Labourers, rationality and survival

Miles Fairburn, Nearly Out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer's Diary (I995), x + 275 (Auckland University Press, Auckland, paperback $39.95). James Cox (1846-1925) was a migrant who left England for New Zealand in I880. He was not entirely unnoticed in his lifetime. The fact that one of his childhood companions was his cousin Richard Jefferies led one scholar researching a study of this celebrated writer to get in touch with Cox. But what has given this humble bachelor labourer a posthumous significance is the survival of his 8oo,ooo-word diary covering the years 1888-1925. It reports numerous aspects of his life in New Zealand. His travels, jobs, workmates, employers, abodes, feelings, correspondence with his family in England, companions and friends, knowledge of various events and topics, and evaluations of himself and others, are all scrupulously and regularly recorded, sometimes in trying circumstances. Although a few other historians have drawn upon the diary, Miles Fairburn is the first scholar to recognize it as a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in the lives, struggles and world views of members of the subordinate classes. Well acquainted with the various approaches to such people, he applies to Cox and his diary no less than 'all the available tools in the historiographical tool box' (21), ranging from narration to analysis to testing procedures. The first part of the book deals with'the story' of Cox's life. After outlining his background in England, Fairburn provides a narration of his life in New Zealand. Occasionally, the diary is allowed to be the main way of conveying an aspect or chapter of his life. Examples are his experiences with a far from reliable traction engine and his period with an alcoholic asphalt contractor. More frequently, the diary, whether quoted or not, and Fairburn's own perceptive understandings are used to chart the course of his life. The author is even able to evoke what it must have been like for Cox, for instance, to work in the wash of a flax mill, have to go on the road after a period of better living and thresh grain on a hot or windy day. This moving narrative attains the goal implicit in Peter Gay's apercu that 'style is the art of the historian's science'.l

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