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This is a study of the writing of New Zealand history between 1920 and 1940. Its principal themes are differing practices of history and the ways in which these practices intersected with the problems of what
The first chapter examines general and theoretical problems. Each of the five following chapters discusses a different historian, community of historians, or historiographical project. Chapter two discusses the work of local historians. Chapter three deals with the work of A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and The Treaty of Waitangi, are discussed at some length. Chapter five concerns the writing of New Zealand history in universities, in particular the genre of the general history and the treatment of New Zealand history as it related to British, colonial policy. Finally, the thesis discusses the popular histories written for the New Zealand Centennial in 1940. These 'Centennial surveys' combined elements of academic and local histories. They illustrate the increasing cultural authority of academics and graduates in historiographical circles and in state-sponsored cultural work. They also show that this development was resisted by other historians. The final chapter takes stock of the changes associated with the growth of academic history, and examines their effect on the problems of 'cultural colonisation'.
One of the aims of this thesis is to show how writing history is not simply an individual activity. In this respect this thesis is no different from the works it studies. A lot of people have contributed to it. My primary debts are to
I would also like to thank the History Department of the University of Auckland, for tutoring work that has supported me and greatly improved my knowledge of the nineteenth-century history that my subjects were writing about. In the department,
Finally, I want to thank my friends, family and flatmates. They have helped me with proofreading, given me a place to stay in Wellington, talked about history with me, and looked after me in a lot of other ways. I wish to thank especially Lisa Bailey, Christine Berry, David Bowden, Vivien Fergusson, Raewyn Glynn, Sarah Graham, Anne Hilliard, Maxine Iversen, Susan McClennan, Matthew Melvin, Matthew Russell, Damon Salesa and Grace Smit.
This thesis examines the writing of New Zealand history between 1920 and 1940. It addresses the issues of what New Zealand history 'was about' in these years, the various conventions that shaped its research and writing, and the ways in which histories replicated, reformulated and sometimes contested existing textualisations of 'New Zealand'. It is an exercise in intellectual history and attempts to relate texts and contexts in ways different from those used in other works of New Zealand intellectual history.
This introductory chapter outlines some of the problems explored in this study. It sets out a general conception of the cultural framework of history-writing in interwar New Zealand, surveys some of the institutional changes affecting the writing of New Zealand history, and explains the method I have adopted for reading works of history.
I have organised my discussion of history-writing, and Pakeha culture generally, under the rubric of colonisation. In doing so I have followed the lead of This concept underpins Gibbons' two essays, but for a discussion of the term, see On the phrase 'home in thought' see Oxford History of New Zealand Literature and in an essay published in Sites in 1986.The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, Auckland, 1991; Gibbons, 'A Note on Writing, Identity, and Colonisation in Aotearoa', Sites, 13 (Spring 1986), pp. 32-8.Phoenix, 1, 2 (July 1932), p. 23.
For this reason 'cultural colonisation' has more power as an interpretative category than national identity, which has been used more often in discussions of historical writing and other Pakeha cultural products.A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity, Wellington, 1986, ch. 17; New Zealand Journal of History, 21, 2 (October 1987), pp. 197-214.New Zealand Verse, London, 1906, pp. xiv-xv. Tutira could be recommended so forcefully by thoroughly urban people as a way of understanding New Zealand. Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1926; Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, pp. 149-55; Literature and Authorship in New Zealand, London, 1943, p. 35.
Cultural colonisation remained a stated goal well after the interwar period. In this vein
The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by ….
J. C. Beaglehole , 'The New Zealand Scholar', inPeter Munz , ed.,The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, Wellington, 1969, p. 252. Frost's poem was also quoted inKeith Sinclair ,A History of New Zealand, Harmondsworth, 1959, pp. 300-301. Rather than endorsing Frost's poem asBeaglehole did, Sinclair aligned it with the claims ofAllen Curnow ,Charles Brasch ,Ursula Bethell , and other 'South Islanders' who emphasised the rootlessness of life 'in these islands'.
The Story of New Zealand, London, 1960, p. 288.
Employing the terms of the people one is writing about has the advantage of recapturing some of the tenor of their work. As such, colonisation has interpretative advantages in this context that its alternatives, such as class, gender and age, do not have. Issues of class, gender and age are discussed frequently in this thesis, but they are not privileged as interpretative concepts in the way colonisation is. Colonisation pervaded these categories in interwar New Zealand; in part it structured them. The colonising framework is implicated, for instance, in the distinction between private and public spheres in local histories.
Nevertheless, using the terms of the colonisers themselves can be a risky strategy. However, 'colonisation' is such a two-sided word that it is less open to reinscriptions of colonialist sentiments than are more subtle tropes, such as European 'adaptation' to 'new world' conditions. 'Colonisation' is Manichean. It means both settlement and creation, dispossession and destruction. The former pair depends on the latter pair. 'There is no document of civilization', Illuminations, ed.
In the years 1920-40 the major task of cultural colonisation was what
The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?
There are only two possible answers. The white culture can attempt to incorporate the Other, superficially, through beaded moccasins and names like Mohawk Motors, or with much more sophistication, through the novels of
Rudy Wiebe . Conversely, thewhite culture may reject the indigene: This country really began with the arrival of the whites.'
Terry Goldie ,Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian,Australian,and New Zealand Literatures, Kingston, Ontario, 1989, pp. 12-13.
Both these broad kinds of indigenisation, attempts at the paradoxical task of 'becoming indigenous', have occurred in New Zealand. In New Zealand, as in Canada, cultural appropriation occurred in both 'high' and 'popular' culture. In the scholarly domain that is the focus of this thesis, the headquarters of cultural appropriation was the Polynesian Society. The ethnological work of the society's members had few overt relations to government and the so-called Maori problem: it was more concerned with absorbing the 'colour' and uniqueness of taonga into Pakeha culture. Similar operations can be discerned in writing about New Zealand flora, fauna and 'scenery', not only in tourist propaganda but also in less tendentious writing. Gibbons, 'A Note on Writing Identity, and Colonisation', p. 33. Ethnology is often referred to in this thesis, as a point of reference, or as another activity of some of the people discussed herein. I do not, however, discuss ethnology directly. While some writers (such as Old Whanganui, Hawera, 1915, and The City of Auckland, New Zealand, 1840-1920, Auckland, 1922.
Historical writing at this time engaged with patriotic exoticism in residual ways if at all. Local histories avoided celebrating the indigenous. Their accounts of the taming of the wilderness were seldom attended by regret. The histories
The other indigenising strategy Goldie mentions—'This country really began with the arrival of the whites'—was much more in evidence in New Zealand historiography. It was seldom stated, and may seldom have been thought consciously. But the assumption that 'New Zealand' practically meant Pakeha New Zealand was a defining assumption of much historical and other writing. These writings were quite diverse. One kind was the worship of Britain, of which Home is often taken as the epitome. Just as the country one lived in could be exotic, a country one had never seen could be 'home'. Others, such as Home: A New Zealander's Adventure, London, 1927, p. 8.
It is not difficult to find pro-British statements in New Zealand historical writing. Nor is it surprising. The important point is that the treatment of Britain as 'Home' often meant that what counted as a valid aspect of New Zealand history was a function of the Britishness that could be discerned in it. The work of
Being aware of Britain did not necessarily entail a neglect of those aspects of New Zealand's past which could not convincingly be seen as an expression of Britishness. The Wellington book-collector and historian, Bulletin School in New Zealand?', Historical Studies, 20, 81 (October 1983), pp. 534-5. The contrast is valid if one inserts the word 'young' into the phrase 'intellectuals of the nineties'. Best, Andersen, Cowan and Goldie were intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s too, and not without authority.
Stewart to McCormick, 19 December 1940, McCormick Papers, 166/14.
Voluble imperialism and patriotic exoticism alike were frowned upon by the young intellectuals who have since been canonically identified with the 1930s. Nationalism was by no means the only concern of these varied groups of people ( But see Phoenix was at least as internationalist as nationalist.Phoenix, 1, 1 (March 1932); Phoenix, 1, 2 (July 1932). On these writers generally see Landfall, 41 (September 1987), pp. 293-311.Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, ed. A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, Christchurch, 1945, p. 52. See also The Deepening Stream: Cultural Influences in New Zealand, Christchurch, 1940, pp. 20-21, 23, 30, 31; Curnow, 'Sentence', The Dance', 'House and Land', 'The Scene' and 'Dialogue of Island &Time', in Curnow, Island and Time, Christchurch, 1941, pp. 2, 10, 20-21, 22-3, 40-44; Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, p. 149.
Of the historians active in the interwar period, only New Zealand: A Short History addressed the question of a genuine New Zealand identity and the apparent lack of existing local resources from which to construct one. Letters and Art in New Zealand blurred the distinctions between 'general' history and literary history, and located an emergent New Zealand identity in the writing of National Education, 20, 210 (1 March 1938), p. 56.
There were major divisions between historians as to what counted as New Zealand history, and as to what its overall moral was. The most serious divide was between those who claimed that Maori-Pakeha interaction was the driving force behind New Zealand history, and those who favoured narratives in which Pakeha built a society in a physical and cultural wilderness, narratives in which Maori played only incidental parts. Writing in this latter category ranged from local histories that centred on the efforts of pioneers, to heavily academic works on formal sovereignty and matters of government and administration. In the histories written for the New Zealand Centennial some of these different kinds of Maori-excluding narrative coalesced, while narratives that accorded Maori a more important place were edged out.
Changes in the marketplace of culture had a bearing on these metanarratives and practices. This is one reason I have held off defining the terms 'history' and 'historian' until this point. Some people may balk at the inclusion of the work of Early Settlers' Associations; others may object to I have, however, omitted incidental snippets of history such as those that appear in promotional pamphlets and encyclopaedias. These kinds of writing, and historical pieces in the School Journal and other educational periodicals, are important and I bring them in where pertinent, but their full inclusion would rob the thesis of its focus and trivialise the significance of the conventions of specifically historiographical communities, both institutional and discursive.when she or he writes history or engages in associated activities such as teaching or historical debate. I have taken 'history' to be writing about the past which claims factual truth instead of, or as well as, artistic 'truth'. 'History' is a European form of knowledge and I have not attempted to confuse matters, or claim an authority I do not have, by treating Pakeha works of history alongside whakapapa and other Maori forms of discourse.
The period 1920-40 has been chosen as much for the range of histories written then as for the changes in the practice of history in these years. The beginning date is
The common factor in the institutional changes during this period was state involvement. Government fostering of scholarship and the arts began before the interwar period, and reached a peak after it. It needs to be stressed that this involvement was inconsistent and intermittent, though it became more concerted after 1935. A cultural infrastructure heavily dependent on the state was being created.
Local historians did not benefit from governmental largesse until the provincial histories commemorating the Centennial were assembled. State patronage had more effect on historians with national rather than local reputations and interests. Governments had sponsored historical work intermittently since Historical Records in the first decade of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s there were ad hoc investments in historical documents and the subsidising or commissioning of works of history, and in 1934 the
Parallel developments occurred in other areas of scholarship. In the natural sciences, the state subsidised the New Zealand Institute and fostered scientific activity through the Dominion Museum, the Board of Science and Art, and, after 1926, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.In Search of New Zealand's Scientific Heritage, Wellington, 1984.Manifest Duty: The Polynesian Society over 100 Years, Auckland, 1992, p. 60.
There was thus a considerable level of government involvement in cultural life even before 1935. That year, of course, saw the advent of the first Labour government, many of whose self-educated members were believers in scholarship and the arts. It was also the year when
The most important state cultural activity of the period, however, was the expansion of the university colleges. In 1920 the colleges were meagrely equipped teaching institutions with unevenly trained staff. In the next two decades, library facilities and salaries began to improve, and the colleges recruited more staff with experience of academic research at overseas universities. A great deal more scholarly research was conducted. By the end of this period, the universities still had their limitations, but they were fairly active intellectual forums, cultivating scholars, commentators, writers, scientists and, just as importantly, new kinds of readers and talkers. For interesting examples, see Diary Beginnings 1939, Christchurch, 1990, and Gormack, Diary for 1942-3, Christchurch, 1991.
In assessing the impact of the universities on intellectual activity, two main points need to be kept in mind. The first is that academics were seldom the first people to work in a given field. In the natural sciences, existing institutions and their 'amateur' members accommodated and transformed the growth of the universities and the increase in other patronage of science. See Science, Settlers and Scholars: The Centennial History of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Wellington, 1987.Manifest Duty, pp. 64-5, 77-8.
The incursion of the universities into the writing of New Zealand history (which may be dated to the publication of Ibid., pp. 77-8.Constitutional History and Law of New Zealand in 1914, but began in earnest in the 1920s) provoked less outright conflict than occurred in literary and ethnological circles. Some academics, such as Journal of the Polynesian Society was to ethnology.
The conflict between historians on the Centennial project is more important for the comparisons it reveals than for its impact on the writing of New Zealand history. This brings me to the second point. Academics' increasing influence derived to a considerable extent from the larger university-educated public that they had helped to create. The 'rise' of the universities did not always entail a 'triumph', a point where a field of study became 'professionalised'. Academic ethnology came close to such a point, though well after 1940. The Short Reflection on the Present State of Literature in This Country, Christchurch, nd [1935].
Similarly, in the case of history, the rise of the universities did not altogether discredit in the public eye the kinds of history practised by Cowan, Buick, Scholefield and others. Today there is still a substantial number of historians who work outside the universities and who have a national readership (a readership that includes university graduates). Some writers continue to produce work in the style of historians discussed in this thesis; some have won the James Cowan Award for Historical Journalism.
These points have two main implications for this thesis. First, it is important not to assume that in the interwar period the universities spread out into empty space, and that there were no 'real' historians before A significant account that makes this assumption is Sinclair, Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 29.Destiny Apart, p. 241. For more casual examples, see New Zealand Journal of History, 24, 2 (October 1990), p. 174; Tony Nightingale, 'Shirley Tunnicliff: Nelson Historian', Phanzine, 2, 2 (July 1996), pp. 5-6.
This brings me to another 'problem of the imagination': how to write about historical texts. My response to this 'problem' requires some elaboration because it does not draw greatly on local precedents. Until recently, literary critics have tended to ignore New Zealand non-fiction other than autobiography. An exception is the account of Otago's historians in Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 104 (italics added).Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, pp. xiii-xiv.A History of Otago, Dunedin, 1984, pp. 173-78, 197-201.Oxford History of New Zealand Literature. This thesis is heavily indebted to Gibbons' essay, not just in its overall outlines but also its specifics. Gibbons' methods, however, are not appropriate to a narrower and more detailed study such as this one. Gibbons recognises this and implicitly distinguishes himself from '[t]hose who would write the literary history of New Zealand non-fiction in detail'. He advises those writing that history to 'read the texts as multiple drafts' of the textual production of New Zealand.
The metaphor of multiple drafts, of discourse as a kind of work-in-progress, is applicable to any kind of writing. But it has an almost literal relevance to non-fiction, which is explicitly based on factual sources and the writing of other scholars. Non-fiction's invocation and manipulation of these sources is what most distinguishes it from other kinds of writing. Consequently, non-fiction writings cannot be For a New Zealand example, see Maori Origins and Migrations: The Genesis of Some Pakeha Myths and Legends, Auckland, 1979, especially p. 58.
Though Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, 1994, p. 35.
I am arguing that non-fiction, like other kinds of discourse, is intertextual—that texts are created by encounters between already existing cultural materials. Not all those cultural materials are 'texts' in the limited sense of the word: ideology, 'facts', 'events' and 'lives' are not 'texts' in the literal sense in which books are. But, in discourse, ideology, facts, events and lives are textualised.
To elaborate on and clarify these arguments I will say some more about the principal kinds of contexts that were rearranged in the texts discussed in this thesis: 'ideology' and 'culture', authors' intentions and lives, 'primary' and 'secondary' sources, and the conventions of historical writing.
'Ideology' and 'culture', including the colonial problems outlined above, should not be treated as forces that 'author' all texts with only minimal mediation by other forces, such as individual writers and source material. Ideology and culture themselves are not extra-textual: they exist For example, through appropriations and combinations. 'Meanings are never simply inscribed on the minds and bodies of American Historical Review, 92, 4 (October 1987), p. 884.New Zealand in the Making, and the Centennial surveys. Pakeha ideology, including its racism, is more complex than some accounts admit.Proud to Be White? A Survey of Pakeha Prejudice in New Zealand, Auckland, 1986.
The second group of contexts I wish to comment on is that of authors' intentions and lives. My emphasis on intertextuality and appropriation means that I am hostile both to the dissolution of authorial and textual particulars into an amorphous discursive gene-pool and to the privileging of authorial intent or life-experiences as a primary determinant of a text, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London, 1988, especially p. 171.by their information; or for the nature of their education. Biographical information has some particular dangers when used to interpret texts. One problem is that 'intentions' are often formulated retrospectively; there are dangers in assuming a coherence in an author's overt intentions or supposedly deeper patterns structured by their life experiences.Studies in Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, pp. 44-5.Where the White Man Treads, 2nd edn, Auckland, 1928. For biographies, see The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, Auckland, 1996.George Rhodes of the Levels requires a knowledge of its author's life and social position if its operations are to be adequately understood.
The most fundamental argument against readings that treat authorial intent as an interpretative master-key is that writers can never totally subjugate language or ideology. In historical writing, there is the added consideration of 'primary sources'. Historians' sources are themselves texts, and their voices may offer resistance to attempts to incorporate them into a particular narrative. To treat authorial intent, or 'tropological strategies', as the primary determinants of a history text's character is to essentialise the author (or the stylistic repertoire of his or her time) in much the same way as a 'stenographic' conception of history (where historians unproblematially absorb evidence and then "write it up') essentialises 'the record'. See Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism, Ithaca, 1983, pp. 137-8.
The voices of primary sources may also conflict with ideological currents in the historian's present. Source voices may throw the historian's narrative into confusion (as in Cowan's Settlers and Pioneers), lead to a significant but non-revolutionary revision of popular wisdom (as in some of the Centennial surveys), or be obscured by exclusion or rhetorical practice (as in Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi). Not only documents and interviews, but also other books interact with authorial and ideological factors. Among these books are those of people such as
Convincingly tracing a history's connections with documents, oral sources and other books is not always possible. In some cases, such as Buick's, the author's remaining papers do not contain detailed working notes, and I have traced their findings back through footnotes, or through references in their own and others' correspondence to what they had read or been told. In other cases, such as those of could know at a given time, and thus to log the appropriations and exclusions constituting their texts.
The last contexts that I want to mention are disciplinary and generic conventions, by which I mean the subjects associated with particular traditions of history, and the protocols for ordering source material and arguments in history and in other forms of discourse from which histories borrow, such as fiction. These are protocols that may be policed (especially in the case of the universities) by people with institutional standing. These conventions are cultural materials analogous to (indeed, a local and specific part of) ideology, and are treated here in a similar fashion: I attempt to examine how particular conventions of rhetoric and narrative work within texts. I am using neither 'rhetoric' nor 'narrative' in a pejorative sense. 'Rhetoric' is taken to mean the practice of argument. Discussions of historians' 'narratives', and the application of generic terms such as 'tragedy' and 'comedy' to works of history, owe a great deal, of course, to Hayden White's The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Madison, 1987.Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore, 1973, and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, 1978. However, as should be apparent by now, I do not agree with White's early insistence on the determinative nature of such 'modes of emplotment'.
Analysing narrative and 'aesthetics' lends itself to 'ahistorical' judgements, but provided that the critical voice does not drown out those of the texts being discussed, the gains outweigh the costs. I have tried to ground but not bury my readings in contemporary responses. Whether or not one should ever treat a contemporary response as a representative indication of what a text meant Holcroft, at the time, the decorum of much correspondence and book-reviewing in interwar New Zealand makes such an approach unjustifiable for this study at least. Having read a large number of newspaper reviews of New Zealand books in this period, I can only agree with the lamentations of Holcroft, Deepening Stream, pp. 60-62; A History of New Zealand Fiction from 1862 to the Present Time with Some Account of Its Relation to the National Life and Character, Dunedin, 1939, p. 72.
Overall, therefore, I have tried to treat texts as encounters between different contextual elements. I do not have the space to give detailed readings of every significant text. I have therefore adopted the tactic of surveying a particular body of work in general terms while remaining alert to these matters of 'encounter', and then moving on to an extended reading of one or more exemplary texts. The texts selected are not necessarily 'typical'. They come to terms with their contexts in ways that illuminate the body of work discussed in a given chapter by contest and revision as much as by example. Each chapter deals with a particular community, historiographical project, or author. While authors and institutions are not treated as interpretative master-keys, their significance is recognised in the division of the chapter. No chapter's subject is discrete, but each has enough integrity to make it worth the focus of a chapter of its own. This structure enables me to register the impact of institutions and discursive communities, but does not restrict references to connections with, and divergences from, the work discussed in other chapters. Each chapter makes frequent references beyond its borders. The interconnections between the different chapters are then pulled together more tightly in the conclusion.
Finally, I will indicate how I have divided up my material. The first chapter examines the work of historians writing about their district or family, and for a similarly local audience. Their texts 'colonised' their districts by explaining the district's merits in terms of Pakeha effort, and by claiming autochthony. The pioneer legend they elaborated was adopted but transformed by Cowan, who is the subject of chapter three. Cowan's metanarrative of New Zealand history was the only one in this period to accord Maori an agency comparable to that of Europeans, and it was the only one which thoroughly combined the pioneer legend with an emphasis on the New Zealand Wars and culture-contact. In attempting this syncretism, Cowan's texts disclose some of the contradictions of New Zealand histories at this time, and the incompatibility of
In these respects Cowan was unusual; his difference and the importance of the cultural contradictions he reveals makes him worthy of his own chapter. He was, however, also part of the Wellington circle of historians that I discuss in chapter four. Of this group, Buick too created a narrative of New Zealand's founding out of Maori-Pakeha interaction. Buick's story, set out in his The Treaty of Waitangi, which I discuss at some length, was very different from Cowan's. The rest of chapter four discusses the institutional and interpersonal relationships within which a number of historians wrote history and collected source material.
Chapter five deals with the emergence of a distinctively academic mode of history in New Zealand, and its two main textual products: monographs on New Zealand in the context of imperial historiography, and general histories that
Local history may be defined simply as historical writing about a specific district, up to and including a province. It overlaps with family history, which, in the interwar period, related lives and achievements to the 'progress' of particular districts. The interwar period was an important phase in the establishment of networks of local historians, and a time when substantially more local history was published than previously. An examination of William Martin and A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand from 1880 to its terminal date of 1909 reveals few works of local history until the 1890s. Travel literature and speculations about Maori were much more common. Many of the 1890s histories were offshoots of provincial jubilees, especially Otago's.A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand, Wellington, 1909.Short History of the Otago Early Settlers' Association 1898-1948 and Guide to the Museum [Dunedin, 1949], p. 8. See also Sinclair, Destiny Apart, p. 39.
This chapter examines some of the recurrent characteristics of local history in this period. Most of these characteristics were clustered around the ideal of 'pioneering'. Local history came in a variety of forms, and a single chapter on such a vast body of material tends to homogenise the texts it discusses. One can compensate for this by discussing individual texts in detail, and at the end of this chapter I will do so. At the outset, however, it is worthwhile to indicate some of the forms of writing under discussion, and the different fora in which they were written.
A lot of local history came in small units. Lectures, published lectures, short anthologies and newspaper articles were important genres. Much work in these formats was at least partly autobiographical, with the author as a witness to the scenes and events described, if not a prominent participant.Records of Early Days: Some Beginnings in Dunedin and Otago [Dunedin, 1929].
Book-length works of local history fall into a number of categories. One is the family biography, hardly any of which were critical of the relatives from whom the authors derived much of their prestige. See, for example, Mrs J. Howard Jackson, Examples include Annals of a New Zealand Family: The Household of Gilbert Mair, Early Pioneer, Dunedin, 1935. Jackson was born William Rolleston: A New Zealand Statesman, Christchurch, 1940, was an extreme case. The Rolleston family retained editorial control and stipulated that no one 'should be offended by anything in the book'. Stephanie M. Dale, 'Gentleman of Politics: A Life of William Downie Stewart 1878-1949', MA thesis, University of Otago, 1981, pp. 181-2.Medical Practice in Otago and Southland was a series of articles on individual doctors, its whole equal to the sum of its parts.Medical Practice in Otago and Southland in the Early Days: A Description of the Manner of Life, Trials and Difficulties of Some of the Pioneer Doctors, of the Places in Which, and of the People among Whom They Laboured, Dunedin, 1922.Early Days in Central Otago, gathered together anecdotes rather than miniature biographies.Early Days in Central Otago: Being Tales of Times Gone By, Dunedin, 1930.
The disjointed character of many works of local history may owe something to the circumstances of their publication. A number of books, including Fulton's, began their lives as series of newspaper articles. Fulton, See, for example, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. v; Jackson, Annals of a New Zealand Family, p. 13; The Early Canterbury Runs, 3rd edn, Christchurch, 1946 (first pub. 1930), p. 9.Auckland Star, fostered the publication of history in their newspapers and, in some cases, in book-form through sibling companies.The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 2, Wellington, 1993.
Historical societies were the other main outlet for local history. Some societies published history, and others at least heard papers on historical subjects. The Wellington Early Settlers' and Historical Association took its scholarly function seriously, attempting to gather information, photographs and pictures, and to elicit memoirs and other papers. Or rather, some of its members did. Others were more interested in social gatherings. When the association was resurrected at the end of World War I, it was noted: 'Whilst the social side of our work has been so successfull [sic], the Historical part has to a great extent been neglected.' Report of Annual General Meeting, 10 July 1918, Wellington Early Settlers' and Historical Association Minute Book, 1912-1921, MSX-3559, ATL Report of Annual General Meeting, 23 June 1920, Wellington Early Settlers' and Historical Association Minute Book, 1912-1921, MSX-3559; Journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 2, 1 (May 1922)-2, 4 (May 1923).Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, Gore, 1933.
In addition to these restrictions, early settlers' associations were exclusive. To be eligible to join, members usually had to have spent a minimum of thirty years in the district (sometimes as many as fifty), or be descended from such residents. There were alternatives. 'Locals' of some religious communities, particularly the Methodist Church, were served by religious historical societies. Olssen, The Wesley Historical Society in Aotearoa/New Zealand: The First Sixty Years, Auckland, 1992, chs 1-2; The Future of the Past: Themes in New Zealand History, Palmerston North, 1991, pp. 7-8.History of Otago, p. 174; Evening Post, 26 June 1926; Evening Post, 11 May 1931 (reporting on meetings of the Canterbury branch); Auckland Star, 15 September 1934 (reporting on a meeting of the Auckland Historical Society); programmes of the Auckland Historical Society for 1936-7, in G. H. Scholefield Papers, MS Papers 212/37, ATL.
When each province began work on a history for the New Zealand Centennial, academics and local historians mixed on numerous committees.
In these historical societies, academics and historians such as Buick addressed national themes, but others kept to local subjects. There were exceptions, of course. Roberts, For an example of Chappell's Auckland and Methodist history, see his A. B. Chappell, 'MS Notes etc Relating to James Busby', nd [c. 1930-37], NZMS 179, APL. Chappell to New Zealand Herald subeditor, sometime university registrar, and an ordained minister who had been 'left without pastoral charge' since 1919 'because of a "disciplinary matter"').Wesley Historical Society, p. 33; A History of the University of Auckland 1883–1983, Auckland, 1983, pp. 124-5.Across a Hundred Years 1841-1941: A Brief Story of the Beginning and Early Progress of Methodism in Auckland, N.Z. [Auckland, 1941].Halfway Round the Harbour: An Autobiography, Auckland, 1993, p. 58, has an amusing anecdote about Chappell's interest in Busby in 1940.
Most members of local historical societies and early settlers' associations had fewer pretensions than Chappell. Or rather, their pretensions and their intended audiences were more local. National issues were seldom strongly integrated into their district histories. Local histories were animated by particularised local 'interests', in both senses of this word. All the local historians discussed in this chapter were residents or former residents of the districts they wrote about, and their works commemorated settler achievements.
One thing local histories did share with histories of broader scope, and with ethnology, was a commitment to collection, the accumulation of narratives and artefacts before their keepers died and their cultural possessions vanished with them. Local historians employed the same language of disappearing knowledge as the Polynesian Society did; 'early settlers' as well as 'the old-time Maori' were dying off. Sorrenson, 'Objects of the Association', Manifest Duty, pp. 24, 64, 65; Atholl Anderson, Introduction: Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori: The Otago University Museum Ethnological Project, 1920, ed. Anderson, Dunedin, 1994, pp. 12, 14. Examples concerning settler history include Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. v; and Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, p. 21.Journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 2, 2 (September 1922), p. 28; Martin and Skinner, eds, Short History of the Otago Early Settlers' Association, pp. 11, 32-3.Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, p. 20.
Collection was not only a preparatory step in the writing of local history; many works of local history textually re-enacted the process of collecting. Acland's The Early Canterbury Runs (1930) is a striking example. Based on more than thirty years of interviews, the book was a compendium of facts on nineteenth-century sheep-runs. It was divided into geographical categories and each run was accorded about a page. No scrap of information was wasted and there was hardly any narrative structure to the whole or even to the individual entries. Acland's project had no need for closure and narrative structure. He treated the book as perennially provisional, a published work-in-progress, bringing out expanded editions in 1940 and 1946.
Even those local histories that were not outright compendia like The Early Canterbury Runs paralleled collecting practices. Histories were often like family albums, both in the heterogeneity of their information and in their personal investments. Authors often prefaced their works with disclaimers of 'literary skill': they were simply 'transcribing' or 'compiling'.Bidwill of Pihautea: The Life of Charles Robert Bidwill, Christchurch, 1927, p. vii; The Early Days of Canterbury: A Miscellaneous Collection of Interesting Facts Dealing with The Settlement's First Thirty Years of Colonisation, 1850-1880, Christchurch, 1932, p. 9; The Albertlanders: Brave Pioneers of the 'Sixties, Auckland, 1927, p. 6.Early Days in Central Otago) were rare.
The practice of bulk quotation and preserving the integrity of the source material abetted one of the central purposes of local histories: to 'praise famous men and the fathers that begat us', as the biblical epigraph to one book put it. Fulton, For example, Auckland Provincial Centennial Council, Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 73.Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. i. Gilkison echoed the phrase: 'Having praised great men and noble women …' Gilkison, Early Days in Central Otago, p. 204.Roll of Early Settlers and Descendants in the Auckland Province Prior to the End of 1852, Auckland, 1940.
There were three bakers and three butchers in Gore and one in East Gore—the same number of bakers as there is to-day. It appears the people's diet consisted principally of bread and meat. Only six of the original shops remain, now occupied by Messrs Daly and Leishman, McCutcheon, Boyne Bros. and Miss Johnston, Crawford and Grant, and Messrs Thomson and Beattie; and only eight people remain on the sections they occupied then—viz.: Mrs Baldwin, Mrs Geo. Low, Mrs Wilson, Mr Jas. Beattie (The Hill), Mr J. Maude, Mrs Geisig, Miss A. Ross, and Mrs Thos. Green. Football was played on the land occupied by Messrs R. and F. Wallis' stores near the brewery. The Gore Volunteers and Gore Fire Brigade were formed about this time, and shortly afterwards asphalt was laid down on the Main Street.
From the next paragraph, the remaining four pages of Burrows' 'paper' consisted of a list of names organised by area and street.Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, pp. 59-63. See also Bruce, Early Days of Canterbury, ch. 8.
Not all works of local history were as folkish as Burrows'. Others were closely tied to institutions and hierarchies. As is suggested by their profusion of names and their valuing of reminiscence and interviews, local histories placed a premium on individual persons. 'History', wrote one author, 'consists of the story of lives of men.' Gilkison, Barr, Early Days in Central Otago, p. 184.because of their institutional positions and their places in community hierarchies. An individual's importance lay City of Auckland, especially pp. 67-76.
Local histories reiterated institutional hierarchies because they were narratives of 'public' activities, and binding those public activities together was the process of colonisation. These works recounted the building of prosperous and upstanding communities out of a 'wilderness'. The facts accumulated in compendious works were direct or indirect indices of this progress. 'Local histories', Gibbons has written, 'are … colonizing texts in a very direct sense, since they justify the European appropriation of the land.' Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 66.Tales of Pioneer Women, Christchurch, 1940, p. xv.
Works of local history had 'colonising' dimensions other than justifying the appropriation of land by claiming that only Pakeha had made it fruitful. These histories also arrogated to Pakeha the vocabulary of origins. Colonists became 'early settlers', 'old identities', passengers on the 'first ships'. Through their association with and work on the land they 'belonged' to a district. Though less self-aware than those who 'played a good deal with words like "indigenous"', local historians performed similar operations on a local scale.within hierarchies of local Pakeha.
Other kinds of colonising text, such as ethnologies, focused on Maori. But ethnology and local history were seldom combined in the same text. There were exceptions, such as Downes, Old Whanganui, and the activities of Jim Fleming of the Native School at Tongariro National Park, who attempted to assemble history books for his students based on Cowan's New Zealand Wars and Fleming's own 'interesting talks with local Maori elders'.Old Whanganui; Fleming to Scholefield, 23 April 1940, Scholefield Papers, 212/43.
The pioneer images in local histories may be traced to nineteenth-century immigration propaganda and its idealisation of work and 'vigour'. Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 524. For Australian comparisons, see Bulletin) had long been stock characters in New Zealand fiction.Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, 2nd edn., Melbourne, 1992; Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, Sydney, 1981, ch. 6.George Rhodes of the Levels and His Brothers, Early Settlers of New Zealand: Particularly the Story of the Founding of the Levels, the First Sheep Station in South Canterbury, Auckland, 1937, p. 93.
Resourcefulness was one of the principal attributes of the pioneer woman, along with courage and determination. Pioneer women also brought domestic warmth and moral hygiene to the frontier, keeping male settlers civilised as they went about transforming the 'wilderness'. Occasionally pioneer women were placed in the foreground, See, for example, Woodhouse, ed., Fulton, Woodhouse, 'Editor's Note', in Woodhouse, ed., Tales of Pioneer Women.Medical Practice in Otago and Southland: 'If one reads between the lines of my story, one can easily see the heroic figure made by the women who shared the trials and hardships of their husbands'.Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. ii.Tales of Pioneer Women, p. xv; Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. ii.
Pioneer women stayed feminine; pioneer men were not debased by unpleasant conditions. But the pioneers' heroic status depended on more than integrity and hard work. The pioneer myth assumed that pioneering was, among other things, a public service deliberately rendered. Local histories were built on the premise that
Seeing pioneers as public-minded accorded with the personal characteristics associated with them. Local histories did depict some of the private traits of pioneers, but these were traits, such as honour and generosity, that would not be embarrassing if disclosed in public (as, in texts, they were). Personal failings and private hostilities were elided. Brett and Hook, Albertlanders, p. 435.
This was history without guilt or rancour, but not without responsibility. One of the most persistent rhetorical figures of local histories in the interwar period was the exhortation to honour the memory of a district's pioneers. The motto of the Otago Early Settlers' Association, which appeared on its publications, was 'Reanimate Otago's Pioneers to Fame Undying through the Years'. One of the stated goals of its Wellington counterpart was To inspire a feeling of veneration for the early colonists, their works and institutions.' 'Objects of the Association', Brett and Hook, Martin and Skinner, eds, Bidwill and Woodhouse, Journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 2, 2 (September 1922), p. 28.Albertlanders, p. 5.Short History of the Otago Early Settlers' Association, p. 32; Bidwill and Woodhouse, Bidwill of Pihautea, p. vii; Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. v.Bidwill of Pihautea, p. vii; Brett and Hook, Albertlanders, p. 435. For an example from religious history, see Chappell, Across a Hundred Years, pp. 2, 59.