George Chamier's Philosopher Dick, The Story of a Settler Unsettled (Critical Essay‪)‬

Philosopher Dick (1890/91) tells the story of George Chamier's stand-in Richard Raleigh, alias 'Philosopher Dick'. He serves as a cadet on 'Marino Station', a frontier station in North Canterbury standing in for the actual Horsley Down, where Chamier worked for his cousins, the Lances, from his arrival in New Zealand in 1859 until 1863. (2) As the subtitle Adventures and Contemplations of a New Zealand Shepherd suggests, the novel follows Raleigh/Chamier through a series of picaresque adventures on the station and farther out back, which are interwoven with his 'philosophical' contemplations of life there, and of his place in the scheme of things. It represents the first phase in Chamier's transtasman trilogy, in which he works through his own experience as a settler and works out the position of the unsettled settler. The trilogy mimics the grand narrative of settlement as a 'centripetal' movement toward the city, with each phase progressively more settled but unsettlement always at issue. Philosopher Dick takes place at the (relatively) unsettled and unsettling frontier and takes as its focus the unsettlement of settlers themselves. In the second novel, A South-Sea Siren (1895), where we move into the small town of 'Sunnydowns' (Leithfield, North Canterbury), the unsettlement of settler society is at issue; in the third, The Story of a Successful Man (1895), set in the colonial metropolis of 'Marvellous Melbourne', it is that of settler capitalism. (3) The story of Raleigh's unsettlement and his working through it--his 'Philosopher's Progress' (4)--represents the main thread of the narrative. When we first meet him, Raleigh has assumed the role of resident philosopher of the station, a pastoral philosopher in the mould of Shakespeare's 'melancholy Jaques', who can see through the 'dismal comedy' of station life (p. 63). (5) He enjoys slumming it with the other station hands and casting his cynical eye over goings-on on the station, but the violence of the industrial agriculture practised on the station--and the antipathy of other settlers to his philosophising, which they perceive as unsettling--soon start to test his philosophy. The other settlers are also unsettled by his cynicism about colonial ideas and ideals, and his lack of 'energy': they think he has 'no idea of bettering [his] condition', of progressing himself and the colony (p. 30; p. 32), so, in a move akin to the return to nature of that other 'Melancholy Jacques', Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Raleigh decides to go it alone as a 'boundary-walker" based at his hermitage in the hills (p. 90). (6) But he becomes increasingly unsettled as his sense of self begins to disintegrate. He tries to keep it together by communing with nature through a Byronic, or rather, Manfredian unbounded sensibility, by making himself over from nothing. The resultant experience of nature (or Nature: big 'n') as sublime and other uncanny experiences out back bring home to him his unsettlement and lead him to contemplate suicide by throwing himself into an abyss. He does come back from the brink, though with something less than Byron's 'certainty'--more like an acceptance of uncertainty, a recognition that settlers cannot but let themselves be 'colonised'--settled--by the place itself (p. 149). Settlers must make do--but by doing without: 'we accommodate ourselves to circumstances, that's all. How do we do? Why, we do without' (p. 58).