1989. Eleven years later in the Catlins, at the southernmost coast of the South Island, our little family was on holiday. Francis, then aged four, ran ahead of us to discover the forest. In 1989 I was a doctoral student and aspiring church historian. On returning to this enchanted place, I had an experience of the numinous. I sensed the antiquity of the podocarp forest, its darkness and beauty. Instead of the flame flickering in the sanctuary, symbolising divine presence, there were frozen flames,³ totara ravaged by woman.⁴ Light poured through a filigree of branches, rather than through stained glass windows. The bush canopy became a living reliquary for the creatures of the forest. Rata, rather than pohutakawa, blazed.

Given my years as a university teacher in Religious Studies and membership of S. Michael & All Angels, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Christchurch with a rich heritage,⁵ I recognised the signs of sacred space. Passing back through South Otago, we breathed in the wide, open spaces. At Brighton Beach, where James K. Baxter played as a boy, I breathed in the southern ocean. After the experience of open space, every limitation of God’s presence in the world grated. Back

Yet on this Sunday, the congregation sang responsively with the choir from Psalm 96: “Sing a new song unto the Lord for he lives in holiness and glory.” Like all people of faith, we live in the gap between the “literature of aspiration” and popular piety. I wanted to bridge that gap and quickly identified seven ways in which our worship could be made more human, and more divine. Taking my cue from the liturgy, and thinking of both the rata in the bush canopy and the Hebrew prophets, I asked: “Where is this God, before whom the threshold of the temple shakes? Has God, and God’s glory,

departed the sanctuary?”

Were more hymns, evoking this land and place, the answer? St Michael’s was not known for its hospitality to contemporary hymns. Over the years, our organists have preferred the tried and proven. Some members of the choir claimed that none of the hymns by New Zealand’s best- known hymn writers, like Colin Gibson and Shirley Murray, could stand comparison with the great hymns of the past.⁶ After a year’s full-time poetry writing and editing, I found that I too was more critical of

could create a distinctive voice. I yearned to hear music in the poetry – subtle word plays, assonance, alliteration, and variation of pace – and poetry in the music. If David danced before the ark of the covenant, in ecstatic holy joy, why should our hymns not dance, from time to time? Why should exuberance evoke immediate fears that high church Anglicans were turning “Charismatic” or becoming red-hot “Penties” and might start speaking in tongues at any moment?

Our vicar, the Venerable Peter Williams, asked me to comb the best contemporary hymnals for suitable hymns for S. Michael’s. A bird’s eye view of New Zealand hymn writing confirmed that trends in contemporary poetry held sway in the church. In most of the hymns, there was a paring back of any lushness in language, a distrust of metaphor, and a rejection of the anthropomorphic. Colin Gibson’s “dolphin Christ’ was an exception.⁷ On the other hand, quaint archaisms from the 1930s, long since eliminated in poetry, survived in our hymns, particularly in Christmas carols. In a substitution exercise, pohutakawa took the place of holly and ivy.⁸ The process of indigenization had a strong North Island flavour, and few South

Islanders seemed to regard this as intellectual colonization. Much like the “Georgian” poets of the 1920s,⁹ some contemporary hymn writers seemed to take a “motif” approach to nature, resulting in a certain sentimentality. James K. Baxter had written his “Song to the Holy Spirit”, but it was never intended to be sung.¹⁰

The events, which started with Francis dancing on top of Mt Herbert, were completely unexpected. I continued to compose the hymns I yearned to sing. In six weeks I had drafted the words and music for six more hymns. Some were universal in character, others distinctly local. Land and people sing, based on Baxter’s “Song to the Holy Spirit”, integrated parts of my life that hitherto had remained separate, in particular my love since childhood of the Canterbury landscape, seen through the eyes of painters like William Sutton (1917-2000), Doris Lusk(1916-1990), and Rita Angus (1908-1970).

Heartened by the response of parishioners and visitors at S. Michael’s, where some of our hymns were sung for the first time, Bill and I decided to make them more widely available. The main publisher of new hymns and songs by New Zealanders, the New Zealand Hymnbook Trust, releases a new spiral-bound collection about every five years. Faith Forever Singing had just come out.¹¹ We were not prepared to wait five years.

As the choir librarian at St Michael’s, Bill was aware that new music can be released for congregational use without delay through the worldwide web. The internet provides a range of downloadable church music resources, from simple accompaniment files (MIDI) and samples of new work sung by choirs on CD-quality clips (MP3) to sheet music. With our own website in mind, we attended a three week business course at the Christchurch Small Business Enterprise stopped going to church many years ago were enthusiastic about Tussocks Dancing and our ideas to write new hymns to celebrate major life events,

Our prototype website was set up by a school leaver, Anselm Williams. Since the full website was launched on Easter Day 2001, people from all over the world have visited www.godzonehymns.com and made high-quality prints of the music for Tussocks Dancing, our gift song. Some people also listened to the MIDI files for the nine other hymns and songs in our first collection. Our Godzone Hymns Music Copyright Licence enables a church, school, chaplaincy, community choir or other group to make unlimited copies of a music set for their own use upon payment of a one-off fee.

Hundreds of press releases emailed to church newspaper editors in New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Canada and the UK resulted in 10,000 hits in less than a month. This newest hymns website developed by a New Zealand couple seemed to capture the imagination. Many short and long articles were printed, particularly in Anglican newspapers and websites. We hoped that the sample of the lyrics and MIDI piano or organ accompaniment for each hymn

Bill and I started to visit local churches with our music, making appointments to see the Music Director in the first instance. Some made the time to see us, making valuable suggestions for new hymns. For instance, after a visit to the large and thriving St Christopher’s Anglican Church, Avonhead, Christchurch, I wrote an Offertory hymn especially for that community, Give our Gifts. It has been very warmly received. More often than not, Music Directors were far too busy to spend time getting to know new hymns and songs.

When a technician friend and our website developer suggested we record a CD to make the music accessible to people in congregations who weren’t musicians, it no longer seemed so outrageous. Our new music must

Based on seeing the sheet music, the Music Director of TV1’s “Praise Be”, Peter Averi, decided to record Poiema Voices singing Tussocks Dancing and five of my earliest hymns. The intensive rehearsals and experience of singing for television prepared us for recording the thirteen newest hymns I had written, working with Christchurch musicians Barry Brinson, Denis Guyan and Peter Low on the final published arrangements. With these recordings completed, we had enough material for a full CD.

Tussocks Dancing was launched at a concert at S. Michael’s Church on 5 October. All 22 hymn-texts are printed in the CD booklet, unlike most New Zealand hymn CDs. The collection is introduced by Emeritus Professor Colin Gibson, one of this country’s leading hymn writers. People recovering from illness, those who are grieving the loss of a loved one, and those outside the church have all found the music uplifting.

The CD is being sold by internet and mail order within and beyond New Zealand. With the release of Tussocks Dancing, perhaps we will start to see a “reverse colonisation” of hymns from New Zealand back to the old centres from which our church-music traditions sprang.

Endnotes
1. This article was originally published in an earlier version as: Jane Simpson, “Tussocks Dancing: the Story of One of the Newest Hymns from New Zealand,” Vashti’s Voices 2 no.8 (Autumn 2001): 14-17. [includes the sheet music of Tussocks Dancing]

2. Hone Tuwhare (b.1922), Ngä Puhi, is best known for his highly personal and, at times, political poetry. On Tuwhare’s practice of reading his new work to friends on the phone, even on their answering machines, see Janet Hunt, Hone Tuwhare: a Biography (Auckland: Godwit, 1998), 174.

3. See Christopher Perkins (1891-1968), Frozen Flames, 1931, oil on canvas, Auckland Art Gallery; and Michael Dunn, A Concise History of New Zealand Painting (Auckland: David Bateman, Roseville East, N.S.W.: Craftsman House, 1991), 72-76 and his “Frozen Flame & Slain Tree: the Dead Tree Theme in New Zealand Art of the Thirties and Forties,” Art New Zealand, no.13 (1979): 40-45.

4. On the forest remnants that have survived “the onslaught of man”, see Rhys Buckingham & John
Hall-Jones, The Catlins: Guidebook to the Catlins and Surrounding Districts (Invercargill: The Department of Conservation, 1987), 17-33.

5. See Marie Peters, Christchurch – St Michael’s: a Study in Anglicanism in New Zealand, 1851 – 1972 (Christchurch: The University of Canterbury, 1986). The literary figures Ngaio Marsh, Allen Curnow and James K. Baxter all worshipped at S. Michael’s for a time, 184-85.

6. See Colin Gibson, Singing Love: a Collection of New Hymns, Songs & Carols for Today's Church, (London/Auckland: Collins Liturgical, 1988); Shirley Murray, In Every Corner Sing: the Hymns of Shirley Erena Murray, (2nd ed., Carol Stream, Il.: Hope Pub. Co., 1992) [1st ed. Wellington: S.
Murray, c.1987].

7. Colin Gibson, “Where the Road Runs Out,” in Singing Love (1988), 16-17.

8. See Colin Gibson, “Mapping the New Zealand Landscape: a Survey of the Hymnic Tradition”, in Emilsen, Susan and Emilsen, William W. (eds), Mapping the Landscape: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ian Breward, Series, American University Studies IX, History, v.193 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 238-54.

10. James K. Baxter, “Song to the Holy Spirit,” [1973], in Weir, John (ed.), Collected Poems / James K. Baxter, repr. with corrections, (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1995), 572.

11. See John Thornley, ‘The New Zealand Hymnbook Trust: an Introduction’, Stimulus, vol.8 no.4 (November 2000), pp.21-24.

Dr Jane Simpson is an historian, poet and composer, and was the first tenured woman lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury (1993-1999). Since then she has concentrated on writing. Her first poetry collection, Candlewick Kelp, was published this year.