" was driven out of the middle class and into the working class. But others would claim that it has simply gone underground, even in Auckland. In any case, it is still creating victims, both male and female. This will be the case until a new pantheon of masculinity models are blessed by society.[30]