Charles Brasch and Broad Bay

The following is a transcription of a talk by Alan Roddick to the visiting Australian Studies Abroad group, 11 November 2022. Alan is Charles Brasch’s literary executor. Charles died this day, 50 years ago on 20 May 1973.

Once upon a time, Charles Brasch fell in love, and that’s why we’re here at the Caselberg house this afternoon, in Broad Bay! The story covers more than sixty years, so I need to join the dots.

Brasch thought of himself as a Dunedin poet throughout his life, although he spent many years travelling and living in Britain and Europe. After spending the War years in London, he came back to New Zealand to establish the important literary journal Landfall in 1947; he was its editor for its first twenty years.

Brasch was part of a large wealthy mercantile extended family – his great-grandfather Bendix Hallenstein had been the Mayor of Queenstown – and he himself became an important patron of artists, writers, and institutions such as the University of Otago and its Hocken Library. Among his many bequests in 1973 was his holiday cottage at Broad Bay, which he left to Anna and John Caselberg.

Anna was an accomplished painter, the daughter of the painter Toss Woollaston whom Brasch had helped support throughout his life, and her husband John Caselberg was a writer of short stories and occasional verse. Having become the owners of number 10 Gwyn Street, and wanting to live here at Broad Bay, they eventually bought the house next door as well, to live in. For a while the cottage was used by Anna as her studio, but later it was sold, and has been privately owned since then. In 2004 John and Anna both died, and a group of local people set up the Caselberg Trust to buy the house from their daughter and establish it as a residence for artists and writers.

Now to go back to the love-story. In the late 1950’s, Brasch fell for a marine biologist twenty years his junior, who was Director of the Otago University’s Portobello Marine Laboratory, at the end of the headland across the water from Broad Bay. Unfortunately, he seems to have kept his feelings to himself, so his love was not reciprocated –which he agonised over in his Journal. This was some years before our Homosexual Law Reform was enacted, and in his Journal he referred to him only as ‘A’, but it’s now known his friend was a distinguished marine scientist Andrew Packard.

Brasch visited the laboratory now and again, either by bus or in Andrew’s rackety car (he seems never to have had a car himself), and in May 1958 after one visit he noted: ‘I have often thought of a house down the Peninsula. If only I weren’t dependent on the post, for Landfall.’

In November 1958 he wrote: ‘My urge to live by moving water, within sight and sound of it – how much is because I associate it with Andrew and the lab. at the station? Partly; and I should not forget Andrew, with moving water before me.’

Sadly for Brasch, in 1959 the beloved was offered a job at the world-famous Naples Marine Research Laboratory – and there’s a touching account of how Brasch, spending a precious day with Andrew, was asked to help him write his letter of acceptance for Naples! In his journal for that year he quoted a couplet by W.H. Auden that has a bitter-sweet ring to it:

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Even though Andrew was far away, Brasch’s ‘urge to live by moving water’ persisted, and when the Broad Bay cottage came up for sale in 1961, he bought it as a place to stay overnight or weekends, and where friends might visit – among them the novelist Janet Frame and poets Ruth Dallas, RAK Mason and CK Stead.

In January 1962 he wrote that although he had thought his days of sea-bathing were over, and that he ‘could no longer stand cold water’, he had a rare treat one day…

‘…swimming at Broad Bay exploring the bay from the water, following the shoreline, watching the hills opposite & the channels between the islands. Floating over beds of seaweed rather than trying to swim through them, discovering little sandy coves where I could stand among them, the water up to my shoulders – in the marvellously mild water this was a luxury & a delight & the discovery of a new element to live in briefly – & not so briefly on that day when I cruised about for perhaps half an hour happy & half incredulous.’

For many New Zealanders, the holiday place is where we practise our home-handyman skills, but Do It Yourself was not in Brasch’s blood. In that same journal entry he admits that:

I do not want to know how things work – I have never wanted to. As I listened to Philip Woollaston and Jack Baxter discussing how to put a new roof on the veranda of the cottage at Broad Bay, the design of boats, the performance of motor cars, it struck me that I must be peculiar in not wanting to follow & understand. I can follow simple instructions if I have to, but I am not interested merely in knowing how. Is this a form of escapism, of contracting out? Possible. I say it is to leave my mind clear for other matters, but can’t be sure that I’m not deceiving myself. It may be simply a form of mental laziness.

And of course, those ‘other matters’ included writing, and at least one of his poems came to him as he sat beside the cabbage-tree that stood in front of ‘the Brasch cottage’ - a poem recalling his lost love across the water.

Dream of love, you only forsake us at last

In extremis. It is you after all

That bound us to life through the desolate years

When every personable figure had

Long since with reason turned to our juniors;

And yet you lingered encouragingly

And persuaded us that life held something still –

Just what, you would never be caught saying.

I look today at your final haunt, across

Crisp waters lightly stirring, and wonder,

Drowsily wonder beside the cabbage tree,

Grateful for everything, how I could have

Lived without you, missing the exaltation,

Deprived of the despair. If you deceive,

Blessed deception, that allows us to live

Beyond ourselves – powers, expectations

Working for us, though never our possession.

So that’s the story: lost love, and the wee cottage beside the Harbour, that led eventually to the Caselberg Trust and later to its Charles Brasch Studio, returning the name of Brasch to this special place where he could (sometimes) be happy!

Alan Roddick

Guest User20 May 2023