Waiting for a Book

Scott Hamilton

Aotearoan media and social media are abuzz with speculation about Nicky Hager's forthcoming book. Hager's publishers Potton and Burton have not disclosed the book's name, let alone its subject. All will be revealed tonight, at Wellington's Unity Bookshop. Previous Hager volumes have arrived shortly before elections, and destabilised governments with claims about crimes and cover ups.

Journalist Philip Matthews joked on social media that 'some people are going to be very disappointed' if Hager's new book is a collection of poetry, or the story of 'two penguins who fall in love'. 

But Nicky Hager hasn't always published politically charged books. Early in his career he produced a long 'working paper' called 'The Origins of Signals Intelligence in NZ'. It's fascinating, gritty history, and it can be downloaded for free from the website of the Disarmament and Security Centre. Hager describes the establishment of radar stations in NZ during World War Two and the efforts of chain-smoking men and women in cold huts to crack Japanese and German codes. The peculiarities of geography and technology suddenly brought events like the Battle of the Atlantic close. British subs and ships sometimes found it necessary to send messages home via the transmission station at Musick Point, in East Auckland, and their orders often came by the same route. 

Hager was interested in this history because it presaged the development of much more sophisticated technology like the American spy base in Waihopai. His work on signals stations continues the tradition of extra-academic, activist research created by Owen Wilkes. Both Wilkes and Hager were 'peacemongers', who supplied the information they gathered to opponents of facilities like Waihopai and of New Zealand's military and intelligence alliances with America and Britain. But good research can be useful to anyone, regardless of their political opinions, and Hager's work on signal stations reveals him to be a solid scholar, who is able to mine obscure primary sources, relate them to the secondary literature, and lay his findings out clearly.

A century ago a British soldier-scholar brought out a long-awaited book, and queues gathered outside shops. TE Lawrence's huge The Seven Pillars of Wisdom described the guerrilla war he had fought in Arabia a decade earlier. He had been working on the book for seven years, and had twice lost the manuscript. But in the years after 1926 many copies of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom turned up in second-hand bookshops. They were often in pristine condition. Lawrence was more admired than read. 

I was living in Nuku'alofa in 2013, when John Thomas' massive History of Tonga was finally published. Thomas was the austere and intolerant Wesleyan who converted Taufa'ahau, the country's first modern king. He had written the book by hand in the decade before his death in 1881. A queue of the faithful formed at the Friendly Islands Bookshop. My landlady stood in that queue, and later proudly showed me her copy of Thomas' tome. I noticed that she hadn't bothered removing it from its plastic wrapper. 

A History of Tonga should have been called A History of Thomas. The book focused almost exclusively on its author's work as a missionary, and featured long, repetitive denunciations of 'heathens' and 'Papists'. I suspect that the only people who read the book carefully are those who want to turn it into a weapon against Thomas' legacy. I'm one of those people, and so is Visesio Siasau. Sio and I pored over A History of Tonga, focusing on the bits and pieces of precious information it offered about the country's pre-Christian culture and religion. Thomas described the godhouses where shamans lived, the exquisite carvings of the deity Hikule'o, and the dances and songs that he found obscene and tried to ban. For Visesio, an artist whose work tries to revive and celebrate Tonga's pre-Christian culture, the book was a valuable resource. Like many missionary polemicists, Thomas had ultimately helped preserve what he sought to destroy.

Not all eagerly awaited books go unread. For many years Ludwig Wittgenstein resisted publishing the new ideas that drew philosophers from around the world to the room in Cambridge where he lectured. Some of those who heard Wittgenstein resorted to transcribing and publishing his words. Wittgenstein was bootlegged long before Dylan. The Blue Book and the Brown Book, so named because of their original covers, were transcriptions of Wittgenstein lectures published unofficially. They had a wider readership and more influence than most officially published books of philosophy.

After Wittgenstein died his former student Elizabeth Anscombe had the job of arranging the thousands of scraps paper he left behind into books. A crowd gathered at Cambridge one day in 1953 when word got around that Philosophical Investigations had arrived from the printers.  In Fly and Fly Bottle, his wry account of the hothouse world of British linguistic philosophy, Ved Mehta describes the almost hysterical excitement that day. After word came that they were waiting outside the wrong bookstore, the crowd went charging towards another. 'This truly is the pursuit of knowledge!' a don puffed to Mehta as they rushed along the cobblestones.

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