The pleasure’s in the missing

“The pleasure’s in the missing” is Thomas Balfour’s compact description of a migrant’s divided longing. In his conversation with Alistair Lauderback, the phrase captures a cycle in which home and the goldfields become most desirable when they are absent—and gives the novel a pointed contrast between nostalgic attachment to a distant country and the dispossession of land close at hand.

The saying and its speaker

Balfour offers the expression while talking with Lauderback about England and the idea of home. He has not set foot in England since before his hair turned grey; Lauderback remembers that Balfour had been in California, then falls quiet, chastising himself for forgetting. Balfour’s own history gives weight to his observation: “the pleasure’s in the missing.”

The remark is delivered in a private conversation before the day’s dinner crowd has begun to arrive. It is well after ten on a Saturday following a week of rain, and Balfour draws his chair closer to Lauderback so the politician will not need to speak loudly. The small gesture suits the conversation’s reflective, confidential tone: Balfour is not making a public argument so much as drawing Lauderback into a recognition they share.

The return that renews longing

Balfour describes men who come to the diggings intending to keep one foot on the boat and return as soon as they have made their fortune. They go home, buy a settled life, find a sweetheart, and establish themselves; yet, in his account, they then dream of the diggings. The memories they cherish are not only of success, but of the earlier time when they could hold the gold in their hands and spoke of home, their mothers, and familiar food.

The expression turns on that reversal. While the men are away, they long for England; once they have returned, they long for the goldfields. The desired place is bound up with its distance, and arrival cannot restore the earlier experience unchanged. Balfour’s pointed conclusion is that the men miss the old country but do not go back: home persists as an object of feeling even when the life imagined there has been replaced by a different longing.

Homesickness and a homeland

The expression’s wistfulness sits beside a more material history of land and belonging. Te Rau Tauwhare’s people, Poutini Ngāi Tahu, had once commanded the western coast of the South Island. The Crown purchased that extensive territory for three hundred pounds, leaving the iwi the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. Six years later, the scale of the gold rush made the consequences stark: diggers paid for licences and land, while the value of the gold taken from the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation.

The contrast is not simply between people who stay and people who leave. For Balfour’s migrants, distance makes the old country an object of longing; for Te Rau, the Arahura Valley is part of a homeland from which his people have been confined, despite their enduring relationship to it. The expression’s language of pleasurable absence therefore acquires an uneasy edge beside the history of a homeland converted into purchasable acreage and extractable wealth.

Land as more than property

Crosbie Wells paid the Crown fifty pounds for a hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley. He built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, cleared a garden, and began a timber mill. Te Rau travelled through the valley to seek pounamu in the riverbed, and his encounters with Wells grew into regular visits to the cottage. These details distinguish two relations to place: purchase and development on one hand, and lived knowledge, customary ties, and repeated presence on the other.

That distinction becomes sharper after Wells’s death, when Edgar Clinch acquires the acreage. Te Rau resents that Clinch has not spent time there, walked the boundaries, or made use of the land, and that the cottage has instead been stripped of anything saleable. To Te Rau, a profit requiring no labour, skill, or care is hollow because it treats land as currency. His counterstatement is categorical: “Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.” Beside that conviction, Balfour’s phrase concerns the ache of a place missed from afar; Te Rau’s concern is that the place itself can be taken, divided, and priced while its people remain attached to it.