THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:

JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS

Lawrence Jones
II
The Brighton World
Page 28 

The symbolism of the rocks varies.  If those half-buried rocks between Barney's Island and 
the swimming beach  become the limbs of Prometheus, Lion Rock out off Big Rock, 
surrounded by the sea, 'shaped like a lion, fronting the south, / With mane of greybrown kelp 
alive and coiling', is associated with a cynical love affair between a young man and a middle- 
aged woman living in a cottage opposite it.    To the older poet it seems to speak of death: 
               out there 
     Where the waves never cease to break 

     In the calmest weather, there's a hump-backed 
     Jut of reef - we called it Lion Rock - 

     Growling with its wild white mane 
     As if it told us even then 

     Death is the one door out of the labyrinth! 

With Lion Rock, as with Barney's Island, rock as symbol merges with island as symbol. 
Baxter as critic has interpreted the island  in Curnow's terms as 'a symbol of isolation from 
European tradition, both in place and time'.    The island in his world is Green Island, 
primarily a marker of the boundaries of his little world, but also to the young poet  in 1944 a 
symbol of isolation, more natural than cultural: 
     Stone sea moves southward; the volcanic island 
     Scrub sides quiet, surf-eaten 
     In antarctic isolation 
     Breasts that tideless flow. 
 
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