Island Stories
The Writing of New Zealand History 1920-1940
Chris Hilliard
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History, The University of Auckland, February 1997
Abstract
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 Peter Gibbons has called 'cultural colonisation'. Those problems concern the construction of 'New Zealand' on Pakeha terms in ways that range from the appropriation of Maori culture to conflations of 'New Zealand' with 'Pakeha'.
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 James Cowan, who argued that conflict and compact between Maori and Pakeha lay at the heart of New Zealand history. The thesis then moves on to the work of a group of Wellington historians whose endeavours to collect source material were replicated in their texts. Two of the most significant works produced in this milieu, G. H. Scholefield's A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and T. Lindsay Buick's 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'.
Contents
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[Abstract](#n4)
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[ii](#n4)
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[Acknowledgements](#n6)
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[iv](#n6)
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[List of Abbreviations](#n7)
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[v](#n7)
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[1](#n8)
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[Problems of the Imagination](#n8)
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[1](#n8)
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[2](#n25)
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[Local History](#n25)
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[18](#n25)
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[3](#n44)
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[James Cowan and the Frontiers of New Zealand History](#n44)
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[37](#n44)
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[4](#n59)
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[Collecting, Oratory, and the Work of Wellington Historians](#n59)
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[52](#n59)
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[5](#n86)
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[Establishing the Nation: New Zealand History in Universities](#n86)
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[79](#n86)
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[6](#n115)
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[Centennial Splendours](#n115)
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[108](#n115)
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[7](#n154)
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[Conclusion](#n154)
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[147](#n154)
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[Bibliography](#n164)
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[157](#n164)
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Acknowledgements
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 Deborah Montgomerie and Raewyn Dalziel. They have been exemplary supervisors, diligent, provocative, and complementary.
Jock Phillips, David Colquhoun and Rachel Barrowman have shared their unpublished work with me and made helpful comments on various chapters. Tim Beaglehole lent me some of his father's papers and commented on a draft of chapter five. Peter Gibbons and Malcolm MacKinnon have given me information from their own research. I have benefited much from discussions with Mary Paul and Alex Calder.
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, Judith Bassett, Barbara Batt, Caroline Daley, Diana Holmes, Hugh Laracy, Barry Reay, Philip Rousseau and Nisha Saheed have all helped me with my thesis. I am grateful to the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs for a research apprenticeship that enabled me to do more archival research than would otherwise have been possible, and for the people I met there. I also want to thank the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Manuscripts and Archives Section; the staff of the University of Auckland Library, especially the Interloans and New Zealand and Pacific Departments; and Kathleen Coleridge of the J. C. Beaglehole Room at the Victoria University of Wellington Library.
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.
List of Abbreviations
APL |
Auckland Public Library |
ATL |
Alexander Turnbull Library |
IA1 |
Department of Internal Affairs files, series one |
NA |
National Archives, Wellington |
UA |
University of Auckland Library |
VUW |
Victoria University of Wellington Library |
1. Problems of the Imagination
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 Peter Gibbons in his discussion of non-fiction in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature and in an essay published in Sites in 1986.Peter Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', in Terry Sturm, ed., 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.
The manifold acts of writing can be viewed as acts of 'cultural colonisation'.This concept underpins Gibbons' two essays, but for a discussion of the term, see Peter Gibbons, '"Going Native": A Case Study of Cultural Appropriation in a Settler Society, with Particular Reference to the Activities of Johannes Andersen in New Zealand During the First Half of the Twentieth Century', 3 vols, DPhil thesis, Waikato University, 1992, vol. 3, p. 693n.
Few would dispute this in the case of, say, political tracts written in an attempt to delegitimate Maori culture and rights, or flagrant appropriations of taonga. But even texts that do not refer to Maori people can be part of the enterprise of colonisation in their treatment of the European presence in Aotearoa as natural, normative, or simply not needing explanation or justification. The search for a 'home in thought' that was prominent among university-associated writers in the 1930s often eschewed the orientalism of other nationalist images but was colonialist in its concern with turning Europeans into 'settlers' in a cultural sense, rather than unsettled exiles, or godwit-like birds of passage.On the phrase 'home in thought' see James Bertram, 'A Commentary', 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.Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity, Wellington, 1986, ch. 17; W. L. Renwick, '"Show Us These Islands and Ourselves … Give Us a Home in Thought"', New Zealand Journal of History, 21, 2 (October 1987), pp. 197-214.
I have further reasons for adopting the concept, however. 'Cultural colonisation' is not just a heuristic device imposed retrospectively on early twentieth-century New Zealand: it was a concept employed by contemporary writers to describe the work of creating a culture. Commentators on New Zealand literature blamed the defects of the works they discussed on the fact that most colonists had been busy with practical pioneering tasks, but then expressed the hope that future colonists would be able to write poetry and fiction in ways analogous to the colonising activities of their forebears. The first and second generations of European New Zealanders had 'comparatively little time for things not practical—the columns must be set up before we turn to moulding the entablature.'W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie. 'Introduction' to Alexander and Currie. eds. New Zealand Verse, London, 1906, pp. xiv-xv.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, it was possible to turn to moulding the entablature of high culture, and writers and scholars were routinely dubbed 'pioneers'. The relationship between 'breaking in' the land and cultural 'pioneering' is one reason why a book so saturated in farming detail as H. Guthrie-Smith's Tutira could be recommended so forcefully by thoroughly urban people as a way of understanding New Zealand.H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1926; E. H. McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, pp. 149-55; J. W. Heenan, 'New Zealand's Greatest Book', text of a talk given in 1936, J. W. Heenan Papers, MS Papers 1132/90, ATL; 'Art and Letters in New Zealand by E. H. McCormick: Talk from 3YA by J. H. E. Schroder', nd [1940], E. H. McCormick Papers, MS Papers 166/14, ATL. See also Alan Mulgan, Literature and Authorship in New Zealand, London, 1943, p. 35.
Cultural colonisation remained a stated goal well after the interwar period. In this vein J. C. Beaglehole's 1954 lecture 'The New Zealand Scholar' invoked Robert Frost's poem 'The Gift Outright' as an appropriate description of the colonial cultural predicament:
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', in Peter Munz, ed., The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, Wellington, 1969, p. 252. Frost's poem was also quoted in Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, Harmondsworth, 1959, pp. 300-301. Rather than endorsing Frost's poem as Beaglehole did, Sinclair aligned it with the claims of Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Ursula Bethell, and other 'South Islanders' who emphasised the rootlessness of life 'in these islands'.
W. H. Oliver summed up the 'modest maturity' of New Zealand culture in 1960 with the words, 'The spiritual pioneer is beginning to populate the land'.W. H. Oliver, 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', Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, 'which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.'Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London, 1992 (English trans first pub. 1969), p. 248.
Pakeha historians, poets and other writers usually treated 'New Zealand' as a 'document' of creation while repressing the destruction in which the colony was implicated. It is now difficult to do that.
In the years 1920-40 the major task of cultural colonisation was what Terry Goldie calls 'indigenisation'. Writing with reference to Canada, Goldie comments:
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, the white 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.Paul Allan Hamer discusses the parallels between Pakeha discussions of indigenous people and indigenous environments, and their respective 'taming', in his 'Nature and Natives: Transforming and Saving the Indigenous in New Zealand', MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1992.
In writing about Maori and native plants and animals, Pakeha created texts that celebrated 'the remnants of that alien world which the original colonists tried to destroy'.Gibbons, 'A Note on Writing Identity, and Colonisation', p. 33.
These kinds of writing may be denoted by the oxymoron 'patriotic exoticism'.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 James Cowan and James Herries Beattie) had interests which spanned both history and ethnology, making it difficult to draw a line between 'historians' and 'ethnologists', it is less difficult to draw a line between 'history' and 'ethnology'. Ethnological texts dealt with 'traditional' accounts of 'old-time' Maori, and embodied methodological and disciplinary protocols quite distinct from those involved in writing about events in New Zealand after 1769. The subject-matter was also chronologically distinct, with 1840 or thereabouts as a border. The two kinds of discourse were seldom combined in the same text, and those works that did combine them juxtaposed rather than blended: the discursive register shifted from Maori-centred 'tradition' to European-centred 'history' as the narrative passed through the period 1814-40. Examples include T. W. Downes, Old Whanganui, Hawera, 1915, and George Graham, 'A Maori History of the Auckland Isthmus (Tamaki-Makau-Rau)', in John Barr, 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 T. Lindsay Buick wrote in the interwar period cultivated the 'picturesque' in their description of scenes such as Waitangi in February 1840, but they did not stress the exotic. Much more complicit with patriotic exoticism were James Cowan's many historical works on 'frontier' New Zealand. They invested the remaining pristine specimens of New Zealand scenery with a rich exoticism and recounted stories of cannibalism in some detail. More generally, Cowan painted New Zealand's 'pioneering period' as 'teeming' with fascinating encounters between settlers and Maori.
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 Alan Mulgan's 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 Jessie Mackay, worshipped Ireland and Scotland as well as or instead of the England that Mulgan's 'heart ache[d] to see'.Alan Mulgan, 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 James Hight is a good example of this. The same assumption underpinned research on New Zealand conducted (often by expatriate New Zealanders) at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Here the assumption rested not (just) on a New Zealand 'Home'-sickness, but on those universities' definitions of history: New Zealand history was not important in itself but could be relevant to the overall study of British colonial policy.
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, Horace Fildes, was interested in the New Zealand Wars and Maori society, but he also had investments in the cult of Wakefield. Both empire-worship and muted forms of patriotic exoticism could occur in two works by the same writer, or even the same text. Buick combined paeans to 'the' British character (not just in prefaces) with his exploitation of the 'picturesque' and 'romantic' in the history of Maori-European contact. Neither the exaltation of the New Zealand picturesque nor a concern with New Zealand's Britishness may be locked into a particular period, or a particular generation.J. O. C. Phillips contrasts the 'intellectuals of the nineties in New Zealand—Edward Tregear, Elsdon Best, James Cowan, J. C. Andersen, Arthur Adams, Alfred Hill, Charles Goldie with 'the young intellectuals of the thirties' so as to imply a shift from a nationalism concerned with cultural appropriation to a more academic, European-centred nationalism. Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland—or Was There a 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.
William Downie Stewart, a historian born, like Cowan and Andersen, in the 1870s, told E. H. McCormick in 1940: 'I … doubt whether I agree with your view that the … pakeha thinks with pride of … Maori history as part of his background & tradition. Does he not instinctively link himself up with his English origins & regard Maori history as a thing apart?'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 (Allen Curnow, James Bertram, A. R. D. Fairburn, M. H. Holcroft, and many others); even the first year of Phoenix was at least as internationalist as nationalist.Phoenix, 1, 1 (March 1932); Phoenix, 1, 2 (July 1932). On these writers generally see Stevan Eldred-Grigg, 'A Bourgeois Blue? Nationalism and Letters from the 1920s to the 1950s', Landfall, 41 (September 1987), pp. 293-311.
The relevant point here is that when such people talked about a 'native' or 'indigenous' literature, they meant one that was Pakeha and did not depend on borrowings from Maori culture or kitsch treatments of natural beauty.But see Robin Hyde, 'The Singers of Loneliness', in Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, ed. Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews, Wellington, 1991.
The exclusion of Maori from the idea of 'New Zealand' was most thorough in those writings concerned with the apparent 'common problem of the imagination' manifested in the idea 'that we are confronted by a natural time, a natural order, to which our presence in these islands is accidental, irrelevant; that we are interlopers on an indifferent or hostile scene'.Allen Curnow, 'Introduction' to Curnow, ed., A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, Christchurch, 1945, p. 52. See also M. H. Holcroft, 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; Charles Brasch, 'The Silent Land', in Curnow, ed., Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, p. 149.
Of the historians active in the interwar period, only Beaglehole and McCormick (who, I will later argue, may legitimately be viewed as a historian) engaged in their work with the indigenising strategies of these writers. Beaglehole's 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. McCormick's 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 Sargeson and John Mulgan, not in the patriotic exoticist literature long touted as a solution. Cowan opposed McCormick's arguments about literature, and the general tendency of McCormick, Beaglehole and the 'creative' writers to situate Pakeha identity in poetry and fiction.James Cowan, 'New Zealand History: Its Teaching and Its Uses', National Education, 20, 210 (1 March 1938), p. 56. Beaglehole and many writers of fiction and poetry also located a New Zealand identity in domestic politics and New Zealand's participation in international affairs.
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 Horace Fildes being described as a historian. Such objections are based on the assumption that 'real' historians are 'professional' historians, those who work in universities or for government historical agencies. That assumption is inappropriate to this thesis, which is a study of the state of New Zealand historiography before these professional niches were well established.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.
Fildes and others were considered historians by their colleagues and certain members of the public who left behind written evidence of their opinions. A 'historian' may be defined simply as someone who writes history. Or, better, a person is a historian 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 not a hard-and-fast border; the years around the end of World War I saw the writing of a number of important works by established practitioners in New Zealand history and the first incursions into the subject by academics. The period closes with the disruption of war, the deaths of some notable New Zealand historians, the inauguration of a tradition of history that was to last in the universities for several decades, and the large historiographical project of the New Zealand Centennial.
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 Robert McNab began his 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 Dominion Museum hired Buick to gather historical data. A government activity of great importance to the practice of history was the maintenance of the Alexander Turnbull Library from 1920 onwards.
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.Michael E. Hoare, 'The Board of Science and Art 1913-1930: A Precursor to the DSIR', in M. E. Hoare and L. G. Bell, eds, In Search of New Zealand's Scientific Heritage, Wellington, 1984.
The Museum also employed Elsdon Best to write up his ethnological work, and in the early twenties Apirana Ngata and Gordon Coates set up the Board of Maori Ethnological Research and the Maori Purposes Fund Board, which also sponsored ethnology.M. P. K. Sorrenson, 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 Joseph Heenan became Under-Secretary for Internal Affairs, the department responsible for most of the cultural dimensions of government activity. Together Heenan, Peter Fraser and, to a lesser extent, W. E. Parry established systematic government support for the arts and scholarship. Much of that story belongs to the 1940s, but in the last few years of the interwar period the government granted pensions to ailing writers and, more importantly, brought about the huge publishing programme associated with the Centennial.
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 R. S. Gormack, 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 C. A. Fleming, Science, Settlers and Scholars: The Centennial History of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Wellington, 1987.
In ethnology, the expansion of the universities was less extensive and less steady: some of the Polynesian Society's older members, and Andersen, the editor of its Journal for much of this period, successfully resisted the few academic incursions into the journal until the 1940s.Sorrenson, Manifest Duty, pp. 64-5, 77-8.
Writing fiction and poetry was not something the university colleges taught, but analogous events occurred in literary circles, as some young, university-educated writers of the 1930s challenged a literary establishment whose power base was in the literary pages of the daily newspapers.
The incursion of the universities into the writing of New Zealand history (which may be dated to the publication of James Hight and H. D. Bamford's 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 John Rawson Elder of Otago University, worked according to conventions shared by some prominent non-university historians. Others mingled with non-academics in the branches of the New Zealand Historical Association. But there were fundamental differences between younger academics and other historians, in method, subject-matter, and style. Often these stayed private, in critical readings of others' books rather than in open debate. Direct conflict between academics and non-academics over the writing of history became most pronounced when historians of different kinds were brought together for the Centennial historical publications from 1937 to 1941. When a roughly analogous conflict occurred in 1932-4 in the Polynesian Society, the arena was the society's journal.Ibid., pp. 77-8.
History lacked the strong national organisation of ethnology, and the assembly of very different historians on the Centennial project was the closest history came to a conflict in a place as central to the field as the 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 Polynesian Society became 'academicised' (an ugly word, but one more accurate than 'professionalised'), and thereafter most ethnological work with scholarly claims was done in universities, but there remained a popular demand for 'Maori myths and legends', to which writers and publishers such as A. H. and A. W. Reed catered. In literature, young writers with university experience and often with modernist leanings gained institutional ground from 'Mulgan, Marris, Schroder' (most conspicuously in their editions of anthologies) but not everyone in New Zealand, not even a majority, was reading Sargeson and Curnow.Denis Glover, Short Reflection on the Present State of Literature in This Country, Christchurch, nd [1935]. Alan Mulgan, J. H. E. Schroder, and C. A. Marris edited literary pages in newspapers; Marris also edited a poetry annual.
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 Beaglehole, J. B. Condliffe and other academics arrived on the scene.A significant account that makes this assumption is Sinclair, Destiny Apart, p. 241. For more casual examples, see Marcia Stenson, 'History in New Zealand Schools', 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.
A large number of the historians discussed in this thesis worked outside the university colleges and were members of intellectual communities that were relatively detached from academia. Secondly, the changes in the practice of New Zealand history in this period did not amount to a revolution, but they were significant. One of the purposes of this study is to show how institutional changes intersected with the historiographical elements of what Gibbons calls 'the textual production of "New Zealand"'.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 29.
It is this 'textual production' that is the primary concern of the thesis. Associated matters such as teaching, broadcasting, the accumulation of source material, the reputations and impact of particular historians, and indeed the institutional changes just canvassed, are dealt with, sometimes in some detail, but they are made to illuminate the writing of history, not vice versa.
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.Terry Sturm, 'Introduction' to Sturm, ed., Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, pp. xiii-xiv.
New Zealand historians have not been unaware of the literary dimensions of their discipline, but in general they have discussed their predecessors' writing in brief tributes, eulogies or 'historiographical' essays.An exception is the account of Otago's historians in Erik Olssen, A History of Otago, Dunedin, 1984, pp. 173-78, 197-201.
The most important work on non-fiction, including historical writing, is Gibbons' essay in the 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.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 104 (italics added).
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 adequately explored through orthodox biographies which see texts as straightforward products of authorial intent. Nor is it enough to place particular texts within wider traditions without exploring how those traditions engage with the subject-matter of individual texts. To treat a text as largely determined by an international tradition such as Western anthropology makes the same error as an orthodox 'literary biography': it attributes the important characteristics of a text to a central originating power.For a New Zealand example, see M. P. K. Sorrenson, Maori Origins and Migrations: The Genesis of Some Pakeha Myths and Legends, Auckland, 1979, especially p. 58.
The study of non-fiction texts 'in detail' requires a more complex conception of the relationships between texts and their contexts.
Though Jacques Derrida's terms have become diluted through overuse, I think that text and context are a binarism in the Derridean sense: two terms that exist only through their opposition, a conceptual opposition that masks their mutual implication in each other. The cliche 'the context explains' does not hold. For one thing, '[i]f contextualization were fully explanatory, texts would be derivative items in which nothing new or different happened'.Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, 1994, p. 35.
Moreover, there is no such thing as 'the' context, which exists outside the text and which in some way 'produces' the text. Each text has multiple contexts, which are themselves heterogeneous collections of texts. Texts are created by the combination of different contextual elements, such as authors' life experiences and intentions, other books, the publishing market, current events, and, for historians, 'primary sources'. A text is a permutation of contexts, and contexts are maintained and renewed in texts. Contexts are inside texts as well as outside them.
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 through appropriations and combinations. 'Meanings are never simply inscribed on the minds and bodies of those to whom they are directed or on whom they are "imposed" but are always reinscribed in the act of reception.'John E. Toews, 'Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience', American Historical Review, 92, 4 (October 1987), p. 884.
Many of the texts discussed in this thesis reinscribed ideology quite straightforwardly. But it is a mistake to assume texts to be middens of social attitudes, from which one may pluck unproblematic evidence of 'attitudes to' this or 'perceptions of' that. Such claims may be valid as conclusions, but they should not be assumptions. Departures from received ideas occur in surprising places in the works discussed in this thesis. One of the things I hope to give a sense of is the variety within Pakeha ideology and its colonising problematic. Histories sharing the same assumptions could be very different, as is demonstrated by the local histories, Condliffe's New Zealand in the Making, and the Centennial surveys. Pakeha ideology, including its racism, is more complex than some accounts admit.For example, Angela Ballara, 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, Roland Barthes's treatment of the death of the author ignores the way in which writing, by reprocessing existing texts, is a kind of reading.Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London, 1988, especially p. 171.
Authors are important agents of that reading. For the most part I have drawn on biographical data for quite impersonal information—for instance, to find out whether a writer had read this or that book, as evidence of how they came 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.James Clifford, '"Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners": Ethnobiographical Prospects', in Daniel Aaron, ed., Studies in Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, pp. 44-5.
A related practice is the attribution of aspects of texts to Irish' or 'Scottish' traits of their authors. This is not inevitably wrong, but without substantial documentation it is simply the friendly inverse of scapegoating. There is also the problem that authors with similar lives may write very different books. I have not sought, for instance, to pin Cowan's writings about Maori down to the bicultural experiences of his childhood in the 1870s and 1880s, which he spent on a farm on the site of the battle of Orakau. Cowan himself invoked these experiences as evidence of his authority, but others who had similar experiences (such as William Baucke) wrote very differently about Maori.William Baucke, Where the White Man Treads, 2nd edn, Auckland, 1928. For biographies, see Sheila Natusch, 'Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Baucke', and David Colquhoun, 'James Cowan', both in Claudia Orange, ed., The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, Auckland, 1996.
By contrast, a family biography such as Airini Woodhouse's 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 Edward Gibbon Wakefield who made New Zealand history through their texts as well as their actions. The texts of these writers and others more remote (among them William Wordsworth and Francis Parkman) traverse the boundaries between past and present. Neglecting such texts and 'primary sources' misses the point that historical discourse is not some mere analogue of 'contemporary' social attitudes but exists through an exchange (albeit with varying degrees of openness) between 'present' and 'past' texts and ideological formations.
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 McCormick and Cowan, I have drawn on substantial collections of working notes or earlier versions. For most local historians, I have had to resort to juxtapositions of a number of texts in the field. An examination of sources and of other contemporaries' practice makes it possible, with varying degrees of success, to sketch what a historian 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.Allan Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, 'The Rhetoric of History', in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, eds, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Madison, 1987.
Historians often use 'narrative' as an antonym for 'analysis', but here it is used in a broad sense to denote a historical work's subject matter and the way its material is arranged in the text.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 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 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, McCormick and others about New Zealand book-reviewing at this time.Holcroft, Deepening Stream, pp. 60-62; McCormick to Heenan, 2 October 1940, Heenan Papers, 1132/134; E. M. Smith, 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.
When frank contemporary discussions are available (and they often are in the letters and notes of Fildes, James Rutherford, Cowan, McCormick and other Centennial workers), I have used them to indicate what some contemporaries made of these texts. These contemporary readings are alternatives or complements to my own.
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 Terry Goldie's two paths to indigenisation.
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 'explained' New Zealand. Chapter six examines the Centennial surveys and the ways in which academic concerns and standards intersected with those of other kinds of history to create a series of books that edged out the values of Cowan and Buick and, in places, fused together the narratives of local histories and the methods, styles and concerns of academic works.
2. Local History
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 T. M. Hocken's 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.T. M. Hocken, A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand, Wellington, 1909.
Otago's jubilee provided the impetus for the formation of an early settlers' association, initially affiliated to the New Zealand Natives Association.William Martin and Eric Skinner, eds, 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.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, more and more small towns passed their fiftieth anniversaries. Such milestones made it feasible to form societies as well as to publish one-off jubilee volumes, and there was a large upsurge in the number of societies formed and the number of books and booklets published. Local historical and early settlers' societies were central to local histories, partly because the presentation of historical papers could be a social activity, and partly because local histories involved local social obligations. While not all such histories were published to coincide with anniversaries, the majority of them served similar commemorative ends.
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 different 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.Alfred Eccles, Records of Early Days: Some Beginnings in Dunedin and Otago [Dunedin, 1929].
Lectures and pamphlets were usually single-author works; miscellanies tended to be collaborative. While shorter works of local history could be strong on plot and anecdote, they did not have to be: listing habitual activities and pointing out whose shop used to be on which corner were themselves valid exercises.
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, Annals of a New Zealand Family: The Household of Gilbert Mair, Early Pioneer, Dunedin, 1935. Jackson was born Laura Mair, a daughter of Gilbert Mair, Senior.
These family biographies epitomised the practice of biography in New Zealand generally. The few biographies written by people other than the subject's relatives had this filial piety thrust upon them: their work depended on the blessing of and sources supplied by the family.Examples include Guy Scholefield's work on Hobson, Eric Ramsden's on Marsden, and James Cowan's on Donald McLean. The imposed loyalty was not unwelcome in any of these cases, however. William Downie Stewart's 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.
Another genre was the compendium of portraits. Robert Valpy Fulton's Medical Practice in Otago and Southland was a series of articles on individual doctors, its whole equal to the sum of its parts.Robert Valpy Fulton, 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.
Other collections, such as Robert Gilkison's Early Days in Central Otago, gathered together anecdotes rather than miniature biographies.Robert Gilkison, Early Days in Central Otago: Being Tales of Times Gone By, Dunedin, 1930.
Other books that did not define themselves as miscellanies of anecdotes cannot easily be distinguished from books that did.
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, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. v; Jackson, Annals of a New Zealand Family, p. 13; L. G. D. Acland, The Early Canterbury Runs, 3rd edn, Christchurch, 1946 (first pub. 1930), p. 9.
Again, there is a parallel with Cowan, though Cowan exploited the practice of newspaper history to the point where he could support himself by such work. Sympathetic newspaper editors and proprietors, such as Henry Brett of the Auckland Star, fostered the publication of history in their newspapers and, in some cases, in book-form through sibling companies.See, for example, Michael Brett, 'Henry Brett', in Claudia Orange, ed., 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
The problem remained, and the Association's journal lapsed in 1923.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).
The Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association was likewise pulled in different directions.Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, Gore, 1933.
Other societies appear to have made fewer attempts to be scholarly fora, though they built up museums and portrait collections.
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.David G. Roberts, The Wesley Historical Society in Aotearoa/New Zealand: The First Sixty Years, Auckland, 1992, chs 1-2; Peter Lineham, 'Religion', in Colin Davis and Peter Lineham, eds, The Future of the Past: Themes in New Zealand History, Palmerston North, 1991, pp. 7-8.
In addition, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin had general historical societies, some of which were under the auspices of the New Zealand Historical Association or Society (both terms were used, apparently for the same body), which seems to have been a group of societies that were, in practice, autonomous.P. J. G. Smith, circular to members of the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Historical Society, 25 July 1929, J. G Andersen Papers, MS Papers 148/22, ATL.
In the 'branches' of this association, local historians mixed with academics and other noted historians, such as William Downie Stewart and T. Lindsay Buick. In Dunedin, Auckland and Christchurch, at least, the local professors of history were prominent members.Olssen, 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. A. B. Chappell was a stalwart of both the Auckland Historical Society and the Wesley Historical Society (as well as a 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"').Roberts, Wesley Historical Society, p. 33; Keith Sinclair, A History of the University of Auckland 1883–1983, Auckland, 1983, pp. 124-5.
He reached beyond his interests in the histories of Auckland and Methodism to pursue a fascination with the Bay of Islands in the pre-1840 period.For an example of Chappell's Auckland and Methodist history, see his Across a Hundred Years 1841-1941: A Brief Story of the Beginning and Early Progress of Methodism in Auckland, N.Z. [Auckland, 1941].
He expended considerable energy in rescuing James Busby's reputation.A. B. Chappell, 'MS Notes etc Relating to James Busby', nd [c. 1930-37], NZMS 179, APL. Keith Sinclair, Halfway Round the Harbour: An Autobiography, Auckland, 1993, p. 58, has an amusing anecdote about Chappell's interest in Busby in 1940.
In the mid-1930s he became convinced that Kororareka had never been the capital of New Zealand, and also wrote on the more abstract question of the significance of capitals.Chappell to Horace Fildes, 12 June 1933, Horace Fildes MSS Papers, box 1, VUW; [Chappell,] 'What Is a Capital? Sana of Yemen', undated clipping from unspecified newspaper in Chappell, notebook [c. 1925-35], NZMS 138, APL. This notebook contains many rough notes by Chappell on this subject.
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, Manifest Duty, pp. 24, 64, 65; Atholl Anderson, Introduction: James Herries Beattie and the 1920 Project, in James Herries Beattie, 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 James Hislop to Johannes Andersen, 2 October 1922, IA1, 113/6, NA.
It was important to 'preserve some of the early history of the district … before it is too late'.Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, p. 21.
Local societies collected portraits and pioneer implements, and stressed the urgency of collecting manuscripts and recording narratives and reminiscences.'Objects of the Association', 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.
The delivery and publication of lectures 'plac[ed] on record what were considered to be important items relating to the history of the district.'Records of the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association, vol. 2, p. 20.
Local historians were not always uncritical of nostalgic memories, but unlike some historians discussed in this thesis they treated memories as a key unit of evidence.
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'.William Edward Bidwill and Airini Elizabeth Woodhouse, Bidwill of Pihautea: The Life of Charles Robert Bidwill, Christchurch, 1927, p. vii; A. Selwyn Bruce, 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; Henry Brett and Henry Hook, The Albertlanders: Brave Pioneers of the 'Sixties, Auckland, 1927, p. 6.
Local histories quoted in bulk, so as not to disturb the integrity of a source. They did not quote for short illustration, but reproduced paragraphs or multiple pages of source material, usually contemporary testimonies, interviewees' accounts, or recollections published in newspapers. Rather than creating a synthetic narrative with a strong authorial voice, these histories tended to keep the source intact, sometimes reducing the author's textual persona to the function of a plaque on a display-cabinet. Exceptions to this pattern (such as Gilkison's 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, 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.
It mattered not only to speak well of them, but also to let them have their own say. A related practice was that of acknowledging the achievements of as many people as was humanly possible. Rolls of early settlers were compiled for anniversaries,For example, Auckland Provincial Centennial Council, Roll of Early Settlers and Descendants in the Auckland Province Prior to the End of 1852, Auckland, 1940.
but the habit of naming en masse pervaded other texts because most local histories were commemorations whether they coincided with a jubilee or not. Gibbons has written that local histories at this time tended to contain 'about as many names as the district's telephone directory'.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 73.
A quotation from the paper that Albert N. Burrows read at the Gore and Surrounding Districts' Early Settlers' Association annual reunion in August 1929 should show that this comment is not as hyperbolic as it may seem:
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, Early Days in Central Otago, p. 184.
But in many cases, the textual versions of those individuals were stereotypes, and most of these people were important because of their institutional positions and their places in community hierarchies. An individual's importance lay in his (and occasionally her) having been the first practitioner of a particular trade in the district, the first mayor and so on. Even John Barr's history of Auckland, commissioned by the city council, was less concerned with the workings of institutions than with listing the people who occupied positions within them.Barr, 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.
Local histories were a narrative analogue of the 'waste lands' legal doctrine. Often, this 'waste lands' attitude was implicit: where conflict with Maori was not discussed in detail, the indigenous inhabitants of a district were relegated to the preface of a narrative, or to the roles of helpers or hazards ('Maori scares' were stock events in local histories).A. E. Woodhouse, 'Editor's Note' in Woodhouse, ed., Tales of Pioneer Women, Christchurch, 1940, p. xv.
The privileging of settlement as the defining characteristic of a district's history made Maori significant only insofar as they contributed to or impeded settlement.
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.Beaglehole, 'New Zealand Scholar', p. 247.
One's role in the colonisation of a district affected one's status 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 T. W. 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'.Downes, Old Whanganui; Fleming to Scholefield, 23 April 1940, Scholefield Papers, 212/43.
In most local histories, though, Maori play minor roles in European dramas. The main roles were those of the 'pioneers'.
The pioneer images in local histories may be traced to nineteenth-century immigration propaganda and its idealisation of work and 'vigour'.Margaret A. McClure, 'On Work: Perceptions of Work in Late Nineteenth Century New Zealand 1870-1900', MLitt thesis, University of Auckland, 1993, ch. 1.
Respectable pioneers (as opposed to, say, the drifters of the Bulletin) had long been stock characters in New Zealand fiction.Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 524. For Australian comparisons, see J. B. Hirst, 'The Pioneer Legend', in John Carroll, ed., 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.
Their most obvious trait was the way they toiled in a fashion that approached heroism. Local histories emphasised pioneers' courage by paying close attention to the hardships overcome. The physical conditions in which pioneers laboured were described in thick material detail, a practice both paralleled and enabled by the collection of pioneer artefacts. The ingenuity of their responses to difficult situations was described likewise: 'Saddles and bridles were even scarcer than horses, but the resourceful pioneer frequently made a satisfactory substitute for bridles from the fibrous leaves of the wild flax and rode bareback.'A. E. Woodhouse, 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., Tales of Pioneer Women.
but more often, in the work of female historians as well as male, they were praised while remaining on the sideline of the narrative. Thus Fulton wrote in 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'.Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. ii.
Fulton's comment and the place of women in his book exemplified the role of pioneer women in many local histories. Like the men they were tested, and they often had to perform traditionally masculine actions, such as horse-riding.Woodhouse, 'Editor's Note', in Woodhouse, ed., Tales of Pioneer Women, p. xv; Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. ii.
But the women remained something apart from the men, always different, sometimes marginal.
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 the fruits of 'civilisation' were conscious gifts by the pioneers, not mere by-products of efforts expended solely for their own or their children's gain. In some cases, of course, this was a reasonable conclusion to draw, but pioneer histories seldom exhibited signs of reasoning toward this conclusion. It was assumed as a given.
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. Henry Brett and Henry Hook wrote that their book on the Albertland settlement in the Kaipara left out 'the faults and frictions of Albertland life, which are common to human nature and every community.'Brett and Hook, Albertlanders, p. 435.
The troubles to be remembered were troubles external to the pioneers, obstacles that were surmounted. There was no room for blame of the pioneers.
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', Journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 2, 2 (September 1922), p. 28.
The 'duty of remembrance' had two components: the striving to remember and the striving to make the memory a model of one's life.Brett and Hook, Albertlanders, p. 5.
It was commonplace to say that a book was written, or a museum collection assembled, in order that present-day Pakeha might comprehend the hardships the pioneers faced.Martin and Skinner, eds, 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.
These travails appreciated, Pakeha might 'leaen to meet the trials of modern times with the same spirit which animated these pioneer settlers'.Bidwill and Woodhouse, 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.
The more cautious (or stern) expressed this as a hope; others, such as Gilkison, declared that the pioneer spirit did indeed live on. Like many non-historians, Gilkison linked pioneering and soldiering: 'Without exception the sons of the old pioneers throughout Otago went forward at the call [in World War I]… hundreds of brave men went forth in the spirit that led their fathers … "so live the fathers in the sons".'Gilkison, Early Days in Central Otago, p. 204; Sinclair, Destiny Apart, p. 142; Jock Phillips, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male—A History, 2nd edn., Auckland, 1996, pp. 145-6, 165-6.
The responsibility of (selective) memory and the specifics of the pioneer myth meant that local history was not a mere diversion without public significance. It inscribed the 'colonial helpmeet' as a feminine ideal and glorified a devoted work ethic.On the colonial helpmeet see Raewyn Dalziel, 'The Colonial Helpmeet: Women's Role and the Vote in Nineteenth Century New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of History, 11, 2 (October 1977), pp. 112-23.
The pioneer legend was, of course, widespread in Pakeha culture. Sometimes it was unhitched from 'early settlers' and attached to a general colonial spirit which was supposed to exist in the offspring of more recent immigrants as well. The extent to which local historians were responsible for the currency of pioneer stereotypes in Pakeha culture is a difficult question. Local historical societies were not mass movements, and early settlers' associations were inherently restrictive in their membership. Moreover, exclusivity did not necessarily mean devotion. Wellington's association could not inspire enough of its 368 members to contribute to or even buy copies of its journal, which ceased publication after four issues, even though the Association itself had been going since before World War I.George Hunter and W. A. Edwards, 'Eighth Annual Report', journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 2, 4 (May 1923), p. 21. A list of members appears on pp. 24-6 of the same issue.
To this objection one may reply that local historians' sketches were published in mainstream newspapers as well as in obscure bulletins. And the extent of the dissemination of ideas and vocabularies is not a linear function of the size of their immediate audience. Local histories may be seen as significant if not overwhelming disseminators and guardians of the pioneer legend.
Their most direct ideological impact, however, may have been as local as their specific contents. Local histories implied that the well established pioneer families of a district owed their position to merit and the heroic efforts which made twentieth-century comfort possible. As a hegemonic image, the pioneer myth was subject to repeated appropriation and contestation. To illustrate the political import local histories could have, and to give some idea of the variations from the generalised account of the pioneer legend I have given so far, I will now discuss the career of the pioneer legend in Otago's local histories during the interwar period.
Otago is not a typical case but an extreme one. The idea of the 'first settlers' of 1848 remained of political importance for a long time. Otago also had one of the largest bodies of local historical literature. Writing on local history in substantial quantities began earlier in Otago than elsewhere, partly on the backs of commemorative church histories. Erik Olssen suggests that in the interwar period, the 'vitality of Otago's historical tradition' was related to an awareness of Otago's decline—its golden age was in the past, not the present or the future.Olssen, History of Otago, pp. 177-8.
The pioneer legend had different emphases in different regions, and in Otago it was unsurprisingly coloured by Presbyterian values.Ibid., p. 174; Sketches from the Life of William Paterson, 27 Years Secretary of the Otago Early Settlers' Association [Dunedin, 1945], pp. 2, 9, 18.
The principal bearers of the pioneer mantle were the Free Church settlers of the late 1840s and the 1850s. Their descendants vigilantly maintained that these were the true and only pioneers of Otago. This claim, however, was open to challenge on behalf of earlier whalers and later gold-miners. In 1931 the centennial of the Otakou whaling station was celebrated and a commemorative plaque unveiled by the Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe.'Early Whalers: Centenary of Arrival: Governor-General Unveils Tablet', Otago Witness, 30 November 1931.
The event provoked 'much controversy'.K. C. McDonald, City of Dunedin: A Century of Civic Enterprise, Dunedin, 1965, p. 346; Olssen, History of Otago, p. 197.
'There was a disposition on the part of people brought up on the legend of 1848 to dispute the historical importance of anything that had happened before that year, and to resent the celebration as an attempt to usurp the honour due to the founders of the Otago settlement.'McDonald, City of Dunedin, pp. 346-7.
The Early Settlers' Association retaliated the following year with a footpath tablet commemorating the spot where 'the pioneer settlers landed from a boat off the "John Wickliffe" on the 23rd day of March, 1848, to found this City and Province'.Ibid., p. 347.
The commemoration of the whalers challenged the status of the Presbyterians as pioneers in the sense of first European arrivals. Gold-rush immigrants and their sympathisers could challenge their status in a different way, by borrowing other elements of pioneer rhetoric. The descendants of the Free Church settlers preserved their parents' hostility to the gold-rush immigrants, and did not incorporate them into the pioneer legend. At first the Otago Early Settlers' Association excluded all those who had arrived after 1861, 'this being regarded as the commencement of a second and very distinct era of settlement, when the new arrivals were certainly not all pious Presbyterians'.Martin and Skinner, eds, Short History of the Otago Early Settlers' Association, p. 9.
This restriction was progressively relaxed, and by 1918 an early settler was defined as any European who had arrived before 1868 (unlike other such societies, the Otago association had a large membership, growing from 2000 in 1920 to 3000 in 1938).Ibid., pp. 9, 17, 19.
Nevertheless, the gold-rush immigrants were not prominent characters in the histories produced for the association.
Other Otago histories redeemed the gold-miners. Alexander Don's history of the Presbyterian Church in Central Otago (of which Don had been a prominent member) understandably emphasised the piety of a 'great many' of the miners.Alexander Don, Memories of the Golden Road: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Central Otago, Dunedin, 1936, pp. 98-9.
Gilkison's Early Days in Central Otago was more extravagant, applying parts of the pioneer legend to the gold-rush immigrants. Unsurprisingly, Gilkison left behind Free Church puritanism; he relished rowdy goldfields yarns, and he also wrote movingly about the dual character of the criminal Henry Garrett.Gilkison, Early Days in Central Otago, pp. 99-109, especially pp. 106-9.
Gilkison nevertheless saw in his men the determination, vigour and general merit typical of upstanding pioneers; goldfields conditions became 'the hardships of the pioneer life'; those miners who were married had wives who were brave, kindly and hospitable.Ibid., pp. 25, 27, 60, 196, 202.
Goldfields clichés and pioneer clichés coalesced in this remarkable passage: 'No other country ever received such a body of magnificent men as immigrants. All in the flower of youth … they came into Otago an army of picked men … [b]ubbling over with vigour and animal spirits and love of adventure …'Ibid., pp. 45-6.
Towards the end of the book Gilkison presented capsules of some 'typical pioneers'.Ibid., ch. 20.
William Jackson Barry, one of these 'form[s] of the genus Pioneer', worked in the following occupations: 'Sailor, skipper, whaler, cattleman, butcher, fisher, horse-trainer, gold digger'.Ibid., p. 188.
He was as versatile as any farming pioneer, but none of his activities would have made him a pioneer by the standards of the Otago Early Settlers' Association. The same went for Gilkison's other 'typical pioneers'.
A related but much more moderate process occurred in Fulton's Medical Practice in Otago and Southland. Here the early doctors were 'pioneer doctors'. They travelled long distances in bad weather to minister to the sick; like other pioneers, they had versatile, self-sacrificing 'loving helpmeets' for wives.Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. ii.
The idea of the 'pioneer doctor', however, did not originate with Fulton: some of the newspaper sources he relied on also cast the early doctors as pioneers.For example, Fulton, Medical Practice in Otago and Southland, p. 81.
Erik Olssen writes that Fulton, a prominent member of the Otago Early Settlers' Association, 'portrayed the early doctors as heroic figures and helped to legitimise the aspirations of the medical profession for a wider leadership'.Olssen, History of Otago, p. 174.
In Otago, then, the pioneer legend was jealously guarded by its Presbyterian custodians, challenged or appropriated by the champions of other Otago residents, and employed as the standard mode of praising a European group. Fulton and Gilkison may have been deliberate in their use of pioneer rhetoric, but even if they were not, the point remains that because pioneering was such a hegemonic ideal, laudatory discussions of any kind of colonist would be likely to draw on the vocabulary and tropes that constituted the image of the pioneer. It was thus possible to speak of missionaries as 'pioneers' and, beyond the field of history-writing, to apply pioneering terminology to groups as diverse as soldiers and writers in early twentieth-century New Zealand.
This discussion of Otago's histories goes some way to balancing the general and the particular in this chapter. To finish, I will discuss in detail one exemplary text. George Rhodes of the Levels (1937) by Airini Woodhouse replicated many of the stock elements of local history I have discussed. It modified other such elements, and in some aspects it was quite different from most local histories and provides a useful contrast. More than the Otago histories, it shows that the stock devices of local history were not simply a straitjacket, but were open to change.
The Levels was the first sheep-station in South Canterbury. George Rhodes ran it, and he and his brothers were Canterbury magnates well before the founding of the Canterbury Association. Woodhouse (1896-1989) was his grand-daughter, and grew up on Blue Cliffs, one of the family's other sheep-stations. When she wrote George Rhodes of the Levels she had already written (with William Edward Bidwill) a biography of her other grandfather.Helene Mclver, 'Airini Elizabeth Woodhouse (Rhodes)', in Anna Rebecca, ed., Notable South Canterbury Women, Timaru, 1993, pp. 177-8.
The book's full title is worth quoting to indicate its range of subjects: 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. The book resists categorisation as a biography or a history of a family. It is both more and less than each of these. The opening chapters focused on William Rhodes as he established himself in New Zealand in the 1830s. With William based in Wellington from 1840 onwards, the narrative concentrated increasingly on the two Rhodes brothers, George and Robert, who lived in Canterbury and administered a number of sheep-runs owned by them and William, of which the Levels was one. Woodhouse told the Wellington historian Horace Fildes: 'I found it impossible to deal equally with all four brothers, so choose [sic] my own grandfather as the principal figure: with him R.H.R. [Robert Heaton Rhodes] was the most closely connected.'Woodhouse to Fildes, 15 June 1937, Fildes Papers, box 16.
The brothers, however, were not the only 'family' whose history is recounted: after George married, the narrative concentrated on his new family; after his death at the age of 47, it followed his wife to her new husband, and also described Robert's last years. Much of the action happened on George's property or among those he knew, but his character seldom dominated. As the book's title suggests, the stations themselves were important subjects of the book. Woodhouse also paid attention to wider developments in Canterbury, in part, no doubt, because of the power the Rhodes brothers wielded in Canterbury as a whole. The book was a history of a place as well as a history of families.
Woodhouse's main source for her book was her family's papers. She also read many newspaper reminiscences and some other historians' works, which gave her more of a national context than was usual in local histories.For example, Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, pp. 24-6, 205-6.
Woodhouse drew on conversations with people connected with the Levels, some of them evidently held before she began work on the book.Ibid., pp. 98-9.
She retraced some of the steps taken by her subjects on their travels,Ibid., pp. 28n, 115.
and drew on her personal knowledge of farming. All these allowed her to deal in the thick material detail typical of local histories. H. Guthrie-Smith told Woodhouse while she was working on the book: 'Leave out nothing, Nothing, about the lives of the pioneers.'A. E. Woodhouse, Guthrie-Smith of Tutira, Christchurch, 1959, p. 203.
The finished product was packed with detail. Two illustrations will capture the tone. 'They lived in a hut, thirty feet long and twelve wide, with walls six feet high built of totara slabs thickly lined with cob, made by mixing clay with water and chopped tussock'. 'James Thomson's wife … always had a tankard of hot beer ready for him, heated by plunging into it a red hot poker, and she remembers how the children loved to hear the sizzling noise that it made.'Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, pp. 87, 92.
As well as evoking the texture of living conditions, the book contained a lot of detail about farm management and commerce.A newspaper editorial used George Rhodes of the Levels to illustrate that '[t]he real interest in the development of a new country must be social and economic' rather than political. Emphasising the importance of detail, the editorial remarked that in George Rhodes of the Levels 'is a quantity of material calculated to throw a clear light on how the land came to be settled, and [on] the enterprises of the pioneers'. 'New Zealand History', Westport Times and Star, 15 June 1937.
Much of this appeared in extracts from ledgers and journals. The text quoted extensively from George's journal, to 'give some idea of the station work during this period and of George's very varied activities'Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, p. 162.
; Woodhouse reproduced in their entirety a large number of letters. The quotations, however, had a different effect from the graceless assemblages of many other local histories. The narrative voice carried much of the story and was not reduced to a mere link between quotes. Ironically, the greater strength of the narrative voice lent the quoted passages more resonance.
If George Rhodes of the Levels differed from other pioneer histories slightly but tellingly in its use of quotation, it did so too in other areas, such as its ideological dimensions. The final chapter ('Ave Atque Vale') saluted all the original station-owners, including the Rhodes brothers, and declared that on their descendants 'rests a responsibility, and they should never fail to take their share in maintaining the honour and progress of the colony founded by their forefathers, the pioneers'.Ibid., p. 218.
When applied to the descendants of the wealthy, rather than rank-and-file 'old identities', the duty of memory had connotations of noblesse oblige. The wealth and standing of the Rhodes brothers set them apart from other colonists, and their descendants inherited and actively maintained their prestige. Christchurch Cathedral bore plaques to the Rhodes, its benefactors, and when Alan Mulgan told Guy Scholefield of a weekend spent at Blue Cliffs he described his hosts as 'N.Z. aristocracy—Mrs Woodhouse is a Rhodes, as you know.'Ibid., p. 210; Mulgan to Scholefield, 20 October 1946, Scholefield Papers, 212/C10.
George Rhodes of the Levels had some aristocratic pretensions, such as the coat of arms reproduced as a frontispiece, and the sequence of 'begats', dating from 1689, on the first page. Away from the beginning and the end, however, the text displayed a certain modesty. Woodhouse wrote with the dignity of the secure, or knew that the story, told the way she told it, was enough to establish the grandeur of the family.Stevan Eldred-Grigg writes that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Rhodes family 'was almost as rich as a small North Island province, R. H. Rhodes alone being worth over £570,000 at his death in 1884'. Eldred-Grigg, A New History of Canterbury, Dunedin, 1982, p. 53.
The text emphasises the standing and authority of the brothers rather than the rapidity of their rise. George Rhodes served time in unpleasant conditions, and a local resident 'vouched for his ability as a ploughman', but 'George did not consider that a large employer should give too much time to manual labour, and it was one of his favourite sayings that "The eye of the master is worth more than both his hands."'Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, p. 128.
In the book, George never assumes the part of the recently wealthy man who acts as an equal of his workers. The book discloses the Rhodes family's middle-class origins,Ibid., pp. 1-2.
but praises the brothers for their colonial foundation-laying rather than their self-improvement. Woodhouse does not play up the theme of success-in-the-colonies. Instead, she attempts to establish in her characters a stable fidelity to their locale. This is evident in the extended names she gives people: 'George Rhodes of the Levels'; 'Robert Rhodes of Purau'; 'Hornbrook of Arowhenua'.Ibid., pp. 133, 179. See also Woodhouse, 'Some Pages from the Journal of Catherine Orbell, Written on the Ship Mariner, 1849' in Woodhouse, ed., Tales of Pioneer Women, pp. 273n, 280.
(Two of Woodhouse's other books were called Bidwill of Pihautea and Guthrie-Smith of Tutira.)
The process is also evident in less subtle ways: The land, then unoccupied save by Maoris and a handful of whalers, has become the home of a nation. Homesteads have been built and have disappeared, but through eighty years of changing times the little slab hut at the Levels, the oldest existing house in South Canterbury, still so full of memories of George Rhodes, the first settler, has kept its watch over the plains spreading before it.'Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, pp. 217-8
George Rhodes of the Levels further implied the naturalness of the Rhodes' presence in Canterbury by its minimal treatment of any feelings of exile and imitations of English ways. The trip to England that George and his family made in 1860 was a working holiday and a joyful family reunion, but not a spiritual pilgrimage.Ibid., pp. 153-4.
There are signs, however, that George felt more of a pull to England than Woodhouse let on. One of the towns that he tried to create 'was named Epworth after his birthplace in Yorkshire'; 'the Levels' was also the name of the part of Yorkshire from which the family hailed.Ibid., pp. 57, 126, 156.
At two points in the narrative, George attempted to import English birds. Woodhouse elaborated on this more than she did on the matter of place names: 'in common with most early settlers, [he] took more interest in those he had known at Home, than in learning how to love the native species'. That some of the imported birds survived was, commented the narrator, 'unfortunate'.Ibid., pp. 154, 173.
The implication was that on this point Woodhouse's own generation had gone further along the path of her friend Guthrie-Smith than the early settlers had.On Woodhouse's own ornithological activities, see her Guthrie-Smith of Tutira, Christchurch, 1959, pp. 193, 197, 200n.
Thus, while it was important to keep alive the pioneer spirit, it was not necessary to emulate the pioneers' every habit. In a similar vein was Woodhouse's treatment of small farmers' triumph over the squatters late in the nineteenth century. '[T]he day was passing when it was right for one man to hold a huge area of good land', she commented, immediately after writing: 'One can sympathise with the squatters. With vision and courage they had come to this little-known country, taken up land barely explored, much less surveyed, made their homes in a wilderness and prepared the way for those who were to follow after.'Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, pp. 204-5.
Woodhouse both claimed founder status for the early runholders—'the true pioneers of the country, who had ventured into the unknown land without assistance or support from the Government or any colonizing organization'—and implied that she and their other descendants had moved with the times.Ibid., p. 43.
Woodhouse thus 'indigenised' the Rhodes through claims of origination and autochthony. The real indigenes were not prominent figures in the book. Woodhouse noted that when the brothers arrived, there were few Maori in 'South Canterbury'.Ibid., p. 55.
(Woodhouse referred to the area as Canterbury even before it received that name, which was well after the Rhodes arrived there.) The brothers' leases with Ngai Tahu were not mentioned, though local Maori were described as being friendly with George and Robert Heaton Rhodes. The fact that William Barnard Rhodes fathered a child with a Maori woman was not mentioned.Brad Patterson, 'William Barnard Rhodes', in W. H. Oliver, ed., The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, Wellington, 1990, p. 362.
Unusually for a local history, George Rhodes of the Levels did not banish personal 'faults and frictions' from the narrative. William Rhodes 'was never a mild-tempered man', and he and his brothers had some disagreements.Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, pp. 40-1, 203 (quotation from p. 203).
In the 1850s, 'it looked like the old agreement might be dissolved. William and Robert occasionally expressed themselves very plainly in their letters to each other, but, however strained their relations might be, they never varied their terminations, and both always remained the other's "affectionate brother," though sometimes one would not have suspected much brotherly love from the text of the letters. Robert and George, on the other hand, were always staunch friends.'Ibid., p. 134.
Nevertheless, there were indications that George was not friendly with everyone. At one point Woodhouse wrote that George, 'though slow to anger, never hesitated, should occasion arise, to enforce his authority with his fists.'Ibid., p. 129. Nowhere in the book does George resort to his fists, however.
Later in the book she quoted an obituary for George in the Lyttelton Times: 'He was known as a strict and perhaps stern man of business, of the highest integrity and honour, and when occasion required, liberal and charitable to a degree scarcely appreciated by those who met him as strangers.'Ibid., p. 175.
This quotation closed the chapter in which George died. It was a strangely unfulsome conclusion, especially in the light of the more adulatory eulogy of George that Woodhouse quoted at the end of the book.Ibid., p. 216.
It was never suggested, however, that there was any tension in George and Elizabeth's marriage. With Elizabeth, George's kindness was 'never failing'.Ibid., p. 87.
The book's descriptions of Elizabeth Rhodes and other pioneer women largely accord with Gibbons' argument about traditions of women's pioneer writing. Discussing two Centennial anthologies of pioneer women's stories (one, Tales of Pioneer Women, edited by Woodhouse), Gibbons comments that their contents 'conform broadly to the "pioneer legend" established by male writers, but many of the contributors specify women's particular experiences'. A defining feature of the two collections, he comments, is that 'the detail of women's experiences is preserved: no recollection of food or technology or human incident is considered too trivial to be included'.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', pp. 81-2.
Though Gibbons does not say so explicitly, this is an argument about public and private spheres: women's pioneer writing corresponded largely to men's but with more emphasis on the private. While local histories by men also placed a premium on material detail (one detailed discussion of food-preparation in George Rhodes of the Levels occurred in a quotation of a newspaper reminiscence by a male run-worker),Woodhouse, George Rhodes of the Levels, p. 62.
writing by and about women tended to draw more attention to the textures of 'private' activities. It is hard to imagine an early settlers' association man writing as Woodhouse did about the pregnant Elizabeth Rhodes: 'On one occasion one of her breasts swelled and hardened and she did not know what to do, but a Maori again came to her aid and applied a poultice of native leaves, probably Koromiko.'Ibid., p. 92.
The distinction between public and private was most pronounced in the treatment of emotions, in George Rhodes of the Levels as elsewhere. The psychological privations of pioneer life were acknowledged for women but not for men, and thus in their sternness men like George remained inscrutable to the reader. Woodhouse, however, did not detail Elizabeth's feelings through Elizabeth's own words. She never said that Elizabeth had a diary; from the letters quoted, Elizabeth would have been unlikely to complain about her loneliness to her relatives in England. Therefore, like other writers, Woodhouse described these feelings through implication, indicating the circumstances giving rise to loneliness (no neighbours for so many miles, poor roads), and speculating about the feelings caused.Ibid., p. 88.
In some contrast, the death of George and Elizabeth's first son was reported very tersely.Ibid., p. 148.
Woodhouse's characterisations of the 'very few white women in the district' were quite orthodox.Ibid., p. 92.
In Elizabeth, George 'had a true partner, who, with wonderful adaptability and strength of purpose, cheerfully surmounted all difficulties and made a real home in that almost unpeopled region'.Ibid., p. 87.
Mrs Israel Rhodes (no relation to the other Rhodes) found inner strength through pioneering. Initially 'delicate' and fearful, she found that '[t]he simple, healthy life agreed with her so well that she became a strong woman and reared a large family'. On some days she would milk the cows, make butter, walk eight miles on a rough track to sell it, buy supplies and carry them home, and then milk the cows again before going to bed. 'They had gallant, stout hearts, these pioneer wives and mothers.'Ibid., pp. 41-2.
Mrs Hornbrook and Miss Collier were similarly 'intrepid'.Ibid., pp. 88, 91-2.
At one point Woodhouse noted the unsuitability of nineteenth-century women's dress on the frontier. The women, she said, 'must have looked enviously at the men in their loose red or blue flannel shirts, moleskin trousers, Wellington boots and shady cabbage-tree hats'.Ibid., pp. 87.
But any transgression by the pioneer women remained inchoate. This can be seen as a metaphor for Woodhouse's treatment of pioneer women: they expanded the private sphere without puncturing it.
George Rhodes of the Levels itself had a roughly analogous relationship with the orthodoxies of local history generally. In its treatment of pioneer women and its use of detail, it was fairly typical; in its quotations and its discussion of 'faults and frictions' it departed from the mainstream of local and family history while remaining substantially within the genre. Pervading Woodhouse's book and local history generally was the idea of colonisation, conceived in 'public' economic terms. The centrality of breaking in the land and building settlements wrote Maori out of the narrative except insofar as they contributed to or retarded this process, and performed a similar operation on pioneer women and on the emotional lives of pioneers generally. The selection of people and activities whose memory it championed was a function of the primary concept of colonisation.
Local histories thus did more than describe colonising activities. They dealt with Pakeha in terms of their contribution to the public business of settlement, and they re-enacted colonisation textually by defining a district's history as the history of Pakeha endeavour in that area. They were clustered around the second of Terry Goldie's poles of indigenisation: 'This country really began with the arrival of the whites'.Goldie, Fear and Temptation, p. 13.
Local histories were one kind of response to the 'problems of the imagination' associated with colonist culture. Other responses to these problems eschewed the pioneer legend but preserved its conflation of 'Pakeha' with 'New Zealand'. Still other responses transformed the pioneer tradition by critique or by combination with different traditions. One such response was Guthrie-Smith's Tutira. Another was the work of James Cowan. His writings are the subject of the next chapter.
3. James Cowan and the Frontiers of New Zealand History
The need to remember was a recurrent theme of James Cowan's writing as well as local history. Like local historians, Cowan exhorted his readers to keep alive memories of a noble past. Reminiscences were the major primary source of Cowan's histories, and his works often described the act of reminiscing. In Tales of the Maori Coast, Cowan described a visit he made to Maketu in the Bay of Plenty. The village reeked of history, with its tangled vines, its old tombs, and its carvings from an age when 'the Maori wood-carving art was … in its glory'. One Sunday, Cowan went to explore 'the tangled old churchyard'. Everything he saw there was 'antique-looking'. An elderly Arawa parson rang the churchbell, and then 'he sat down with me, and we talked of old Maketu, and inevitably about fishing'. Thus began an idyll about the good old times when there were more fish. Sitting on the bank, the parson and Cowan drifted away into drowsiness and reverie about the past, forgetting that one of them was due to give a sermon at any minute.James Cowan, 'Big Fishing: A Bay of Plenty Pastoral', in Cowan, Tales of the Maori Coast, Wellington, 1930, pp. 13-17.
The portrait of the old minister at Maketu touches on several important aspects of Cowan's work that I wish to discuss in this chapter. One of these is his attitude to New Zealand's past. Though there were some similarities between Cowan's depiction of elderly Maori and those of his friend C. F. Goldie,In the 1930s Cowan and Goldie made plans to collaborate on a glossy book of Goldie portraits with biographical essays by Cowan on the subjects. The book, to be titled "Noble Relics of a Noble Race' never eventuated, because Goldie was not satisfied with the quality of reproduction in any of the printers' samples that Cowan obtained. Goldie to Cowan, 10 June 1935; Goldie to Cowan, 30 September 1935; Eileen Cowan to Eric Ramsden, 15 July [1944?], Ramsden Papers, MS Papers 196/266, ATL. In 1901, Cowan had written a booklet of biographical sketches on each of the Lindauer Portraits in Henry Partridge's collection. James Cowan, Maori Biographies: Sketches of Old New Zealand Compiled by James Cowan: Descriptive Catalogue of Maori Portraits Painted by Herr G. Lindauer, Auckland, 1901. See also Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori 1840-1914, Auckland, 1992, pp. 198-9.
Cowan's position was more ambiguous: the parson is both a relic and a companion, a part of a very different past that stretches into the present. Moreover, Cowan sometimes wrote about 'heroic' Pakeha in the same terms. 'Gilbert Mair,' Cowan wrote in 1923, 'is of a type that never more will be seen in New Zealand, for the conditions that produced and developed his peculiar fancies and the [course] of his life's work are vanished for ever.'James Cowan, untitled typescript, 1923, James Cowan Papers, MS Papers 39/41E, ATL. This piece was to be the preface to Mair's Reminiscences and Maori Stories, Auckland, 1923, but the increasingly addled Mair lost his copy of the preface: Violet Mair to Cowan, 24 October 1923, Cowan Papers, 39/41E. The preface that appears in the published book is written by Henry Brett, and is very similar to Cowan's.
Cowan persistently noted that the immense changes New Zealand underwent in the nineteenth century were still within the memories of those living in the first decades of the twentieth. The speed of such transformations, he wrote,
excites wonder among all who give a thought to our history…. We who are not yet old have seen blockhouses and redoubts …. Many a white veteran and many a Maori can still tell of battle adventures, of stormings and defences, of daring scouts and man-huntings, in country that is now disturbed by nothing more alarming than the railway engine's whistle or the motor horn of the well-off dairy farmer.Cowan, 'Chapter I: The Old Race and the New', nd, Cowan Papers, 39/42C. This passage is from a draft of the first chapter of Cowan's The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period, 2 vols, Wellington, 1922-3 (page references are to the 1983 reprint). The passage quoted here does not appear in the finished version.
Although this history was recent, it was not secure. Cowan blamed some of this on popular apathy.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 3; Cowan to G. W. Russell, 28 November 1917, IA1, 4/2/13.
Those who had lived through New Zealand's 'pioneering period' were dying unrecorded. For Cowan, who believed that personal memories rather than official documents gave 'the real meat of history',James Cowan, Hero Stories of New Zealand, Wellington, 1935, p. x; Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. v-vi.
the death of the participants meant the death of the history. Therefore, like local historians and ethnologists, Cowan devoted himself to collecting stories about the recent past for the sake of the future. These concerns of collection and preservation were the main ground on which Cowan and his supporters managed to talk the wartime government into commissioning his history of the New Zealand Wars.H. Hill to W. Massey, 1 October 1917; J. Allan Thomson to J. C. Hislop, 1 December 1917; T. W. Leys to G. W. Russell, 1 February 1918, IA1, 4/2/13; Hislop to R. F. Bollard, 4 January 1924, IA1 126/8/23; Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, H-22, 1918, p. 8. H. D. Skinner argued the case for James Herries Beattie's collection of 'information about the South Island natives' in very similar terms to those used to justify Cowan's New Zealand Wars. See Anderson, 'Introduction' to Beattie, Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori, p. 14.
Why did these stories need to be preserved? One reason, which I will discuss later, is that the events of the nineteenth century created responsibilities for Pakeha in the twentieth. Another was that '[patriotism flourishes best upon the soil of history',Cowan, Hero Stories, p. ix; Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 3.
and, for Cowan, New Zealand history was fertile ground. It abounded with whathe called 'frontier tales'—Wild West stories of danger, courage and chivalry. It also offered more peaceful intercultural encounters, the heroic story of 'breaking in the land', Maori mythology, and the wonder of natural abundance.
The aim of this chapter is to examine how Cowan told his stories about this rich past. The focus is on some of the other matters raised by the image of the minister in the churchyard in Maketu: the issues of narration and the roles of Maori people in the stories Cowan told.I am focusing on Cowan's historical works, not on his more explicitly ethnological writings, or the material he wrote for the Department of Tourism and Publicity. Where relevant I shall bring these writings into my discussion of Cowan's historical works, but they are different enough to make it misleading to discuss them as if they were of a piece with the histories.
Maori have a much bigger part in Cowan's work than in local histories or indeed any other historical works of the interwar period. Cowan's pioneers were not just farmers but also 'frontiersmen'.Cowan, Hero Stories, p. viii.
He was interested in the frontier between Maori and Pakeha. I will look first at Cowan's methods as a historian, and the style in which he wrote. I will then examine the narrative structures he employed, and consider his general narrative of New Zealand history and race relations. After that I will move on to the relations between Cowan's texts and their various contexts. Cowan's work was a syncretism of a wide range of contexts. Sometimes he managed to tame the differing voices in the contexts informing his work, and sometimes he failed. The tensions in Cowan's syncretism become most apparent in his Centennial volume Settlers and Pioneers, and I shall conclude with a discussion of that book.
Cowan wrote about New Zealand's raw, colourful past in a style that fitted together so neatly with his methods as a historian that it is impossible to say which 'caused' the other. The two key features of his method were his use of oral history and his love of stories and anecdotes. Cowan constantly collected stories. Some were sent to him,Cowan's A Trader in Cannibal Land: The Life and Adventures of Captain Tapsell, Dunedin, 1935 is based closely on the MS autobiography of Tapsell narrated to the local Resident Magistrate by the dying Tapsell. Tapsell's great-grandson sent the MS to Cowan in 1920. John McAlister to Cowan, 13 April 1920, Cowan Papers, 39/32. Another example is the story of 'Black Tom', a runaway slave from Delaware who became a Pacific whaler: G. E. L. Westbrook to Cowan, 21 May 1926, Cowan Papers, 39/2.
others he elicited from the mariners, veterans and old settlers whom he met in his travels around the country. Upon hearing a new story, he would transcribe it, publish it in a newspaper and later recycle it in a book. Cowan's papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library abound with newspaper cuttings of his work that have been glued onto blank paper, with their background material crossed out and a chapter heading attached. Scarcely edited, these newspaper stories would appear in a subsequent book.For example, 'How Tapsell Bought His Flax', Cowan Papers, 39/33. The gratuitous repetitions in Cowan's The Adventures of Kimble Bent: A Story of Wild Life in the New Zealand Bush, London, 1911, may be a residue of this process.
Cowan's books on Kimble Bent and Hans Tapsell began their lives serialised in newspapers. While Cowan was working on Settlers and Pioneers, Oliver Duff, then editor of the Centennial publications, told Cowan that he hoped that none of the anecdotes to be used in the book would appear in newspapers beforehand.Cowan to Duff, 1 December 1938, IA1, 62/110/2.
Fifteen years earlier, Cowan had felt stung when a clerk in the Department of Internal Affairs rejected his request for further payment for personal losses incurred during the editing of the wars book. The clerk told him that while working on the war history at government expense, Cowan had had the opportunity for collecting material for future books. Cowan's response was not to deny the charge, but to assert that this bonus was 'more than offset by the fact that this History is not merely the product of the short period I was under Government engagement on contract; it embodies the result of many years' work, practically a life-time of note-gathering on the subject'.Cowan to P. J. Kelleher, 16 February 1924, IA1, 4/2/13.
Cowan got most of the 'real meat' of his histories from oral sources and their near analogue, diaries and reminiscences. While he did not rely solely on oral sources, he privileged them over official documents, and even over written memoirs. On numerous occasions he rejected written accounts as inaccurate in the light of oral accounts. More surprisingly, though, he sometimes rejected Pakeha texts in the light of Maori oral accounts,Cowan, To Add Puke-taukere Chapter: The Swordsman in the Swamp: An Incident of the Waitara War', undated typescript, Cowan Papers, 39/42F; Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 2, p. 54.
or declared that a Maori oral testimony was more accurate than European ones.Cowan, Adventures of Kimble Bent, p. 61; New Zealand Wars, vol. 2, p. 209, In 1922 Cowan told a fellow historian that he knew that von Tempsky 'was not shot from a tree. There are many versions of his end published, & the pakeha ones are mostly wrong. I obtained good narratives some years ago from two of the six or seven Maoris who fired at him at a few yards['] distance—they were not in a tree but crouching on the ground beside the little watercourse at the pa.' Cowan to Horace Fildes, 16 December 1922, Fildes Papers, box 34.
On occasions where his sources were hopelessly contradictory, he simply juxtaposed the conflicting testimonies.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. 392-3; Adventures of Kimble Bent, ch. 15.
Buick and most local historians saw value in oral sources, but other historians did not, and at times they crossed swords with Cowan. One of these was the Wellington historian and bibliophile Horace Fildes. He and Cowan had a spirited argument over oral sources and the history of Gate Pa. Cowan appealed to the personal directness of his sources: 'My information came from those who fought in the battle.' Fildes disputed the worth of testimonies given 'about 45 years after Gate Pa'.Cowan to Fildes, 19 December 1935; annotations to this letter by Fildes, Fildes Papers, box 34.
Neither Fildes nor Cowan budged. Fildes insisted that the mere dust of 'contemporary record' was 'worth 1 oz troy of Reminiscence', and Cowan defiantly asserted the superiority of his oral sources over 'hearsay talk garbled in the newspapers of the day & in books such as [J. E.] Alexander's & repeated by one pseudo-historian after another after another as in our school histories & mission chronicles'.Fildes to Cowan, 22 December 1935 (copy by Fildes); Cowan to Fildes, 28 December 1935, Fildes Papers, box 34.
Two years after this argument, S. Barton Babbage, who had just completed an MA at Auckland University College, dismissed Cowan's account of the battle of Moutoa as unfounded. In place of Cowan's claims, Babbage offered only one piece of 'hard evidence': 'A certain amount of information is given on the inscription on the monument erected on Pukename Hill in Wanganui, which I have seen. The inscription reads: "To the memory of those brave men who fell at Moutoa, 14th May, 1864, in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism."'S. Barton Babbage, Hauhauism: An Episode in the Maori Wars 1863-1866, Wellington, 1937, p. 43n.
Cowan took the criticism as an assault on his oral history work altogether, and declared, 'My best authorities are—or were, "human documents", not other people's books.'Cowan to T. W. Downes, 10 November 1937, Cowan Papers, 39/5. Downes, a Wanganui resident, was an active member of the Polynesian society and a collector of Maori oral traditions: Gibbons, '"Going Native"', pp. 289-90, 301, 303; Sorrenson, Manifest Duty, pp. 65, 77, 90.
Cowan's interview notes are written up as narratives rather than as question-and-answer sessions. This makes it difficult to explore the dialogics of his interviewing practice. However, some mundane points can be made. Cowan was bilingual and claimed some affinity with Maori people. Though his texts are strewn with racist comments, Cowan had sufficient familiarity with and respect for Maori people for his large numbers of Maori informants to trust him enough to share their stories with him.James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Auckland, 1986, p. 16.
Sometimes, this trust came with time. For instance, when Cowan first talked to Peita Kotuku, he 'gave, with a little hesitation, something of his life history'. Some years later, when Cowan spoke to him again, Kotuku 'very frankly narrated his remarkable war-trail adventures, and answered many questions'.Cowan, 'A Hauhau Warrior's Story: The Adventures of Peita Kotuku, Last Survivor of the "Rifleman" Escapees (Notes taken by J. Cowan, 23/2/21)', Cowan Papers, 39/41A.
Kaumatua would take Cowan to old battle sites, which were often unmarked, and tell him how things had been at the time of the battle.Cowan to Fildes, 30 July 1935, Fildes Papers, box 34.
Cowan's methods as an oral historian carried over into his texts, many of which read like analogues of the masculine yarns that flourished in frontier New Zealand.Phillips, Man's Country?, pp. 32-4.
Cowan's penchant for the immediate and the personal led him, like local historians, to tell many of his stories by direct quotation, rather than by means of a synthetic narrative written in an indirect style. Instead of breaking up his source-material Cowan strung together large chunks of eye-witness' testimonies, with bridging paragraphs of his own. Anecdotes or brief adventures were the building blocks of Cowan's works. In the short-story genre, this kind of structure was common: a large number of New Zealand and Australian stories took the form of a single narrative or anecdote, often using direct speech with an authorial frame explaining how the author came to hear the story now being relayed to the reader.For New Zealand examples see O. N. Gillespie, ed., New Zealand Short Stories, London, 1930, and, for an earlier period, Ray Hargreaves and Peter Holland, eds, The Duel on the Creek and Other Tales of Victorian New Zealand, Dunedin, 1995.
What is unusual about Cowan is that he used the anecdote or 'adventure' format even in his most serious historical works.
'Adventure' dominates Cowan's narrative structures to the point where it becomes a kind of literary commodity independent of character. Cowan's stories give virtually no sustained sense of the personalities of their protagonists. The main characters of The Adventures of Kimble Bent and A Trader in Cannibal Land exist as locations of adventures rather than personae in their own right: Hans Tapsell and Kimble Bent matter because of the events they were caught up in, rather than for their personalities. There is a considerable irony in this. Ever keen to point out the human essence of history, in his own work Cowan did little justice to the personalities of the people he wrote about. This lack of what James Clifford calls the 'minimal narrative of identity' essential to biography makes The Adventures of Kimble Bent almost as diffuse as the story collections: the book is a collection of adventures which have some connection, often only a minimal one, with the titular hero.James Clifford, '"Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners": Ethnobiographical Prospects', in Daniel Aaron, ed., Studies in Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, p. 51.
This narrative diffusion persists in The New Zealand Wars, even though that book was an official history and contained few of Cowan's usual declarations about how adventurous New Zealand's past was. Cowan's poetic of adventure continued to govern the structure of his writings even when stripped of some of its trappings. The book was organised more at the level of the chapter than as a whole. It had little overall structure, which hampered the thorough analysis of the interrelations between the different wars that the book was supposed to provide.Cowan to G. W. Russell, 28 November 1917, IA1, 4/2/13.
Indeed, The New Zealand Wars was even more de-centred than Cowan's other books, because it was so compendious. As the writer of an official record, Cowan was obliged to chronicle every engagement of the wars, right down to the 1863 shoot-out at the Pukekohe East church stockade.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, ch. 30. For small engagements like this, which were not widely known, Cowan had to rely exclusively on oral testimony or records of such gathered by others. For the Pukekohe engagement, his principal source was narratives collected by a Mauku settler, Mrs B. Crispe: drafts and source notes in Cowan Papers, 39/41B.
Nevertheless, Cowan's works were loosely bound together by an overall narrative, one which acted less as a structural unifier than as a criterion by which he chose which stories to tell. This general narrative told how New Zealand was made through racial interaction. Cowan was always keen to show that Maori and Pakeha were one people. In his ethnological writings, he sometimes endorsed the view that Maori were 'a branch, though a distant one, of the Caucasian race'.Cowan, The Maoris of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1910, p. 30; Cowan, The Maori Yesterday and Today, Auckland, 1930, p. 24. The words quoted appear verbatim in both books.
In his historical works, however, Cowan argued that Maori and Pakeha had become one people through a dialectical process of interaction. The New Zealand Wars were central to this process. The wars and the attendant period of settlement, he said, 'were the most vital period of [New Zealand's] national existence.'Cowan to G. W. Russell, 28 November 1917, IA1, 4/2/13.
In Cowan's schema, the wars bred mutual respect: Maori and Pakeha came to admire each other's tenacity and chivalry, as enemies or as allies.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. 2-3.
Here Cowan diverged from his American influences, which treated racial war as a journey into a 'savage' underworld and back, a journey that was redemptive for the white participants only.Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America, New York, 1992, p. 14.
Cowan's argument, in contrast, was summed up in a famous sentence in the first chapter of his war history: 'The wars ended with a strong mutual respect, tinged with a real affection, which would never have existed but for this ordeal by battle.'Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 3.
Cowan's story of New Zealand and the role of Maori in that story differed sharply from other contemporary or earlier Pakeha histories of New Zealand. Most historians writing at the same time as Cowan treated New Zealand history as a history of European endeavour, whether it be the pioneering of local history, or the establishment of British sovereignty that some academic works dealt with. In these histories, Maori were assistants, impediments, or 'environmental factors'. In generic terms, this narrative was a comedy. Cowan's racial-harmony-through-war plot was a tragicomedy: the tragic events of war generated a journey from which the protagonists emerge reconciled, and better people. In the settler histories of local historians, academic historians and most of the Centennial writers, Europeans were the actors and Maori were the props. In Cowan's story, not only were both Maori and Europeans actors, but both were also a grateful and inspired audience.
The Maori characters in Cowan's story were stereotypes, but no more so than the Pakeha ones. The conflict-driven nature of Cowan's plot meant that Maori do enter the narrative as forces in their own right. Cowan rejected the idea that Maori defeat in the wars was inevitable,Ibid., pp. 5-6. Cowan often drew attention to contingency, and pointed out how famous events, such as Te Kooti's attack on Matawhero, could have been avoided. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 242-3.
and to some extent he recognised Maori agency, autonomy and dynamism. However, his awareness of Maori innovation was largely confined to military technology, and did not extend to political and religious developments.See, for example, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 54, 390.
Pai Marire was always 'fanaticism'. Cowan described its incantations and cannibalism in 'exotic' detail, but never gave any sense of why all this should inspire fanatic responses. However, even when he found Maori practices objectionable or unfathomable, he often admired the way Maori showed commitment to them. Cowan rejected the cliche that Maori were unable to adapt,See William Baucke, 'Some Reasons for the Decline of the Maori' and 'The Old, Old Plea', in Baucke, Where the White Man Treads
but accepted its rosy cousin, the idea that they were committed and tenacious. Whether contemporary Maori retained this spirit or had gone 'soft' was something he could not decide.Compare Cowan, The Maori Yesterday and Today, pp. 10-12, and Cowan, 'Te Araki te Pohu: Warrior of the Arawa', 1908, Cowan Papers, 39/53A. ('He was an old, old man … a product of the days when every Maori was a trained soldier … long before the flabby days of peace had taken the tang of life from the warrior race.')
A curiosity with Cowan's work is how he managed to maintain his belief that the wars bred respectful race relations even after he had talked to a lot of veterans who had shot at one another years before. For plenty of the European troops, the wars bred contempt rather than respect.Belich, New Zealand Wars, pp. 329-30; N. A. C. McMillan, 'Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky', in Oliver, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, p. 530.
Part of the answer may lie with the people Cowan interviewed. Perhaps those who were bitter about the wars did not want to contribute to a project commemorating them. Cowan's informants seldom expressed bitterness or hatred against the people they fought—not just in his books, but in his interview notes as well. When his Pakeha informants abused their enemies, they tended at the same time to praise their kupapa allies.For an example from one of Cowan's regular informants, see G. A. Preece, 'Pursuit of Te Kooti through the Urewera Country', in F. J. W. Gascoyne, Soldiering in New Zealand: Being Reminiscences of a Veteran, London, 1916. Cowan, however, does not appear to have used this particular piece in writing The New Zealand Wars.
Both Maori and Pakeha informants come across as nostalgic and interested rather than angry. Cowan often introduced old enemies to each other for the first time, and they got on. Such intense enactments of Cowan's myth of racial harmony could only serve to convince him of its general applicability. Thus Cowan often seems to have reiterated the views of a certain kind of old veteran.
Cowan acted this way most of all for a small group of European veterans: Gilbert Mair, Thomas Porter and, to a lesser extent, G. A. Preece. Cowan quoted these people again and again.See J. C. Andersen and G. C. Petersen, The Mair Family, Wellington, 1956, pp. 9-10.
Mair and Porter lobbied the government to commission his war history. Preece and Mair read the galley proofs of The New Zealand Wars and brought about many amendments.Proofs in Cowan Papers, 39/43B-C
After their war service these men retained an involvement with Maori people, as resident magistrates, Native Land Court judges, or tourist guides. Porter married a Ngati Porou woman. It would be too much to say that they lived Cowan's myth, but their lives and their interests certainly made it an ideal. They wrote about their war experiences, dabbled in history-writing, and wrote articles and books which combined reminiscences with syrupy treatments of Maori mythology.Mair, Reminiscences and Maori Stories; Mair, The Story of Gate Pa: April 29th, 1864, Tauranga, 1937 (first pub. 1926); T. W. Porter, Legends of the Maori and Personal Reminiscences of the East Coast of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1925; Porter, The History of the Early Days of Poverty Bay: Major Ropata Wahawaha N.Z.C., M.L.C.: The Story of His Life and Times, Gisborne, 1923.
Porter and Mair observed that one of the perks of being on the Native Land Court was the stories one got to collect.Mair, Reminiscences and Maori Stories, p. 54; Porter, Legends of the Maori and Personal Reminiscences, p. 61. See also [W. E. Gudgeon], The History and Doings of the Maoris, from the Year 1820 to the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Auckland, 1885, p. 94. This book, like several of Gudgeon's other books, was published under his father's name, Thomas Wayth Gudgeon.
They were collectors of culture. Their values and even their phrasing percolated through Cowan's texts.For clear examples, see Mair, The Story of Gate Pa, pp. 10, 16, 19, 30.
The immediacy and intensity of Cowan's familiarity with them and their texts goes some way toward accounting for his race-relations myth.Cowan also drew heavily on writing by and advice from another ex-veteran, Native Land Court judge and writer, W. E. Gudgeon, but the treatment of Maori in Gudgeon's works was seldom replicated in Cowan's texts. See, for instance, Gudgeon, Reminiscences of the War in New Zealand, London, 1879, pp. v-vii.
Cowan's informants constituted an important context of his work, but by no means the only one. Others included understandings of Pakeha masculinity, ideas associated with World War I, and American writing that ranged from Wild West pulp fiction to the historians Francis Parkman and Theodore Roosevelt. Rather than deal with these and other contexts one by one, I will discuss the interaction of some of them in Cowan's account of the 1845-6 War in the North. Cowan's treatment of this war can be seen as an encounter between his race-relations myth, ideas associated with World War I, and conflicting voices in his primary sources. The conflict in the sources is between the defence mechanisms of what James Belich calls 'the Victorian interpretation of racial conflict', and the evidence that those mechanisms attempt to brush aside.
Cowan began his account of the Northern War with a scene-setting chapter on 'Kororareka beach in the war-brewing "forties"',Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 7.
He acknowledged its 'all pervading flavour of licence and lawlessness' but deemed this state of affairs 'red-bloodedredblooded', not requiring self-righteous condemnation.Ibid.
The chapter was conscientiously picturesque. It shifted into the present tense and led the reader around on a tour: 'Follow the stores-buying captain or chief officer … into one of the weatherboard trading-houses, blue with strong tobacco smoke'; 'Now board one of those whaleships lying out yonder at an easy anchor'.Ibid., p. 10.
Gibbons has written: 'Cowan's evocation of a concealed assault party and the unsuspecting defenders at Kororareka during the night before the early morning attack in March 1845 is probably inspired by Parkman's account of the attack on Deerfield'.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 62.
The description of Kororareka itself recalls Parkman's chapter on Deerfield, which also took the reader through the layout of its village, and described what its inhabitants were 'no doubt' doing before the attack.Francis Parkman, 'The Sack of Deerfield', in The Parkman Reader, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, Boston, 1955, pp. 372-4.
Though his accounts of battle are spiced with statements about heroism and danger, Cowan's prose, unlike Parkman's, becomes much more mechanical in the battle-scenes.
Many people writing after the war and many contemporaries blamed British failings in the war on the British commanders, especially Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Despard. The assumption was that Maori would not be able to fight in a tactically and technologically credible way—that a British commander would have to be an idiot to fail. Cowan took notes on contemporary denunciations of Despard by settlers who got their news second-hand,H. S. Chapman to Henry Chapman, 30 September 1845, transcript in Cowan Papers, 39/42E.
and he was told by a nonagenarian veteran that Despard 'did not know his business'.Testimony of W. H. Free, Cowan Papers, 39/41D, quoted in Belich, New Zealand Wars, p. 48. I have been unable to find this document in Cowan's papers in the Turnbull, though I have read a different account by Free in Cowan's papers.
Cowan himself portrays Despard as impatient and as reckless with his men's lives,Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. 61, 82.
but in Cowan's view, Despard's failings were not the most important factor in the war.
For Cowan the course of the war had more to do with the Maori tactics and fortifications than it did with Despard's competence. In public Despard complained about a lack of equipment at Ohaeawai; Cowan said that he would still have failed even if he had had such equipment.Ibid., p. 70.
Cowan devotes considerable space to the construction and workings of the pa at Ohaeawai and Ruapekapeka.Ibid., pp. 51-5, 76-9.
The commanding position of the pa, the strength of the outer fortifications, and the safety of the inner bunkers, explain the British defeat at Ohaeawai for Cowan. The fall of Ruapekapeka comes about only by a surprise attack when the defenders are praying on a Sunday morning, and it is Ngapuhi scouts, not Despard's men, who are responsible for the victory. The main evidence upon which Cowan bases this account consists of contemporary British survey plans of the different pa,Ibid., p. 77; description of Ohaeawai pa by Sergeant R. Hallaway, Cowan Papers, 39/41B.
personal visits to the battle sites, and interviews and correspondence with elderly Maori and Pakeha veterans.Cowan, 'Ohaeawai', Cowan Papers, 39/42D; 'The Ohaeawai Battlefield: Rihara [K]ou's Narrative', Cowan Papers, 39/41; 'The Forlorn Hope at Ohaeawai: Corpl. Free's Experience (Additional)', Cowan Papers, 39/41; 'Ruapekapeka Pa: Colonel Mundy's Description', Cowan Papers, 39/42D.
He also drew upon Despard's description of Ruapekapeka to Governor George Grey and Despard's comment that '[t]he extraordinary defence of this place [Ruapekapeka], particularly in its interior defence, far exceeded any idea [that] could have been formed of it'.Despard to Grey, 12 January 1846, transcript in Cowan Papers, 39/41; Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 86. In the book the quotation was amended to 'the extraordinary strength of this place, particularly in the interior defence, far exceeded any idea that could have been formed of it'.
Cowan's treatment of the war in the North shows how unreliable it is to assume that historians in the past 'found what they were looking for'. With the evidence he had, Cowan could have written another account which would have fitted in with his overall story just as well. Cowan was certainly not above extravagant criticism of imperial commanders. He could have saved face for the British by scapegoating Despard. He could have lauded Ngapuhi enough by emphasising only their valour, without praising their 'soldierly genius' as well.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 76. The context of the sentence makes it clear that 'genius' here means great intelligence, rather than nature or character.
Maori courage and tenacity were essential to Cowan's story; Maori intelligence was not. In these chapters, however, evidence of Maori innovation displaced any ideological inclination to shortchange that innovation.
Elsewhere in Cowan's account of the War in the North, contemporary ideological currents and his own metanarrative did drown out primary sources. In the diary of the missionary Robert Burrows, Cowan had come across some post-war episodes that complicated an assured view of the peace. One was the icy meeting of Heke and Grey at breakfast at Burrows' house after the war. Another was the time when Captain Everard Home of the Calliope met Kawiti soon after the war. When Home said, 'Well, Kawiti, it is peace now,' Kawiti replied, 'It is for you to say if you have had enough, then we will say we have had enough.'Cowan, 'Heke and the Governor (Rev. R. Burrows' Diary)', nd, Cowan Papers, 39/41E. The translation of Kawiti's reply is by Burrows.
Later, Home visited Ohaeawai, and was introduced to Pene Taui. Burrows wrote:
'Oh,' said Pene to me, aside, 'this is the captain who supplied the shot we have lying about here;' and giving a hint to a youth standing by, the lad started off and in a few minutes returned with a bag on his shoulders holding something of considerable weight. At a nod from Pene he rolled some half dozen 9 lb shot at Sir Everard's feet, the chief asking him at the same time if he had seen them before. Sir Everard was greatly amused, and much pleased with his visit. He asked Pene if he felt the place to be his home again. Pene replied, 'It is only now you have paid me this visit that I begin to feel I am on my own land.'Ibid. The punctuation is as in Cowan's notes.
These three episodes from Burrows' diary make the conclusion of the war in the North look either tense or strangely comic. Cowan, however, concludes his account of the war in the North by praising Grey's decision not to confiscate land, and by pointing out that the flagstaff did not go back up. So everybody won. Moreover, he wrote, 'Ngapuhi have ever since 1846 been loyal friends of the whites', and later sent hundreds of their young men to fight at Gallipoli.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 87.
Thus the story finishes with a synthesis of Cowan's line on racial harmony and the then-nascent myth that tensions between Maori and Pakeha dissolved as '[t]heir blood … commingled in the trenches of Gallipoli'.Maui Pomare, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, vol. 177 (1916), p. 942.
In this section of The New Zealand Wars, then, Cowan manages to tame the stories he told. This was not always the case. Cowan's admiration of the European invaders sat uneasily with his admiration of the indigenous people. Settlers and Pioneers, Cowan's volume in the series of Centennial surveys, is one work where the conflict between contexts is not resolved. The book was supposed to be a history of rural settlement in New Zealand by Europeans, With a retrospective glow it depicted settler farm plenitude in rich, sensual detail. But the book was overwritten and even more diffuse than Cowan's other works. In a memorable put-down, D. O. W. Hall of the Centennial staff described it as a 'wickedly episodic bundle of papers'.Hall, 'Mr Cowan's Survey', 8 September 1939, IA1 62/110/2.
For the Centennial staff, though, the biggest problem with the book was its chapter on the Waikato War, which, Cowan pointed out, was a precondition of much of the European settlement of the Waikato. This chapter was removed by the editorial staff and the under-secretary for Internal Affairs. However, a fragmentary draft of the chapter exists in the 'Miscellaneous Typescripts' section of Cowan's papers in the Turnbull.Cowan, The Settlement of the Waikato', unpaginated typescript, 1939, Cowan Papers, 39/54D. The cutting of this chapter has been discussed before, most notably by Denis McEldowney in 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', in Sturm, ed., Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 571, and Antony James Booker, 'The Centennial Surveys of New Zealand, 1936-41', BA(Hons) research exercise, Massey University, 1983, pp. 35-6. As neither of these works discusses this draft of the chapter, I should explain why I think this is indeed a fragmentary draft of the missing chapter. The manuscript of Settlers and Pioneers (Wellington, 1940) is scattered through folders 53C, 53D, 54A, 54B, and 55B, of the Cowan Papers. The chapter typescripts in these folders are all typed on the same size paper in the same format (title in capitals underlined in red)—a format not used by Cowan on any other drafts that I have seen. Secondly, the typescript fits neatly into the structure of the rest of the book (between chapters three and four). Thirdly, the draft was filed away in October 1939. Fourthly, the typescript has a handwritten note at the end saying 'rest of chapter is typed', indicating that this typescript is part of a book, not a stand-alone newspaper piece.
It makes for incendiary reading.
Cowan started by observing that 'Waikato's story began in a series of errors of judgement—to put it very mildly—and developed into a tragedy, the ruin of a people.' Then he moved away from this position and came close to breaking with the prevailing tradition of explaining the evils of colonisation by referring to the misdeeds of individual Europeans (the Waitara 'blunder' being a classic example). Cowan damned the whole conduct of the war and its aftermath, and brought in individual European participants only to show that they too recognised its injustices:
The New Zealand Government of the early 'sixties—one administration after another—treated the Maoris of Waikato more cynically and brusquely than the Italians treated the Abyssinians. Italy at least left their surviving opponents on the land. But the revenge for acts of so-called rebellion in Waikato was wholesale dispossession and eviction. There is no denying the basic facts; they have been acknowledged officially in recent years, but even more than sixty years ago they were admitted by that fair-minded Native Minister Sir Donald Maclean, and by Sir George Grey, who had been one of the prime war-makers himself.Cowan, 'The Settlement of the Waikato' (italics added). Cowan spelt McLean's name Maclean because that was the way McLean's son spelt it: Cowan, Sir Donald Maclean: The Story of a New Zealand Statesman, Dunedin, 1940, p. viii.
In September 1939, comparing previous New Zealand governments to fascist Italy was staggeringly provocative, especially in an official publication. Furthermore, in the formative stages of the Centennial historical project, Joseph Heenan, its director, had urged that the New Zealand wars 'should not be stressed'.Minutes of a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Historical Committee, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1. The previous year, when Guy Scholefield had suggested a Centennial survey on 'Native Affairs', Heenan had replied that this was a 'delicate' matter, and deferred it. Minutes of Standing Committee meeting, 21 June 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1.
So it was hardly surprising that the chapter was removed. Cowan told E. H. McCormick, by then the editor of the Centennial surveys, that he wanted to discuss the Waikato war 'forcibly in order to bring the facts of history home to the readers—& especially Waikato pakehas who are an ignorant lot; like most farmers they don't read anything but the newspapers. This book being a centennial occasion, they might read this.'Cowan to McCormick, 24 October 1939, IA1, 62/110/2.
I. L. G. Sutherland commiserated with Cowan: 'I think it is disgraceful that you were not permitted to tell the truth about Waikato. How can good relations between two peoples be maintained on the basis of falsehoods, or the suppression of the truth?'I. L. G. Sutherland to Cowan, 2 September 1940, Cowan Papers, 39/3. Compare Cowan: 'it is impossible to reconcile the two races completely … until the old crime of "muru-whenua" … is atoned for.' Cowan, The Settlement of the Waikato'.
Cowan's insistence on recalling 'the whole truth' of 'a country's past' reveals another dimension of his conception of the past as persisting into the present. He could see the consequences of the raupatu or confiscation in the Waikato of the 1930s: 'There are Maori men and women and children working in Chinese gardens to-day whose immediate ancestors were stripped of their homes and land seventy-five years ago.'Cowan, 'The Settlement of the Waikato'.
Most of the time in Cowan's work, the past lingered on to offer lessons or food for inspiration. But it also created obligations, which could be evaded only with grotesque hypocrisy. As Cowan put it in a wry passage:
I wish the insensitive Englishman of Waikato could have heard the views of a certain Maori friend of mine on the subject of the raupatu. The good old man had a sense of humour strongly developed for a Maori; he thought it was a beautiful joke asking the evicted tribes to come back and sing jubilee hymns of praise in a Church built with the timber that they had freely given for it, with their labour, in the district that had been seized from them. 'The pakeha,' he said, 'is willing to let bygones be bygones, but does he offer to give me back my potato ground?'Ibid. For similar protests by Cowan, see 'Memento M(a)ori', Auckland Star, 16 October 1937, and 'The Facts about Te Kooti: How Injustice Made a Rebel', in Cowan, Tales of the Maori Border, Wellington, 1944.
In its final form, the book offered only two oblique paragraphs on the Waikato war.After Cowan had removed the offending chapter from the proofs of Settlers and Pioneers, E. H. McCormick wrote to him saying that the 'connecting link' that Cowan had just written for 'the Waikato section … is very impartial.' This seems to refer to the paragraph quoted here. McCormick to Cowan, 26 October 1939; Cowan to McCormick, 24 October 1939, IA1, 62/110/2.
One of them read in part: 'The tragedy of war, like so many far greater wars before and since, could have been avoided. At any rate, the frontier settlers and the Maori farmers were not the war-makers.'Cowan, Settlers and Pioneers, p. 21.
Rather than making colonisation troublingly ambiguous, this paragraph partially exonerates 'the pioneers'. This way, the book reads like a mildly generous version of the standard pioneer tribute. It makes a token acknowledgement of the suffering caused by colonisation, but does so without enough detail or emotion to call into question the valorisation of 'the pioneers'.
In the draft chapter, Cowan had written: 'in the process of glorifying the hard-toiling pioneers who made the way easy for the present generation, some of the most important facts of the pioneers' beginnings are apt to be overlooked, not to say ignored.' But, of course, Cowan himself participated in 'the process of glorifying the hard-toiling pioneers'. And although Cowan now said that while Maori remained dispossessed it was 'idle to say that pakeha and Maori are one people', he himself had made such idle claims often. In Settlers and Pioneers, as in his other books, the authorial voice seems unaware of the incompatibility of the two stories, Maori and Pakeha, it tells so passionately. But in Settlers and Pioneers, the conflict between the two is acted out more explicitly than elsewhere.It is difficult to say whether Settlers and Pioneers constitutes a climax in Cowan's work. In the 1930s, Cowan increasingly spoke out against injustices to Maori. Several people who read an earlier draft of this chapter suggested that Cowan may have felt safer about being outspoken after the government awarded him a special pension in 1936. However, the pension did not solve all Cowan's worries. It did not allow him, his wife (who was twenty years younger than he was) and their two sons, to live especially comfortably. Cowan must have known that he would not be able to support his family for long. Moreover, Cowan's corpus abounds with both repetitions and inconsistencies, which make it difficult to view his work as developing in a linear way. In any case, the importance I have attached to Settlers and Pioneers rests on the extent to which the contradictions in his work are made explicit, not on whether the book is a climactic moment in Cowan's work.
Cowan felt violated by the excision of the Waikato chapter, but the act of censorship did him the service of obscuring the tensions at the heart of his work.
Cowan's attempt to combine two strategies of indigenisation failed, but that does not detract from his importance. More than anyone else in interwar historiography, he accorded Maori an agency commensurate with that of Pakeha. His textual contradictions indicate the boundaries of Pakeha constructions of the wars, race relations, and 'New Zealand'. The reception of Cowan's work also sheds some light on these boundaries. With his extensive exposure in newspapers as well as in books, Cowan had a very wide audience, but his metanarrative did not become a lived-in national mythology. He and his informants were fighting a losing battle. The Centennial organisers did not want to know, and notable Pakeha discussions of New Zealand identity written in the thirties and forties displayed a remarkable amnesia about the wars.Holcroft, Deepening Stream; Curnow, 'Introduction' to Curnow, ed., Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45; and, infinitely less substantially, Oliver Duff, New Zealand Now, Wellington, 1941. For an example that infuriated Cowan, see Gillespie, 'Preface' to Gillespie, ed., New Zealand Short Stories, pp. v-vii. An exception is Hyde, 'Singers of Loneliness'. The idea of amnesia is suggested by James Belich in his New Zealand Wars, pp. 320-1, and 'Riwha Titokowaru', in Oliver, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, p. 545.
In interwar historiography, Cowan was himself out on a frontier.
4. Wellington Historians, Collecting, and Oratory
When T. Lindsay Buick entered the employ of the Dominion Museum in August 1934 he was told that his title would not be 'Government Historiographer', as he had hoped. Though he would be doing historical work, he would appear in official documents as 'clerk'—the same title Elsdon Best had had when he worked writing up ethnological data.J. A. Young to T. Lindsay Buick, 9 August 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.
When angling for a government job writing history, Buick suggested that the Department of Internal Affairs revive Best's job 'in a modified way': 'Mr. Best's employment, as you are aware, chiefly centred round the recording of Maori customs, but as there is now no one to take his place, my suggestion is that the office should be devoted to the recording of the phases of European history still unrecorded …. The point of importance is the setting down in black and white of many facts relating to the settlement and development of New Zealand which call for a permanent record while it is yet possible to make that record.'Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1 1935/187/128.
Accordingly, Buick took Best's place on the Dominion Museum's payroll and succeeded him in the newspaper room on the top floor of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Bowen Street in Wellington.Rachel Barrowman, The Turnbull: A Library and Its World, Auckland, 1995, pp. 34-5.
I do not want to suggest that history supplanted ethnology in Pakeha intellectual circles some, time in August 1934. There are other 'morals' to be taken from this episode. The first is that Buick belonged to a community of historians that is analogous to, and overlapped with, the Polynesian Society of which Best was the leading light. The parallel should not be pushed too far: the Polynesian Society was highly organised, had its own journal, and extended beyond Wellington in formalised ways; the historiographical community to which Buick belonged was not based in one society, but depended on personal contacts and meetings between clients and patrons at Wellington's libraries. It was also comparatively small, and its contacts with other historians in New Zealand and overseas depended on frequent but irregular correspondence. It was, however, the most productive and collaborative group of historians in New Zealand during the interwar period.
The second moral of the juxtaposition of Buick and Best is that some of the concerns of this Wellington-based historiographical circle paralleled the concerns of those paddling in the wake of S. Percy Smith. Part of the mission of Smith and his fellows and successors in the Polynesian Society was the collection of Polynesian 'lore' before the knowledgeable informants died out. For the historians discussed in this chapter, it was vital that obscure journals, letters, books and paintings be preserved and their contents known. As we have seen, local historians, and Cowan, himself a member of the Wellington circle, worried about saving traces of New Zealand's history from oblivion. The local historians dealt mostly in artefacts and reminiscences, and Cowan in oral reminiscence. Other Wellingtonians were more concerned with old manuscripts. Their concern overlapped with their hobby of book-collecting and the library jobs that some of them had. They sought to gather material for their own use and for the histories that would be written in the future. Like all historians, they made a fuss over the discovery of new documents. But for them, salvage was as important a trope as discovery.
The first part of this chapter details the institutional and interpersonal relationships constituting this community. The second looks at the interest in collecting sources, and the fruits of this interest, including its textual embodiments. In particular, I discuss the methods and principles of Guy Scholefield's collection of information for A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. In the third section, I look at a subject dear to these historians, the Bay of Islands in the years 1814-40, and discuss Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi as an important result of this interest.
The historians discussed at the greatest length in this chapter are Buick, Scholefield, and Horace Fildes. Cowan was just as active a participant in historical debate and co-operation as these three, though in the 1930s his contact with others was increasingly through correspondence and the telephone, as his health and Wellington's rain kept him confined to his house.Cowan to Scholefield, 12 March 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.
I have, however, already discussed him in some detail. Johannes Andersen mattered more in this period as an ethnologist and editor than as a historian, but he was important to the work of historians as an authority on some aspects of New Zealand history, and as the custodian of these historians' greatest resource, the Alexander Turnbull Library. William Downie Stewart and Eric Ramsden lived outside Wellington while they wrote history in the 1930s, but were in regular contact with Buick, Fildes and Scholefield, with whom they discussed their work, and whom they sometimes employed as research assistants.
In 1921 Buick referred to the 'wealth and leisure' needed to write good history.Buick to the editor, Christchurch Press, 15 July 1921, T. Lindsay Buick Papers, MS Papers 58/25, ATL.
Few New Zealanders in the interwar period could afford to devote themselves to the writing of history unless they were of retirement age. Even academic historians had little time for writing, burdened as they were with heavy administrative and teaching loads, and having minimal provision for leave. Despite his files of stories and his habit of recycling, Cowan barely made ends meet writing history full-time. Other historians had to find ways of creating wealth and leisure, or combining their historical work with compatible day-jobs.
From 1926, Scholefield's day-job was running the General Assembly Library. Before that he had worked in journalism, like Cowan, Ramsden and Buick. Some of his early books, such as New Zealand in Evolution: Industrial, Economic and Political, began life as newspaper articles.Guy H. Scholefield, New Zealand in Evolution: Industrial, Economic and Political, London, 1909.
From 1908 to 1919, he worked in London as a syndicated correspondent for the New Zealand press, and then as a doctoral student at the London School of Economics. On his return to New Zealand he spent several years editing the Wairarapa Age and then returned to Wellington, getting the librarian's job ahead of Andersen, who thought he had been promised the position.G. H. Scholefield, 'Autobiography', unpublished typescript, nd [c. 1960] pp. 196-204, Scholefield Papers, 212/67; Andersen to Sir Joseph Kinsey, July or August 1926, Andersen Papers, 148/1. I am grateful to Peter Gibbons for giving me notes on this letter.
Scholefield made his library position (which he held until 1947) reinforce his historical interests even more than his journalistic work had. The manuscripts he collected and the indexes he compiled facilitated his Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and other reference projects. Scholefield wrote monographs before and after the interwar years, and continued to write and broadcast political comment during this period,V. Rigg to Scholefield, 26 October 1939, Scholefield Papers, 212/C9; Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 283-4.
but from 1926 he concentrated on collecting source material and publishing editions or reference texts such as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. He has been described as the 'one-time doyen of New Zealand historians',Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand 1860-1950, Wellington, 1990, p. 35.
but it would be more accurate to call him the concierge.
Scholefield lived from 1877 to 1963: the interwar period began in the middle of his career. Buick, by contrast, was born eleven years earlier and died in 1938: the interwar years were the twilight of his career, but also his most productive period.
Earlier in life Buick had been a Liberal MHR, and was a whip from 1893-6. Leaving politics, he moved into journalism, and bought interests in a succession of newspapers until in 1913 he became a parliamentary reporter for the United Press Association.J. E. Traue, Thomas Lindsay Buick', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, p. 77. As is suggested by the government subsidies on some of his books, and his eventual securing of a government job, Buick maintained useful contacts with people in high places, perhaps through parliamentary reporting as much as through his earlier connections as an MHR.
By 1927, he was working nights at United Press, unhappy with his work there and keen to work full-time on the history-writing he had been doing since 1900.Buick to Gordon Coates, 4 April 1927; Buick to H. R. H. Balneavis, 22 April 1928, IA1, 1935/187/128. Traue, 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', p. 77, erroneously claims that Buick was doing parliamentary reporting until his retirement from journalism in 1933.
Eventually, in 1934, he secured the job writing history under the auspices of the Dominion Museum (though, like Best, he was based in the Turnbull Library). As we shall see later, the job was supposed to involve collecting and collating data, but Buick used it to continue his work writing narrative books. Buick thus found wealth and leisure sufficient to permit him to write history full-time for the last three-and-a-half years of his life.'Sufficient' is the key word. Buick's salary was only £250 a year. He had originally asked for £500. Cowan had been paid £300 a year for his work on The New Zealand Wars fifteen years earlier. Young to Buick, 3 August 1934; Balneavis to Coates, 7 September 1928, IA1, 1935/187/128; Hislop to R. F. Bollard, 4 January 1924, IA1 126/8/23.
Fildes enjoyed the greatest wealth and leisure of any of the historians discussed here, though he published nothing apart from several pamphlets and numerous newspaper pieces on 'recondite subjects relative to the beginnings of New Zealand'.Fildes to J. A. Young, 6 October 1933, IA1, 1935/187/128.
What his material comfort did allow him to do was to collect, organise and digest books and other historical sources to make himself a fount of detail on a wide range of subjects. His significance in this historiographical milieu lay in his roles as authority, gadfly and assistant to others—'your helpfulness … and your standing as a collector of historical data', as Cowan told him.Cowan to Fildes, 28 December 1935, Fildes Papers, box 34. The references in this chapter to the Fildes collection in the Victoria University of Wellington Library require a note of explanation. In the two preceding chapters I have cited Fildes' correspondence and other personal papers—the Fildes Papers. Items in this category are cited in the following way: [item description], Fildes Papers, [box number]. In this chapter, I also cite Fildes' collection of books. Fildes annotated his copies of books and kept related notes and letters in them. References to correspondence or notes kept in these books are followed by the citation: Fildes [series-number of volume]. Where I have cited one of Fildes' annotations to a book, the reference takes the following form: [author of book], [title of book], p. [page annotated], Fildes [series-number of volume].
Fildes had not had any education past Standard Seven; he spent all his working life in the Post Office at various offices round the country, retiring in 1929 (at the age of 54) as assistant chief postmaster of Wellington. He did not marry until 1931, when he was 56 years old, and he remained childless. His job and family status meant that he was reasonably well off, though he had to economise somewhat after he bought his large house in Kelburn.K. A. Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes and His Collection', New Zealand Libraries, 38, 5 (October 1975), pp. 254, 265-6.
Fildes spent a lot of his money on books, manuscripts and art. Unlike some book-collectors, Fildes collected more out of an interest in books' contents than for the joys of the hunt. Like Hocken and unlike Turnbull, he spent much time and effort transcribing and taking notes on others' books and manuscripts.Fildes to A. J. Harrop, 28 July 1930, A. J. Harrop Papers, MS Papers 1271/1, ATL; H. J. Barnett to Fildes, 14 August 1930, Fildes Papers, box 37.
He kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, notes and other stray data and diligently indexed his collection, thus facilitating the retrieval of information for himself and others.Fildes, Scrapbook on Porirua, MS Papers 1081, ATL; Selective Indexes to Certain Books Relating to Early New Zealand, Compiled by H. E. M. Fildes, ca. 1920 to 1937, and Now Transcribed by the Victoria University of Wellington Library, Wellington, 1984.
Fildes' knowledge of New Zealand history was encyclopaedic, not just in its extent but also in its organisation. Fildes arguably knew, or was able to find, more facts of New Zealand history than anyone else at the time.
These three met each other and others in a variety of settings. Each belonged to a variety of associations in Wellington's active intellectual life. Scholefield, wearing his hat as political commentator, was a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations and later the Institute of International Relations; wearing his author's hat, he was a prominent member of PEN, in the course of whose business he dealt with Cowan.Scholefield, 'Autobiography, pp. 230-1; Cowan to Scholefield, 12 March 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.
Buick, Fildes, Cowan and, of course, Andersen, were members of the Polynesian Society, which met regularly in the Turnbull Library. There was, however, no stable central body for historical discussions. From 1918 to 1924 the Wellington Philosophical Society had a History Section, to which Buick, Andersen and Best lectured, but the section could not keep up interest.David Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making in New Zealand 1840-1930', draft of a research essay for Diploma in Museum Studies, Massey University, 1996, pp. 41-2; Buick to the editor, Christchurch Press, 15 July 1921, Buick Papers, 58/25.
From the manuscript sources that remain, it does not seem that the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association was an important forum for well known historians.
Consequently, specifically historiographical networks formed informally, through chance acquaintance and repeated contact. Buick made regular use of the telephone, and Fildes rang the increasingly housebound Cowan to talk about books.Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801; Fildes to Buick, 2 August 1933, in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353, ATL.
Buick met for morning tea with Fildes and Dora Wilcox, a poet (she wrote the poem from which came the title of the Kowhai Gold anthology)G. H. Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific, 4th edn, Wellington, 1941, p. 352; Pat Lawlor, Confessions of a Journalist: with Observations on Some Australian and New Zealand Writers, Auckland, 1935, pp. 255-6; Quentin Pope, ed., Kowhai Gold: An Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Verse, London, 1930, p. ii. Wilcox later became Mrs Hamelius and then Mrs Moore but seems to have kept her maiden name as a pen name.
with an abiding interest in the French artist Charles Meryon, who had painted scenes of Akaroa and its environs in the 1830s.Wilcox to Fildes, 10 June 1923, Fildes Papers, box 39; Wilcox, 'Charles Meryon: A French Artist in New Zealand', United Empire: The Royal Colonial Institute Journal, 9, 10 (October 1921), pp. 690-93, Fildes 1235a.
In addition, there was correspondence, within Wellington and without. Stewart's career as a writer began in earnest after he had retired from national politics and had returned to Dunedin. From Dunedin he corresponded regularly with Fildes and Scholefield, both of whom he drew on for research favours. Ramsden did likewise. He was a New Zealander by birth, and later an Evening Post journalist, but when he began writing New Zealand history in the 1930s he was living in Sydney. He working for the Sydney Morning Herald until forced to resign in 1934 'owing to some trouble over a scoop concerning Test Match pictures'.Ramsden to Fildes, 5 July 1934, Fildes Papers, box 8.
After this time he seems to have done some freelance journalism, and his wife, a journalist too, helped support him financially.Ramsden to W. E. Parry, 29 October 1936, IA1, 126/8/20.
Ramsden did research on Samuel Marsden for several years before his book Marsden and the Missions was published in 1936.Eric Ramsden, 'Early History', Auckland Star, 4 February 1933; Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions: Prelude to Waitangi, Dunedin, 1936.
The Mitchell Library and the papers of one of Marsden's granddaughters living in Sydney provided some of the book's sources, but he also had Fildes do research for him in Wellington, and corresponded with Scholefield and Stewart.Fildes to Ramsden, 10 February 1937, 'short copy in Fildes 122; Ramsden to Scholefield, '29 February 1933' (presumably 1 March: 1933 was not a leap year); Ramsden to Stewart, 29 October 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C9.
Historians also met at the Turnbull and parliamentary libraries. Cowan, Buick and Fildes met at the Turnbull as clients; from 1934 to 1938, Buick had an office there. At the Turnbull they had frequent contact with Andersen, the librarian, and its other regulars, such as teacher Nellie Coad, teachers' college lecturer Fanny Irvine-Smith, and judge Frederick Chapman.Barrowman, Turnbull, pp. 34-6, 204n.
Both libraries were vital bases for the work of these and other writers. The staff alone were an asset Andersen supplied information to A. G. Butchers as he wrote his history of education in New Zealand; two of Andersen's 'lady assistants', Grace Davidson and Alice Woodhouse, translated French documents for Buick's The French at Akaroa.Gibbons, '"Going Native"', vol. 2, p. 435; see also pp. 436-8; Alice Woodhouse, 'Early Days in the Turnbull Library', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 116. Alice Woodhouse was Airini Woodhouse's sister-in-law: Airini Woodhouse to Fildes, 19 September 1935, box 16, Fildes Papers.
More important, though, were the two libraries' collections. The Turnbull's strength for New Zealand history lay in its collections of New Zealand and Pacific books and manuscripts; the GAL's strengths were its official publications, archives and newspapers. The archival strength of the GAL owed much to Scholefield, who travelled the country collecting archival material, and acquired the papers of some notable politicians.Ralph Munn and John Barr, New Zealand Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for Their Improvement, Christchurch, 1934, p. 30; Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 207, 216; Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, H-32, 1958, p. 17.
For most of those historians researching topics other than political ones, though, the Turnbull Library was a more important resource. Technically the GAL was much bigger—in 1936 it had 140,000 volumes compared to the Turnbull's 80,000—but in a letter to Gordon Coates ten years earlier Andersen, the librarian from 1919 to 1937, had said that the Turnbull contained 'more than two-thirds as many books' as the GAL.Munn and Barr, New Zealand Libraries, p. 30; Report of the Alexander Turnbull Library for the Year Ended 31st March 1937, Wellington, 1937, p. 3; Andersen to Coates, 13 July 1926, quoted in A. G. Bagnall, 'A Troubled Childhood: "The Nucleus of a National Collection"', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 105.
Presumably many of the GAL's 140,000 books were volumes in government series. Size aside, the quality of the Turnbull's collection made the GAL's look like 'a sort of sublimated card-index', according to a scholarly friend whom Heenan asked to spy on the Turnbull in 1935.Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 55.
It would be wrong to present Buick, Fildes, Scholefield and so on as a happy and harmonious grouping. This was not a closely knit community. It was riven by fighting and silences. Fildes quarrelled with everyone, with varying degrees of severity, and it was said that Buick and Andersen did not speak to each other, despite the fact that each worked in an office in the Turnbull.Ibid., p. 35.
However, the members of this community did (at most times) co-operate, and the work they and others produced owed much to the collaborations of this community.
These collaborations took the forms of historical debate and research undertaken for other people. Buick, Fildes, Cowan and the others debated the merits of histories written by each other and by other people. Fildes had a habit of sending authors unsolicited critiques of their works. His critiques usually concerned points of detail, as did the debates of these historians generally. Whether Hone Heke was the first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi was a matter of some interest to them.Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers, 196/169; Kenneth Ledward to Fildes, 29 June 1933 (as transcribed by Fildes); 'Matanga' [Chappell], 'Our Famous Treaty: New Light on Old Facts', New Zealand Herald, 17 June 1933, both in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353.
Buick, Fildes and Ramsden expended much energy in an argument over whether the house depicted in a sketch by Lieutenant Thomas Woore was really James Busby's house at Waitangi.Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers, 196/169; Buick to Ramsden, 13 August 1933, Ramsden Papers, 196/170; Ramsden to Fildes, 4 December 1933, Fildes Papers, box 8.
Cowan and Fildes argued over Henare Taratoa's actions at Gate Pa.Cowan to Fildes, 30 July 1935; Cowan to Fildes, August 1935 (no day given); Fildes to Cowan, 22 December 1935 (copy by Fildes), Fildes Papers, box 34.
These debates did not bring about much change. The participants tended to stick to their guns.
More fruitful were the exchanges of information that took place. While on a trip to London in 1935, Scholefield checked the log of the Herald in the Public Record Office for the third edition of Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi.Scholefield to Buick, 6 August 1935, Buick Papers, 58/112.
Buick gave Fildes a facsimile of a letter from Hobson to Busby at a time when Fildes was working on Busby.Fildes to Buick, 2 August 1933, in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353; Fildes, 'Busby's Victoria', New Zealand Herald, 15 May 1934.
Fildes did substantial research for Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions, working for '3 weeks morning & afternoon at the Turnbull Library, with City lunch & afternoon tea, reading the whole of Busby's despatches, copying out 70 or 80 sheets of paper … & writing you long letters'.Fildes to Ramsden, 10 February 1937, 'short copy' in Fildes 122.
Doing research for others was Fildes' main contribution to interwar historiography. Unlike, for example, Scholefield, he did not express disappointed literary pretensions, but it is difficult not to see him as a frustrated writer.Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 204, 226.
His slender publications were written very heavily, in a style quite different from his wry correspondence.H. Fildes, The Last of the Ngati Mamoe: The Wild People of the New Zealand Mountain and Bush, Dunedin, 1936.
That he kept doing work for others for years while complaining about their ingratitude suggests that he derived some vicarious satisfaction from it. Aside from the help he rendered Ramsden, he also assisted Woodhouse, Elder, Guthrie-Smith, Andersen, Chappell, the Auckland Star proprietor and historian of the Albertland settlement Henry Brett, the Wellington Teachers' Training College lecturer Fanny Irvine-Smith, the Dunedin historian Basil Howard, Edward Gibbon Wakefield's relatives and others.Woodhouse to Fildes, 15 June 1937, 18 July 1937, and 3 September 1937, Fildes Papers, box 16; Elder to Fildes, 21 December 1935, Fildes Papers, box 39; Guthrie-Smith to Fildes, 24 March 1937, Fildes Papers, box 5; Andersen to Fildes, 20 June 1932, Fildes Papers, box 1; Chappell to Fildes, 12 June 1933; Fildes to Chappell, 14 June 1933, Fildes Papers, box 1; Brett to Fildes, 25 July 1923, Fildes Papers, box 34; F. L. Irvine-Smith, The Streets of My City; Wellington, New Zealand, Wellington, 1948, pp, 7, 26, 61; Howard to Fildes, 26 November 1933, Fildes Papers, box 39; Edith Jervis to Fildes, 30 August 1931, Fildes Papers, box 39.
Fildes did long-distance research for Stewart's biography of William Rolleston,Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 265.
and helped Buick greatly, with research from Fildes' own collection, compiling reports for Buick and proofing his works, including the second edition of The Treaty of Waitangi, The French at Akaroa, The Mystery of the Moa, and a lecture on James Cook.Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers 196/169; Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801; Fildes to Ramsden, 30 May 1934, Ramsden Papers, 196/171. The lecture was 'Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S.: A Lecture Delivered by T. Lindsay Buick, C.M.G., F.R. Hist.S. before the Members of the Yorkshire Society of New Zealand at Wellington 6th June 1934', qMS-0296, ATL.
Fildes felt that Buick's acknowledgements pages did not sufficiently credit him.Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801.
In the case of Buick's Jubilee of the Port of Wellington 1880-1930, Fildes made amends for himself by writing '& to no one more than to Mr H. Fildes who was practically joint author' on his copy at the end of Buick's list of thanks to 'a number of gentlemen who have aided me with their research and advice.'T. Lindsay Buick, Jubilee of the Port of Wellington 1880-1930, Wellington, 1930, p. 5, Fildes 1801.
Fildes reported similar misdemeanours by Buick with regard to Wilcox and Grace Davidson.Fildes to Ramsden, 30 May 1934, Ramsden Papers 196/171; Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers 196/169. Hugh Wright, the Mitchell Librarian, wrote to Fildes about Buick's treatment of him over the Jubilee of the Port of Wellington: 'I am surprised to learn that T. Lindsay Buick treated you as he did Dora Wilcox. The least an author can do is to publicly acknowledge the assistance given him by others.' Wright to Fildes, 29 January 1930, Fildes 1801.
Even allowing for exaggeration on Fildes' part, Buick's extensive and somewhat unprincipled use of other people dents the image of Buick as a selfless craftsman who started as a carpenter and finished as a historian.Accounts depicting Buick in this way include Traue, 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', and D. O. W. H[all], 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', in A. H. McClintock, ed., An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 3 vols, Wellington, 1966, vol. 1.
No working drafts remain of Buick's books or of Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions, so it is not possible to trace the substantial impact of Fildes' work on them. The consequences of this collective activity cannot be traced through the texts. It is, nevertheless, important to disclose some of the working relationships that are obscured by putting one person's name on the title page of a book. Something of their collaborative habits can be followed in their attempts to collect historical sources.
Cowan and many local historians talked about the need to collect remnants of the past before it was too late. In Cowan's case the objects collected were memories; the local historians also wanted pioneer implements, the furnishings of life. Appeals to collect for the sake of the memory of the pioneers or 'the old-time Maori' carried emotional weight, and some historians doubtless played on that. But not all appeals for the preservation of history made reference to elderly pioneers or Maori, and the calls for salvage were not mere cloaks for historians' hunger for sources for their own work. There were good anecdotal reasons for saying that records were in danger of destruction. Some time in the 1890s Thomas Hocken found the Treaty of Waitangi 'buried in a heap of old papers and rubbish in a dungeon' underneath the Parliament Buildings and damaged by rats.Otago Daily Times, 11 August 1909, quoted in E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr. Hocken and His Fellow Collectors, Dunedin, 1961, p. 46; Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making', p. 21. Colquhoun also cites, but does not quote, a letter from the under-secretary of Internal Affairs to his Minister, which, says Colquhoun, 'suggests that there has been some exaggeration in archives lore about the Department's neglect'. Ibid.
But the urgency of the task of salvage may also have owed something to Pakeha perceptions of present and past. Some writers treated the rapidity of New Zealand's transformation from a 'wilderness' to a prosperous dominion with assured satisfaction.Gillespie, 'Preface' to Gillespie, ed., New Zealand Short Stories, pp. v-vi,
Others found a disorienting rapidity in New Zealand history. Guthrie-Smith and Cowan remarked on this,Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, p. vii; Cowan, 'Chapter I: The Old Race and the New', typescript, nd, Cowan Papers 39/42C.
and Buick wrote of 'our fast receding history'.T. Lindsay Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi, or, How New Zealand Became a British Colony, Wellington, 1914, p. v.
A pointed sense that the past was both recent and distant may have been a 'common problem of the imagination' for Pakeha who had lived the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.
For the historians discussed in this chapter, collecting historical sources overlapped with the library positions of some of them and their hobby of book-collecting. Fildes, Stewart, Scholefield and Andersen were active bibliophiles; Andersen wrote a book called The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting.Johannes Andersen, The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, Auckland, 1936; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes'. For Stewart, see E. H. McCormick, Alexander Turnbull: His Life, His Circle, His Collections, Wellington, 1974, p. 221. For Scholefield, see P. A. Lawlor, Books and Bookmen: New Zealand and Overseas, Wellington, 1954, p. 101.
I will not go any further in detailing the collections of this circle, and of the government institutions that their work revolved around, but will examine some of their attempts to fuse their roles as collectors and historians.On government collecting see Barrowman, Turnbull, chs 2-3; Bagnall, 'A Troubled Childhood'; Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making'.
As book-collectors and historians these people were well aware of Hocken's combination of the two roles, but their role-model for salvaging of New Zealand historical records was Robert McNab. Scholefield paid tribute to McNab's influence, and Buick dedicated the first edition of his Treaty of Waitangi 'to Robert M'Nab … to whose enterprise and self-sacrifice we owe the recovery' of so much of that 'fast receding history'.Scholefield to Thomas Mackenzie, 28 October 1913, IA1, 126/8/10; Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, 1st edn, p. v.
From about 1898 until his death in 1917, McNab worked at excavating historical source material.J. E. Traue, 'Robert McNab', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, p. 315.
He did his research in Sydney, London and Paris,McNab to Scholefield, 1 April 1910; McNab to Scholefield, 24 December 1913, Scholefield Papers, 212/C10.
and in the libraries of Hocken and Turnbull. McNab made considerable use of Alexander Turnbull's library, much as his followers depended on the library when it became public property.McCormick, Alexander Turnbull, p. 206.
He also appealed to readers to send him old manuscripts, since 'generations may pass before another individual is found foolish enough to worry out all the detail of our early history'.Robert McNab, From Tasman to Marsden: A History of Northern New Zealand from 1642 to 1818, Dunedin, 1914, p. xii.
McNab made no pretensions to literature: 'The reader is given the results of the Author's research, not the fruits of his thought.'Robert McNab, The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840, Christchurch, 1913, p. vii.
His two volumes of Historical Records of New Zealand (1908, 1914) were outright compendia. His other publications fell somewhere between anthology and synthesis, tending toward the former. McNab constructed relentlessly factual, chronologically ordered narratives, punctuated with large chunks of quotation. It was deemed important to let sources speak for themselves. There are clear similarities between his work and later local historical compilations.
Buick's position on the payroll of the Dominion Museum was conceived as a continuation of McNab's work. At least, the Department of Internal Affairs saw it that way. An early suggestion of such a position was made by Downie Stewart in 1926. Writing to one of his successors as Minister of Internal Affairs, Stewart said that McNab's work should be continued. He recommended Jessie Hetherington, a secondary schools inspector, Cambridge alumna, and author of New Zealand: Its Political Connection with Great Britain.Stewart to R. F. Bollard, 6 April 1926, IA1, 1935/187/128; Beryl Hughes, 'Jessie Isabel Hetherington', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3.
Nothing seems to have come of this suggestion, but Buick recommended himself for a similar job from 1927 onwards.Buick to Coates, 4 April 1927; Buick to Balneavis, 22 April 1928; P. A. de la Perrelle to Apirana Ngata, 7 November 1929; Buick to Young, 25 September 1933; Fildes to Young, 6 October 1933; Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.
He wanted to work full-time on 'the compilation of the historical records of New Zealand and the preparation and publication of the results'. His efforts did not need to be published immediately.Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1 1935/187/128.
Buick was careful to point out that he wasn't asking for a job which was all research and no publishing—rather, documentary salvage and 'recording in narrative form' were to be twin aims.Ibid.
W. R. B. Oliver, the Director of the Dominion Museum, was sympathetic: 'As far as I am aware, a considerable proportion of the history of New Zealand is still awaiting a properly documented exposition. Besides filling this gap there is work for a historian to do in collecting for publication more historical records of the type published by the Hon. R. McNab.'Oliver to Malcolm Fraser, 5 July 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.
In the light of subsequent events, however, it seems that Buick had no intention of becoming a compiler rather than an author. The tentative list of projects he submitted to Oliver just after he was hired included an examination of the unindexed Great Britain Parliamentary Papers in the GAL in search of interesting material on New Zealand, but that was the only retrieval work suggested. Other projects included 'Te Whiti and His Times', 'A History of the Province of Nelson', 'The Governorship of Governor FitzRoy', and a book on the New Zealand Constitution Act. These were suggestions for monographs, not compilations. The proposed works on Te Whiti and FitzRoy were conceived as revisionist, countering existing 'stereotyped' interpretations.Buick to Oliver, 20 August 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128. Fragmentary drafts of both the Te Whiti and FitzRoy works exist in Buick's papers in the Turnbull.
Buick also proposed a re-writing of his own Old Marlborough, the writing of The Discovery of Dinornis, a sequel to his Mystery of the Moa, and 'An Appreciation of Thomas Bracken'—a project he had entertained as early as 1914.Buick to Fildes, 13 June 1914, Fildes Papers, box 15.
Oliver approved of this agenda,Oliver to Fraser, 24 August 1934; Oliver to J. W. Heenan, 3 February 1936, IA1, 1935/187/128.
and compilation work thus became subordinate to Buick's assisting members of the public and pursuing his own interests.Buick to Oliver, 21 September 1935, IA1, 1935/187/128; M. J. Thorp to Buick, 16 August 1937, Buick Papers, 58/2; Buick to Heenan, 11 November 1937, Buick Papers, 58/8.
But Buick's appointment was not entirely without value for the gathering of officially useful historical data. Buick gathered information on New Zealand's first national flag and compiled lists of dates for the coming Centennial celebrations,Buick to Heenan or Oliver, 10 December 1936, IA1, 1935/187/128.
though he died in February 1938 before much of the preparatory work of the Centennial had been done. The closest Buick came to compiling historical records was transcribing a 343-page manuscript by Baron de Thierry in the Auckland Public Library.Buick to Heenan, 19 October 1937 and 2 November 1937, IA1, 1935/187/128; Charles, Baron de Thierry, 'Historical Narrative of an Attempt to Form a Settlement in New Zealand', ed. T. Lindsay Buick, nd, qMS-2014, ATL.
His appointment thus failed to combine history-writing with record-gathering in the way McNab had.
Historians also worked in their private capacities to augment the collections of public libraries,Ramsden to Scholefield, '29 February 1933', Scholefield Papers, 212/C9; Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 88; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 263.
but the remaining connections between history and collection that I want to discuss here are textual ones. As with the local histories and Cowan's works, practices of collection were repeated in some texts. Buick, Ramsden and Stewart wrote in the mode of extensive quotation practised by McNab, Cowan and the local historians. McNab had written in 1913: 'The publication of the Author's paraphrase of the material would rob the events of that accuracy which is the feature of many of the rough unlettered accounts of the principals, and would never prove the last word on the question.'McNab, Old Whaling Days, p. vii.
For McNab, avoiding paraphrase and synthesis was part of his quest to establish factual foundations for histories of New Zealand; with others, extensive quotation was important for its personal flavour as much as for its accuracy. While he was working on his biography of Rolleston, Stewart discussed the matter explicitly in a letter to James Rutherford, Professor of History at Auckland University College:
I have the book about finished but not being like you a trained historian I am constantly puzzled how far to interrupt the narrative by inserting letters. If one merely tears out of the letter a few sentences, or paraphrases it, one has the feeling that having used that part of the letter for its immediate purpose means that the full letter will never be published. My inclination is to put in the full letter, even though it deals with other topics and interrupts the flow of the narrative. I notice some biographers use practically no letters and merely state the substance of them where necessary in their own language. This makes the story run smoothly but if the man is a good letter writer it seems a pity to lose his mode of expressing himself.Stewart to Rutherford, 16 March 1939, James Rutherford Papers, MSS A-42, folder E26/8, UA.
Other texts repeated collecting practices more obviously. Stewart edited the diary of his grandfather, George Hepburn.Dale, 'Gentleman of Polities', p. 174.
At his relatives' behest Fildes wrote up a mélange of reminiscences and diary entries of his grandfather, James John Taine. The work ran to 592 typed pages. Fildes added copious notes and queries, but did not attempt to synthesise the jagged fragments into any kind of coherent narrative.'Reminiscences of James John Taine, a Wellington and New Zealand Pioneer Settler of 1839, Compiled by H. E. M. Fildes, with Portraits and Illustrations', Micro MS 218, ATL.
The most impressive textual analogue of the will to collect and protect historical data was Scholefield's Dictionary. It was not entirely 'Scholefield's Dictionary'. Rutherford, J. B. Condliffe and others wrote a few of the entries. Airini Woodhouse supplied him with information for the Rhodes entries and Cowan gave him material on Donald McLean.Woodhouse to Scholefield, 19 August 1938, Scholefield Papers, 212/C3A; Cowan to Scholefield, 23 July 1940, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.
Fildes, A. E. Currie and Bishop Herbert Williams, a correspondent on Maori matters with many historians of this time, made suggestions and corrections.A. E. Currie, 'D.N.Z.B.', nd [1940?], Scholefield Papers, 212/C6; G. H. Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 2 vols, Wellington, 1940, vol. 1, p. xvi; vol. 2, p. 197; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 263.
In its final stages, J. C. Beaglehole 'spent much time and enormous pains on the book'.McCormick to Heenan, 13 October 1939, IA1, 62/9/2.
Nevertheless, Scholefield did the bulk of the work. It was his pet project, and he worked on it for more than thirty years.
The project's origins lay in the first edition of Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific, which Scholefield compiled with fellow New Zealand Times journalist Emil Schwabe in 1907-8. Unlike those in the Cyclopedia of New Zealand, published from 1897 to 1907, the entries in Who's Who were not paid for by their subjects. Biographical information was supplied by the subjects themselves but was, said Scholefield, 'carefully checked by reliable sources'.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.
Without Schwabe, Scholefield kept Who's Who alive, putting out further editions in 1925, 1932, 1941 and 1951. As new information came to hand, he included it in his growing biographical database.Scholefield, 'Autobiography', p. 223.
In the early 1930s, by his own account, Scholefield began to consider using this database as the foundation of a New Zealand equivalent of the immense British Dictionary of National Biography. He recalled in his autobiography: 'As I fed fresh cards into [the card catalogue built up for Who's Who] I could envisage the publication in a decade or so of a National Biography of New Zealand. That now became a feature of my work.'Ibid.
Scholefield worked on the Dictionary as a personal project until the announcement in 1936 that the Centennial celebrations would involve an extensive publishing programme. He wrote to the Under-secretary for Internal Affairs suggesting the inclusion of the Dictionary among the Centennial publications.Scholefield to Heenan, 12 May 1936, IA1, 62/8, part 1.
A committee considered the proposal,Minutes of National Historical Committee meeting, 10 June 1937, IA1 62/7/1. The committee comprised James Hight, James Rutherford, James Thorn, J. T. Paul, A. D. McIntosh and E. H. McCormick, most of whom will be discussed later in this thesis.
and the Dictionary became one of the official Centennial publications.
Scholefield's card catalogue for Who's Who was a major resource for the Dictionary, but it had its limitations. Scholefield observed that 'public men' were more reticent about 'this type of publicity' in 1908 than in the 1930s, and many were omitted because they were too modest to supply information.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.
Secondly, Who's Who could not include everyone of significance in New Zealand history because it dealt only with people alive at or just before the time of publication (the Dictionary included no living persons).In official documents this is assumed as a given; there is no record of any suggestion that the Dictionary should include living people. The British Dictionary of National Biography also had excluded the living. Given the deferential nature of writing about living people at this time, it would have been difficult to apply to their lives such scrutiny as was applied to the dead. Scholefield's prefaces to Who's Who and the Dictionary indicate that the spectre of the Cyclopedia of New Zealand weighed heavily on him. The Dunedin journalist D. W. M. Burn suggested a Centennial survey on expatriates doing well overseas. The Editorial Committee rejected the suggestion for fear that it would 'excite jealousies' and 'degenerate into a catalogue of undistinguished names'. Burn to Peter Fraser, 7 September 1937, IA1, 62/8, Part 1; Oliver Duff to Heenan, 23 March 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, Part 1. (However, during 1940, the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission 'devoted ten talks to "New Zealand Brains Abroad", and these did not pretend to exhaust the subject': Alan Mulgan, 'The Population Problems: The Cultural Aspect', undated typescript, Alan Mulgan Papers, MS Papers 224/19, ATL.)
For those who had died before the first Who's Who, Scholefield's starting point was the scattering of compendia on New Zealanders of note published in New Zealand in 1910, including what Andersen called 'that great repository of fiction', the Cyclopedia of New Zealand.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, pp. v-vii; Andersen, Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, p. 77.
In the years between the first Who's Who and the Dictionary, what Scholefield regarded as some good works of 'collective biography' were published, notably Acland's Early Canterbury Runs and Fulton's Medical Practice in Otago and Southland.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.
There were also some adequate book-length biographies.
Despite this, Scholefield still had to undertake a massive amount of primary research. His main primary sources were information from relatives of the subjects to be written about, and obituaries in newspapers. A large number of the entries in the Dictionary end with a citation of an obituary. As the General Assembly Librarian, Scholefield had access to a wide range of newspapers from the country's history.Munn and Barr, New Zealand Libraries, p. 30.
He also hunted down notices in less mainstream publications. The Old Boys' lists of private schools were an important source,Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.
and copies of the Christ's College Register frequently turn up in Scholefield's papers in the Turnbull. Other journals from which he gleaned biographical essays included Katipo, Newspaper News, The Church Chronicle, Flashlight, Church Gazette, and even the Hampstead Parish Church Magazine of April 1909 for an article on Bishop Selwyn. He kept a fairly complete collection of clippings of Cowan's series on 'Famous New Zealanders', published every month in the New Zealand Railways Magazine from 1933 to 1936.There are copies of the Cowan pieces and the other journal articles referred to in this paragraph in Scholefield Papers, 212/58.
Scholefield also drew upon the knowledge of the descendants of his subjects. He lamented that people did not know enough about their relatives, and often could not tell him anything that he did not already know.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xiv.
However, his correspondence reveals that Scholefield was helped to a great degree by the information supplied by relatives and local historians.There is a mass of letters from relatives and local historians in Scholefield Papers, 212 /C1.
When he began to work seriously on the Dictionary, Scholefield wrote a series of potted biographies for the daily press, 'in the hope that this outline of the lives of some of the more prominent figures in the history of the provinces would lead to verification or correction of errors in advance of publication' in the Dictionary.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. ix.
No fewer than 118 of these biographies were published in the Christchurch Press, the Evening Post and the Otago Daily Times in 1929-31. Several years later Scholefield wrote a companion series on national rather than provincial figures. These articles, Scholefield recalled, served their purpose: they 'interested many in the great figures of the past' and 'induced those already having some knowledge of the subject to point out inaccuracies and suggest additions'.Ibid.
Scholefield's research methods interacted with the principles of collection and selection that the Dictionary embodied. Despite Scholefield's claim to have eschewed 'evaluation' and adopted 'a purely factual approach', many Dictionary articles were constrained by his dependence on information from relatives.Ibid., p. xii; G. F. James, review of Scholefield, Dictionary, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 3 (April 1941), p. 200.
Family members were selective in the information they wished to publicise, and Scholefield consequently shouldered some of the filio-pietistic constraints of local history. Among those constraints was the habit of disclosing only those personal, 'private' matters that would not be embarrassing if aired in public. In this and other respects, the Dictionary was a monument to the 'public' values of local histories and other biographical works. The criterion for admission to the Dictionary was 'significance'. 'Neither birth nor wealth in itself is a valid qualification. Significance in our national history, from whatever standpoint, is the sole consideration.'Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xi.
Scholefield defined significance as public impact—hence his phrase 'public men', 'Commoners', who from different perspectives might be thought significant by virtue of their typicality, found no place in Scholefield's scheme. Few women other than writers, artists or school principals appear in the Dictionary.
Holding a position in national politics guaranteed entry virtually ex officio. Other groups who fell into the category of the publicly significant were noted in D. O. W. Hall's public-relations account of the forthcoming Dictionary. They included Maori leaders, members of the old Provincial Councils, judges, 'the more notable magistrates', and bishops. Other 'men who fall outside' the aforementioned categories could also gain entry, depending on their 'significance'. These 'men' included missionaries, soldiers, public servants, educationalists, writers, artists, prominent women, and mayors of 'any of the chief cities'.D. O. W. Hall, 'The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography', 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/9/2.
Te Wherowhero, Wiremu Tamehana Tarapipipi, Te Kooti and other Maori leaders were 'significant', but some Maori 'public men' slipped through Scholefield's net. Scholefield found Maori 'difficult to obtain information from'.Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific 1925, Masterton, 1924, p. 4.
Part of this difficulty must be attributable to Scholefield's own character. Maori who had played an important part in New Zealand history, and their descendants, had fewer qualms about sharing their life stories with Cowan and Ramsden. There is also evidence that Scholefield had difficulty identifying publicly significant Maori. A year before the Dictionary was published, he wrote to Te Kauru Karaitiana, whose acquaintance he seemed to have made only recently, and asked, 'By the way, can you tell me who Henare Matua was? He was chosen as candidate at the election of 1879 at which Henare Tomoana was elected.'Scholefield to Te Kauru Karaitiana, 4 May 1939, Scholefield Papers, 212/43.
That the author of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography did not know who the founder of the Hawke's Bay Repudiation Movement was did not augur well for the quality of his Maori biographies.
In the introduction to the Dictionary, Scholefield drew attention to his inclusion of malefactors such as James Mackenzie, and 'persons of special interest' such as William Stedman Aldis and William Lane.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, pp. xii, xiii.
'Despite his efforts to take due note of all walks of life, however', wrote a contemporary academic reviewer, 'the politicians definitely dominate Dr. Scholefield's pages'.James, review of Scholefield, Dictionary, p. 196.
One of the peculiarities of Scholefield's introduction was that most of the obscure figures he claimed to have made 'a genuine effort to 'rescue from oblivion' were not commoners or artists but members of the Provincial Councils.Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xiii.
Despite his claims, Scholefield was not struggling against an orthodoxy. W. P. Morrell's substantial and academically respectable book on the provincial system had been published eight years before the Dictionary, and Elder's New Zealand: An Outline History explicitly acknowledged the provinces and admitted their councillors to the national pantheon.W. P. Morrell, The Provincial System in New Zealand 1852-76, London, 1932; John Rawson Elder, New Zealand: An Outline History, London, 1928, p. 76.
Scholefield's 'rescue' of the provinces had less to do with historiographical orthodoxy than with his personal investment in old provincial figures, some of whom he had come to know through correspondence, and in whom he had had a long-standing interest.Scholefield, 'Autobiography', p. 218.
Like Cowan and the local historians, he had strong personal ties to his subjects.
Late in his life Scholefield regretted that his potential for 'creative' work had been frustrated by his attention to the Dictionary and other reference compendia.Ibid., pp. 204, 226; Scholefield to John Meech, 27 April 1961, IA1, 62/9/2.
He was less comfortable than McNab was about forsaking 'literary edifices' for factual compilations.McNab, Old Whaling Days, p. viii.
However its practitioners regarded the matter, though, the collection of historical sources and the publication of source material and factual digests formed an important strand of interwar historiography. Its importance lay not only in the information and sources harvested and preserved, but also in the way collection shaped the texts written in the Wellington milieu and by local historians around New Zealand. The textual analogues of collection were the closest the non-university historians came to an over-arching disciplinary convention.
Scholefield and Stewart had the biography of 'New Zealand statesmen', and Fildes busied himself with all manner of subjects, but the subject that generated the most common interest among the historians discussed in this chapter was the Bay of Islands between 1814 and 1840. Buick and Ramsden wrote books on Maori and Pakeha interaction in the North. Fildes wrote some newspaper articles and collected material on the subject. Correspondents in other centres, such as Chappell in Auckland and Elder in Dunedin, worked over the same ground. Their work focused on a limited area, but it was significantly different from local history. It lacked the specifically local commemorative aspect, and it made developments in the North emblematic of the story of New Zealand as a whole. Many other places in New Zealand had witnessed missionary and Maori interaction, and signings of the Treaty of Waitangi, but nowhere else attracted study by so many non-residents. The North had a 'picturesque' appeal for outsiders. 'The Bay of Islands', with its beautiful landscapes, its Maori inhabitants, and its licentious European population, was almost a stock device as well as a subject.
Cowan's portrait of Kororareka's 'licence and lawlessness' as appealingly 'red-blooded' was the most positive.Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 7.
Fildes argued that Kororareka had not been as bad as other places in the Pacific.H. Fildes, 'In 1837: Some Early History: The First Brewery', Dominion, 24 December 1936.
Ramsden had a different view: 'Hardened, vicious, loose-living, resentful of law and order in any form, the scum of Port Jackson and the Pacific generally had, before 1837, congregated in the Bay of Islands'.Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions, p. 45; see also pp. 55, 60, 66-8, 74, 150-1.
Kororareka's raffish inhabitants threatened the missionary enterprise in the Bay of Islands. For Ramsden, this was regrettable in itself, because his book attempted to make New Zealand's story the story of Maori-Pakeha unity through Christianity. Others valued the missions more for their contribution to the British annexation and settlement of New Zealand. Where Marsden conceived the adoption of western ways as a tool of Christianisation, some historians praised the missionaries for 'civilising' through Christianisation. Their own strategy thus almost inverted, the missionaries became 'pioneer[s]' and paved the way for British settlement.John Rawson Elder, 'The Senior Chaplain in New South Wales', in Elder, ed., The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden 1765-1838, Dunedin, 1932, p. 46; Elder, Outline History, p. 35; W. G. McClymont, The Exploration of New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, p. 36.
Of the historical studies written in the interwar period on the Bay of Islands, racial contact and the steps toward annexation, Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi was perhaps the best known, the most enduring and in some ways the most representative. It is this book that I have singled out for an extended discussion here. The book was first published in 1914, and was considerably expanded for the second edition published in 1933. This is the edition I will be discussing.
The discussion that follows does not pretend to sum up Buick's life work. Buick wrote history for forty years. The Treaty of Waitangi is quite different from some of his other work, such as the books on Te Rauparaha and 'old Manawatu' that he wrote in the first decade of the twentieth century. One enthusiastic reader's response indicates the flavour of some of Buick's other work: 'If you want to write a Lindsay Buick history with real adventure, pioneering and "atmosphere"—go to the Chathams. The place reeks of early whalers, canons [sic], full riggers, cosmopolitans, bullock teams, Te Kooti, etc. There are "old people" who yarn all night and their dope is of universal interest. Rape and murder, shipwreck and waterspouts—oh, I wish I could weave it into a saga. I can only recommend you to advise Lindsay B. of the opportunity he is losing.'Charles Fleming to 'Mr Sutherland', 2 February 1938, Buick Papers, 58/8,
The Treaty of Waitangi, by contrast, created an air of what might be called literary statesmanship.
Buick claimed that the treaty had never been seriously breached; he made the treaty symbolic of Maori acceptance of 'British' ways. The treaty both enabled British settlement and created responsibilities to Maori. Buick's book was a signal attempt at pressing the treaty upon Pakeha. By the 1930s, the treaty 'had almost gone out of the public mind', according to Vernon Reed, the MHR for the Bay of Islands from 1908 to 1922 and a Legislative Councillor from 1924 to 1931, who had attempted since 1908 to stimulate Pakeha interest in the treaty.Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, Wellington, 1987, p. 234; Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand, 5th edn, Wellington, 1951, p. 196; Reed to W. E. Parry, 26 June 1936, IA1, 62/25, part 1.
The treaty was 'barely mentioned' in the celebration of the colony's fiftieth jubilee in 1890.Jock Phillips, '1940—The Centennial', unpublished paper, 1994, unpaginated.
While he did not have Vernon Reed's concern for Bay of Islands tourism, Buick's purposes were just as celebratory. How he managed to make such a positive book out of such a fraught history is the subject of my discussion.
Buick's celebration extends to most of the book's characters. He made a point of emphasising the upright character of his important Maori and Pakeha actors, such as William Hobson and Tamati Waka Nene.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, 2nd edn, pp. 65, 69, 143-5. Subsequent references are to the second edition unless otherwise stated.
He took an extremely benevolent view of New Zealand's colonial administrators generally,Ibid., p. 350.
and wrote that George Grey had an 'innate love of justice'.Ibid., p. 328.
Good sorts abounded in cameo parts. For instance, in taking the treaty south, Henry Williams is assisted by 'Captain Clayton, who, like the loyal sailor he was, readily agreed to forgo his more lucrative coastal trade in order that his vessel might remain at the disposal of the Government'.Ibid., p. 211.
The only real disreputables are the Pakeha ruffians and grog-shop-owners littering the Bay of Islands. Maori do not act 'barbarically'—cannibalism, for instance, is played down.Ibid., p. 345. Buick was, however, critical of Captain Joseph Nias of the Herald, with whom William Hobson quarrelled. Buick so defamed Nias that his daughter Caroline (not his granddaughter: Joseph Nias married at the age of 61) protested to the office of the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, searched through official records to vindicate her father, and then travelled to New Zealand, where she denounced Buick in the New Zealand Herald on 6 February 1937. The following year a friend of Caroline Nias published a 100-page book based on her research. It was a sustained refutation of Buick's claims. Buick died while the book was in press. T. D. H. Hall, Captain Joseph Nias and the Treaty of Waitangi: A Vindication, Wellington, 1938; Caroline Nias to C. Burdekin, 3 January 1934; Buick to the editor, New Zealand Herald, 11 March 1937, T. D. H. Hall Papers, MS Papers 24/3, ATL.
The waste lands debate and everything else after 1840 are dealt with comparatively briefly. Buick's focus is on the treaty's birth, not its career. His story begins with the missionaries and James Busby, and rumblings in England and New Zealand towards British annexation. There follows an account of Hobson's activities and the drafting and translation of the treaty, and then a lengthy treatment of the negotiations with Maori over the treaty, drawn primarily from William Colenso's Authentic and Genuine History of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Buick then surveys the terms of the treaty and how they had been implemented; the bulk of the final chapter concerns the debate in England over the proposed New Zealand constitution and its bearing on the treaty and the New Zealand Company.
Even without discussing the career of the treaty at length, Buick still had to do a considerable amount of whitewashing to make the treaty look like the founding document of a wholesome mythology of 'he iwi tahi tatou'. Buick's treatment of the problems with the Maori translation of the treaty are particularly suspect. The only part of the English text which was poorly translated was 'forests and fisheries [sic]', which was subsumed under the general category 'taonga katoa'.Ibid., p. 113.
Buick takes kawanatanga to mean sovereignty or supreme authority, and interprets Nopera Panakareao's famous dictum as follows: 'The sovereignty was the shadow, the land was the substance'.Ibid., pp. 282-4 (quotation from p. 284).
To criticise Buick for not seeing the problems involved in the terms rangatiratanga and kawanatanga runs the risk of anachronism. In his explication of the treaty for Maori in 1922, Apirana Ngata had characterised Te Tiriti as a treaty of 'complete cession',Apirana Ngata, The Treaty of Waitangi: An Explanation/Te Tiriti o Waitangi: He Whakamarama, trans. M. R. Jones, Christchurch, 1963 (first published in Maori alone in 1922), p. 5; see also p. 8.
There, Ngata too interpreted Nopera Panakareao's dictum to take the shadow of the land to be authority.Ibid., p. 10.
Ngata had advised Buick about the Maori translations for Buick's book.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. xii.
It was, however, possible for Pakeha to come to different understandings of Te Tiriti which made it quite different from the English text but still meaningful. In 1939 or 1940, James Rutherford, hardly a 'philo-Maori', wrote that the English term 'possession' in the treaty was 'very imperfectly translated'. Rangatiratanga 'literally' meant '"chieftainship"'. 'But it was not very easy for them [the chiefs] to distinguish at all clearly between the territorial sovereignty to be ceded to the Queen, and their individual territorial ownership.'James Rutherford, 'The Meaning of Waitangi', nd [1939 or 1940], Rutherford Papers A-42, folder F28/5.
Ten years after the final edition of Buick's book, but well before the work of Ruth Ross, Rutherford could write: 'The Maori text of the Treaty guarantees to the chiefs and tribes the "Rangatira-tanga" of their lands—i.e. the "Chieftainship", or "the power of the Rangatira"—which taken literally seemed to imply that, on their own lands, the Maori chiefs would, retain all their power [,] authority and "mana" as rangatira over their own people. No wonder Nopera could say, "The shadow of the land goes to the Queen. The substance remains with us."'J. Rutherford, Hone Heke's Rebellion 1844-1846: An Episode in the Establishment of British Rule in New Zealand, Auckland, 1947, p. 8 (italics and inconsistencies in punctuation and capitalisation as in original). Rutherford's essay had been delivered as a lecture the year before. The two texts are not greatly different. Rutherford, 'Hone Heke's War, 1844-46: An Analysis of Its Origins and Nature', typescript of lecture, 1946, Rutherford Papers, MSS A-42, folder E23/1.
It would therefore be overly permissive to treat Buick's version of Te Tiriti simply as a product 'of its time'. Moreover, Buick's claims of the unanimity of the two texts—and it is this notion of accord, not the precise content of that accord, which is central to his myth-making project—efface important facts, in particular T. E. Young's re-writing of the treaty in 1869. Walter Mantell, formerly a Native Minister and from 1866 until his death a Legislative Councillor, had insisted on a new translation into Maori, one more in line with current government thinking. Young's translation replaced 'kawanatanga' with 'rangatiratanga', and replaced 'rangatiratanga' with 'tuturutanga' (absolute guarantee).Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 182-3.
Buick must have been aware of this because at one stage he refers to Young's compilation of 'an official list of the treaty signatories for the information of the Legislative Council, which is printed in the Blue Books of the Dominion'.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. 157.
This list begins on the page facing Young's translation.Appendices to the Journals of the Legislative Council, 1869, pp. 69-70 (the translation), 71-76 (the list of signatories).
If the treaty was indeed accurately translated in 1840, and if Te Tiriti really did provide for a cession of supreme authority, why was it necessary for the government to re-write the Maori text in 1869? It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Buick simply excluded evidence that did not accord with his argument that the two texts were unanimous.
Buick's style in The Treaty of Waitangi contributes to the smoothness of his story. The rhetorical strategies of his discussion of confiscation and war are of particular importance, but his general practice of creating an impression of authority requires attention first. Generally, Buick wrote measured, sedate prose disturbed by the occasional garish adjective. He often wrote in periods, with multiple clauses queuing up behind semicolons. Archaisms such as 'ere' gave the text a staid, authoritative feel. Though adulatory, the tone seldom savoured of propaganda. The narrator frequently considered contrasting opinions of a person's character and came out on the side of the more generous estimate, thus maintaining both amicability and an impression of judiciousness.
The Treaty of Waitangi has two principal stylistic voices, those of the chronicler and the orator. The chronicler follows the model of McNab, writing chronologically, quoting often and very extensively (and often to the detriment of narrative flow), retaining for each character what Stewart called 'his mode of expressing himself'. This style is particularly evident in the account of the signing of the treaty, where Buick reproduces lengthy passages from speeches recorded in Colenso's Authentic and Genuine History. But Buick's chronicler is different from McNab's. There are much stronger narrative sinews. Though his chapters sometimes lose their focus (partly because of their length), individual paragraphs and episodes do not jar against each other. A reviewer comparing McNab and Buick wrote that Buick had less detail and a stronger 'simply told but directly consecutive narrative which, though not without value as to detail, has its chief importance as a comprehensive picture. To put it briefly, with Mr. Buick the whole is greater than its part[s].''Liber', "The Book of the Day', Dominion, April 1914, clipping in IA1, 126/8/2. 'Liber' was Charles Wilson, Scholefield's predecessor as parliamentary librarian and 'our Sainte-Beuve or Edmund Gosse': J. C. Beaglehole, 'The Library and the Cosmos', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 68. Two volumes of Wilson's literary criticism were published, but they contain no reviews of New Zealand matter. Wilson, Rambles in Bookland, Wellington, 1922, and New Rambles in Bookland, Wellington, 1923.
Not only was Buick's work more cohesive, it was also more 'sympathetic'. The reviewer was presumably referring to Buick's speculations on characters' motives and feelings. Buick adopted a comfortably superior tone and wrote as if he knew the actors personally.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 354-5.
This is the scholarly equivalent of name-dropping, building up an air of authority through hints of intimacy.
Buick also differed from McNab by adding 'imaginative colour' to his account.Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 65.
Contemporaries described Buick's writing as evocative, the work of a writer who brought the past to life.Percy J. H. White to Buick, 14 July 1929, IA1, 1935/187/128; clippings in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353.
But Buick's really colourful turns are the exception rather than the rule, placed for dramatic effect. The fire of indignation ran through the Maori veins as they contemplated the deception; the rumble of discontent grew as the tidings spread; the breath of battle was in the air'.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. 335.
In The Treaty of Waitangi, the most common kind of imaginative embellishment is the 'poetic' description of the weather, sometimes with Ruskin's pathetic fallacy blown up to cosmic proportions: 'under the approving smile of Heaven'; 'The morning of the auspicious day (Wednesday, 5th February) broke with nature's approving smile upon it. The sun shining brightly in the heavens, lit up the blue waters of the bay, the slopes of the brown hills, the shadows of the sombre forest in which the birds sang even more blithely than was their wont'.Ibid., pp. 114, 163.
The other voice in The Treaty of Waitangi occurred mainly on the margins of the work, in the prefaces and at the end of the final chapter. These were the parts of the text that discussed the beneficial consequences of the treaty—in particular its purported long-term assimilative benefits—and circumscribed its breaches. This was the voice of Buick the orator: these passages clearly paralleled speeches that Buick made in the 1930s. One of these was a speech on the treaty to an unspecified audience of 'Gentlemen' some time in the 1930s,Buick, 'The Treaty of Waitangi', notes for speech, nd [after 1932], Buick Papers, 58/66.
and the other was the sanguine, paternalistic and social-Darwinian address Buick wrote for Lord Bledisloe to deliver at the ceremony when Bledisloe presented the treaty grounds to the dominion in 1934.This latter speech was republished masquerading as Bledisloe's own work in the collection Ideals of Nationhood, where it was described by the editor—one T. Lindsay Buick—as a 'classic … of [its] kind', containing 'words of justice' and 'a true appreciation of the real significance of the Treaty of Waitangi'. Buick, 'Introduction' to Lord Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood: A Selection of Addresses Delivered in New Zealand by The Right Hon, Lord Bledisloe, P.C., G.C.M.G, K.B.E., F.S.A., M.A., F.C.S., M.R.A.C., during His Governor-Generalship of the Dominion, ed. T. Lindsay Buick, New Plymouth, 1935, p. 7. The speech appears on pp. 146-55. Buick's copy, and copies of the accompanying letters to Bledisloe, are in Buick Papers, 58/1.
Buick the orator's main rhetorical strategy was the way he skilfully trod a fine line between apology and apologia. The Taranaki war of 1860-61 was said to be unjust, but this was undercut somewhat by Buick's reference to it in the same paragraph, twice, as a 'blunder'.Ibid., p. 354. Speaking of the Waitara purchase as a 'blunder' was an established practice by Buick's time, but William Pember Reeves' statement of this position was much more severe: he called Waitara 'a blunder worse than a crime'. William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, 4th edn, London, 1950, p. 199.
To the same end—the combination of repentance and unrepentance—Buick conceded lesser points to retain more important ones. Thus he admitted in mild terms that the Taranaki confiscations and the treatment of Te Whiti were unjust, creating an air of magnanimity which may have been sufficient to blind some readers to the way the text moved, in the next few paragraphs, straight from the defeat in the Waikato war to the Kauhanganui without any reference to the confiscation of two million acres of Waikato land.Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 354-7.
Buick glossed over conflict and broken promises in other ways too. A footnote on the last page of the text referred in a grotesque fashion to Wiremu Ratana's petition concerning treaty grievances. It is used as evidence that 'to-day the Maori is more insistent upon a due observation of its covenants than is the European': nothing is said of the content of the petition apart from the fact that it requests that the treaty be embodied in New Zealand and imperial statutes.Ibid., p. 359 and n.
Buick placed a paternalistic emphasis on maintaining Maori trust, but he did not frankly admit past breaches of trust.Ibid., p. vii; Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi', notes for speech, nd [after 1932], Buick Papers, 58/66.
Buick's story of Maori-Pakeha concord and Maori endorsement of 'British' ways found a place in New Zealand culture in several ways. It sold moderately well, and at least one reader described it as a book 'which all New Zealanders ought to read'.Ellinor Hunter Brown to 'chicks', 2 June 1914, quoted in Sinclair, Destiny Apart, p. 60.
It ran to three editions, the second of which the government subsidised by buying copies for cabinet ministers and thirty-six government departments.Malcolm Fraser to J. A. Young, 27 June 1933; '"The Treaty of Waitangi" by T. Lindsay Buick: List of Departments to Receive a Copy of the Book When Printed', 20 May 1933, IA1, 126/8/2.
Buick's story reached the height of its prominence in 1934. Two years previously, Bledisloe had announced that he had bought the site where the treaty was signed and was giving it to the nation. Bledisloe also subsidised the second edition of Buick's book to commemorate the gift further.Cecil Day to Malcolm Fraser, 17 June 1933, IA1, 126/8/2.
At the ceremonies at Waitangi in February 1934, practically all the speakers, Maori and Pakeha, followed Buick's line on the treaty—that it was 'the Maori Magna Carta', that Pakeha had never seriously breached it, and that Pakeha had an ongoing duty to minister to Maori.T. Lindsay Buick, Waitangi: Ninety Four Years After, New Plymouth, 1934, ch. 5.
Bledisloe certainly followed Buick's line—Buick wrote his speech for him.Ibid., pp. 70-80; Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood, pp. 146-55.
Though Pakeha enthusiasm for the treaty as a founding document waned after 1934, Buick's myth did eventually take hold. However, by the time a New Zealand government made the sixth of February the national day, the public profile of the treaty was beginning to erode assimilationist rhetoric, not reinforce it.
Like Cowan, Buick fashioned a narrative of New Zealand's development which involved concord between Maori and Pakeha. Their stories were vastly different: Cowan saw compact arising from conflict; Buick edited conflict from his story, and saw Maori as the subordinates of Pakeha guardians. Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions is more concerned with Christianity than sovereignty, and it does not defend European governments the way Buick's book does. But the differences in argument, subject matter and moral import should not obscure the fact that the works of Cowan, Buick and Ramsden were the only ones in the interwar period to concentrate on Maori-Pakeha relations as a formative aspect of New Zealand history.
Buick mattered more for his writing than for his contributions to the accumulation of historical sources. Others collected material whose usefulness has long outlasted that of their books. Given the scope of this thesis, however, I have concentrated less on the archival acquisitions of Scholefield and Fildes than I have on the textual analogues of their collecting. Historians around New Zealand amassed data for their own and others' usage, and wrote in ways that echoed this practice. The weighty body of work produced by Buick, Scholefield, Cowan, Ramsden and Stewart in the interwar period, and in particular Scholefield's Dictionary, were the most substantial instances of this kind of historical writing.
The ties of collaboration and debate between Fildes, Scholefield, Buick, Cowan, Andersen, Stewart, Ramsden and others have been described in some detail in this chapter because these ties constituted an important historiographical community. To be sure, its debates and disputes sometimes seem trivial to an outsider. But this circle's members were prolific given the extent of their 'wealth and leisure', and their work often depended on the labour of others, especially Fildes. Because of the accidents of evidence I cannot be sure that no similar historiographical communities existed in New Zealand. I can, however, say that no other historiographical community produced as much historical literature as the one discussed here.
The Wellington community was also unusual in its separation from academic historians. Buick crossed swords with Rutherford over the accuracy of an Auckland compilation of dates for the Centennial, but otherwise seems to have had no contact with academics.Buick to Heenan, 25 August 1936; Rutherford to Chappell, 29 October 1936, Rutherford Papers, A-42, folder F29/4.
The only academic with whom these historians were in regular contact was Elder, and he was not a Wellington resident. In Auckland, Rutherford mixed with Chappell, Forbes Eadie and other non-university historians; in Dunedin, Elder did likewise. The Wellingtonians' local professor until 1935 was F. P. Wilson, who wrote no New Zealand history. He was president of the Wellington Early Settlers' Association during the 1930s, and until 1931 was president of the Wellington Historical Association (that is, the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association), but he seems to have had little contact with Buick, Fildes, Cowan, Scholefield and the others.Scholefield, Who's Who, 3rd edn, p. 351; 4th edn, p. 355.
When Beaglehole and F. L. W. Wood took up posts at Victoria in 1936, they greatly enlivened historical studies at the college. Within two years of their arrival, Buick and Fildes were dead. Cowan slid into incapacitation three years later.Colquhoun, 'James Cowan', p. 121; E. C. Huie, notes on Cowan's funeral, nd [1943], Scholefield Papers, 212/C6.
The community had broken down, and the question of how it would have related to—or dealt with—the community that formed around Beaglehole and Wood was not posed.
When Buick died in 1938, his office in the Turnbull Library was not occupied by another resident historian. Later that year, however, Heenan appointed Beaglehole 'research adviser' to the library, though in practice he was a research adviser to the Historical Branch of Internal Affairs.Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 74.
The change is an indication, perhaps too convenient, of the shift in government approval from non-university historians to historians working in the academy. This shift was most pronounced in the Centennial history programme. As we shall see, however, the differences between the university historians and the Wellington circle were not always as clear-cut as the differences between Buick and Beaglehole.
5. Establishing the Nation: New Zealand History in Universities
Academic historians in the interwar period often said that New Zealand history began in Britain. Debatable as this claim now seems, it may at least stand in connection with the history of academic history. The academic study of New Zealand began in England in a literal sense—many of the most substantial academic works on New Zealand history began life as doctoral theses at English universities—and it began there in a figurative sense in that the disciplinary protocols of academic history were set in England. The development of the writing of history in New Zealand universities from 1920 to 1940 is largely a story of the entrenchment of early twentieth-century English academic practices in this country. This process was not complete by 1940, and different kinds of history continued to be written by New Zealand academics. The establishment of English academic standards was not itself an act of 'colonisation', since the practices it challenged were Pakeha ones that had taken shape in the colleges of the University of New Zealand. Rather, trends in the universities intersected with cultural colonisation in the ways they led to reconstitutions of New Zealand history according to academic standards and English historiographical concerns.
In the first part of this chapter I outline the incursions of English academic history into the New Zealand colleges and indicate the conditions under which history was and could be written there. I then move on to examine a major strand in academic writing on New Zealand history: the discussion of annexation and the beginnings of British government in New Zealand. Most of this work was written in English universities under the rubric of imperial history. I examine the arguments and exclusions that arose from studying New Zealand history in this disciplinary context. Finally, I discuss another genre that academics worked in: general histories of New Zealand. A recurrent theme of the chapter is the different ways in which 'New Zealand history' became a valid subject of academic inquiry.
The first serious academic publication on New Zealand history was The Constitutional History and Law of New Zealand (1914), written by James Hight and H. D. Bamford.J. Hight and H. D. Bamford, The Constitutional History and Law of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1914.
Hight, Professor of History and Political Science at Canterbury University College from 1920 to 1948, appears to have written part one, the constitutional history, and Bamford, a lawyer and former lecturer in law at Auckland University College, the part dealing with constitutional law. At first glance Hight's constitutional history promises something quite different from the local chronicles, yarns, war stories, factual compendia, studies of the Bay of Islands and other staples of New Zealand historiography at the time. However, with its skeletal, resolutely linear narrative and long, weakly integrated quotations, the text was strikingly similar to McNab's work. In its concern with the specifics of New Zealand's founding as a British colony, the book recalled McNab and Buick; with its legal bent it is reminiscent of Downie Stewart. This was more a history written in a university than a distinctively academic history.
The highest degree for which Hight studied was an MA from Canterbury.Hight was awarded a LittD by the University of New Zealand in 1906.
His MA was in English and French: as far as history was concerned, he was as self-taught as any non-university historian. The Professor of History at Otago University throughout the interwar period, John Rawson Elder, had more credentials as a historian than Hight had had when he began lecturing in history. Elder was forty when he took up the chair at Otago, and had lectured in history at the University of Aberdeen in history for twelve years. (For eight of those years he doubled as a lecturer in the Spanish language at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen.)G. H. Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand, 5th edn, Wellington, 1951, p. 70.
Though he was academically trained in Britain, his work in New Zealand history had much more in common with Cowan, Buick and Fildes than with the other university historians.
One of their common interests was missionaries. It is almost symbolic that Elder acquired the task of editing The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden from Andersen.Andersen told Fildes that he had originally 'had the editing of the Journals in hand', but 'Elder wrote asking if I was going on with it, as if not he wished to do it; so as I had plenty [of] other work on hand I said go ahead'. Andersen to Fildes, 20 June 1932, Fildes Papers, box 1. On Elder's editing practice see Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall, Auckland, 1968, pp. vii-viii.
Elder also wrote a number of books on gold-mining, bush-ranging and pioneering.See John Rawson Elder, Goldseekers and Bushrangers in New Zealand, London, 1930; Elder, ed., Glimpses of Old New Zealand, London, 1924.
These were written in the mode of extensive quotation favoured by non-university historians, although the narrative voice takes up more space. They share non-university historians' penchant for the 'romantic' aspects of goldmining and so on, though they were much less florid in style.Elder, Goldseekers and Bushrangers, pp. 5, 34, 37.
On one occasion, though not talking directly about his own work, Elder remarked that '[t]o arrange and collate into readable narratives the materials left by early pioneers, colonists, surveyors, and miners—the men of action who founded the State—is a work not only of interest but of necessity if our citizens are to know the source of these traditions of conduct which are the very life-blood of their country'.J. R. Elder, 'The Renaissance of History as a Human Interest and an Australasian Instance', in Report of the Twentieth Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Brisbane, 1931, p. 246.
Jock Phillips' comment that Elder 'largely chose to compete in the popular market for history catered for by writers such as Cowan' is at least as convincing as Elder's own explanation of the point of such work.Jock Phillips, 'Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips and Footie on Saturday Afternoon: Reflections on 100 Years of New Zealand Historiography', New Zealand Journal of History, 24, 2 (October 1990), p. 124.
Unlike most of Cowan's books, though, Elder's works on goldmining and exploration were published in London by Blackie and Son, whose main line of work was in children's books.See Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950, Oxford, 1992, p. 227.
Elder was thus also seeking a British market for colonial adventure. Altogether, in his interests, his style and his connections with non-university historians and Polynesian Society members such as George Graham,Elder, ed., Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, pp. 9-10.
Elder was not unusual as a New Zealand historian.
The cases of Elder and Hight make it clear that historians who worked in universities did not all write history that was vastly different from historians outside the academy. A distinctively academic tradition of history was, however, established in the New Zealand university colleges in the interwar period. This came about largely through the appointment of younger historians trained differently from both Hight and Elder. To explain this development in the writing of New Zealand history in the universities, one needs to refer to some general trends in the New Zealand colleges and overseas universities as well as the new appointees and their work. These material conditions also help to explain why new recruits without a background in New Zealand history nevertheless wrote on that subject once they got here.
The first important development, and one which affected Hight and Elder as well as others, was the institutional recognition of history as a subject worthy of consideration in itself. (Why New Zealand history came to be acceptable as such will be discussed below.) For a time those who taught history at Auckland and Victoria had both lectured in economics and commercial geography as well; one also taught mental science, and the other physical geography, economic history and currency and banking.J. C. Beaglehole, Victoria University College: An Essay towards a History, Wellington, 1949, p. 108; Sinclair, University of Auckland, p. 79.
Even those with narrower responsibilities still had divided disciplinary loyalties. At Otago and Canterbury until 1919-20, the Professor of History was also the Professor of Economics. Hight reportedly did justice to both subjects, though inclined toward history in his writing; H. D. Bedford was very much an economist, whose knowledge of history seemed unimpressive to at least one student.J. B. Condliffe, 'The Teacher and His Influence', in R. S. Allan, ed., Liberty and Learning: Essays in Honour of Sir James Hight, Christchurch, 1950; J. T. Paul, Professor Bedford: His Life and Work, Invercargill, 1919, pp. 7-8; W. P. Morrell, Memoirs, Dunedin, 1979, pp. 23-4.
After 1920 in the South Island colleges, and in the 1930s in the North Island, separate chairs of history were established (though Hight's subsumed political science). The creation of separate chairs and lectureships in history was an important part of the establishment of history as an academic discipline.
Professors of History usually worked with one lecturer or assistant lecturer. Some lecturers, such as Beaglehole, and Willis Airey, published and pamphleteered as well as teaching; others, New Zealand MA graduates such as Alice M. F. Candy, N. S. Woods and, before he went to Cambridge after World War II, Angus Ross, wrote little history and are not discussed in this thesis.On Candy see Muriel Bradshaw, The Flight of Time in a Changing World: Reminiscences, Christchurch, 1993, p. 43; Mary Boyd, 'Women in the Historical Profession: Women Historians in the 1940s', Women's Studies Journal, 4, 1 (September 1988), pp. 77-8; James Hight and Alice M. F. Candy, A Short History of the Canterbury College (University of New Zealand) with a Register of Graduates and Associates of the College, Auckland, 1927, p. 253; and W. J. Gardner, E. T. Beardsley and T. E. Carter, A History of the University of Canterbury 1873-1973, Christchurch, 1973, p. 206n. With regard to Woods, see his 'A Survey of the Advent of Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration in New Zealand', in Report of the Twenty-second Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Melbourne, 1935. On Ross at this time see Morrell, Memoirs, p. 108.
Their relatively small written output may have been by choice, or may have been forced on them by the size of their workloads.
Academics' workloads were heavy. Despite their low salaries,Hugh Parton, The University of New Zealand, Auckland, 1979, p. 104; Gardner, Beardsley and Carter, University of Canterbury, pp. 291-2.
academics had substantial administrative responsibilities, and there were few clerical staff.Gardner, Beardsley and Carter, University of Canterbury, p. 294.
Teaching and marking loads were burdensome.Airey to George Fowlds, 1 August 1932, W. T. G. Airey Papers, MSS A-201, folder 65, UA; James Hight, Canterbury College: Commemoration Day: Thursday, March 22, 1928, Christchurch, 1928, p. 19.
There was little provision for overseas leave; Hight had been a professor for eighteen years before he got a year's leave in England.J. C. Beaglehole, The University of New Zealand: An Historical Study, Auckland, 1937, pp. 401, 402n; N. C. Phillips, 'James Hight', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, p. 217.
All these things hampered research and writing. So did the 'ludicrously inadequate' library facilities of the university colleges.J. B. Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making: A Survey of Economic and Social Development, London, 1930, p. 451.
When Ralph Munn and John Barr inspected the college libraries under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation in 1934, they found that 'the book collections are much too small to support effective undergraduate teaching, and they offer little or nothing to advanced students and faculty members'.Munn and Barr, New Zealand Libraries, p. 35.
The situation at Otago and Victoria was mitigated by the existence of the Hocken Library (which facilitated Elder's work) and the Turnbull and Parliamentary Libraries (which attracted students, if not academics until after 1936). Away from these windfalls, Canterbury and Auckland suffered from meagre college libraries.Gardner, Beardsley and Carter, University of Canterbury, pp. 189-91; Olive A. Johnson, 'Alice Minchin', in Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams, eds, The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa, Wellington, 1991; R. M. Algie, 'Auckland University College: Memorandum: For Professors, Lecturers and Others who may be Interested: Books For General Cultural Reading', 14 June 1935, Rutherford Papers, A-42, folder 139/6.
These conditions improved as New Zealand moved out of the depression. More importantly, staff vacancies created by professors' retiring or (in the case of Joseph Penfound Grossmann at Auckland) absconding were filled by younger scholars trained in historical research. Hight and Elder were educated before the research doctorate (the PhD or DPhil) was instituted in British universities, let alone New Zealand ones. Their doctoral degrees were doctorates of literature, then as now a degree awarded on the basis of published works, not supervised research. After much resistance, research doctorates were established from 1917.Renate Simpson, How the PhD Came to Britain: A Century of Struggle for Postgraduate Education, Guildford, 1983, ch. 6.
The recruitment in the 1930s of graduates of Oxford, Cambridge and London, especially the PhDs, brought New Zealand academic historiography closer to the conventions of contemporary English academic practice, which was an ideal even for those, such as Hight, who had not been educated in this way.American historiography and its debate about 'relativism' had practically no impact on New Zealand at the time. Even Rutherford, the only one to have done a PhD at an American university, shows no sign of American influences in his work. On the 'relativism' debate see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge, England, 1988, ch. 9.
These drew heavily on German models (especially the work of Leopold von Ranke), and nineteenth-century English documentary scholars, in particular William Stubbs. These conventions may be summarised briefly as an increasing premium on research; the rigorous scrutiny of primary sources; a pragmatic synthesis of (methodological) scientism and (expository) artistry; and a focus on the political anatomy and physiology of Britain and, in the case of the historians discussed here, its empire.Reba N. Softer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870-1930, Stanford, 1994; Christopher Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850, Edinburgh, 1990; Peter R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800-1914, Manchester, 1986.
New Zealand academic historians engaged with the English version of the discipline both in English institutions as research students, and from afar, as missionaries of English-style academia in colonial university colleges.
In the interwar period, the swing toward research graduates was confined to the North Island colleges. At Victoria and Auckland, the Professors of History (and other things) until the mid-thirties were singularly inactive as writers. F. P. Wilson at Victoria published nothing,A. G. Bagnall, ed., New Zealand National Bibliography to the Year 1960, vol. 4, Wellington, 1975, lists no publications by Wilson. On Wilson see Beaglehole, Victoria University College, pp. 108, 186, 220; G. H. Scholefield, Who's who in New Zealand and the 'Western Pacific, 3rd edn, Wellington, 1932, p. 351; and T. H. Beaglehole, '"Home"? J. C. Beaglehole in London, 1925-1929', Turnbull Library Record, 14, 2 (October 1981), p. 70.
Grossmann was a popular lecturer, but his 'sole contributions to the national bibliography consist of brief pamphlets on bimetallism and the evils of deforestation'.Phillips, 'Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips', p. 123; Sinclair, University of Auckland, pp. 79-80, 132, 149-50. There are testimonies to Grossmann's lecturing in I. G. Taylor, 'Women at Auckland University College 1930-1935', MA oral history paper, University of Auckland, 1985, pp. 26-7, and Bradshaw, Flight of Time, p. 32.
F. L. W. Wood replaced Wilson as professor in 1936, and Beaglehole was appointed to a lectureship at Victoria at the same time. Both had English degrees (Beaglehole had a doctorate), and both had published at least one book. Both quickly began fostering the study of New Zealand history, through their own work, their involvement in the New Zealand Centennial's various committees, and their supervision of postgraduate students.
At Auckland the change was less sudden: straddling the professorships of Grossmann and James Rutherford was the term of the lecturer, Airey, an Aucklander who had studied at Oxford but not taken a doctorate. Airey did not impress the majority of students, but he was 'particularly effective in the more personal tuition of advanced students.'J. B. Condliffe, testimonial for Airey for the chair in history at Auckland University College [1934], Airey Papers, A-201, folder 63; Sinclair, University of Auckland, p. 173.
Airey published some history, but his importance to New Zealand history lies more in his roles as a teacher and a pamphleteer on contemporary concerns, work that he grounded firmly in history.Airey, 'Manchuria II: The Historical Background', typescript, nd [1931 or 1932], Airey Papers, MSS A-201, folder 14; 'Colonies and World Peace', notes for a lunchtime talk to the Auckland branch of the League of Nations Union, 27 April 1939, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 14; 'Poland', fragmentary typescript, 1940, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 15; International Relations 1918-1939', typescript of a talk to the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Institute for International Affairs, October 1940, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 15.
Rutherford, who beat Airey (and, notoriously, Beaglehole) to the chair in 1934, was a graduate of the University of Durham and, unusually for a New Zealand academic, had a PhD from an American university (Michigan, in Rutherford's case). On appointment, he 'at once began research on New Zealand history in the nineteenth century'.Sinclair, University of Auckland, p. 172.
Beaglehole and Rutherford were, obviously, a minority of academic historians. But they were productive. Beaglehole published four books on New Zealand history between 1928 and 1940, more than Hight published in his lifetime. While Wood and Airey published much less on New Zealand than Beaglehole and Rutherford, they too brought values to their teaching that were different from Hight's and Elder's.
A further step away from non-academic modes of history was the support, by Beaglehole and Wood, at least, of the journal Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand. Like the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Historical Studies provided a trans-Tasman forum for historical work.The volumes of the Report of the … Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (formerly Report of the … Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science) from 1921 to 1939 include contributions from Wood, Buick, A. B. Chappell, Hight, Elder, N. S. Woods, L. C. and Mrs Webb, and I. L. G. Sutherland. Elder was President of the History Section in 1931 and Hight was President in 1935.
Unlike the ANZAAS, at whose meetings Buick and Chappell also spoke, Historical Studies was emphatically academic. When he called for such a journal at an ANZAAS meeting in Canberra in 1939, the eventual editor, G. F. James of the University of Melbourne, made it clear that the journal should be an academic one, and that the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society did not do justice to Australasian historical scholarship. Likewise, when he appealed to Rutherford to form 'a local group in Auckland', he said that he hoped to 'obtain the assistnance [sic] of a group of four or five persons in each state or province, consisting of representatives of the respective universities, university and public libraries, and teachers' colleges and/or associations; but in each case the initiative must come from the university itself.James to Rutherford, 17 June 1939, Rutherford Papers, A-42, folder 140/1 (italics added).
Rutherford does not seem to have taken up the task, and apart from a review by Airey, Centennial promotions and bibliographic articles by Scholefield and C. R. H. Taylor (Andersen's successor as Turnbull Librarian), the only New Zealand contributions to the journal up to and including 1943 were by Wood, Beaglehole and their students. Historical Studies did not cause a revolution in New Zealand historiography, but it created a significant forum for academic work on Australasian history.
Despite developments such as the founding of Historical Studies, improvements in libraries and better provision for leave, university-based historians were not in any position to say complacent things about the state of New Zealand history by the end of the interwar period. And if the conditions for the scholarly study of New Zealand history were less than ideal, it was all but impossible to contribute substantially to the history of the rest of the world. Beaglehole's The Exploration of the Pacific (1934) is the only such contribution by a historian working in New Zealand in the interwar period. While he was working on his PhD, Beaglehole had assumed that returning to New Zealand would mean the end of his career as a historian.Beaglehole, '"Home"?', p. 77.
New Zealand's academic facilities and its isolation from the intellectual centres of British historiography made New Zealand history, or New Zealand's patch of imperial history, virtually the only kind of history possible for those historians who worked in this country. The topics on which their MA students wrote their theses corroborate this claim.The Union List of Theses lists 363 theses done in history at New Zealand universities from 1920 to 1940 inclusive. Of these only 18 were not on New Zealand topics. Ten of those 18 were on the Pacific Islands; of the remaining five, the topic is not always clear from the title—W. F. Monk's (Canterbury, 1934) was called 'Pages of History Reconsidered'. Of the theses listed under Political Science, all but two were also included in the History list. Both of these were on a New Zealand topic. D. L. Jenkins, ed., Union list of Theses of the University of New Zealand 1910-1954, Wellington, 1956.
However, university historians had further reasons for, or justifications of, the study of New Zealand history. Hight formulated the most elaborate case. That New Zealand's development 'epitomise[d] the whole of human progress' was a claim he made at least three times in the twenties and thirties.James Hight, address to the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Historical Association in 1931, as reported in the Evening Post, 11 May 1931; 'Introduction' to J. B. Condliffe, A Short History of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1929 (first pub. 1925); 'Introduction', to J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians, eds, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 7, part 2: New Zealand, Cambridge, 1933, pp. 3-5, 7. The quotation is from the speech to the Canterbury branch of the NZHA. Unless otherwise noted, the other quotations in this paragraph come from the speech, not the introductions.
In New Zealand's history, he claimed, one could see '[t]he hunting and fishing stages of primitive man', 'illustrated, inter alia, by the life of the Maoris', as well as 'the pastoral, agricultural, and the industrial stages' of human development. All these 'have succeeded or overlain one another so rapidly in New Zealand, that a surviving pioneer of one of our early settlements has witnessed in his own lifetime economic and general social development that has occupied centuries in the lands of the Old World'.Hight, 'Introduction' to Condliffe, Short History, pp. vii-viii. Compare Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, p. vii, and Cowan, 'Chapter I: The Old Race and the New', undated typescript, Cowan Papers, 39/42C.
British constitutional developments recurred with the same heightened rapidity. From this premise Hight argued that New Zealand history offered a test case, or a control, for world history. 'History could be studied in New Zealand almost as in a laboratory without the complications of older societies where life had been complex for centuries.' Antipodean economics were of particular interest: 'In New Zealand the economic factor had … full play, freer than in most other countries where it was disguised and obscured by racial, religious, and class rivalries. In New Zealand it [is] comparatively easy to assess the influence which the economic factor wielded in social policy.'Hight's claim that New Zealand had no serious racial rivalries should not necessarily be taken as an assertion of 'good' Maori-Pakeha relations. He may have been referring to conflicts between white 'races', as in South Africa. New Zealand's lack of 'racial conflict' between whites was referred to by others in New Zealand at this time.
Hight left it to others to implement this amalgam of Reeves, Guthrie-Smith and Adam Smith. If New Zealand history were to be a serious test case for world history, it would need to be addressed to the rest of the world. Hight did not publish outside New Zealand; his audience was local, or at best Australasian,Hight read two papers to Anzaas meetings in the interwar period, one on the founding of the Canterbury settlement, and another entitled, 'Some Observations on the Use of History', which is reprinted in Allan, ed., Liberty and Learning.
and in his writing he concentrated on New Zealand itself and the wider world's significance to New Zealand, rather than New Zealand's significance to the wider world.
A more representative view of why New Zealand history mattered in the universities was Elder's response to the proposal, initiated by Harold Miller, the Victoria University College Librarian, but publicly (and not necessarily wholeheartedly) sponsored by Hight, Ngata, Herbert Williams, A. H. Johnstone and F. L. Combs, for a chair in New Zealand history to be established as a Centennial commemoration.Auckland Star, 24 August 1936; New Zealand Herald, 24 August 1936. William Downie Stewart to Horace Fildes, 3 August 1936, Fildes Papers, box 11a. Stewart wrote: 'I told Harold Miller, Victoria College Librarian, he should make contact with you. He wanted to issue a circular, proposing the establishment of a chair in New Zealand History for the Centenary, but the matter requires much consideration…. Strangely enough he did not appear to have consulted any of the College Historians except Hight.' Hight privately said that the proposal was fraught with difficulty: Hight to Scholefield, 28 August 1936, Scholefield Papers, 212/37.
To establish a chair in New Zealand history, Elder wrote, would be
to emphasise a narrow and parochial view of history, which New Zealand, in its essential isolation, should strive to avoid. New Zealand history, so far as the pakeha is concerned, begins long centuries before 1814, and the scholar who is devoting himself to a study of the fundamental facts underlying the influences which have made the British character is, of necessity, studying an essential part of New Zealand history. New Zealand history, in short, is a part of British colonial history, and must be considered with, and in relation to, the whole subject.Auckland Star, 2 September 1936. Elder's objection is ironic in that of the academic writers on New Zealand history at this time, he wrote the least about New Zealand's relationship with Britain.
Not all academic histories proceeded upon this assumption, but many did. None did more so than those which examined New Zealand through the lenses of the historiography of British colonial policy. Rutherford and Beaglehole worked in this area while in New Zealand; Beaglehole also worked in it as a doctoral student in London in the late 1920s. W. P. Morrell, who became Professor of History at Otago in 1946; A. J. Harrop, a student of Hight's who went on to Cambridge and then remained in England editing a newspaper for expatriate New Zealanders; and J. S. Marais, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa, all wrote about New Zealand as a part of British imperial expansion and government for their doctoral degrees. Thus the academicisation of New Zealand history occurred at Oxford, Cambridge and London as well as in New Zealand history departments staffed by their graduates. How New Zealand's past was dealt with in this strand of academic history is the subject of the next section.
The historians who wrote doctoral theses involving New Zealand worked in the field of imperial history. Their subject was the expansion and administration of the British Empire. Beaglehole's supervisor at London, Arthur Percival Newton, argued that the history of the empire was 'greater than the sum total of the history of each of its parts'. Historians should therefore study 'general movements in the Empire as a whole' rather than write histories of individual colonies.Arthur Percival Newton, The Old Empire and the New, London, 1917, p. 21.
Morrell and Beaglehole wrote about British colonial policy generally; Harrop and Marais contravened Newton's edict, but the questions they put to their subject matter still concerned 'general movements in the Empire as a whole'. They wrote about the colonisation of New Zealand as an episode in colonial development.
Imperial history became established as a legitimate field of study following the publication of John Seeley's Expansion of England (1894), which found in British imperialism a patriotic sequel to the constitutional struggles that 'concluded' in 1688. English academic interest increased in the next two decades.Brian H. Fletcher, 'History as a Moral Force: George Arnold Wood at Sydney University, 1891-1928', in Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas, eds, The Discovery of Australian History 1890-1939, Melbourne, 1995, p. 16.
'It was, however, a gain in numbers rather than in academic prestige'.Frederick Madden, 'The Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford, 1905-1971', in Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse, eds, Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams, London, 1982, p. 15.
In the interwar period, at least, the subject was not a glamorous one for up-and-coming British historians. Morrell found that his doctorate in colonial history was not 'an easily marketable article' in English academia, despite the fact that he had lectured at Oxford for three years.Morrell, Memoirs, p. 49. See also Beaglehole, '"Home"?', p. 74.
Most work in imperial history was done by 'post-graduate students from the Dominions in London', the elder statesmen of imperial history who supervised them (Newton, H. E. Egerton, Reginald Coupland, and E. A. Benians), some younger scholars such as Kenneth Bell and Trevor Williams, and a few Americans such as Paul Knaplund and Helen Taft Manning.Beaglehole, 'Colonial Office' pp, 170, 188-9. A non-New Zealand example of a colonial postgraduate is C. W. de Kiewiet, who came from South Africa and wrote about its relations with Britain. On de Kiewiet, who turned down the Auckland chair that went to Rutherford, see Beaglehole, '"Home"?', pp. 76, 77, and J. C. Beaglehole's discussion of a later book of de Kiewiet's in The Writing of Imperial History', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 2, 7 (May 1943), pp. 137-40.
Research students of imperial history wrote in genres new to New Zealand history: the historical monograph and its more ragged relative, the doctoral thesis. Both genres were supposed to reconcile analysis and chronological narrative. Primary sources were to be consumed in large quantities and slowly digested. Finding primary sources was not the problem it was for other New Zealand historians. As Frederick Madden comments, 'It was a question largely of working carefully and intelligently through the Colonial Office files—the in-and-out correspondence—of telling an attractive narrative, and of making sensible comment and conclusions.'Madden, 'Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford', p. 15.
The emphasis was on administration and political machinations. Imperial history did not eschew economic and military concerns, however: its blind spots were settler and native agency. What legitimated the study of New Zealand in British universities was the colony's relevance to the metropolis. Non-metropolitan matters were not important for their own sake, and official documents and sources written in England were privileged over accounts by 'civilians' on the imperial frontier.
In keeping with such concerns, the key period for those studying New Zealand was the years 1829-56, the period bounded by the publication of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney and the implementation of responsible government. University historians' discussions of this period revolved around Wakefield and his fellow 'theorists of 1830'. These people were central to the narratives and arguments made within academic historiography, and their writings exerted a beguiling influence on later writers. Marais' The Colonisation of New Zealand is perhaps the most extreme evidence of the seductive powers of Wakefield and his associates. As a South African, Marais presumably had nothing parochial to gain from paying homage to Wakefield. Nevertheless, Marais had, as Beaglehole wrote, 'an unfortunate ability to swallow Wakefield whole'.Beaglehole, 'Colonial Office', p. 189.
To take one example, Marais accepted that '[i]n the actual conduct of emigration the Company was conspicuously successful'. Few paupers or unhealthy people were shovelled out, an evil against which the Company had taken 'special precautions'. Marais remarked, 'It is rather a matter of surprise that [poor-quality immigrants] were so few in number' given the Company's 'huge business'.J. S. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand, London, 1927, pp. 66-7.
Alongside this and other passages Rutherford annotated his copy of the book with comments like 'ho-ho!', 'Nonsense', and 'Blah'.The copy of The Colonisation of New Zealand in the Willis Airey Library in the History Department at Auckland University is annotated in Rutherford's handwriting. The comments quoted are inked in the margins of pp. 67, 74 and 97.
Marais' 'swallowing' of Wakefield may be partly explicable by the constraints of his project. The Colonisation of New Zealand was a slightly revised version of a DPhil thesis written largely from Hansards, parliamentary papers, Colonial Office files in the Public Record Office, and the published works of the protagonists. An examination of more than a handful of first-hand New Zealand sources other than Company ones might have called into question parts of his account. The writings of the proponents of colonisation also played a part. In the correspondence between the Colonial Office and the colonisers, 'The palm … must be adjudged to the Company's spokesmen'. 'They wrote letters that were cunningly contrived to touch their readers' sympathies at many points. Sometimes they would reason … with unimpeachable logic … at other times they would bait [the Colonial Office] with gentle irony or with more stinging shafts of sarcasm … 'Marais, Colonisation of New Zealand, p. 178.
Marais was as much a victim of their rhetoric as a connoisseur of it.
Wakefield's 'powers of vigorous utterance' took in other writers too.A. J. Harrop, The Amazing Career of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, London, 1928, p. 62.
One example is his speech in 1836 to the House of Commons Committee on the Disposal of Waste Lands in the Colonies, in which he said that the colonisation of New Zealand was inevitable because of increasing contact between Maori and disreputable Europeans in the Pacific, contact which would make the establishment of British law necessary, and that his scheme would prevent colonisation 'in a most slovenly and scrambling and disgraceful manner'.Quoted in Harrop, England and New Zealand, pp. 39-40.
This passage was widely quoted,Other examples are Harrop, Amazing Career, pp. 85-6; Hight and Bamford, Constitutional History and Law, pp. 65-6; Marais, Colonisation of New Zealand, p. 26.
and its argument about the inevitability of colonisation and the responsibility of colonising in an orderly and British fashion was replicated in historians' discussions of New Zealand in the 1830s. Harrop melodramatically described a New Zealand 'in the throes of anarchy' and juxtaposed this situation with the rise of systematic colonisation, so as to cast the latter as a redemption and a facing up to responsibilities.Harrop, England and New Zealand, p. 27.
For Marais, 'The New Zealand Association was the principal author of the annexation of New Zealand' in such a way that the association could almost take credit.Marais, Colonisation of New Zealand, p. 97. 'Blah', wrote Rutherford.
If, to some extent, Wakefield's texts made twentieth-century history in their own image, some of the historians repaid the compliment. Harrop's works openly re-write Wakefield in the light of imperial relations in the early twentieth century, making him the father of an insufficiently grateful colony and a historical antecedent of some kind of imperial federation. England and New Zealand, based on Harrop's doctoral thesis, explicitly brought contemporary concerns into their examination of Wakefield and the Colonial Office. The enormous importance of the actors to present day New Zealand are repeatedly emphasised, even to the point of debt: 'it may be confidently assumed that if Durham, Wakefield, and Buller had not played their respective parts in the history of the two countries, the relations between England and New Zealand would be far less cordial than they are to-day',Harrop, England and New Zealand, p. 47.
Similarly, the redeeming features of Lord Glenelg's term as Colonial Secretary are introduced as his 'two claims to the gratitude of the people of Australia and New Zealand'.Ibid., p. 55.
Pervading Harrop's book was a sense that the expansion of the British empire in the mid-nineteenth century was a good thing, and that the knots it tied were worth maintaining. From this premise, Wakefield and his fellows become not only creditors of modern colonials, but also modem ideals. In a discussion of claims made in 1825 that Canada had no value to Britain and would become part of the United States, Harrop inserted the comment: 'In 1925, exactly a century later, similar views were expressed.'Ibid., p. 30.
Outside English academia, Hight made similar links. At the end of his discussion of the arrival of the constitution, a child of Wakefield, Durham and colonists with 'vigour and determination',Hight and Bamford, Constitutional History and Law, pp. 258, 261-2, 265-6.
he located the New Zealand constitution in the context of colonial government throughout the Empire. The overall trend of imperial development, of which the New Zealand constitution and Australian and Canadian federation formed part, was towards 'some form of closer union, whether Imperial Federation or Britannic Alliance'.Ibid., pp. 268-9. To be fair to Hight, one should point out that this was written just before World War I.
The monographs of Morrell, Harrop and Marais did not finish in the 1840s, but carried their studies on to the establishment of responsible government. The constitutional developments of the years 1846-56 were a continuation of the problem of the extension of British governmental forms to the colonies. Maori-Pakeha relations were viewed in the light of this problem.W. P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, London, 1966 (first pub. 1930), pp. 318-23, 328-31.
Wakefield and his associates remain important figures in this later period. Wakefield was seen as the moving spirit behind Lord Durham's report on Canada in 1839, which advocated granting responsible government to keep Canada within the Empire. The Durham Report was cast as inaugurating a new relationship between Britain and the colonies. New Zealand was no exception. The New Zealand Constitution 'was the offspring' of the Durham Report; it was 'framed in the broadest spirit of the Durham Report'.Harrop, England and New Zealand, p. 258; Hight and Bamford, Constitutional History and Law, p. 266.
Academic historians related the debates over the constitution much less dramatically than they did the debates over systematic colonisation. In the earlier debates historians found it harder to see validity in the Colonial Office's arguments; for the constitutional debates, the record provided ample documentary support for the reasonableness of George Grey's actions (perhaps in part because of Grey's own powers of persuasion and 'near monopoly of the flow of information to the Colonial Office'),Belich, New Zealand Wars, pp. 123-5.
and the level of coincidence between the wishes of the settlers and the Colonial Office.
What historians thought of Wakefield was relative to what they thought of the Colonial Office. Scholarly work on the Colonial Office, wrote Beaglehole, who had written his PhD thesis on the office, began to contest 'the Wakefield-Buller-Molesworth view of the Colonial Office … [in which] angels of light, of faith, of freedom and imperial expansion, fight valiantly the forces of darkness and of disdain, in fact the obscurantist clerks of Downing Street'.Beaglehole, 'Colonial Office', p. 170.
Beaglehole detected a move away from this view after World War I, as a consequence of serious archival study.Ibid.
Trevor Williams of Oxford did work on the annexation of New Zealand, and let Beaglehole know what he was finding; Beaglehole told him it would be good to have 'all the new stuff—e.g. about Stephen … and it would be very nice to have some debunking of E.G.W. But we don't want just the story of the same old negotiations improved on.'Beaglehole to Williams, 17 April 1939, IA1, 62/110/13. Beaglehole was hoping, rather late in the piece, to work Williams's subject into the Centennial surveys series. The plan did not come to fruition.
Morrell was fairly even-handed in his praise and blame of the Colonial Office and the colonisers.Morrell, British Colonial Policy, pp. 128, 130.
The history of British colonial policy, he remarked, was not 'a record of muddling and misgovernment'.Ibid., p. viii.
Not all those writing on New Zealand participated in this revisionism. Marais was amply, stereotypically critical of the Colonial Office and its evangelical associates; he repeated Charles Buller's caricature of James Stephen as 'Mr. "Over-Secretary" Stephen', a claim soon to be debunked by Paul Knaplund.Marais, Colonisation of New Zealand, pp. 13, 33-4, 40, 224; quotation from p. 34. On Knaplund, see Beaglehole, 'Colonial Office', pp. 185, 188-9, and Beaglehole, 'Writing of Imperial History', pp. 129-34.
For Marais, substantial archival work did not undermine 'the Wakefield-Buller-Molesworth view' of the Colonial Office or the colonisation of New Zealand generally. Harrop's zeal for Wakefield was not, however, accompanied by a scapegoating condemnation of the Office. He took pains to establish the moral integrity and competence of its personnel.Harrop, England and New Zealand, pp. 297, 299-301.
Indeed, Harrop's conclusion to England and New Zealand read: 'That it should have been proved possible to found a British colony without exterminating the native race … is perhaps the best justification not only for those who laboured in the cause of the British colonization of New Zealand, but for those who insisted from the beginning on the necessity of protecting the interests of the natives. It is, in a word, the justification of Dandeson Coates and James Stephen as well as the justification of Charles Buller and Edward Gibbon Wakefield.'Ibid., p. 311.
But in this final sentence Harrop made a claim that the rest of his book, like others, did not substantiate. Even when treated generously (as by Morrell and Harrop) rather than scapegoated (as by Marais), the Colonial Office never occupied a position of heroism in academic accounts of New Zealand's founding.
This is not surprising, but it points to the gulf separating the narratives of academic and non-academic historians of the decades on either side of 1840. In the works of Buick and Ramsden, the Europeans who did most to found New Zealand are British government officials and the missionaries; in the academics' works, London evangelicals, and the Colonial Office and its agents were not the dynamic figures: George Grey was important, but he was never cast as an originator, as Wakefield, Buller, Durham and Molesworth were. The touchstones of Buick and Ramsden were the missions and the Treaty; those of the academics were the Wakefield colonies and the constitution.
The gap between these two kinds of account of the colony's founding is related to restricted foci on particular kinds of evidence, and investments in different traditions. Buick and Ramsden lacked sustained access to the Public Record Office,A. D. McIntosh to Heenan, 28 December 1936, IA1, 126/8/20.
and had local cultural capital invested in the idea of the missionaries. Those writing in London, Oxford or Cambridge lacked access to material produced in New Zealand other than the accounts of, say, Maning, Swainson, Fox and Jerningham Wakefield; but the centrality of official documents to their discipline made this deficiency of little relevance. University historians profited from the accuracy and rigour of their documentary methods, but these methods excluded other sources that might have altered the significance of official accounts (the feasibility of enforcing British law is an obvious area in which more use of local sources may have made an impact). The combined rigour and limitations of the academics' documentary method are a reminder that disciplinary conventions limit a line of inquiry for the same reasons that they make it possible.
It would be inappropriate to finish this discussion without noting that the metropolitan exclusivity of this historiography was being quietly unsettled at the end of the interwar period. Rutherford did not base his work on the Treaty and the 1840s exclusively or even primarily on parliamentary papers and other official sources. There must have been an element of choice in this, because on a long trip to England in 1937, he (and his wife) took extensive notes on the CO 208 and 209 files in the Public Record Office, the files on which Harrop, Marais and Morrell grounded their work on New Zealand, Whatever his reasons, right from his arrival in Auckland, Rutherford had set about collecting New Zealand manuscript sources. He had been in Auckland only two years before he talked Archdeacon W. J. Simkin into donating some of the papers of Hugh Carleton and Henry Williams, among other things, to the College library.Rutherford to T. U. Wells, 6 May 1936, Rutherford Papers, A-42, folder 140/2. Among the other acquisitions were volumes of the Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, New Zealand Gazettes, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, and Auckland Provincial Gazettes, complete sets of which were 'not at present available either in the College Library or in the City Library'.
The manuscripts he recovered, especially those of James Clendon, the United States consul in the Bay of Islands at the time of the Treaty, were much used in his work. Rutherford kept to the questions of imperial historiography, treating the War in the North as a case study of the problems of colonial government. But he derived some of his answers from local sources. As I showed in the preceding chapter, Rutherford was more aware than many Pakeha historians of the complexities of the Treaty.
Rutherford is seldom admitted to the pantheon of notable New Zealand historians. No doubt this owes something to his obnoxiousness to others as he grew older: he did not have a troupe of loyal students to keep his reputation alive, whereas his colleague Airey did. Nevertheless, Rutherford's work in the thirties and forties was a new departure in the study of the origins of British government in New Zealand. It was a precedent for, and perhaps a precondition of, the later reorientation of discussions of colonial government, racial conflict and the New Zealand Company by Keith Sinclair, John Miller, Michael Turnbull, David Herron and others.
Academic historians worked in another genre very different to the monograph and the essay that were the staples of writing on colonial policy: the general history of the nation. General histories obliged historians to act as 'legislators and interpreters': to synthesise a wide variety of sources and subjects into an 'explanation' of New Zealand that would speak to the present. Accordingly, general histories of New Zealand rested on a different premise from the monographs, articles and theses of colonial-policy history. In the latter field, New Zealand was relevant insofar as it could inform the field as a whole. In general histories, the validity of New Zealand history resided in a different publishing context and in the need to explain New Zealand history to a non-specialist audience (though perhaps still an audience of intellectuals). General histories, therefore, were not necessarily written out of an enthusiasm for New Zealand history. When Beaglehole wrote his New Zealand: A Short History in the early 1930s, he was, by his own account, not 'a conscious New Zealander'.Beaglehole, 'New Zealand Scholar', pp. 245-7.
This does not mean we must read this 'brilliantly savage' book as an expression of Beaglehole's 'bitterness at the country of his birth'.Phillips, 'Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips', p. 124.
It means that a survey history may involve a concern for New Zealand's future more than it entails a love of New Zealand's past.
Many of those who did believe New Zealand's history was vibrant and fascinating did not write general histories. Both Buick and Cowan had metanarratives of New Zealand's character and roots, but they took particular phenomena (the Treaty of Waitangi, the New Zealand Wars) and particular geographical areas (the Bay of Islands, and the rest of the North Island as well in Cowan's case) and treated the essence of New Zealand history as these particulars writ large. They did not roam over a wide landscape of subjects within one text. University historians dominated the genre of the short history, which embodied the powers of generalisation and interpretation associated with the academic as public intellectual.
Assuming that the multi-author New Zealand volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire was not entirely an academic work, it may be said that five general histories of New Zealand were written in the interwar period by academics.The New Zealand volume of the Cambridge History may, at a stretch, count as a history written by academics. It was dominated by Hight and his students. The volume was 'edited' from afar by A. P. Newton of the University of London (Beaglehole's supervisor), J. Holland Rose of Cambridge University, and E. A. Benians (Harrop's supervisor), also of Cambridge. Their distance is suggested by their reference in the preface to 'Dr Joseph Hight'. According to Harrop ('Hight as Historian', in Allan, ed., Liberty and Learning, p. 32), Hight was the real editor of the New Zealand volume, and it was he who compiled the original plan with suggested contributors. (Of the Australian volume of the Cambridge History, Ernest Scott was 'formally the advisor and in practice the editor': Stuart Macintyre, 'Ernest Scott: "My History is a Romance'", in Macintyre and Thomas, eds, Discovery of Australian History, p. 88.) I have not discussed the New Zealand volume of the Cambridge History here partly because some of its contributors (such as Scholefield) have been dealt with elsewhere in this thesis, and partly because most of the chapters by academics were précis of their other works. Condliffe's two chapters, for instance, summarise the relevant parts of his New Zealand in the Making.
One of them, Condliffe's A Short History of New Zealand, was a school textbook, and it would confuse matters to compare it with the others here. The same goes for Elder's New Zealand: An Outline History, the rationale and intended audience of which it is hard to imagine: the book was 95 pages long, entirely predictable except in its errors, and from the Liberals' reign onwards it shifts abruptly into the present tense to read like a pamphlet survey of contemporary New Zealand.Elder, Outline History. Examples of 'unpredictable' errors are the identification of Ernest Rutherford as 'Sir Charles Rutherford' (p. 76) and the claim that part of Wakefield's plan was that 'while the colony should be made as much like Britain as possible, class distinctions should be done away with' (pp. 40-41).
This leaves three single-author general histories: Morrell's New Zealand, Beaglehole's New Zealand: A Short History and Condliffe's New Zealand in the Making. The Condliffe and Beaglehole studies were by far the most influential volumes among New Zealand intellectuals in the interwar period. New Zealand writers at the time seldom referred to Morrell's book, and its sales were disappointing, at least in part because the English publishers did not co-operate with Whitcombe and Tombs, who dominated the New Zealand book market.Morrell, Memoirs, p. 61.
The book was, moreover, not Morrell's best; alongside astute comments and thorough discussions there were plenty of ill-considered or quite silly judgments that one suspects he would have altered had he had longer to write the book and more opportunity for thorough research.
The short histories by Condliffe and Beaglehole brought something new to New Zealand historiography and greatly stimulated (and annoyed) readers. A comment Airey made in 1939 serves as a good way into these two books. One should beware, he told the Auckland League of Nations Union, 'of thinking of countries as persons'.Airey, 'Colonies and World Peace', notes for a lunchtime talk to the League of Nations Union, 27 April 1939, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 14.
He was concerned with the way the personification of nations obscured sectional interests within nations, and conflated capitalists with the citizenry generally. The genre necessitated the treatment of New Zealand as a distinct entity, and 'thinking as countries as persons' was, along with the botanical metaphors which will be discussed in the next chapter, one of the two principal ways of conceiving nations in interwar New Zealand. In short histories and in public comment, 'thinking of countries as persons' was at its most explicit in the identification of relationships between the imperial 'mother' and the colonial child, and in delineation of specific periods such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, and maturity. The point at which maturity was reached—New Zealand's national 'coming of age'—was announced more than once.Maureen Sharpe, 'Anzac Day in New Zealand, 1916-1939', New Zealand Journal of History, 15, 2 (October 1981), p. 102; Michael Joseph Savage, 'The Spirit of Centennial Year', New Zealand Centennial News, 13 (April 1940), p. 2; W. E. Parry, untitled address, 'NZ Centenary 1940: Report of Conference Held in Parlmt Bldgs Wgtn on Monday 2nd March 1936', Heenan Papers, 1132/290.
A more subtle anthropomorphism underpinned the belief that there was a 'national life', a coherence in what happened in these southern Pacific islands that was akin to the purported coherence of a person's life.
Condliffe's book was primarily an economic history, but it employed the same anthropomorphic figures. In economic terms, the colony had 'a troubled childhood, followed by a period of rather wild and unregulated growth and expansion of interests'. 'Like an adolescent youth, New Zealand in the boom period of the seventies attempted too much, and tried out its powers prematurely in many directions.' After this adolescence, it 'passed through a sobering period of self-examination and mistrust, and had only gradually emerged into the broader and more stable possibilities of adult life'.Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, p. 204.
The main character of Condliffe's book was economic history's equivalent of the national life, the life of the 'New Zealand economy'.
I have put the words 'New Zealand economy' in quotation marks because the term does not simply refer to the sum of economic activity in the islands now identified as New Zealand. The New Zealand economy is not a given but something created, and it is created largely by Pakeha. 'For all practical purposes the economic history of New Zealand begins with the arrival of the first Wellington settlers in 1840.'Ibid., p. 17.
Condliffe thus defines the 'New Zealand economy' as something that emerges through settlement, and which required 'the breaking up of Maori economy and the destruction of tribal organisation and discipline'.Ibid., p. 63 (italics added).
Condliffe's position is close to one of Goldie's poles of indigenisation, a flat assertion that 'This country really began with the arrival of the whites.'Goldie, Fear and Temptation, p. 13.
In New Zealand in the Making, as in local histories, the effect of the conflation of 'Pakeha' and 'New Zealand' was to make Maori activities meaningful only with regard to the now normative Pakeha ('New Zealand') activities.
This occurs in two ways. First, Maori actions become troublesome impediments to the purportedly normal 'advance' of European settlement and the attendant economic 'progress', to use Condliffe's term. European settlement is 'rudely interrupted by the Maori wars' before it reaches its 'logical' conclusion.Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, p. 210.
Elsewhere in the book, Condliffe writes that the North Island provinces were 'harassed by the long-drawn-out and costly Maori wars'.Ibid., p. 30.
The naturalness of settlement is emphasised by Condliffe's businesslike downgrading of the wars to the status of harassments and interruptions.
The book might have kept Maori only in the role of impediments. Writing to Peter Buck in May 1928, Apirana Ngata commented:
Condliffe wrote over to [Felix] Keesing to amass information here before leaving for Honolulu [where Condliffe was then living] on the contribution of the Maori to the economic life of N.Z. He made the sweeping statement that only in art, literature & mythology had the Maori made any notable contribution, except on the East Coast where I had achieved something unusual with my folk…. When they cracked up the pakeha 'pioneer' who carved a home out of the forest primeval they forgot the Maori who packed the pioneer's goods to his shack, who cut tracks, who felled, burnt, sawed & fenced the forest clearing, docked, shore, dipped & crutched his sheep, drove stock to market, killed the beasts in the works, carted out the wool & so on. The Kauri-gum fields of the north, the timber mills everywhere, the railway & road works, the forest plantations & so on tell the story of Maori labour under pakeha supervision with pakeha money.Ngata to Buck, 6 May 1928, in M. P. K. Sorrenson, ed., Na To Hoa Aroha: From Your Dear Friend: The Correspondence between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck 1925-50, 3 vols, Auckland, 1986-1988, vol. 1, pp. 91-2.
Ngata's letter did not say whether he made this point to Condliffe, but it is possible that he did, as the finished product contained a brief discussion of the role of Maori labour in 'the economic life of the young colony', including the observation: 'Much of the real drudgery involved in "carving homes out of the wilderness" has been the work of Maori hands.'Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, pp. 49-50.
Condliffe thus created for Maori the same roles as they got in local histories: helpers or hazards, nothing prominent.
The other effect of Condliffe's conflation of Pakeha practices with the New Zealand economy was that for Maori in 1930 to participate in the New Zealand economy, they must mimic Pakeha. Condliffe's was an argument of economic 'assimilation'. The chapter on 'the economic status of the Maoris' noted a number of promising signs of Maori economic activity. It emphasised young Maori turning to the professions, and to farming, especially dairying.Ibid., pp. 78-9.
With most of the 'improved' land in Pakeha hands, however, 'the Maori farmer' would have to break in 'the lower quality and less accessible lands of the Dominion'. He would, therefore, 'fill the rôle heretofore played by the pioneer'.Ibid., p. 88.
The extent of the normalisation of Pakeha economic practices was such that Maori could now become pioneers.
Condliffe repeatedly, naggingly, argued that the perspectives of economic history made New Zealand's past look very different from the way it looked in accounts which emphasised politics. To focus on politics was 'too easy': 'The constructive organisation of economic life is difficult to describe, but the records of political interference with it lie open to the most casual student or observer'.Ibid., p. 139.
Internal politics was 'really of first-rate importance' only in times of trouble, 'and obsession with this aspect of history tends inevitably to stress the pathology rather than the physiology of economic growth'.Ibid.
The most recurrent target of Condliffe's criticism was the privileged status of 'state socialism' in New Zealand history and political discourse. Condliffe rejected claims that state socialism was a distinctively New Zealand phenomenon; it was simply, he said, a response to this 'pathology' in a pragmatic 'Anglo-Saxon' manner.Ibid., pp. 139-40. The comments about practicality and Anglo-Saxonism are supported by a quotation from André Siegfried.
He deftly borrowed the 'experimental', sans doctrines justification of state socialism to attack another aspect of the legend. The usual attention to state socialism was the classic case of neglecting real economic physiology for the sake of conspicuous political responses to the pathological. The real causes of New Zealand's prosperity from the mid-1890s were several. One was the rise in world prices after 1895.Ibid., p. 204.
Condliffe argued that the main periods of New Zealand's economic history 'correspond[ed] roughly with similar periods marking fluctuations in the long-term trend of the world-level of prices'.Ibid., pp. 43-4.
The upturn in the New Zealand economy after 1895, which ushered in New Zealand's economic maturity, was carried along by this international trend.
Conditions in New Zealand abetted this prosperity. Condliffe pointed to the development of secondary industry and refrigeration, but to nothing more so than the swing towards dairying and the related population drift northwards.Ibid., pp. 209-10, 213, 216, 218, 225.
Important to the success of dairying was the co-operative movement. Sticking the knife into the Liberals again, Condliffe wrote: 'An economist, weighing the effects of Liberal-Labour administration and legislation, is almost inclined to rate the encouragement and fostering of co-operative methods in dairying as the most valuable of all the services provided by Government departments.'Ibid., p. 220.
Apart from this, though, there were inherent advantages in dairying: it was stable, required little capital, and depended mostly on family labour.Ibid., p. 221.
The growth of dairying was not only 'the most remarkable feature of New Zealand's economic transformation in the last forty years'.Ibid.
Small-farming in the North Island was the 'logical completion' of the 'earlier period of settlement', and the expression of the real New Zealand character. When Condliffe dismissed the notion of state socialism as a distinctive part of the New Zealand character, he was not dismissing the idea of such a character; instead, he was arguing that 'The best energies and most characteristic qualities of the colonists have found their outlet in the agricultural rather than the political sphere'.Ibid., p. 204.
And the most appropriate form of agriculture was the small-scale farming and closer settlement that attended early twentieth-century dairying and the ideal farms of the 1840s. '[T]he bottling up of the people in the south island provinces during the boom and consequent depression of the seventies and eighties resulted in an economic situation and in economic policies which are not truly characteristic of the genius of the colonists'.Ibid., p. 208
At the heart of New Zealand in the Making was not just a yeoman ideal, but a Wakefieldian yeoman ideal. Condliffe held the Wakefield settlements up as models in their attention to education, the high calibre of their leaders, and the generally high character and 'austere idealism' of the rest of the company immigrants—in contrast to the 'poor selection of immigrants' that Vogelism brought.Ibid., pp. 24, 143, 451, 460, 475.
But Condliffe's 'debt to Wakefield' went beyond idealisation: as his arguments about agriculture imply, he implicitly used Wakefield's principles as criteria for assessing New Zealand's development up to 1930. A Wakefieldian sense of orderliness governed Condliffe's comments on economics and society. He deplored land aggregation (not, however, in the terms of John McKenzie or Henry George),Ibid., pp. 103, 141-3.
but he was also hostile to small farmers when, in the early twentieth century, they dominated the economy and culture.Ibid., p. 460.
Condliffe criticised any sectional interest (including twentieth-century unions) that disturbed implicitly sacred economic processes. Sectional interests could run wild in New Zealand because there are 'no powerful institutions as in older lands—an aristocracy, an established church, powerful learned professions, old-established universities—to modify the working of democracy. The only groups which can do so are economic and business organisations, whose standards are necessarily monetary.'Ibid., p. 461 (italics added).
Condliffe supported capitalism and was wary of state regulation,Ibid., p. 231.
yet he also disdained acquisitiveness. His book reconciled these tendencies only through a Wakefieldian belief in an organic capitalist community. Like Wakefield, Condliffe argued that a lack of control and of a vertical slice of English society (including traditional or natural leaders) resulted in colonial vulgarity and the unchecked power of materialism.
New Zealand in the Making was very frank about the ills of New Zealand's democratic 'excesses'. The 'multiplication of opportunities for higher education' that was 'to be expected in a democracy' had its drawbacks.Ibid., p. 455.
'[P]opular pressure … has lowered university standards.'Ibid., p. 453.
This argument was an educational cousin of Wakefield's insistence that the disposal of 'waste lands' be tightly controlled so as to avoid widespread squatting and the debasement of land, wealth and society. Condliffe's discussion of New Zealand culture and its material obsessions was concentrated in the final chapter of New Zealand in the Making, an envoi to the 400 pages of economic history that have preceded it. 'Wait till you see my last chapter in the N.Z. book', he told Airey with relish. 'My patriotic N.Z. typiste almost refused to type the last chapter, she was so annoyed with its tone.'Condliffe to Airey, 3 July 1929, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 64.
The chapter was a formidable attack. Everything had declined since the 1850s. With few checks on democracy and material advancement and no old institutions, the country was dominated by farmers and commercial groups and its culture is intolerant and mediocre.Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, pp. 447, 461, 463.
The principal enemy was the education system, which was overwhelmingly utilitarian, unimaginative, and rigidly imperialist. Since the first generation of leaders and citizens to have come through the New Zealand education system since 1877, the quality of intellectual ability has declined.Ibid., pp. 447, 451, 458, 466, 471. Condliffe himself was not altogether innocent. His Short History, first published in 1925, was 'a brief introductory history of New Zealand for use in schools and colleges' (p. x) that was remarkably wanton in its reassuring clichés. Condliffe noted the 'strict and scrupulous care with which, on the whole, the government of New Zealand has since [1840] adhered to the Treaty [of Waitangi]' (p. 60). New Zealand history was 'part of one of the greatest movements of modern history, the building up of the British Commonwealth of Nations …. New Zealand, though one of the youngest and smallest of the self-governing dominions, has often played a leading part in that movement' (p. 193). And 'the constitution of the League of Nations by the sincerest form of flattery has proved … that the British Commonwealth is the only working model of international co-operation that is available for imitation' (p. 195; see also pp. 206-7). Given Airey's hostility to the jingoism of school syllabi, it is either ironic or appropriate that he revised this book through subsequent editions. Airey had trouble with C. R. Straubel of Whitcombe and Tombs when he was rewriting the book for the seventh edition, which was published in 1953. Straubel thought Airey was too opinionated, and too harsh on Wakefield. Airey to Straubel, 29 May 1950, Straubel to Airey, 6 June 1950, Straubel to Airey, 26 July 1950, Airey Papers, A-201, folder 5.
The University of New Zealand has failed 'to develop even a minority which shall be critical, sceptical, eager, enquiring, and acutely conscious of ideas'.Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, p. 463.
Condliffe's critique has much in common with those of the French political commentator André Siegfried and the British Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but with a more immediate ('native-born') emotional force than Siegfried's tourist bemusement and the Webbs' prim disdain.André Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, trans. E. V. Burns with introductions by William Downie Stewart and David Hamer, Wellington, 1982 (English trans. first pub. in 1914); D. A. Hamer, ed., The Webbs in New Zealand 1898: Beatrice Webb's Diary with Entries by Sidney Webb, Wellington, 1974.
New Zealand in the Making is a prime example of a short history that sought to explain New Zealand to a contemporary audience and to provoke that audience. But it united past and present in its update of Wakefield as a model for modern New Zealand in ways much more sophisticated than Harrop's. Beaglehole's short history was also a contemporary provocation, an 'essay' as its author called it. The tenor of its critique was quite different from that of Condliffe's book. It had more in common with the writings of the emergent intellectuals of the thirties, forties and fifties than it does with Siegfried and the Webbs, let alone Wakefield.
Beaglehole's contemporary concerns shaped the proportions of his book much more than Condliffe's did his. New Zealand: A Short History concentrated on recent history, to the annoyance of one of its reviewers, A. B. Chappell, who complained that everything up to 1890 was crammed into fifty pages.[A. B. Chappell], 'New Zealand's Story: A Short History by Dr. Beaglehole', New Zealand Herald, 22 August 1936. 'Cyrano' (Alan Mulgan) professed to be more pleasantly surprised by the proportions of the book: 'Ourselves: An Historian's History: From Tasman to Savage', Auckland Star, 18 July 1936. The reviews quoted in this paragraph come from a folder of clippings made and annotated by Beaglehole. I am grateful to Professor Tim Beaglehole for lending me this folder.
A. D. McIntosh, a civil servant and Victoria MA graduate in history who had more in common with Beaglehole than Chappell, wrote in Tomorrow: 'Dr. Beaglehole's book is … essentially an interpretation of this country's development in the light of the present phase of our political and economic life'.A. D. McIntosh, 'New Zealand, A Short History', Tomorrow, 2, 27 (22 July 1936), p. 17.
The historical process in which Beaglehole situated New Zealand's present was the spread of capitalism. Before his 'turn toward nationalism' in his work for the Centennial, Beaglehole repeatedly remarked that New Zealand history was interesting chiefly as an example of the expansion of British or Western capitalism.J. C. Beaglehole, 'New Zealand in the Commonwealth: An Attempt at Objectivity', in G. R. Powles, et al., eds, Contemporary New Zealand: A Survey of Domestic and Foreign Policy, Wellington, 1938, p. 2; Beaglehole, University of New Zealand, pp. ix, 386; Beaglehole, 'Centennial Meditations', Spike, 39, 68 (1940), pp. 18-19. Beaglehole most famously discussed his shift from this point of view to a more nationalist one in 'New Zealand Scholar', pp. 245-7, but he made the same point at the time: see Beaglehole, 'Centennial Meditations', pp. 18-19.
New Zealand was a useful case to study because 'the unity of its history is not, like that of the history of the mother-country, a unity in diversity, an integration of epochs. It is, as it were, an essay in a single social and economic system'.J. C. Beaglehole, New Zealand: A Short History, London, 1936, p. 134.
In principle this was not too far from Hight's grand plan for New Zealand history, but Beaglehole executed it with sophistication.
Beaglehole located New Zealand's founding in the emergence in Britain of 'capitalist democracy', the socio-economic system inaugurated by the first Reform Act. Tories, he wrote, need not have worried: 'that mid[-]nineteenth-century liberalism, leaning on the impregnable rock of a just and decent propriety, was the guarantee of an emergent conservatism far more deeply grounded.'Ibid., p. 132.
Along with the acquisitive conservatism of the society created in New Zealand went a heavy emphasis on the state. The colonisation of the 1840s and 1850s is described as 'corporate colonization', and unlike Condliffe, Beaglehole played down the distinction between the Wakefield colonies and the state-run immigration of Vogelism.Ibid., p. 150.
Thus Wakefield is linked more than usual with Ballance, Reeves and Seddon, whose state-heavy tradition included Massey, who, 'in the name of the farmer and of freedom, altered the direction but not the weight of his aid'.Ibid., p. 151.
Thus, extensive intervention by the state (or a state-like body in the case of the colonisation companies) was endemic to New Zealand's economy and politics, and not the preserve of 'state socialists'.State socialism or, more broadly, what Beaglehole calls 'the Liberal tradition', overlapped with the tradition of the state: its principle was the 'amelioration of the lot of the common man without fatal harm to the interests of his masters'. This tradition took in not only Seddon and Reeves but also Grey and Stout; in the 1930s the Labour party 'sedulously cultivat[ed]' its image. Ibid., p. 126.
In the course of this argument Beaglehole tilted at a number of New Zealand myths, including those of New Zealand exceptionalism and the social laboratory. New Zealand was so much 'the exemplar of modern capitalist expansion at its most laudable' that 'its laboratory-value was conditioned [that is, qualified] by the fact that the experiments were bound to be tried by other countries at some near stage, whatever might be the action of New Zealand'.Ibid., pp. 134, 138.
New Zealand's position as a creature of British expansion was reinforced from the 1880s, and even more so after World War I, through its participation in British 'economic imperialism'. This 'imperialism'—based, like 'the nationalism of which it was the rather bloated counterpart', on 'private profit'—shackled international trade.Ibid., p. 143.
New Zealand over-specialised in primary produce and devoted itself unconditionally to the British market for produce and the London money market.Ibid., pp. 140, 143.
When the British market contracted and then collapsed, New Zealand was lost. Beaglehole took pains to distinguish the depression of the 1930s from the Long Depression: it was, he argued, unprecedented. Consequently, New Zealand needed a new economics; William Downie Stewart, Coates' Minister of Finance was 'wise with all the wisdom of a world that had ended'.Ibid., pp. 94, 145. Stewart told Horace Fildes that he thought Beaglehole's book 'very brilliant', but wrong on some points about Stewart's actions. Stewart saw Beaglehole 'once or twice in Wellington' and told him where he was wrong about Stewart. According to Stewart, Beaglehole was surprised and curious, not hostile, and asked Stewart if he would give him this information in writing. Stewart to Fildes, 3 August 1936, Fildes Papers, box 11a.
No one could have done any better than Coates and Stewart, Beaglehole suggested; in 'the setting of mingled capitalism and democracy', political parties were a matter of 'relative unimportance … until a party rose definitely opposed to the perpetuation of the current social system, and inevitably drove together those who fought within its limits'.Beaglehole, New Zealand, p. 154.
Beaglehole held back from declaring the 1935 election to be the total revolution that this comment implied. He discussed some radical steps Labour planned (such as guaranteeing prices), and noted the moderation of the Labour Party of 1935.Ibid., p. 127.
He had, after all, only a few months to witness Labour in power, and he did not venture into political prediction, but New Zealand: A Short History nevertheless constituted a provocative brief for the present and near future.
'Provocative' is a word that can be used too loosely, but Beaglehole addressed his arguments not just to a sympathetic university-educated audience. An earlier version of the book was published in National Opinion, the journal of the Legion of New Zealand, which formed out of right-wing dissatisfaction with the depression government.J. C. Beaglehole, 'Youthful Nation: History of New Zealand', National Opinion, 19 October 1933, 2 November 1933, 16 November 1933, 30 November 1933, 14 December 1933, 18 January 1934, 1 February 1934, 15 February 1934, 1 March 1934, 15 March 1934, 29 March 1934, 12 April 1934, 26 April 1934, 10 May 1934, 24 May 1934, 7 June 1934.
The gap between Beaglehole and some other National Opinion contributors is suggested by their different responses to the 1932 riots. Beaglehole protested at the witch-hunting that followed the riots in a letter which led to his dismissal from Auckland University College; Will Lawson, who was the editor of National Opinion when Beaglehole's history was published there, responded to the riots by suggesting the formation of 'some citizen body ready for service in emergencies which may arise while the Soviet propaganda is stirring the people in one direction or another'.Observer, 21 April 1932, quoted in Michael C. Pugh, 'The New Zealand Legion and Conservative Protest in the Great Depression', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1969, p. 51.
The pages of National Opinion were less threatening than Lawson's comment suggests (the paper carried, among other things, complaints about censorship, and contributions by Sutch).National Opinion, 7 September 1933, 30 November 1933.
Nevertheless, in publishing his short history in National Opinion, Beaglehole was taking his message right to 'the enemy', though a detailed comparison of the two texts shows that some of the book's more critical passages are not present in the National Opinion version.These include the parallel with North America on pp. 131-2 of the book; the sentence 'It was now [1912] the employers, with the weaker unions, who were most unambiguous in their support of arbitration' (p. 77 of the book); and the criticism of police handling of unemployed protest in 1932 (p. 106). The early chapters and the final chapter are not substantially different; the material on 1934 and 1935 is, obviously, not present in the earlier National Opinion version.
New Zealand: A Short History was organised around recent politics, but was shot through with cultural critique. The book's fantastic allusions (in one passage Coates' outlook was compared to a Gainsborough landscape and Stewart's to an El Greco) poked fun at the implied mundanity of the objects of the comparisons.Beaglehole, New Zealand, p. 95.
This style was as significant as a cultural critique as the specific complaints were. The book can be read as an oblique rejoinder to conformist bullying of the kind that shut Beaglehole out of Auckland (attacks on censorship and intolerance of criticism occur often in the book) and to the stolidity of most public comment.Ibid., pp. 96, 131, 136-7, 140, 146-7. On p. 107 Beaglehole's trouble at Auckland is discussed, though without naming names.
The facetious, satirical portraits of individuals are one of its most memorable aspects. Some readers (such as Chappell) found the book's tone annoying, but, in the context of mid-1930s New Zealand, its playfulness was not gratuitous but a challenge to the conventions of much Pakeha political discussion.A sweeping generalisation such as this risks stereotyping, but for a sample of evidence see Auckland University College, Lectures in Journalism: Digest of Extension Course, Auckland, 1934; Alan Mulgan, The Making of a New Zealander, Wellington, 1958, chs 14-15.
Where Condliffe devoted his final chapter to New Zealand culture generally, Beaglehole focused on questions of identity. His verdict was that New Zealand was not, 'with any deep feeling, a nation'. There was a lack of 'tenderness of place, the genius loci'.Beaglehole, New Zealand, pp. 158-9.
There was also a cultural shallowness, which was due in part to isolation. Not entirely convincingly, he asserted that while New Zealand was part and parcel of Western trends, it was also isolated.Ibid., pp. 157-8.
For all writers of general histories, New Zealand's dependence on but isolation from Britain was an important theme of cultural history as well as economic and political development For Beaglehole, New Zealand was 'essentially British' but 'without the complex affiliations of the position which Great Britain has inherited, of which she is the centre'.Beaglehole, New Zealand, pp. 157-8.
The ocean made New Zealand a 'geological exile'.Ibid., p. 158.
Here Beaglehole too anthropomorphised New Zealand. The persona Beaglehole gave to New Zealand is more specific than the generic youth Condliffe assigns it. In New Zealand: A Short History, that persona was the colonial intellectual, often depicted as an 'exile', and who could overcome this exile complex by going 'Home' or building a New Zealand 'home in thought': one of the reasons for New Zealand's lack of 'identity' was that '[n]ot in letters nor in art has life crystallized and ennobled itself'.Ibid., p. 159.
Beaglehole was working with what Gregory S. Jay calls the way 'nations imagine themselves as writers'.Gregory S. Jay, America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History, Ithaca, 1990, p. ix.
In this respect, and in its allusions to the ocean, Beaglehole's commentary on 'New Zealand' identity is related to those of Brasch, Curnow and other relatively young writers. For them, 'identity' resided in the future, to be anticipated with guarded hope or sometimes resignation. Unlike Condliffe and unlike pioneer mythologisers, they could not find hope in past achievements.
In their different ways, New Zealand: A Short History and New Zealand in the Making were unlike anything before them in New Zealand historiography. They were critical to a degree that had only Rusden as a precedent in historical writing, though unlike Rusden their polemics were sustained and closely argued.G. W. Rusden, Aureretanga: Groans of the Maoris, London, 1888; Matthew Russell, '"Had I but a Trumpet Tongue": George Rusden and His Imperious Duty', MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 1995.
The two books were very different, in their ideals, their genres and in their respective political and economic concerns. Both, however, worked on the premise that New Zealand history was the history of Pakeha civilisation. Condliffe did so explicitly, charting the destruction of 'the Maori economy' as a precondition of the establishment of a 'New Zealand' one to which surviving Maori should assimilate. Beaglehole was careful not to conflate New Zealand with Pakeha, but Maori retreat from his narrative as settler society expanded, and the pressing questions of identity that defined his provisional conclusions to New Zealand history concerned Pakeha only.
General histories were not the only mode of contemporary comment that academic historians practised. Wood and Airey contributed more through public lectures and pamphleteering than through historical scholarship. Such activities were very important in the creation of a university-influenced polity. Outside the academy, perhaps only Andersen and Scholefield set themselves up as commentators on as wide a range of issues as Beaglehole, Wood, Condliffe and Airey did. In this chapter, though, I have had to restrict my focus to the conditions and characteristics of academic historical writing.
By the end of the interwar period university historians were writing regularly about New Zealand history. Twenty years previously, the only New Zealand history written by academics was not very different from the history being written by other New Zealand historians. This kind of work continued right through the interwar period, but it was increasingly accompanied by other kinds of writing that only university historians were producing. The study of New Zealand in terms of the historiography of British colonial policy began in English universities and was maintained in New Zealand colleges. While non-academics had written general histories before 1930 and continued to do so, academics moved into the genre in substantial numbers.
General histories presupposed that New Zealand was a distinct entity, but none suggested that it was discrete. Both Condliffe and Beaglehole underlined New Zealand's implication in international processes. Morrell emphasised a more narrowly imperial context. Studies of colonial policy defined the primary concern of the inquiry as metropolitan. By the end of this period, however, Rutherford was reworking this field to accommodate New Zealand sources. General histories too used local sources, but they were a genre for established practitioners. More specific research was the staple diet of the new kind of academic historians and their increasing numbers of postgraduate students. The move toward New Zealand sources by Rutherford was a necessary step in the establishment of a sustainable tradition of academic history written in New Zealand universities.
6. Centennial Splendours
The New Zealand Centennial inspired a number of poems, including Eileen Duggan's 'Centenary Ode' and Allen Curnow's 'The Unhistoric Story'. But the poem most often remembered in connection with it is Denis Glover's 'Centennial'.Denis Glover, 'Centennial', in Allen Curnow, ed., The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, Auckland, 1960, p. 222.
In the year of centennial splendours
There were fireworks and decorated cars
And pungas drooping from verandahs
But no one remembered our failures.
Plenty of platitudes were uttered in 1940. How could it have been otherwise? Nevertheless, Glover's appraisal of the Centennial missed a lot. As the Centennial's 'propaganda officer' told the readers of Tomorrow, the Centennial celebrations involved more than merry-go-rounds at the Centennial Exhibition: the cultural wing of the Centennial organisation was undertaking 'serious' tasks, the largest of which was the production of books on New Zealand history.[D. O. W. Hall], 'The Centennial', Tomorrow, 4, 24 (28 September 1938), p. 766.
In recent years, the literature on the Centennial publications has become quite large, and much of it concentrates on the role of the state, taking the Centennial as a defining moment in the establishment of state patronage of the humanities.Booker, 'Centennial Surveys,' Rachel Barrowman, '"Culture-organising": Joe Heenan and the Beginnings of State Patronage of the Arts', New Zealand Studies, 6, 2 (July 1996), pp. 3-10; McEldowney, "Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', pp. 568-72. First-hand accounts include E. H. McCormick, An Absurd Ambition: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Dennis McEldowney, Auckland, 1996, ch. 10; and Beaglehole, 'New Zealand Scholar', pp. 245-7.
I have drawn extensively on this work, but my concern here is with the histories produced in these institutional conditions. The Centennial surveys were intended to be a comprehensive overview of New Zealand history. In the process, they gathered together different currents of New Zealand historiography and combined them in novel ways. Elements of academic histories and local histories were synthesised, and the published Centennial surveys were built on the common ground between these two kinds of history—the assumption that New Zealand history was largely the history of Pakeha. The themes of Cowan and Buick were challenged. So too were their style and methods. The Centennial staff attempted to re-write New Zealand history according to academic standards. They were not always successful, but the Centennial brought very different historians into contact, and in some cases conflict, with each other.
Before exploring these issues it is necessary to give some idea of the framework and personnel of the Centennial organisation. In 1936 the first Labour government announced that a large amount of money would be set aside for the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The Under-Secretary for Internal Affairs, Joseph Heenan, was given the task of organising the celebrations. Heenan wanted to mark the occasion with more than 'fireworks and decorated cars', and pushed for an ambitious programme of Centennial publications as well as a grand exhibition, re-enactments of historic events, and other more frivolous festivities. Many in the Labour ministry had an interest in history and literature—as is well known, they established the Literary Fund, and granted special pensions to ageing writers. The government consented, and a host of committees was set up to consider what forms the publications should take.
The supreme committee was the National Historical Committee, composed of historians from the university colleges, historians from outside the academy, and representatives of government departments. It oversaw work on a variety of books: the unfinished historical atlas; Scholefield's Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; Making New Zealand, a series of thirty brief and for the most part insubstantial 'pictorials' on New Zealand history and life; provincial histories compiled by satellite provincial committees; and the 'Centennial surveys', the eleven books covering 'the whole field of our national life'.Oliver Duff to J. W. Heenan, 3 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part I.
These were to be 'surveys' rather than 'histories', popular but scholarly.Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1938, H-22, p. 2; Heenan to Horace Belshaw, 4 August 1937, IA1 62/8, part 1.
These 'Centennial surveys', and not the other Centennial publications, are the subject of this chapter.
Much of the practical organisation of this series was done by a 'standing committee' of Wellington members of the National Historical Committee. The most important contributors were Heenan himself, Oliver Duff, E. H. McCormick, D. O. W. Hall, A. D. McIntosh and Beaglehole. Duff was a Christchurch journalist who was editor of the surveys until he left to become editor of the new Listener at the end of 1938. McCormick at this time had been working in the Hocken Library after his return from Cambridge; he became secretary of the National Historical Committee and later Duff's successor as editor. Hall had a BA from Cambridge in English and history; before he became 'propaganda officer' and associate editor of the Centennial publications, he had been living on 'a small private income' and 'trying to survive as a writer'.McEldowney, 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', p. 569; dust jacket of G. T. Alley and D. O. W. Hall, The Farmer in New Zealand, Wellington, 1941.
McIntosh, a history MA graduate of Victoria, had previously worked in the General Assembly Library; from the late thirties he worked in the Prime Minister's Department.A. G. Bagnall, 'Sir Alister Mcintosh KCMG 1906-1978', Turnbull library Record, 12, 1 (May 1979), pp. 5-9; Scholefield, Who's Who, 5th edn, p. 149.
He and Beaglehole were regular advisers. Beaglehole was sometimes de facto deputy-editor. Sub-committee members in other centres lobbied the Wellingtonians and contributed to the planning of the series. Among the more active were Hight, Elder, J. T. Paul and A. B. Chappell.
In the first year of their existence, the Centennial staff and committees floated extravagant plans and dealt with piles of correspondence from people trying to jump on the Centennial gravy train. University graduates wrote to the Department of Internal Affairs angling to have their MA theses published as Centennial publications, and R. W. de Montalk, JP, repeatedly urged the department to republish his prose-poem The Glories of Milford Sound 'as a centennial gift to tourists'.R. W. de Montalk to James Thorn, 13 June 1937 and 6 July 1937; de Montalk to E. H. McCormick, 6 July 1937, IA1, 62/8, part I. A mass of other early and usually self-interested suggestions for Centennial publications is contained in this file.
By late 1938 most of the topics and authors of the surveys had been settled.
Some information about those writers who have not already been mentioned may not be amiss. A substantial proportion of the other authors had postgraduate qualifications, and some had civil service or university jobs. W. G. McClymont was an Otago history graduate who lectured briefly at Otago before becoming a school-teacher. Leicester Webb was a New Zealand-born Cambridge graduate who wrote for the Christchurch Press and lectured part-time in political science at Canterbury University College.Scholefield, Who's Who, 4th edn, p. 346.
Helen Simpson was a New Zealander who did a PhD in English at the University of London and had taught at Canterbury University College and Canterbury Teachers' Training College.'Biographical Note', nd [1940], IA1, 62/110/11.
A. E. Campbell had taught history and worked as a librarian at Wellington Teachers' Training College, worked as a primary school teacher, and lectured in education at Victoria; and in 1939 became director of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.Scholefield, Who's Who, 5th edn, p. 40.
S. H. Jenkinson was 'a well-known engineer in the Railways Department who has much experience of practical journalism'.Hall, promotional notes for Heenan, 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/8/1, part 2.
W. B. Sutch and Sir Apirana Ngata need no introduction.
The textual focus of this chapter does not exclude all the planning work of the Centennial project. My concern is with the stories told about New Zealand, and the arguments about those stories in their embryonic stages are important. Nor is the fact that the surveys were official publications insignificant. I have already discussed this with regard to Cowan, and will consider it in relation to Sutch's survey, which was withheld after prime ministerial intervention. However, this intervention is now well documented, and here I will attend more to the surveys' own representation of the state.
The chapter is in three parts. The first discusses the narratives of the surveys generally. It examines their versions of New Zealand history. Some of the issues raised there are taken up in the second part of the chapter, which analyses the most influential and, to my mind, the most complex of the surveys, McCormick's Letters and Art in New Zealand, The final section deals with the interaction of academic and non-academic conventions of history at the Centennial.
After some debate it was decided that the Centennial surveys should not merely fill gaps in existing scholarship, but cover 'the whole field of our national life'.Duff to Heenan, 3 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part I; McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; McCormick to Heenan, 20 October 1937, IA1 62/8, part 1; Hall, notes for Heenan, 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/8/1, part 2.
The term 'national life' was often used to describe the subject of the surveys: like the general histories discussed in the previous chapter, they were an attempt to explain New Zealand to the public.Other examples are W. E. Parry, speech to National Centennial Council, 8 December 1938, copy in Heenan Papers, 1132/293; Parry, 'National Centennial', [June 1938], IA1, 62/8, part 1; and Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1938, H-22, p. 2.
In this section I will discuss the national history defined by the Centennial surveys. I will begin with the surveys' representation of the state and then broaden out into their depictions of Pakeha society generally. Like the academic short histories, the surveys focused on the development of Pakeha society, and as a corollary Maori were marginalised in the texts. Accordingly, I will go on to discuss the surveys' representation of Maori and lead from there into the principles underpinning the surveys' construction of New Zealand history.
The benevolent colonial state, prominent in earlier writings and in the non-literary celebrations of the Centennial, is not a centrepiece of the Centennial surveys. In part, but only in part, this is a consequence of the non-appearance of Sutch's survey on 'social services'. The debate about the topic and Sutch's rejected manuscripts casts light on the image of the state that the Centennial organisers wanted to project.
Instructing Sutch before work on the survey began, Duff defined its subject-matter in these terms: 'I think that social services are Health, Education, Pensions, etc, and not Life Insurance, State Advances, State Coal Mines, the Railways, the Post Office, or the Reserve Bank.' This second category Duff characterised as 'economic services'; it would be enough to 'glance at them, as you proceed'.Duff to Sutch, 30 June 1938, IA1, 62/110/5.
'Social services' had been a survey topic almost from the start of planning, when F. B. Stephens suggested it.Standing Committee minutes, 21 June 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1.
Sutch was the only author suggested in the planning stages. Neither the topic nor the author was ever on the lists of contentious suggestions. Chappell seems to have been the only National Historical Committee member to question the topic's suitability.Chappell to McCormick, 9 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
Heenan privately told Webb that all the Centennial staff felt 'that the series without one [volume] on Social Services would be woefully incomplete'.Heenan to Webb, 11 October 1940, Heenan Papers, 1132/250.
The role of the state in public welfare, or 'How the State Helps New Zealanders' (one title proposed for the book) was, of course, a concern of New Zealand historiography long before 1935.Unsigned, undated (late 1938?) list of proposed titles for the Centennial surveys, with corrections and additions in E. H. McCormick's handwriting, IA1 62/8/1, part 2.
Sutch's two manuscripts, especially his first, drew much criticism for their alleged severity, bitterness, bias, irrelevancies and clumsiness.Hall, '"Social Services in New Zealand" by W. B. Sutch', 29 April 1940; McIntosh, 'Criticism of first draft of "Social Services'", nd; Duff to McCormick, 16 July 1940; McCormick to Heenan, 26 August 1940; McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1940; Heenan to Walter Nash, 19 September 1940, IA1, 62/110/5.
They also raised the question of whether a book on social services should deal with the conflict giving rise to and arising from those services, or concentrate on their operation. The editorial staff made no explicit statement about the image of the state that they wanted, but one can discern this image in their comments on Sutch's book. Hall complained that the book neglected 'how they [social services] work', which is 'the chief interest, and that Sutch instead 'insist[ed] on the political stresses and bargainings which induced different governments to introduce different social legislation'.Hall, '"Social Services in New Zealand" by W. B. Sutch'.
McIntosh made a similar complaint in connection with Sutch's treatment of the arbitration system.McIntosh, 'Criticism of first draft of "Social Services'".
(Sutch's reply was that in the areas and periods of the chapters being criticised, 'there were no social services—or services of only a most rudimentary kind'.)As reported by McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1940, IA1, 62/110/5.
The Centennial staff envisaged a book which, by minimising its account of conflict and 'bargaining' and focusing on how the services 'work', would make the history of 'state experiments' look harmonious, consensual, and inevitable.
This view of the state came through in what Hall wrote in the survey on farming. There, state intervention in farming from World War I onwards was presented as both sound and inevitable.Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, pp. 113-5. Alley did the research for the book but could not get around to writing it, so Hall wrote it up: IA1, 62/8/3.
Campbell's survey on education located the centralisation and state-control of education in the conditions of settlement, and assumed the unalterable nature of this state of affairs without praising it. Webb's Government in New Zealand did what Hall and McIntosh wanted Sutch's survey to do: it had much more to say about the recent operations of New Zealand's political system than it did about political history. It was also written much more temperately than Sutch's. However, Webb did not exclude references to conflict, and his subject was as sensitive as Sutch's. Yet Webb survived ministerial scrutiny.McCormick to Heenan, 30 January 1940; McCormick to Webb, 4 March 1940, IA1, 62/110/4.
It may have been Sutch's tone as much as his argument that annoyed Peter Fraser.
Webb's arguments struck to the core of Pakeha assumptions about the state. He argued that the New Zealand state had evolved from a constitution designed to restrain authority into one concerned with the active creation of not just civil liberties but also personal welfare and general prosperity. These assumptions, he said, required a new theory of the state, but New Zealanders did not have one. The assumption that state should promote prosperity was not accompanied by a coherent model of relations between the state, labour and capital. Caution was necessary, because when the state had an expanded role, 'safeguards against arbitrary action are no longer guarantees of good government'. Webb's comments on the extent to which New Zealand's political system mitigated the problems related to this situation did not altogether dispel his main point about the country's need of a coherent political philosophy.Webb, Government in New Zealand, pp. 146-50 (quotation from p. 149).
The surveys thus displayed a range of perspectives on the state. If the published surveys proved more acceptable to the government than Sutch's was on the matter of the state, Webb's was nevertheless a long way from the cheerful ministrations of Dr Wellandstrong, the 'robot' who greeted visitors to the Department of Health display at the Centennial Exhibition.Phillips, '1940—the Centennial'.
Apart from a sympathetic portrait of an ideal public servant, closely modelled on Heenan, New Zealand Now, Duff's volume on contemporary Pakeha culture, had nothing to say about the state.Duff, New Zealand Now, pp. 93-5. The book was originally to be titled "The Pakeha', balancing Apirana Ngata's survey on Maori. McCormick to Heenan, 14 April 1938, reporting on the Standing Committee meeting of the previous day, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
The surveys collectively did not place the 'social laboratory' in the foreground of their discussion of the Pakeha character. Nor did they focus on another likely contender, war. Duff and J. T. Paul supported the idea of a survey on war, not particular campaigns but 'the effect of all our campaigns on us as a nation … what war means to us as a people'.Duff to H. K. Kippenberger, 19 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
Hight, Webb and Chappell thought that the topic 'should not be included'.Hight and Webb to McCormick, 22 April 1938; Chappell to McCormick, 9 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1,
The Standing Committee rejected the proposal. As McCormick's report on the meeting said, It was considered by some members that a discussion of racial and international conflicts would be inadvisable in the present series.'McCormick, report on Standing Committee meeting, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
The minutes of the meeting record that Heenan objected on the grounds that the topic would involve the New Zealand Wars.Minutes of Standing Committee meeting, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
As we shall see later, this was a subject he wished to avoid. Duff tried to keep the idea alive, appealing to Brigadier Howard Kippenberger to write such a survey or suggest another writer. Kippenberger replied, 'Many of us have taken part in Imperial wars and have doubtless been affected by our own experiences but the effect on the nation, if such an entity exists, of those individual experiences, appears to me to be nil.'Kippenberger to Duff, 9 June 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
At a meeting of the full National Historical Committee soon afterwards, John A. Lee, a war hero as well as an politician, and F. L. Waite, a Legislative Councillor and the author of the official history of the Gallipoli campaign, said that the subject was already adequately covered.Minutes of National Historical Committee meeting, 17 June 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
It was therefore left to Duffs New Zealand Now, which was to be, among other things, 'a "washing up" volume, taking notice of some of the topics … that it may be thought inadvisable to treat separately'.Duff to Hight, 27 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
The farming pioneer figured more prominently in the Centennial surveys than the legislative 'pioneer' and the Anzac. The surveys generally presented a rural New Zealand with little attention to the towns. After early suggestions of surveys on secondary industries had lapsed, this disparity was inevitable, but it was compounded by the disappearance of the Sutch volume.F. L. W. Wood to McCormick, 25 June 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; McCormick, unaddressed memo reporting on Standing Committee meeting of 21 June 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1. At the first meeting of the National Historical Committee on 10 June 1937, John A. Lee 'mentioned the lack of available material on the history of New Zealand industries particularly in their bearing on social life': Minutes dated 20 July 1937, copy in Buick Papers, 58/107. Suggestions of a survey on the labour movement were abandoned after lengthy discussion: IA1, 62/9/17.
Perhaps surprisingly, the survey on farming did not repeat much of the pioneer legend. The farmer was described as a 'custodian of the quality of our national life',Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, p. 141.
but the book concentrated more on the 'the farming industry' than on the attributes of the pioneer. The surveys by Cowan and Simpson were much more in the orthodox mode of pioneer-adulation. The subject of Simpson's survey, women, had been contentious; so had the suggested authors.McCormick, report of Standing Committee meeting, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; Chappell to McCormick, 9 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; [Elder and Paul], 'Requests to Editorial Sub-Committee by Otago Members of Nation Committee', nd [April 1938], IA1, 62/7/1.
J. T. Paul commented that all the proposed writers (Simpson, Robin Hyde, Jane Mander, Muriel Ellis, Eileen Duggan) would have different views, 'none of them possibly the true picture of the pioneer and homely woman who has, in the gigantic task of helping to build up a young country, regarded work as of more importance than abstractions'.Paul to McCormick, 23 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
As it turned out, however, Simpson wrote a book quite consistent with Paul's feminine ideal. The women in Simpson's book tended to be married, and the point was regularly made that they faced their troubles 'without fuss'.Helen M. Simpson, The Women of New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, pp. 63, 69, 95.
Like local historians, Simpson emphasised that modern New Zealanders, including herself, could scarcely imagine the pioneers' hardships.Ibid., pp. 33, 35-6, 109.
And, like local historians, Simpson claimed that the pioneers' achievements and hardships had to be remembered but their faults and mistakes could be forgotten. 'Need for blame is long past; reason for admiration remains and will remain always.'Ibid., p. 85.
As we have seen, this tradition only partially contained Cowan's Settlers and Pioneers. Nevertheless, in another respect the books by Cowan and Simpson were very similar. Both described the material conditions, and the sensory qualities, of pioneer life. In Cowan's case this involved plenitude, the 'delicious nutty and aromatic flavour' of farm-cured bacon, the cornucopia of a lost rural childhood.Cowan, Settlers and Pioneers, pp. 47-8.
Even a labouring scene was described in thickly sensual terms.Ibid., p. 13. Sensual descriptions of labour were common in late nineteenth-century male immigrants' narratives: McClure, 'On Work', pp. 31-2.
The scenes Simpson describes were less golden: the harshness of domestic work, the claustrophobia of life aboard an immigrant ship. She was at pains to demonstrate in detail the privations settlers faced; the burden of her book was that women participated fully in colonisation (the book hardly entered the twentieth century). In making her case, Simpson went beyond the title of her book to depict life in general and show how women were involved. Some chapters were not so much a history of women as a history with women.Simpson's book was not the only one to do this. Compare Woodhouse, 'Introduction' to Woodhouse, ed., Tales of Pioneer Women, p. xv: 'The tales tell chiefly of women, but the lives of our grandfathers and grandmothers were so closely bound together that to tell of one without the other would not give a true picture of the pioneering days.'
In places, pages went by without a woman appearing.
Of the surveys, Simpson's and Cowan's engaged most with pioneer myths. But a component of those myths was replicated in less likely texts, McCormick's Letters and Art in New Zealand and F. L. W. Wood's New Zealand in the World. Simpson and Cowan emphasised the hardiness and resourcefulness of the pioneers, to the detriment of contemporary New Zealanders. Wood and McCormick did not point out traits of individuals or types, but emphasised the vigour and energy of nineteenth-century colonisers. This vigour had declined in the twentieth century, though both McCormick and Wood saw positive signs of a renaissance in the 1930s. As will be argued in the next section of this chapter, McCormick saw the first three decades of the twentieth century as characterised by material complacency and, in literature, the unimaginative copying of English writing. He did not hold up 'pioneer' writers as major authors, but he valued the crude vitality of some of them over the mannered emptiness of later writers. The new fiction writers of the 1930s were, for him, harbingers of new life in New Zealand literature.
Wood charted a decline from the 'energetic but sometimes unbalanced self-assertion' of Vogel's foreign policy toward an overly imperial 'mother complex'.F. L. W. Wood, New Zealand in the World, Wellington, 1940, pp. 100, 102, 106, 132.
This shift began in the international uncertainties of the late nineteenth century but reached its climax after World War I.Ibid., p. 133.
Working with the anthropomorphic metaphors of some general histories, he wrote: 'though the war naturally stimulated her [New Zealand's] sense of nationhood, her ultimate reaction was not so much a consciousness of her efforts as an independent individual as that she had had a worthy share in the greater glory of an imperial achievement.'Ibid., p. 107.
Massey and other politicians were not solely responsible for this outlook: public opinion ran likewise.Ibid, pp. 105-6.
Only a 'thoughtful minority claimed that New Zealand should stand more firmly on her own feet [and] acclaimed the more virile attitude of other Dominions'.Ibid., p. 106.
New Zealand foreign policy thus went from colonising energy to a lack of virility (as in McCormick's book, the gendered associations of the term 'mother country' were pejorative). Between 1936 and 1939, Labour rocked the imperial boat; this rebellion ended with the outbreak of war, and for Wood the future held the prospect of a compromise between Massey and Vogel.Ibid., p. 133.
Wood and McCormick thus used one assumption of the pioneer myth to structure their narratives. Their surveys and others did not retain other elements of the pioneer myth as ideals. Some were critical of aspects of the stereotype, especially utilitarianism. Campbell, explicitly following Condliffe, deplored the way New Zealand's education system had been limited by the 'pioneer concern with tangible results'.A. E. Campbell, Educating New Zealand, Wellington, 1941, p. 183.
Webb's thoughts on the state made clear his reservations about the drawbacks of the unintellectual practicality so often seen as a defining characteristic of Pakeha culture. Wood lamented the lack of 'intelligent public opinion' as he described a complacent and materialist New Zealand.Wood, New Zealand in the World, p. 123.
Wood, McCormick and Webb saw the 1930s as finishing with genuine but modest signs of 'adult nationhood'.McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 169-70; Wood, New Zealand in the World, p. 133; Webb, Government in New Zealand, p. 140.
Their books made it clear, though, that British heritage and pioneer traditions were not sufficient by themselves, and that independent thought would be necessary for the future. They replicated and also contested the pioneer myths that other surveys celebrated more wholeheartedly. They also created images of 'the' Pakeha 'character' that broke with some stereotypes. Their concerns, however, like those of the surveys generally, did not go far beyond Pakeha matters. The surveys focused on European settlement and culture, and marginalised Maori people.
Most of the surveys marginalised Maori literally: Maori were discussed mostly within what may be called 'Maori prologues'. The device of an opening chapter on Maori, whether a general anthropological survey or creation tradition, to be rehearsed before the bulk of the story began in 1769 or 1840, was well established before 1940, and persisted long afterwards. Its overall effect was to imply that Maori mattered as a subject in themselves only before 1840, and that they retreated as colonisation and 'national development' (in the surveys, the two were practically synonymous) 'advanced'. In works employing Maori prologues, Maori belonged more to the past than to the present, and more to prehistory than the 'real' New Zealand past.
Not all the surveys had a Maori prologue. While Beaglehole's book on discovery had a chapter on Polynesian voyaging, McClymont's book on exploration, or the 'discovery' of the interior, had no equivalent chapter. Webb's Government in New Zealand began with organised settlement, Wood's New Zealand in the World opened with comments about Maori isolation, and McCormick's Letters and Art in New Zealand devoted its first page to the thought that Maori literature and art gave the country a heritage longer than a mere century. The first chapter of Alley and Hall's The Farmer in New Zealand was called 'The Maori Farmer'. It discussed Maori cultivation of kumara for several pages, and then covered 'Europeanised Maori agriculture' from 1814 onwards.Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, p. 4.
Homilies marched out in much the same mode as those in the School Journal pieces Hall wrote as Centennial 'propaganda officer'.Ibid., p. 22; publicity material in IA1 62/9/15, part 1.
The most interesting of the 'Maori prologues' is Beaglehole's, since its style, not just its subject-matter, was sharply different from that used in the discussion of New Zealand's European 'discoverers'. The style of the Maori chapter was extravagant and ornate, with dramatic rhetorical questions and 'picturesque' passages in the absence of quotable documentary sources. Compared with the crisp style of the other chapters, such literariness evoked an air of myth and what other historians called 'romance'. In New Zealand, Beaglehole wrote, Polynesians remained 'a … poetic people'.J. C. Beaglehole, The Discovery of New Zealand, Wellington, 1939, pp. 13-14.
Their modes of telling 'history' were contrasted with 'ours'; 'we' and 'us' recurred throughout the chapter as the non-Maori community to which the authorial voice and the audience's ears belonged.Ibid., p. 2.
The mythical overtones of the chapter were compounded by the implication that Polynesian migration to New Zealand was analogous to the Fall: in New Zealand, Polynesians had 'a different and harder life', one which owed much 'to digging of ground with sweat of the brow', a phrase which recalls the Curse of Adam.Ibid., p. 13; Genesis 3:17-19.
The overall effect was that, while it attempted to take Maori traditions seriously, Beaglehole's chapter created an aura of stylised unreality about 'Polynesian history' compared to the lively European-centred narratives that follow. A related though distinct effect occurred with the style of Elsdon Best's ethnographies.See Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 60.
Beaglehole's survey was unusual in that Maori continued to figure prominently in the narrative after the first chapter. In part this was a function of Beaglehole's subject-matter. In the other surveys, Maori tended to make only incidental appearances, if any, outside prologues. Simpson's book on European women was a partial exception because of the attention she paid to missionary wives. In a not too dissimilar fashion, Maori appeared in McClymont's Exploration of New Zealand as assistants or (environmental) hazards. The act of replacing Maori place-names with European ones, a practice deemed significant by other writers, was dealt with only perfunctorily or not at all.Compare ibid., p. 69.
(At times this led to anachronism: 'The first there was Mackenzie, a sheep stealer, who in March 1855 took 1,000 sheep over the hills from Cave to the Mackenzie country.')McClymont, Exploration of New Zealand, p. 100.
Then, of course, there were the 'Maori Wars'. Had Cowan's account of the Waikato War been published it would have been the longest discussion of the wars in the Centennial surveys. Of the other writers, Wood and McCormick dealt frankly with the wars insofar as they related to their subjects; Alley and Hall treated them as disturbances, and from their book one learns that 'northern settlers' benefited from the outcome of the wars by Maori withdrawing from commercial competition (there was no mention of land confiscation).Wood, New Zealand in the World, pp. 49-51; McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 75-84; Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, pp. 56-7.
This was practically the extent to which the published surveys dealt with the subject. In this respect they were consistent with the wishes of the Centennial staff, or at least Heenan. In a debate over the advisability of a survey on war, 'Mr. Heenan urged that the phase of the Maori-European war should not be stressed'.Minutes of a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Historical Committee, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
When Scholefield had suggested a survey on Native Affairs, Heenan replied that the subject was too 'delicate'.Minutes of Standing Committee meeting, 21 June 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1.
Given his views on the matter, and given his ultimate authority, it was probably Heenan rather than McCormick who made the decision to cut Cowan's chapter.Cowan said to McCormick that he 'deferred to your wishes and Mr Heenan's' in cutting the chapter. McCormick wrote Cowan a letter in which he said, 'It is regrettable to have to suppress the truth, but in the world as at present constituted, it is sometimes inevitable.' Cowan to McCormick, 24 October 1939; McCormick to Cowan, 26 October 1939, IA1, 62/110/2.
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that Heenan and the other organisers of the Centennial wanted to exclude Maori people totally. The first of the surveys was to be a volume on Maori by Ngata. This was not to be the usual Maori prologue, something to get out of the way before the real action began, but a truly impressive beginning to the series. The government was keen to draw attention to New Zealand's 'good' race relations during the Centennial year,W. E. Parry, speech to 'New Zealand Centenary 1940' conference, 2 March 1936, Heenan Papers, 1132/290; Phillips, '1940—The Centennial'.
and though the Centennial files in National Archives record no ministerial intervention on this matter, the Centennial personnel seem to have been aware of this. Duff's instructions to Ngata were all caution:
When I said that it [the survey on Maori] must not be a political story I did not mean that it must have no political threads at all, since the Maori today is obviously what the political, social, economic and geographical changes of the last hundred years have made him; but I meant that it must be a non-party, non-controversial story as far as that is possible…. You will also appreciate the fact that your survey, more perhaps than any other, will be read overseas, and that what the outside world will most wish to have will be a picture of the Maori himself—his mind, his life, his customs, his interests, his arts.Duff to Ngata, 15 July 1938, IA1, 62/110/9.
Duff thus envisaged a Maori equivalent of his own survey, a book that would replace historical development and the conflict it entailed with a fictional personage—'the Maori himself', the Maori as he is. Duff's point was similar to the one Hall and McIntosh made about Sutch: the emphasis should be on how the subject works, not on the struggles that shaped it.
It was important that this 'picture' be drawn by a Maori. The Standing Committee did not seriously consider any Pakeha as potential authors for the survey: the choice was between Ngata and Peter Buck.Standing Committee minutes, 13 April 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; Duff to Heenan, 23 March 1938 (reporting on the Editorial Committee meeting of 21 March 1938), IA1, 62/8/1, part 1. R. M. Campbell, however, suggested I. L. G. Sutherland as author, or Sutherland and Ngata in collaboration: Campbell to Heenan, 9 August 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1. The minutes of the meeting (13 April 1938) at which Ngata was selected over Buck do not mention the reasons for the choice.
Ngata had the requisite cachet as an elder statesman and a cultural go-between. He was, Duff told him, 'a Maori who is not only the voice and leader of his people but a Pakeha scholar as well'.Duff to Ngata, 15 July 1938, IA1, 62/110/9.
Publicity material by David Hall announced: '"The Maori" will, of course, be by Sir Apirana Ngata, who can best make the aspirations and achievements of his race articulate in the language of the pakeha.'Hall, publicity material for Heenan's use, 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/8/1, part 2.
Ngata never finished his survey; it is doubtful that he even began it. I. L. G. Sutherland had extracted contributions to The Maori People Today from Ngata only by 'following him around with a notebook and pencil'.McCormick, Absurd Ambition, p. 142.
The Centennial staff did not give up easily, and pursued him with regular letters. Ngata's replies speak of his other preoccupations: parliament, the organisation of the Maori battalion, the death of his daughter.Ngata to McCormick, 6 October 1939; Ngata to A. W. Mulligan, 30 January 1940, IA1, 62/110/9.
On 6 February 1940, however, Ngata delivered a Centennial survey of sorts. The celebrations at Waitangi on that day were markedly different in tone to the festivities six years earlier for Bledisloe's gift. Then, Buick's story of racial partnership through the sacred charter of Waitangi had been mouthed by all the speakers, Maori ones included.Buick, Waitangi: Ninety Four Years After, ch. 5.
Fewer iwi endorsed the 1940 gathering, and the proceedings themselves were not entirely harmonious.Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 237-8.
Ngata's speech gave credit to Labour, but also dealt out strong criticism of failures to settle the Waikato claims, the 'surplus lands' confiscation disputes in the North, and other grievances. More generally, he said:
I do not know of any year that the Maori people have approached with so much misgiving as the New Zealand Centennial year. In the retrospect, what did the Maori [see]? Lands gone, the powers of the chief crumbled in the dust, Maori culture scattered—broken…. We want to retain our individuality as a race…. So long as we are happy does it matter very much whether we square up to the pakeha standards or not? Let us achieve health, comfort, happiness. We are well on the way to that now, thanks to the policy of the government of New Zealand, but while you help us please remember that a lot of the things that you do for us would appear to be for our betterment but they contain w[ith]in them dynamic forces that somehow or other shatter the Maori culture that we wish to retain as a foundation [of] our individuality as a people.'Speech Delivered by Hon. Sir Apirana Ngata, M.P. at Waitangi celebrations on 6th February, 1940', IA1, 62/25/6. See also Ngata to Buck, 15 July 1940, in Sorrenson, ed., Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 3, pp. 245-6.
Reading this speech, one wonders what Ngata would have said in his survey, and how the Centennial staff would have dealt with it. Ngata, one suspects, would have been harder to deal with than Cowan.
The two key features of the surveys' treatment of Maori, therefore, were an impulse to keep Maori in their (narrative) place, and a tendency to minimise and sanitise Maori participation in New Zealand history after 1840. The first of these features was entirely in keeping with the series as a whole: Maori were not the only group that was to be kept in as 'non-controversial' a place as possible. The second feature went to the heart not only of the Centennial project but to the assumptions of most of the academically trained writers of the surveys, and their conception of New Zealand history. The 'national development' that the surveys charted was the development of the colonisers' society. 'Whatever we have become', Duff wrote, 'it is the becoming that is the subject of these surveys'.Duff, 'Memorandum to Authors', 27 June 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
The becoming was Pakeha, and 'we' of the narrative voice of the surveys and of the editorial correspondence was a Pakeha we, often explicitly contrasted to a Maori them.Duff, New Zealand Now, p. 116; Beaglehole, Discovery of New Zealand, pp. 2, 3; McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 1; Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, p. 141; Parry, speech to 'New Zealand Centenary 1940' conference, 2 March 1936, Heenan Papers, 1132/290; McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
Centennial contributors did not discount the importance of studying Maori, and Beaglehole, at least, greatly admired Sutherland's work.Beaglehole to R. M. Campbell, 21 March 1930, R. M. Campbell Papers, MS Papers 1900/7, ATL; Beaglehole, The New Zealand Mind', Australian Quarterly, 12, 4 (December 1940), pp. 40-50.
But unlike Cowan, Buick and Ramsden, and like Woodhouse, Condliffe, Morrell and Beaglehole, the majority tended to separate Maori history from Pakeha history. Maori appear in 'New Zealand' history only as incidental to European settlement: as prologues to it, aids to it, or impediments to it. The surveys muffled Maori action not by the silence of 'assimilation', but by partial exclusion and by a separation of histories. And those histories were not 'Maori history' and Pakeha history' but Maori history and New Zealand history.
These assumptions are metanarrative assumptions: they defined what New Zealand history was about. Most of the surveys were premised on these assumptions; some surveys combined them with a related argument explicitly formulated as the surveys' cohering principle: the trope of adaptation. Adaptation can be summarised as the idea that 'New Zealand' was the product of the interactions between an imported culture and a new 'environment', which included the indigenous people. Adaptation was dialectical, but it allowed for only a restricted dialectic, because it privileged its thesis (imported culture) over its antithesis (the New Zealand 'environment'). The subject of adaptation, that which adapted, was the primary term. Adaptation was, therefore, a way of bringing local influences into the story of Pakeha development without sacrificing the primacy of New Zealand's 'Britishness'.
As such, adaptation was a way of reconciling a belief in New Zealand's Britishness and those things 'characteristically' New Zealand, such as pioneering and the patriotic exotic. In the interwar period, anglocentrism and a concern with the local or 'indigenous' continued to coexist in Pakeha culture, and sometimes within specific texts. But because they were polar they were exclusionary; they were unconvincing to those who thought that New Zealand was both European and Pacific. Both were paradoxical: Britain could be 'home' to people who had never seen it; and the indigenous could be 'exotic'. The trope of adaptation had the potential for a more satisfying view, the capacity to show that New Zealand was both European and Pacific, and therefore neither wholly European nor wholly Pacific. It offered to solve some of cultural colonisation's 'problems of the imagination'.
McCormick did more than anyone else to promote adaptation as a way of writing New Zealand history. His primary statement on adaptation was a letter he wrote to Heenan on 11 October 1937, well before McCormick succeeded Duff as the editor of the surveys. McCormick talked of the need to give the series coherence: the books, he said, 'should be bound together by some common idea, they should exemplify in all its ramifications some general thesis which is applicable to the whole field of New Zealand history'. In McCormick's opinion, that 'general thesis' should be adaptation:
Now the idea which seems to me of fundamental importance in any consideration of New Zealand history is this; that 100 years ago a sample of nineteenth century society and civilization was transferred to New Zealand and has since been reshaped and adapted, with varying degrees of success, to conform to the conditions of a new environment—i.e. natural surroundings and climate, a new order of society, special economic conditions, a native people and all the other elements which constitute environment in its widest sense.
Farming was an obvious example of a topic that would benefit from such an approach, but 'with a little thought and ingenuity', adaptation could structure discussions of other subjects just as well. The histories of science, literature, painting, transport and law in New Zealand could also be dealt with profitably in this way.McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part I.
Heenan declared himself 'personally in complete agreement' with McCormick's suggestion, and copies of McCormick's memo were sent to the members of the Standing Committee.Heenan to McCormick, 14 October 1937; McCormick to Heenan, 15 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part I.
Beaglehole thought that 'the guiding thread he [McCormick] suggests should be brought very emphatically before authors as our ideal'.Beaglehole to Heenan, 8 November 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part I.
In his general advice to the authors of the surveys in June the following year, Duff announced that the surveys 'should be held together by a common idea': 'that New Zealand today is the result of a century's struggle by a British community to adapt itself to a new environment. We are neither a new nation nor an established society transplanted. We are something of both—Old World still in our politics and culture, New World in our attitude to material and social questions.' The Pakeha 'becoming' that was 'the subject of these surveys' would 'give them cohesion and plan.'Duff, 'Memorandum to Authors', 27 June 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1. In a covering letter to Heenan on the same date, Duff wrote that this memo was 'of course a condensation of the much fuller statement submitted many months ago by Mr McCormick'. Earlier in his memo to authors Duff repeated verbatim another point a passage from McCormick's letter of 11 October 1937.
McCormick had been nursing his idea for some time before October 1937. He had formulated it while living in Dunedin in 1935.McCormick, Absurd Ambition, p. 131.
Late in May 1937, he wrote the speech James Thorn gave as chairman of the first meeting of the National Historical Committee.Thorn to Heenan, 17 May 1937; Heenan to Thorn, 1 June 1937, IA1, 62/7/1.
There he described an ideal history of New Zealand farming: 'Such a history would naturally begin with the state of agriculture in Great Britain in the [eighteen] 'thirties and 'forties …. Next would follow the transplanting of these Old World methods to New Zealand, the discovery that many were not adapted to conditions here and the gradual emergence of new methods in this environment'McCormick, 'Material for Use of the Chairman of the NHC Meeting, 10th June, 1937', IA1, 62/7/1. 'Thorn's' speech was widely reported; Heenan had sent copies of the speech to 'All Newspapers in [the] Dominion' (Heenan, circular letter, 11 June 1937, IA1, 62/7/1). See, for example, Otago Daily Times, 12 June 1937; Auckland Star, 12 June 1937.
Such a history of farming would follow 'that splendid book "Tutira"'.McCormick, 'Material for Use of the Chairman'.
In his programmatic letter of 11 October 1937, McCormick again cast Tutira as the exemplary adaptation narrative. 'Mr. Guthrie-Smith's … approach is, in fact, precisely the one I would advocate for our surveys'. (Tutira, however, charted the impact of the indigenous on Europeans as well as the impact of Europeans on the indigenous: its dialectic was more even than the one McCormick proposed.) McCormick singled out Tutira as an exception to the rule that 'one finds scarcely any recognition … either implicit or explicit', of the idea of adaptation 'in the vast mass of New Zealand writing'. The only example he mentioned other than Tutira was Beaglehole's work, especially The University of New Zealand. Beaglehole's comment that New Zealand history was 'best understandable as a function of the expanding capitalist society of Great Britain' was 'roughly a statement in special terms of a part of the thesis I have attempted to explain'.McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part I.
These were not, however, the only instances of the adaptation trope in the twenties and thirties. McCormick interviewed Horace Belshaw of Auckland University College in 1937, before he wrote his main pronouncement on adaptation but after he had written Thorn's speech. In the interview, Belshaw 'touched on an aspect which would be likely to have a popular appeal—the conflict between man and Nature, the adaptation of British methods to New Zealand and the effects on social and economic life'.McCormick to Heenan, 19 July 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1.
W. H. Cocker's foreword to the 1939 collection of essays by Auckland University College staff to mark the Centennial summed up New Zealand's development in a way uncannily coincident with McCormick's 'thesis'.W. H. Cocker, 'Foreword' to Arthur Sewell, ed., 1840 and After: Essays Written on the Occasion of the New Zealand Centenary, Auckland, 1939.
Allen Curnow likened the moa's 'failure to adapt on islands' to the failure to develop a convincing Pakeha identity.Allen Curnow, 'Attitudes for a New Zealand Poet (III): The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch', in Curnow, ed., Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45, pp. 165-6.
Robin Hyde wrote that Katherine Mansfield 'ran away from a sham England, unsuccessfully transplanted to New Zealand soil, and utterly unable to adapt itself to the real New Zealand'.Hyde, 'Singers of Loneliness', p. 355.
Much more common than the reference to adaptation, however, were the other components of Hyde's metaphor. To liken cultures to plants, and to talk of colonial cultures as 'transplanted', was commonplace. Beaglehole did so repeatedly.Beaglehole, 'New Zealand Mind', p. 48; Beaglehole, 'New Zealand in the Commonwealth', pp. 13, 14.
M. H. Holcroft talked of 'the comparatively shallow placing of Anglo-Saxon roots in the New Zealand soil',Holcroft, Deepening Stream, p. 21.
and a contributor to Tomorrow wrote that an indigenous literature 'is not a plant which can be healthily forced … pinus insignis and the ubiquitous willow, sprout how they may at the moment, are not to be compared with good hard kauri'.'News and Views', Tomorrow, 4, 22 (31 August 1938), p. 674.
Much earlier, William Pember Reeves had likened 'rear[ing …] an English rose' to the parenting that was itself symbolic of colonisation, and in William Satchell's The Elixir of Life, it was said that after finding New Zealand hard, an immigrant would 'begin to take root, and then New Zealand will be "God's Own Country" to him and he will be a New Zealander.'William Pember Reeves, 'A Colonist in His Garden', in Curnow, ed., Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, pp. 98-101; Satchell quoted in E. M. Smith, 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. 65.
The concept of adaptation pressed this metaphor further, inquiring into the effect of the new soil on the roots of the plant.
The 'roots' of these ideas and figures of speech lie in romantic (initially German) conceptions of cultures as organic but mutable. Some early nineteenth-century observers of New Zealand speculated on the possibilities of immigrants and immigrant cultures changing in response to the new environment. Among these were 'Ernest' Dieffenbach and Thomas Cholmondeley.Ernest Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand; with Contributions to the Geography, Geology, Botany, and Natural History of That Country, 2 vols, London, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 2-3; Thomas Cholmondeley, Ultima Thule; or, Thoughts Suggested by a Residence in New Zealand, London, 1854, pp. 311, 316-17.
The notion of the adaptation of culture to environment, and the use of botanical metaphors to describe it, pre-date Social Darwinism, which one might expect to have been their point of origin. However, social Darwinist accounts of adaptation differ substantially from the earlier discussions. The writings of Dieffenbach and Cholmondeley (and Wakefield) talked of transplantation leading to degeneration or at best to the maintenance of a racial status quo, whereas later writers allowed themselves more optimism. The discussions of the fortunes of 'British' masculinity transferred to the South, for example, admit of potential for 'improvement'.See Phillips, Man's Country?, chs 1-3.
McCormick's metanarrative of colonial development thus drew on the discourse of early colonisers themselves. Its ambitions alone make it worth examining. Not all of the surveys' authors took up the idea, though. The books on discovery and exploration could hardly be expected to be organised around adaptation, but the trope's absence from Simpson's The Women of New Zealand and Wood's New Zealand in the World is more surprising. The survey on science was, as we shall see, a failure all round. Duff's New Zealand Now made some gestures toward the idea.Duff, New Zealand Now, pp. 1-2, 28-9.
Four surveys made concerted, though varying, efforts at using adaptation as an organising principle: those on government, farming, education, and literature and art.
In the preface to Government in New Zealand, Webb said that the book was 'designed to show what modifications the New Zealand environment has produced in the British system of representative government and how New Zealand political institutions differ from corresponding political institutions in Great Britain and in other British Dominions.'Webb, Government in New Zealand, p. vii.
The book outlined those differences more often than it traced the process of adaptation that led to them. In one important case the 'adaptation' described was not to the New Zealand 'environment' but to 'the principles of commercial accountancy', an adaptation, Webb said, that other countries could make too.Ibid., pp. 119, 108.
Webb's main case of adaptation in McCormick's sense was local government. Early colonists inherited a putatively English distrust of centralisation, and in Canterbury, 'local government began with an interesting attempt to transplant the direct democracy of the English parish to colonial soil.' Anti-centralism faltered before 'the centripetal tendency inherent in the modern state' and the sparse population and weak social structure that allowed the state to expand so greatly in nineteenth-century New Zealand.Ibid., pp. 123-5; see also pp. 74-5.
Alley and Hall's The Farmer in New Zealand conjured with two senses of 'adaptation'. As well as adaptation in McCormick's sense, there was adaptability, the experimentality and Jack-and-Jill-of-all-trades character routinely attributed to pioneers.Alley and Hall, Farmer in New Zealand, pp. 76-83, 141.
Unlike some pioneer-myth-makers, however, Alley and Hall pointed out that there were failures among the pioneers. Only those individuals who could adapt best were successful.Ibid., pp. 51-2, 85.
Adaptation in the McCormick sense, however, was discussed with regard to the first decades of organised settlement. The revision of 'preconceptions' with the experience of New Zealand conditions was referred to, and specific adaptations were described, including the need for more nomadic grazing than in England, the breeding of different hybrids of sheep.Ibid., pp. 50-53.
It was, however, some way short of the Tutira-style relationship of detail and narrative envisaged in McCormick's ideal history of New Zealand farming.
The survey on education used adaptation most thoroughly and with considerable illumination. A. E. Campbell wrote most of the survey, but C. E. Beeby was initially entrusted with it and it was he who wrote the first chapter, 'Geography and History', which set out the plan to which Campbell adhered. In Educating New Zealand, adaptation was the result of a dialogue between 'geography' and 'history'—in effect, New Zealand's physical (and colonial) conditions, and English and Scottish educational traditions. (The education of Maori was not discussed in the book.) Adaptation to colonial conditions occurred first with farmers and others involved in 'primary necessities'; education and literature lagged behind, imitating a homeland frozen in the mind at the point when immigrants left it.Campbell, Educating New Zealand, pp. 4-5.
The argument of Educating New Zealand was that 'the historical principle of maintaining cultural continuity played a greater part in forming the education system of New Zealand than did the geographical principle of adaptation to a new environment'.Ibid., p. 6.
The division between primary and post-primary education, inherited from England, persisted long after the New Zealand education system's development made such a division artificial.Ibid., pp. 72-3.
The 'geographical principle' did make some gains, such as the swing to centralisation of the control of education with the improvement in communications from the 1870s and a lack of strong voluntary organisations.Ibid., pp. 73.
The persistence of many English traditions, however, was cast as inappropriate and stifling, a consequence of the 'colonial conservatism' of idealising a distant England.Ibid., pp. 106, 116-9.
The irony of such clinging to English forms was that in a different context the end product diverged sharply from English practice in the late 1930s.Ibid., p. 108.
Thus Campbell did 'remember … our failures'. Indeed, in showing the drawbacks of high levels of accessibility and high averages of achievement in the New Zealand education system, like Webb with pragmatism, he made a near-failure of something usually praised as a distinctive New Zealand success.
The Centennial surveys, then, were more complex than the cultural equivalent of 'fireworks and decorated cars'. Even those which dealt largely in stereotypes were not entirely predictable, because their emphases were not always those of Pakeha society generally. The Anzac myth, the social laboratory and 'good' race relations kept relatively low profiles. The stereotype of the pioneer, however, figured prominently, and other European heroes were brought within its orbit. Hence, for example, the claim that missionaries were 'pioneers' of European settlement.Simpson, Women of New Zealand, pp. 2, 17.
Some of the surveys, however, employed the pioneer tradition in novel ways—for structural and argumentative principles rather than for stock personae—and sometimes suggested that the pioneer's relevance as an ideal was fading.
Even more fundamental than pioneer traditions was the idea of colonisation itself—'colonisation' in the sense of creation rather than the destruction which that creation entailed. The subject of the series was, overwhelmingly, Pakeha New Zealand, the colonisation of and sometimes the adaptation to the antipodes. The history of settlement became 'New Zealand' history. Intercultural compact and conflict, both of which served as the metanarratives of other New Zealand histories, became dwarfed by the work of building Pakeha society. In another Internal Affairs commemoration several years later, Allen Curnow wrote of 'The stain of blood that writes an island story'.Allen Curnow, 'Landfall in Unknown Seas', in Curnow, ed, Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, p. 208.
In the Centennial surveys, it was the stain of sweat that wrote the island story.
The strand of this 'island story' that McCormick's Letters and Art explored was that of Pakeha identity, the work of building a 'home in thought'. All the surveys addressed questions of identity, but none as extensively as Letters and Art. Like other young, university-educated members of the Centennial staff, McCormick saw literature and art as primary sources or indices of national identity. McCormick explored the development of New Zealand literature—my focus in this section—in terms of 'adaptation', but he did not focus on the adaptation of literary forms to New Zealand conditions. He was concerned with the adaptation of European culture generally—the creation of a Pakeha spirit and a literature in tune with it. 'The Spirit of New Zealand' was one of the titles originally suggested for Letters and Art, and the book was, in effect, a historical survey of Pakeha identity.Unsigned, undated (late 1938?) list of proposed titles for the Centennial surveys, with corrections and additions in McCormick's handwriting, IA1 62/8/1, part 2. See also McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 59, 69.
McCormick sought to relate literature to social, economic and cultural factors, so that 'literature' would illuminate 'history' and vice versa. The links he made between literary and other histories were not token. For this reason and because of its narrative about Pakeha identity, Letters and Art is not out of place in a thesis on historical writing. In its impact and in the wide range of contexts it re-worked, the book has an importance beyond its significance as a representative Centennial survey.
Among the contexts McCormick's book synthesised were adaptation, the masculinist poetics of 1930s New Zealand writers, the founding texts of English romanticism, and existing works of literary historiography. The existence of two 'rehearsals' for the book, McCormick's Masters theses on New Zealand literature at Victoria University College (1929) and Cambridge University (1935), make it possible to track more fully the appropriations and combinations that constitute Letters and Art.E. H. McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', MA thesis, Victoria University College, 1929, MSX-4251, ATL; McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand: An Essay in Cultural Criticism', MLitt thesis, Cambridge University, 1935, MSX-4250, ATL. To distinguish these two theses in the footnotes, the Victoria thesis will be referred to as 'Literature in New Zealand' and the Cambridge one as 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism'.
These theses will be referred to frequently. The Victoria MA thesis was a string of brief discussions of poetry and fiction, in which romantic criticisms of New Zealand literature were quite explicit. The Cambridge MLitt cast its net wider, looking at Maori literature and non-fiction as well. It examined writing in a well documented social and political context. Much of it was reproduced in Letters and Art.For a fuller discussion of the differences between the two theses see M. P. K. Sorrenson, 'The Making of Letters and Art in New Zealand' in James Ross, Linda Gill and Stuart McRae, eds, Writing a New Country: A Collection of Essays Presented to E. H. McCormick in His 88th Year, Auckland, 1993.
The antagonist in Letters and Art was the literary inheritance of English writers, which acted as a dead weight on the colonial imagination, frustrating the growth of a national spirit in some cases, and in others depriving an emerging spirit of an authentic voice. Literary modes out of fashion in Britain and America persisted in New Zealand.McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', p. 37.
The most pernicious of these was 'a debased and senile Romanticism'McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 192.
—imitations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, their late nineteenth-century reincarnations such as Swinburne, and their Georgian successors.These charges of romanticism were not just invented by the enemies of earlier New Zealand poetry. In a letter to McCormick defending his 'venerable coevals' against the distaste of 'the whole younger generation', the erstwhile anthology-editor W. F. Alexander placed the work of older New Zealand poets in the tradition of 'that older romanticism wh.[ich] filled music & painting as well as poetry for a century, giving us Keats & Scott & Coleridge &, with a last spurt, Rossetti and Swinburne, & centuries earlier got into Vergil & Shakespeare & Lord knows what besides, though it didn't dominate [them? then?]'. Alexander to McCormick, 23 February 1941, McCormick Papers, 166/14.
From Alfred Domett's Ranolf and Amohia to the Kowhai Gold anthology of 1930, this 'romanticism' marred poetry; feeble or awkward Victorian fictional traits, most notably melodrama, likewise blighted fiction.McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 63.
The telos of Letters and Art, the creation of an indigenous literature in tune with and partly creating this national spirit, was reached in the 1930s, and it entailed a triumph over the soporific effects of the old-world inheritance.
The first few chapters dealt with writing (such as explorers' accounts) which McCormick discussed for its factual value rather than its literary merits. In the mid-1840s, New Zealand history really began. Texts appeared that could be taken seriously as literature: that is, texts which were of interest for their internal workings as well as for their constructions of historical events. Among others, McCormick considered Jerningham Wakefield's Adventure in New Zealand, Ernst Dieffenbach's Travels in New Zealand, George Grey's Polynesian Mythology, Samuel Butler's First Year in Canterbury Settlement, and Maning's Old New Zealand. In Letters and Art, these works remained the most durably valuable works of New Zealand literature written prior to 1900. The only later 'great' works of non-fiction were The Long White Cloud and Tutira. Twentieth-century ethnology and history were briefly praised but no individual texts were discussed.Ibid., pp. 124, 149.
In keeping with the agenda of the Centennial publications, non-fiction writing about Maori, working more or less In the mode of 'patriotic exoticism', was elided in favour of a more settler-focused narrative.Unlike Letters and Art, McCormick's MLitt thesis had a chapter on Maori literature.
One reason for the high status accorded to non-fiction works before 1900 may be that there was less competition from more 'creative' writing.M. H. Holcroft, 'New Zealand Literature in the Making: E. H. McCormick's Centennial Survey', undated clipping from unspecified newspaper [Southland Times, late 1940?], McCormick Papers, 166/14.
Another reason is that non-fiction inevitably engages, at least in some degree, with the 'outside' world. McCormick sharply criticised much other nineteenth-century literature for not engaging with the world. He discussed a number of doggerel rhymes and satires and while unable to elevate them to the level of art, he treated their homeliness with sympathy. But 'the mass of New Zealand verse' in the mid-to-late nineteenth century differed only superficially from the work of 'minor versifier[s]' anywhere else in the English-speaking world.McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 96-7.
McCormick concluded: 'One meets with minor felicities of rhythm and phrase, sincere tributes to natural beauty, the worthiest of sentiments. But none of the writers seem to have any vital relationship with the life about them, they rarely experiment with new forms or measures, and they even more rarely discard the clichés of Romantic verse to use the language of everyday speech'.Ibid., p. 97.
Alfred Domett was deemed the most excessive example of this failing. McCormick described Domett's vibrant life and commented wistfully: 'how little of this has crept into the interminable cantos of his "South-Sea Day Dream"', Ranolf and Amohia.Ibid., p. 94.
Domett belonged to the period of 'opening up'. Though the poets themselves bore some of the blame for this situation, the period was not one friendly to the arts, being characterised by material demands and the extraordinary 'disruptions' of the New Zealand Wars, gold rushes and pioneering.Ibid., p. 91-2.
For McCormick 'the next clearly defined phase of New Zealand's history, roughly bounded by the nineties',Ibid., p. 104
brought with it greater stability and the potential for artistic improvement. But this promise was not fully realised. The literature of the nineties was premature; the younger writers were striving 'to give voice to a national spirit that was hardly yet in being'.Ibid., pp. 109, 125.
McCormick took Jessie Mackay, an icon for older critics such as Alan Mulgan, to be the 'spiritual representative' of the 'new generation' of the nineties.Ibid., p. 107; Mulgan, 'Tribute to Jessie Mackay', typescript of a talk broadcast on 28 August 1938, Mulgan Papers, 224/18.
For McCormick, Mackay was most accomplished when writing about the distant past or foreign heroes; when 'her vision is focused nearer home', she was not convincing.McCormick, Letters and Art, p, 109.
An 'inveterate romantic', 'her allegiance was uneasily divided between the world of her parents and her immediate environment'.Ibid.
The novels of the period exhibited a similar, though apparently more thoroughgoing maladjustment.Ibid., p. 117.
They did, however, demonstrate a proto-nationalist independence of outlook unmatched until the 1930s. For McCormick, the hesitant endeavours of the writers of the nineties towards an indigenous literature 'petered out in frustration and indifference'.Ibid., p. 125.
New Zealand at the time lacked cultural resources sufficient to nourish their work, and the stability of the period had given rise to a complacency—part of what André Siegfried called snobbisme.Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, ch. 21.
In literature, snobbisme meant an abandonment of nationalist projects and the leisurely imitation of English writers. When William Pember Reeves left for England, he chose the way 'which was, generally speaking, to be the way for the next thirty years in both art and in letters'.McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 105.
Thus, in those thirty years, most New Zealand writers, caught, like Adelaide Borlase in Edith Searle Grossman's The Heart of the Bush, 'Between Two Hemispheres',Ibid, pp. 126-9.
opted for the northern hemisphere, and wrote of a world that did not exist. For McCormick the literary high points of the years 1900-1930 were the work of Katherine Mansfield and H. Guthrie-Smith: unsurprisingly, McCormick's discussion of them was structured around the ways in which they, unlike their contemporaries, navigated between these hemispheres. In Letters and Art, Mansfield's significance for New Zealand literature derived from her accurate representation of New Zealand and as an example of the personal integrity necessary for 'literature, in the highest sense'.Ibid., p. 140. A similar claim was made in Ian Milner, 'A Note on Katherine Mansfield', Phoenix, 1, 1, (March 1932), unpaginated.
McCormick did not treat Mansfield as acting out or working out the colonial tension between the Old World and the New—instead, she got the best of both worlds. She developed her talent only after her return to England in 1909, but that talent found 'its perfect material in the experiences of [her] early New Zealand years'.McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 134.
In McCormick's account, Guthrie-Smith more than Mansfield worked through the relationships between the different hemispheres. Guthrie-Smith acclimatised through a process of persistent and thickly described scrutiny of local conditions.Ibid., pp. 154-5.
What of the novelists of this time? In his MA thesis, McCormick described the 1920s as the relative 'golden age' of the novel, a decade whose prominent novelists were women. Women, he wrote, were suited to subtle, sympathetic, detailed fiction; 'but New Zealand is a more suitable environment for stories of masculine endeavour, and of pioneering conflicts, a fact which women writers have recognised, though they have seldom been able to treat such themes with necessary vigour and power.'McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', pp. 112-3.
Women themselves were poorly adapted to New Zealand conditions, and were not in tune with the spirit of New Zealand. Letters and Art said nothing so bald, but it distanced women writers from the 'national spirit' that, at the end of the book, McCormick identified with strongly masculinist writing. Grossman was criticised for didacticism, moralism and melodrama; Jane Mander's The Story of a New Zealand River had a well-drawn setting but was marred by 'an excessive emotionalism, which sometimes brings it down to the level of a novelette, and the occasional falsity of the plot'.McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 110-12, 146-8. Jean Devanny, characterised in McCormick's MA thesis as melodramatic and crude but worthy of consideration, warrants only a passing swipe in Letters and Art. McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', p. 116; Letters and Art, p. 148.
The trivialising operations of this comment are intriguing: emotionalism makes the work like a novellette, not a novella. Mander's identification with 'excessive emotionalism' and Grossman's with melodrama linked them with the spectre of Victorianism, a literary mode unsuited to the New Zealand soil. One begins to discern a relationship between femininity and McCormick's literary bêtes noirs.
This association becomes stronger when one looks at McCormick's discussion of poetry of the twenties, which he saw as creating (to quote Letters and Art) 'an abstract idealised, often sentimentalised "literary" world, remote from … reality'.McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 162.
A passage from the Cambridge thesis illustrates the point luridly. McCormick was discussing the poetry of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, poetry he saw as 'a further stage in the process of Romantic development or deterioration',McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 222.
and as slavishly Anglophile—it was poetry that followed the path of Reeves, not Adelaide Borlase. McCormick found a female bias in Kowhai Gold, the peak, he thought, of this poetic tradition: 57% of the authors were women, and 66% of the total entries were by women. 'And from internal evidence it would often be extremely difficult to decide whether a poet or poetess were responsible for a set of verses.' By way of illustration he reproduced excerpts from two lullabies and two poems about fairies, and challenged the reader to work out which poem in each pair is written by a man. He went on: 'These corner-stones of a national literature [as the editor of Kowhai Gold had claimed its contents to be] have been unearthed not to illustrate the effeminacy of certain male versifiers (we could not legitimately expect any poet to stamp the mark of virility on every line of his work) but rather the general nature of the modern New Zealand poetic world, frequented in common by men and women.' Despite the protestation, it is clear that, whether written by men or women, such poetry was deemed feminine.Ibid., pp. 223-4.
It was also foreign, 'completely remote' from the 'natural and social environment' of New Zealand.Ibid., p. 224
Letters and Art made no explicit conflation of femininity with artificiality and maladjustment to New Zealand conditions, but the assumption underwrote the argument of the book. This may be demonstrated by an examination of the book's final chapter, when the telos of an indigenous literature is reached, and found to be strongly masculine.
McCormick began his discussion of the 1930s less emphatically than those who had touted the Centennial as a 'coming of age': for him, New Zealand had 'signs, few but positive, of adult nationhood'.McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 170.
One of the first suggestions 'of a new impulse' was Phoenix. Though mildly critical of Phoenix, McCormick claimed it as a cultural leap forward.Ibid., pp. 170-72.
He presented it as earnestly nationalist, and obscured its earnest internationalism. McCormick beat internationalist leanings in the poetry of Fairburn, Curnow, Mason and Glover with the familiar stick of unindigenousness. Furthermore, '[w]here this group has failed is in their inability, in their more serious work, to come to terms with their social environment'. Fairburn's Dominion was seen as a Procrustean attempt to stretch the New Zealand body politic onto a rack of foreign dogma; Glover indulged in 'facile tributes to the proletariat', and all four had 'an undiscriminating devotion to the younger English poets'.Ibid., pp. 188-89.
Fiction fared better at coming to terms with its 'social environment'. Robin Hyde and John A. Lee constituted an advance in the examination of New Zealand material in a distinctively New Zealand manner, but the biggest breakthroughs were made by John Mulgan and, even more so, Frank Sargeson. Sargeson had four things going for him in McCormick's estimate: imagination, technique, a feel for the 'language and rhythm' of a variety of New Zealand modes of speech, and an understanding of a New Zealand 'underdog' outlook. Sargeson wrote worthy tributes to the proletariat. McCormick discussed this outlook in explicitly masculinist terms, and linked it to an 'unwritten' New Zealand identity developing since the gold rushes. 'Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, Frank Sargeson is traditional to a greater degree than any other New Zealand writer of to-day; he is the exponent of a local tradition that has hitherto been inarticulate.'Ibid., p. 182.
That the height of indigenousness should be so masculine casts further light on the gendered subtext of the book. As Sargeson's indigenous down-to-earthness opposed misplaced, artificial Victorianism and Georgianism, so, by implication, did his concomitant masculinism oppose sentimentalism and effeminacy. McCormick did not 'write women out' of literary history: what he did was exclude from the privileged category of the indigenous any literature that was artificial and feeble, characteristics that, in his work, were associated with femininity.
By 1940 then, New Zealand literature had cast off some of its unsuitable (feminine) inheritances and exhibited signs of 'adult' (masculine) nationhood. McCormick's MA thesis had explicitly likened the colony's cultural development to the maturing of a young man: 'Every young country, like every ambitious young man, longs for immediate greatness.'McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', p. 8.
Letters and Art was a cultural Bildungsroman, the story of a young nation's struggles to find itself and establish itself as something faithful to, yet distinct from, its mother. Given the effeminacy with which literary 'England' is clothed in Letters and Art, the use of that gendered term may be even more relevant than usual.
The irony of McCormick's narrative of struggle against a debased romanticism was that it drew heavily on the ideas of the early romantics themselves, in particular Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads. McCormick used Wordsworth's arguments about literary self-regulation, the authorial self and poetic diction, and transformed them by combining them with Sargesonian poetics, the idea of a national spirit, and the trope of adaptation.Donal Smith attributes McCormick's argument about New Zealand literary development as a struggle with artificial, inappropriate literary inheritances to the influence of McCormick's Cambridge mentor F. R. Leavis's ideas of 'the literary', set out in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). (Donal Smith, 'Eric McCormick's Cambridge' in Ross, Gill and McRae, eds, Writing a New Country, pp. 47-50.) However, McCormick had obviously not read this book in 1929, when he made a similar argument in his MA thesis. In Letters and Art, the romantic terminology of the two theses is pared. back, and the debt to the romantics not explicit. A more direct influence was Leavis's advice to McCormick to study New Zealand writing—not 'literature'—in a 'sociological' or 'anthropological' way, as in his wife Q. D. Leavis's work. See Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, London, 1932, pp. xiv, xv, and Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism, London, 1995, p. 144. However, the MLitt thesis and Letters and Art are much more concerned than is Fiction and the Reading Public with writing rather than the institutions of literature.
For Wordsworth, literature had to be the product of an active engagement between self and world, an engagement true to everyday life and expressed in everyday language. Artificial literary practices deadened the imagination and enfeebled literature. In 1800, the most glaring examples of bad literature were 'frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse'.William Wordsworth, 'Preface' to Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1805, ed. Derek Roper, London, 1976, p. 25.
These were symptoms of the way literature could act as a closed system, independent of non-literary reality. 'The earliest poets', wrote Wordsworth '… generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men; feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative'. But such precedents allowed later poets to mimic the motifs of the greats 'mechanical[ly]', 'without having the same animating passion'.Wordsworth, 'Appendix', in Lyrical Ballads, p. 252; 'Preface', p. 27.
The same general argument underpinned Letters and Art. One instance of it was the complaint quoted above about how literary preconceptions robbed Domett's work of the vitality of his life. In the two theses, McCormick's language as well as his arguments echoed Wordsworth. In the MA thesis, he wrote: 'When literary stimulus is not life itself, but the static inspiration of books, there can be no production of true literature.'McCormick, 'Literature in New Zealand', p. 37.
His dismissal of Kowhai Gold in the MLitt thesis articulated that Wordsworthian sense of lifelessness in poetry: 'Nihil ex nihilo fit'; nothing will come of nothing.McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 222.
When poetic 'language' became self-regulating, cut off from everyday language and passions, it became a means of escape. That such escapist dreaming was barren and dangerous was a theme that pervades Keats' 'mature' poetry; related ideas underlay Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination.S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols, Oxford, 1907, vol. 1, p. 202.
The idea that poetry should be escapist was anathema to Wordsworth, who deplored those 'who talk of poetry as a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac, or sherry.'Wordsworth, 'Preface', pp. 32-3. Though Wordsworth talks of 'poetry', most of his comments are applicable to prose too. He uses 'poetry' to mean something more than good writing in metrical form, and plays down the differences between poetry and prose. Ibid., pp. 28, 29n; Wordsworth, 'Appendix', p. 257.
McCormick too saw the literary enemy as deadening and escapist—in his MLitt thesis he criticised 'pioneer verse' as 'narcotic'.McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 104. See also McCormick, Letters and Art, p. 93.
But where Wordsworth's standard is primarily moral, McCormick's is nationalist. 'Sentimental', 'decorative' poetry is escapist in that it escaped to England. It evaded the challenges of building a New Zealand 'home in thought', of staying to work in the garden of Reeves' colonist.
This distinction between McCormick's argument and Wordsworth's recurs in their differing treatments of the authorial self to which literature must be true. For Wordsworth the self was implicated in, not external to, the construction of the phenomenal world, and the poet was a privileged interpreter, endowed with peculiar receptivity, feeling, thought and expression. 'But these passions and thoughts and feelings', he asserted, 'are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men.'Wordsworth, 'Preface', p. 37.
McCormick's writings embodied a different cult of the author. The authorial self intersected with the 'self' of the nation, 'the Spirit of New Zealand'. When 'the local versifier' wrote, he was, largely because of a heavy diet of English literature, 'probably suppressing a great deal of his "New Zealand self"'.McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 234.
McCormick was duly attentive to personal integrity as essential for writing, but New Zealand itself became co-author of the better works of literature.Rachel Barrowman writes that the 'discourse of New Zealand cultural nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s expresses … [an] ambivalence regarding the role of the artist. It … contains a strong emphasis on originating and creating while simultaneously subscribing to an organic model of culture', the development of which is 'a natural process'. Barrowman, A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950, Wellington, 1991, pp. 232-3.
In this connection it is constructive to compare the readings of Sargeson and John Mulgan in Letters and Art with those of Mansfield and Guthrie-Smith. Whether because their authors were dead, or because of their well known or explicit autobiographical aspects, Tutira and Mansfield's stories—those formative events in the growth of an indigenous literature—were discussed in relation to their authors' lives; Man Alone and Sargeson's stories were not. Other critics were freely biographical about contemporary authors, so decorum is not a readily apparent reason for this reserve, and McCormick had met Sargeson and could have said something about his life if he had wanted.Michael King, Frank Sargeson: A Life, Auckland, 1995, p. 192.
Whatever the reason, the resultant impression was that Man Alone and Conversation in a Train were products less of their authors' idiosyncrasies than of their attunement to 'the spirit of New Zealand', which was part subject-matter, part Muse.
Though they differed, both Wordsworth and McCormick stressed the importance of an authentic authorial self; both also stressed the need for that self to engage with everyday realities and write about them in an appropriately quotidian language. Wordsworth attempted to reject 'mechanical' poeticisms for 'the very language of men': 'I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood'.Wordsworth, 'Preface', p. 26; see also pp. 18, 21, 29, 43.
McCormick's criticism of the diction of Kowhai Gold a similar attitude: 'one finds expression in terms of traditional poetic phraseology—greenswards, coppices, darkling glades, dales, fields, cottages—to select random examples of words unknown to the vocabulary of the non-literary New Zealander'.McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', p. 224.
In Letters and Art, McCormick remarked that Satchell and other novelists dealt in a blandly international English, with no local traits; Anne Glenny Wilson's gallicisms were 'the insignia of a naive and uneasily assimilated culture'. Mander showed some improvement, and Lee, Hyde and John Mulgan showed still more 'sensitiveness to local nuances'. Sargeson was 'the highest point' of the trend towards the use of 'a distinctive New Zealand idiom'.McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 180-1; for Wilson see ibid., pp. 116-7.
McCormick's arguments about how literature should deal with 'real life' were related more directly to late nineteenth-century fiction and early twentieth-century 'social realism'Kai Jensen, Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature, Auckland, 1996, p. 42.
than to Wordsworth, though those movements owed a large debt of precedent to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's stress on '[l]ow and rustic life' and labour was tempered by a purism of sentiment: he talked repeatedly about making sure the content of poetry avoids 'disgust' and 'vulgarity'.Wordsworth, 'Preface', pp. 21, 29, 32.
Simon Lee's swollen ankles were as dangerously earthy as Wordsworth got. The masculinist literature associated with New Zealand's 'coming of age' in the 1930s had less need to expunge the gross. In New Zealand literature in the 1930s there was a frequent idealisation of working men, not just rural labourers, but also wharfies and construction workers.Wordsworth, incidentally, depicted female workers as well as male.
This emphasis extended beyond Glover and Fairburn to the more socialist writers crewing Tomorrow.Jensen, Whole Men, pp. 43-5.
More fundamental than socialist iconography were the dominant images of New Zealand masculinity. After all, this species of masculinism long outlasted the depression and the Popular Front cultural project.Jensen, Whole Men, p. 45.
The adaptation trope, I have argued, derived from romantic conceptions of culture as organic. Letters and Art, however, had a very attenuated relationship with romantic organicism, and McCormick formed his adaptation thesis out of materials much closer to him in time and place. The important connection between adaptation and romanticism was one that Letters and Art itself made. Adaptation provided a narrative framework for the romantic critique McCormick employed. With its ideas of literary genuineness in terms of language, the self and the everyday ranged against literary artificiality, the preface to Lyrical Ballads supplied McCormick and, to varying degrees, his New Zealand predecessors with a criterion of value; Tutira provided a narrative structure for the changing fortunes of New Zealand literature in relation to that criterion.
Letters and Art was not the first work of New Zealand literary historiography out of nothing, but earlier general surveys were cursory. Literary histories were seldom published as stand-alone works. More often they were published on particular occasions (such as the Centennial, or Authors' Week in 1936), and in anthology prefaces. However, the body of writing on the subject was not negligible, and I need to discuss it briefly to indicate the extent to which McCormick altered literary history.
The anthropologically influenced theoretical section of McCormick's Cambridge MLitt thesis was entitled 'Cultural Criticism'. Cultural criticism of less theorised sorts was common in New Zealand literary historiography before McCormick. Commentators related the inadequacies of New Zealand literature to social and economic conditions. One reason for this was the nationalist undertow of literary criticism. A premium was placed on writing that was distinct to 'New Zealand'. Some critics and historians, in particular the unjustifiably forgotten Elizabeth Maisie Smith, argued that a lack of confidence in New Zealand culture and history retarded good literature. New Zealand writers were 'lavish in their use of local colour' but seldom 'captur[ed] the spirit of the country'.Smith, History of New Zealand Fiction, p. 59; see also pp. 62-3.
Here, and in W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie's claim that New Zealand verse caught little of New Zealand life, one can see rehearsals of McCormick's romantic and nationalist critique.Alexander and Currie, 'Introduction', to Alexander and Currie, eds., New Zealand Verse, pp. xxvi-xxvii. The revised (1926) edition of this anthology did not have a comparable, updated introduction. The original introduction was removed and replaced with a bland one-page preface. Alexander and Currie, eds., Treasury of New Zealand Verse: Being a New Edition of New Zealand Verse, Auckland, 1926, p. iii.
In this respect McCormick's work was a development rather than a break. And while some were outraged at McCormick's omissions, many of his emphases for the years before 1930 were the same as those of other critics.See King, Frank Sargeson, p.203.
Mansfield, for instance, was of great importance not only to McCormick but also to commentators as different as the Ian Milner of Phoenix, Arthur Sewell of Auckland University College, and PEN stalwarts such as Pat Lawlor and Scholefield.Milner, 'A Note on Katherine Mansfield'; Arthur Sewell, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Essay, Auckland, 1936; Lawlor, Books and Bookmen, pp. 22-5, 120-9. Scholefield contributed a chapter on Mansfield to her father's memoirs: Harold Beauchamp, Reminiscences and Recollections, New Plymouth, 1937, pp. 190-217. For another slice of popular Mansfieldiana see Tom L. Mills, 'Katherine Mansfield: How Kathleen Beauchamp Came into Her Own', New Zealand Railways Magazine, 8, 5 (September 1933), pp. 6-7.
In his assessments of the 'quality' of New Zealand literature, McCormick diverged from his predecessors in his praise of the writers who made their debuts in the thirties, and in his marginalisation of twentieth-century non-fiction and his exclusion of short fiction and verse that mimicked the Bulletin. The exclusion of Australian-inspired balladry and yarns denied the mantle of unlettered frontiersmen to anyone but Sargeson. It also removed evidence that conflicted with McCormick's argument about the unremitting anglophilia of the literature of the first three decades of the twentieth century.When apparently prodded towards the Bulletin's Red Page by Heenan, McCormick said he had little knowledge of it. McCormick to Heenan, 2 October 1940, Heenan Papers, 1132/134.
McCormick's exclusion of recent non-fiction also made it easier for him to ignore non-anglophile writing such as Andersen's. In Letters and Art, as we have seen, Tutira is the only important work of twentieth-century non-fiction. By contrast in Scholefield and Alan Mulgan's surveys of New Zealand writing across a range of genres, scholarly writing appears as no less important than so-called imaginative work.Scholefield, 'Social Life and Culture', pp. 247-8; Mulgan, Literature and Authorship, ch. 1.
Even Smith praised Buick and Cowan alongside Maning and Reeves.Smith, History of New Zealand Fiction, pp. 73, 36-7.
Reviewing Letters and Art on the radio, J. H. E. Schroder wondered why no room had been found for Acland's Early Canterbury Runs or the work of biographers such as Stewart.'Art and Letters in New Zealand by E. H. McCormick: Talk from 3YA by J. H. E. Schroder', nd [1940], McCormick Papers, 166/14.
Cowan's splenetic response to the book ('a lopsided, immature estimate of our literature') is interesting in this regard.Cowan to Pat Lawlor, 7 January 1941, Pat Lawlor MSS L418N, folder 1, VUW.
Among other things he deplored the absence of Herbert Williams' Maori dictionary, and the work of Edward Tregear and John Macmillan Brown on the Maori language.Cowan, 'Omissions: The Study of Maori: Speech and Literature', typescript of a review or a note on Letters and Art, published in the Auckland Star on 12 February 1941; copy in P. A. Lawlor Papers, MS Papers 4310, ATL.
Cowan's insistence on the importance of some non-fiction texts overlapped with his concern that Maori subjects were declining as a literary inspiration.Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', pp. 534-5.
It is possible to argue that in the absence of a strong body of fiction and poetry, early twentieth-century ethnological and historical writing served aesthetic as well as factual purposes, just as Old New Zealand, Adventure in New Zealand and so on had a factual as well as an aesthetic value. The work of the Polynesian Society had long engaged with exoticist passions, and in the interwar period traditionalist members resisted the incursion of work on material culture into the society's Journal, preferring 'articles on the language, songs, chants and mentality of the Native Race'.Norman Potts to Elsdon Best, 25 January 1926, quoted in Sorrenson, Manifest Duty, p. 65.
Aspects of New Zealand history were often described as 'romantic'.See chs 3 and 4, above, and Elder, Goldseekers and Bushrangers, pp. 5, 34, 37; Condliffe, Short History, p. 193. Gillespie, 'Preface' to Gillespie, ed., New Zealand Short Stories, p. vi, claimed that New Zealand's history 'lack[ed] much romantic material usually found in a new land'. Consider also the titles of these books: A. J. Harrop, The Romance of Westland: The Story of New Zealand's Golden Coast, Auckland, 1923; and N. R. McKenzie, The Gael Fares Forth: The Romantic Story of Waipu and Her Sister Settlements, 2nd edn, Wellington, 1942. This sample is not exhaustive.
The terms of praise were aesthetic as well as empirical, making the past itself an aesthetic phenomenon. Cowan's response to Beaglehole's claim that New Zealand had no great literature was to say that it did not need one, because it had an exciting past.Cowan, 'New Zealand History: Its Teaching and Its Uses', p. 56. Cowan did not name his target, but the offending comment—'Not enough men have died in this land. Not in letters nor in art has life crystallised and ennobled itself'—came from Beaglehole, New Zealand, p. 159.
In other circumstances, literature may be a proxy for history; for some readers and writers in early twentieth-century New Zealand, history became a proxy for literature.
Letters and Art brought non-fiction down from the pedestals on which they had been set: McCormick's book inaugurated the marginalisation of non-autobiographical non-fiction in New Zealand literary criticism that Terry Sturm has diagnosed for the half-century before 1991.Sturm, 'Introduction' to Sturm, ed., Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. xiii.
In this way, McCormick departed from the practice of his predecessors. He re-wrote their work in other ways, too, taking inchoate romantic and nationalist critiques and combining them with a variety of other poetics and with the narrative structure of adaptation. His book was vastly different from any earlier literary history, but it retained some of the assumptions of earlier literary history and criticism, chiefly the belief that literature should be true to life, true to the self, and true to the nation. Those three things, self, life and nation, overlapped in McCormick and his predecessors, all assuming that a national literature, a truly New Zealand literature, would automatically be a nationalist literature. When nationhood was a goal rather than an existing reality, the terms 'national' and 'nationalist' blurred into each other. And when 'New Zealand literature' was by definition nationalist, literary history was always one kind or other of cultural criticism.
Themes of non-academic histories filtered into Letters and Art and other surveys: they were, to varying degrees, syntheses of local and academic historiography. Different historiographical traditions came together in the Centennial project in another way too. While not rejecting the injunction to be 'popular but authoritative', the relatively young, university-trained members of the Centennial staff saw the surveys project as an opportunity to re-fashion New Zealand scholarship according to academic standards. Heenan did not quite see things this way, and some of the authors he insisted upon hiring produced manuscripts that, in Hall's words, 'belong[ed] to the tradition of New Zealand history writing which the Centennial Publications programme was designed to supersede'.Hall, 'Mr Cowan's Survey', 8 September 1939, IA1, 62/110/2.
The confrontations between the different kinds of historians who wrote Centennial surveys did not constitute a showdown that dramatically changed the New Zealand historical 'profession', but they illustrate the range of New Zealand historiographical practice, and the impact of university expansion, at the end of the period studied in this thesis.
Of those involved with the Centennial, it was Hall who was the most explicit about making the surveys a new beginning in New Zealand historical scholarship. As well as sniping comments to that effect about authors' manuscripts, he made a strong public announcement on the subject, after a writer in Tomorrow had complained: 'From present indications it appears that the Centenary celebrations are going to be little more than a glorious bean-feast.''News and Views', Tomorrow, 4, 21 (17 August 1938), p. 642.
Hall's reply stressed the substantial nature of the publications, and claimed: 'New Zealand History has always suffered from the enthusiastic amateur. What is valuable in his researches will now be more strictly assessed by trained minds, and something approaching a standardisation of that elusive entity, historical truth, achieved.'[D. O. W. Hall], 'The Centennial', Tomorrow, 4, 24 (28 September 1938), p. 766; draft copy dated 19 September 1938 in IA1, 62/9/15, part 1. The published version of the quoted passage is identical to the draft.
Hall the publicist may have been exaggerating the expectations of the Centennial staff, but he was not distorting the general orientation of some of its more important members. McCormick's autobiography records similar ambitions for the Centennial books.McCormick, Absurd Ambition, pp. 145-6.
His memoir was, of course, written long after the fact, but it is consistent with his practice as editor. Fourteen years after the Centennial Beaglehole decried the 'amateurishness' of New Zealand scholarship, and in the late 1930s he held similar views about the vulgarity of much 'amateur' writing.Beaglehole, 'New Zealand Scholar', p. 251.
For instance, when N. R. McKenzie approached Heenan in 1940 for a subsidy on a second edition of his book The Gael Fares Forth: The Romantic Story of Waipu and Her Sister Settlements, Beaglehole told Heenan that 'the republication of this book fills me with dismay'.Beaglehole to Heenan, c. 1940, quoted in Barrowman, '"Culture-organising"', p. 7.
The Centennial staff's implicit and sometimes explicit commitment to scholarship sometimes came into conflict with Heenan's actions. Heenan supported 'pure scholarship'Heenan to J. W. Davidson, 13 April 1942, Heenan Papers, 1132/48; Heenan to H. L. Mencken, 18 June 1942, Heenan Papers, 1132/152.
but he did not dream of a Centennial 'standardisation of … historical truth' on academic terms, and he had some reservations about touchy academics.Heenan to Parry, 29 June 1936, IA1, 62/7; Barrowman, '"Culture-organising"', p. 5.
He also insisted on looking after his 'old cobbers' by offering them survey commissions.McCormick, Absurd Ambition, pp. 145-6.
Of the clashes arising from this difference of opinion, the one that required the most editorial work concerned the survey on science in New Zealand. The Centennial staff had trouble finding a suitable author. A budding chemist, Edmund F. Hubbard,Edmund F. Hubbard, The Industrial Future of New Zealand, Wellington [1941], p. 5.
submitted an unsolicited outline. Duff said that it had the makings of an appropriately pitched survey, but Hubbard was not hired as he lacked the necessary scientific knowledge and authority.Hubbard to Duff, 2 July 1938; Duff to Heenan, 5 July 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
At the same time, Duff consulted the distinguished scientists W. P. Evans and Sir Thomas Easterfield. Both told him that science had become so specialised that no one writer could hope to survey the field.Easterfield to Duff, 29 June 1938; Evans to Duff, 11 July 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
They favoured a multi-author volume.Duff to Evans, 26 August 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
Some Editorial Committee members doubted that an author could be found, and felt that the important parts of the subject might be dealt with in Making New Zealand.Duff to Heenan, 23 March 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1.
Heenan insisted on the inclusion of science, and in August 1938 his friend S. H. Jenkinson was chosen to write the book.Booker, 'Centennial Surveys', p. 94; Duff to Evans, 26 August 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 2.
Jenkinson, as I have said, was an engineer in the Railways Department who also did some journalistic work.
Jenkinson decided to treat his subject biographically, in striking contrast to comparable surveys (such as The Farmer in New Zealand). The resultant book, New Zealanders and Science, was thus a pantheon of 'scientists', like an institutional anniversary publication.S. H. Jenkinson, New Zealanders and Science, Wellington, 1940.
As such it was squarely within the 'amateur' practice of avoiding synthesis and keeping the integrity of particularities. The planning committees had envisaged a book that would deal also with the impact on New Zealand of impersonal scientific developments such as refrigeration. Ruth Fletcher (later Ruth Allan), who was working as a research assistant for the Centennial publications, was given the task of re-writing the book completely, 'but even she could not wholly redeem it'.McCormick, Absurd Ambition, p. 146.
Jenkinson's biographical focus remained.
Heenan was also responsible for commissioning Cowan's Settlers and Pioneers, the excesses of which annoyed McCormick and Hall.McEldowney, 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', p. 570.
Hall wrote a swingeing critique of the manuscript, consigning it to the amateur tradition that needed to be superseded. He denounced it as anecdotal, inconsistent, and 'suffer[ing] markedly from the lack of any connected plan'. 'I cannot conceive that he undertook any research for the survey. He apparently looks to Railways Magazine [sic] rhetoric to cover his impudent sins of omission…. This survey, as it stands, would fall well below the standard of the rest. It is a work of emotion rather than scholarship.'Hall, 'Mr Cowan's Survey', 8 September 1939, IA1, 62/110/2.
Despite this criticism, however, little seems to have been done to rein Cowan in with the exception of removing the chapter on the Waikato War. The survey was not rewritten as Jenkinson's was.
As I have already said, from a distance of almost sixty years Settlers and Pioneers seems quite similar to Simpson's The Women of New Zealand. The Centennial staff, however, thought the latter an excellent piece of scholarship.Hall to McCormick, 16 October 1937, and other correspondence in IA1, 62/110/11. Reviewing both surveys in Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 2 (October 1940), pp. 142-3, Sylvia R. Smith classified Simpson's book as a 'historical survey' and Cowan's as a 'collection of reminiscences'. Smith was born Sylvia Masterman; she had written an MA thesis on Samoa at the University of London, and was teaching part-time at Victoria in 1940: Boyd, 'Women in the Historical Profession', p. 77.
The differences in their reception of the two texts illustrate their assumptions about professional and amateur modes of 'social history'. In Tomorrow Hall had promised: 'Aspects of social history never before described will become generally known through these surveys.'Hall, 'The Centennial', p. 766.
The Women of New Zealand was presumably the fruit of this quest. J. W. Davidson, a former Beaglehole student, Centennial research assistant and, by this time, doctoral student at Cambridge, thought the book 'brilliant', 'a landmark in the little touched field of New Zealand social history'.Davidson to Heenan, 28 August 1940, Heenan Papers, 1132/48.
In 1940, 'social history' did not mean 'history from below'. The work of J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond on English labourers was not endorsed by the elite of the English historical profession until the 1930s, and no New Zealand historian seems to have commented on it.Soffer, Discipline and Power, pp. 74-5.
William Cobbett's Rural Rides was floated as a model for Duff's New Zealand Now, in contrast to R. S. Lynd and Ellen M. Lynd's dangerously 'sociological' Middletown.Minutes of Standing Committee meeting, 8 October 1937, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1; minutes of Standing Committee meeting, 21 June 1937, IA1, 62/8, part 1. See also H. C. D. Somerset, Littledene: A New Zealand Rural Community, Auckland, 1938, pp. v, 52.
Social history meant a history of 'everyday' life (though not necessarily that of 'ordinary' people) composed from people's letters and diaries, and from contemporaries' observations of them. When social history was thus conceived in narrative rather than 'sociological' terms, it was structural and stylistic matters, not methodological ones, which meant that Simpson's book would be deemed social history and Cowan's deemed a clutch of sentimental anecdotes. Simpson's book was tightly structured, written in calmer prose, and more discreet than Cowan's in its statements of opinion. Its quotations from manuscript sources may have been more accurate than those in 'unprofessional' books, but the Centennial staff did not check them.It might be objected that Simpson's PhD in English from the University of London was the deciding factor in her legitimacy in the eyes of the Centennial staff. However, Sutch's PhD did not stop them from finding sloppiness, flabbiness and irrelevancies in his manuscript.
In taking a subject dear to non-university historians and writing a more orderly and temperate account of it, Simpson's survey performed a similar task to McClymont's (though with much more flair).Booker comments: '186 "explorers" are mentioned in 189 pages'. Booker, 'Centennial Surveys', p. 53n.
Both Simpson and McClymont were doing what Elder did with his books on goldmining and exploration. All three writers effected a 'standardisation' of amateur histories without questioning their assumptions about the cultural significance of their subjects and their methodological dependence on extensive quotation.
The other surveys (with the exception of Duff's, which was meant to be an exception) also applied professional academic standards to a body of work previously treated spasmodically or uncritically (though Beaglehole had covered some of his territory before with The Exploration of the Pacific). But only a few of the total eleven drowned out their predecessors, fully 'superseding' an earlier tradition.
Webb's Government in New Zealand quietly revised earlier views but was itself torn apart by Leslie Lipson in the Journal of Public Administration and later displaced by Lipson's The Politics of Equality.Heenan to Webb, 16 August 1940, Heenan Papers, 1132/250; Lipson, The Politics of Equality: New Zealand's Adventures in Democracy, Chicago, 1948, especially p. 233n.
The Farmer in New Zealand and Educating New Zealand sold poorly; their influence is difficult to trace, though the former was being used as a text for civil service training in 1945.L. A. Atkinson to A. K. Brady, 31 August 1945, IA1, 62/9/12.
Jenkinson's book sank without a trace. Simpson's Women of New Zealand (one of the best-sellers of the series),Sales figures in J. B. Clark to [A. K. Brady], 18 February 1944, IA1, 62/8/10, part 3; [Heenan?], report on Centennial publications, nd, [April or May 1942?], IA1, 62/8/10, part 3; Heenan to Davidson, 13 April 1942, Heenan Papers, 1132/48.
Cowan's Settlers and Pioneers and McClymont's The Exploration of New Zealand were all works in populous genres, and did not greatly change their fields.
Three surveys effectively replaced previous works. Beaglehole's Discovery of New Zealand, another of the best-sellers of the series, became a standard text.Clark to [Brady], 18 February 1944, IA1, 62/8/10, part 3.
Wood's New Zealand in the World 'broke new ground'.McEldowney, 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', p. 570.
It inaugurated a field of study. Letters and Art was perceived to have done so too, as is evinced in the widespread assumption that along with Allen Curnow's 1945 anthology introduction it is a founding document of New Zealand literary criticism. At the very least, its remapping of the canon to exclude most non-fiction helped to set the parameters of New Zealand literary criticism for decades. Letters and Art, New Zealand in the World and The Discovery of New Zealand were the only volumes of the survey series that fulfilled Hall's professed goal of a publishing programme to supersede amateur traditions.
These three were 'definitive' books, in the casual sense of long-lasting; McCormick's and Wood's were definitive also in the sense that they 'defined' new fields. Three such books and five other academically respectable ones were not a bad result. Dreams of 'a standardisation of that elusive entity, historical truth' could not be satisfied by a single publishing programme, as no doubt McCormick, Beaglehole, Hall and others knew. The professionalisation of New Zealand historical writing was not catalysed significantly by confrontations with 'amateur' historians such as the conflicts at the time of the Centennial. The increasing profile of academics' work on New Zealand history in the years after 1940 owed more to the gradual creation of a new, university-educated public than to battles with non-university historians for their audience. The significance of the Centennial disputes over the method, style, and subject-matter of New Zealand history lies in the way they disclose the increasing cultural authority of university-trained historians by 1940, and the way they show that this authority was neither complete nor uncontested.
The surveys are thus an important illustration of the institutional changes occurring in New Zealand historiography at the end of the period under study. For the same reasons, they involved a combination of different ways of writing about New Zealand, different ways of creating a 'home in thought'. Elements of local histories (which of course shared the assumption that 'New Zealand' essentially meant 'Pakeha' or 'European') were incorporated into the surveys; other indigenising strategies, most conspicuously Cowan's, were not. New Zealand was explained almost exclusively in terms of European activity. Existing modes of indigenisation that foregrounded Maori were incompatible with both adaptation and the less theorised conceptions of the Britishness of New Zealand that were woven together with academic criteria of what counted as history.
Conclusion
The foregoing chapters have both discussed some texts in detail and made more general surveys of them and their contexts. I have attempted to show the interpenetration of texts and contexts. This approach casts some light on the workings of texts, but it also illuminates the contexts that were reformulated through these texts. This task of this final chapter is to piece together the individual chapters' findings to create a broad picture of history-writing in interwar New Zealand. I will proceed by briefly recapping the arguments of the preceding chapters, contrasting the various histories discussed in them with reference to some persistent themes of the thesis, and then assessing the changes in history writing between 1920 and 1940.References will be given only for passages not quoted or discussed in previous chapters.
The local histories of the period 'colonised' their district discursively by claiming that the pioneers made the area fruitful, by marginalising Maori, and by arrogating the language of origins. Each text commemorated a particular group. In keeping with their commemorative functions, local histories named en masse, seldom criticised their subjects or revealed personal 'faults and frictions', and attempted to give voice to their subjects through lengthy quotations. This latter characteristic was related to local historians' efforts to collect and preserve the knowledge and artefacts of the disappearing past. Their histories were organised round the central figure of the pioneer: hardworking, resourceful, energetic, and a public servant to whom later generations owed obligations of memory. The image of the pioneer was an important currency of value in Pakeha culture generally. In local histories, this image was appropriated and contested on behalf of Pakeha groups who were marginalised by local élites.
Cowan too wrote about 'pioneers', but his pioneers were, first and foremost, 'frontiersmen'. They were not only breaking in the land, but exploring racial borders. Other border-crossers, such as the Pakeha-Maori, also loom large in his work. For Cowan, both sides of this border mattered: though there was nothing covert about Cowan's racism, he was the only writer discussed here to accord Maori and Europeans a similar level of agency. Cowan's New Zealand was made through racial conflict and the respect that emerged from this test by battle. In his books Maori were not the incidental figures that they were in the pioneer narratives of the local histories. Cowan's books drew on a variety of sources, including American historiography and popular fiction, and perhaps most importantly the testimonies and friendship of veterans. Cowan's commitment both to Maori causes and to pioneer-adulation, and his attempt to build a story of racial compact out of a racial conflict, made his books unstable. Sometimes, as in the draft of Settlers and Pioneers, this tension became explicit. Cowan had a more ambitious project for a national history than anyone else discussed in this thesis, because his metanarrative admitted much more conflict That he failed to synthesise these conflicting voices does not make his work any less important. Indeed, his failure demonstrates some (but only some) of the heterogeneity of New Zealand's past which other contemporary histories smoothed over.
Like many local historians, Cowan drew heavily on interviews for his history. Personal testimonies, oral and written, gave him 'the real meat of history': history was a matter of individuals' activities, as it was in a more institutionally implicated way for the local historians. For Cowan these individuals' deeds amounted to more than they did for the local historians: they made a national history. Of the other Wellington historians and their contacts in other cities, only Buick and (much less coherently) Ramsden made parallel attempts to create a general story of New Zealand's development. Buick, Ramsden and Cowan took particular phenomena (the Treaty of Waitangi, conversion, war), concentrated on particular locations (the Bay of Islands and in Cowan's case most of the rest of the North Island as well), and treated these as defining or governing New Zealand history. None of them grounded their narratives of the making of New Zealand in a broad general history.
Their wider concerns did not prevent Buick, Ramsden and Cowan from having emotional attachments to their subjects, and inclinations to defend their subjects' reputations, that were equal to those of local historians. Like most local historians, they had personal contact with some of their subjects or their descendants. They were keenly interested in the 'character' of historical personages. The same went for Stewart and Scholefield. Scholefield, who considered himself 'a student of social science' and who was interested in economic and political structures, also produced the most substantial work of biography.Scholefield, 'Autobiography', p. 209.
His Dictionary was also the most impressive textual embodiment of the practice of collecting. Like Cowan with his interviews, and local historians with their interviews, reminiscences, and museum collections, Scholefield, Fildes, Buick, Ramsden and Stewart stressed the need to preserve the residues of 'our fast receding history'. They relied more on written sources than Cowan did, though all except Fildes saw value in interviews. They took pains to augment New Zealand's libraries and archives, and to make accessible through their books the voices of primary sources, albeit with varying levels of accuracy.
The concern with collection extended to some university historians. At Auckland University College, Rutherford gathered historical records; at Otago, Elder edited the journals of Marsden and his lieutenants. Unlike Rutherford, Elder partly adopted the non-university historians' collector-like mode of writing. This way of writing relegated the authorial voice almost to editorial status, and quoted in bulk. Hight too wrote like a collector, though about different subject-matter. Neither Hight nor Elder, the two academic historians whose tenures spanned the interwar period, had been schooled in the academic tradition that took shape in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century, a tradition involving training in research and intense attention to the administrative and constitutional detail of state-formation.
In the mid-1930s, three historians schooled in this tradition (in particular, Beaglehole and Rutherford, though some of the latter's study was in America) took up academic positions in the North Island colleges, and others (Morrell, Marais, Harrop) wrote on New Zealand history from afar. Airey and Condliffe were educated differently, but they too brought to New Zealand history practices different from those of Hight, Elder and those outside the colleges. Among these practices one might count a documentary rigour, though this can be overstated. Fildes seems to have been as accurate as any of the academics, and like most of the academics he distrusted oral sources. The major innovations of the newer academics were, first, the treatment of New Zealand history in a new genre, the scholarly monograph, thoroughly footnoted and written more as a synthesis of sources than an anthology of quotations; secondly, the treatment of New Zealand history within the framework of the historiography of British colonial policy, rather than merely within the confines of imperial patriotism; and thirdly, sweeping general histories. These general histories brought substantial and sustained economic analyses and almost unprecedented cultural critiques. Though they took the nation seriously as a historiographical unit, they emphasised its dependence on the outside world, and some were nationalist through their criticism rather than praise. Where Cowan and Buick had treated New Zealand's overall history as a particular process (war, sovereignty) writ large, the general histories written in the universities cast their net over a wider range of subjects. Their accounts, however, concentrated mostly on Europeans; like the local histories, they pushed Maori to one side.
In this way these university histories were ideologically closer to the local histories, Scholefield and Stewart than they were to Cowan and Buick. The latter pair foregrounded race relations; the others put Maori people on the sideline of 'New Zealand' history, which was tacitly assumed to be a European phenomenon. Maori consequently appeared mostly in subplots designated specific to themselves: 'Maori scares', 'Maori wars', 'the Maori problem'. Texts as different as Beaglehole's New Zealand: A Short History and Woodhouse's George Rhodes of the Levels assumed that New Zealand history was the history of European endeavour in these islands.
In this respect the Centennial surveys were a 'standardisation' of New Zealand historiography. In marked contrast to some of the non-literary Centennial celebrations, the surveys eschewed 'patriotic exoticism'. Reference to conflict between Maori and Pakeha was also muted; even 'good' race relations were not emphasised. Their style modified, pioneer narratives were retained. In some cases subtly used as structuring principles for discussions of topics as unlikely as literature and international relations. European settlement and society became the stuff of New Zealand history. In some of the surveys, this history was conceived along the lines of McCormick's adaptation thesis. Others treated New Zealand history as Pakeha history in less theorised ways.
I want now to draw together the issues raised in the preceding chapters, and examine more directly some issues and relationships that I have so far treated incidentally. The first matter I want to look at is these historians' different positions on the question of 'objectivity'. The local historians made no claim to absolute truth. Some explicitly stated the commemorative purposes of their works, and acknowledged their elision of 'faults and frictions'. When Cowan defended the accuracy of his works, he said they were 'true': he seldom had recourse to the more clinical term 'objective'. For him, historical truth was bound up with personal investments. 'Human documents' such as interviews brought an investigator closer to the truth than more impersonal texts did. He privileged the accounts of people he had met personally; when he reached an evidential impasse, he would simply provide documentation from which readers could draw their own conclusions.
Whatever the veridical status of Buick's work, on the surface The Treaty of Waitangi conveys an impression of wise judgement. His prose enacted comparisons of different sides of an argument and magisterially settled on a conclusion that involved the least amount of conflict and criticism. Hight impressed upon his students the objectivist pronouncements of Lord Acton; for him, as for Scholefield, who wanted his Dictionary to be non-evaluative and 'purely factual', the stance of objectivism seems to have foreclosed any self-examination. Thus could the austere Hight refer airily to 'that sense of rough justice which is never wholly absent from any community of white men'.Hight and Bamford, Constitutional History and Law, p. 35.
Most other academics made less pretence at total exclusion of subjectivity than Hight did. They were more alert to the complexities and contrariness of evidence, perhaps because of their grounding in archival research. To make broad generalisations about their philosophies by reading between the lines is dangerous: perhaps the most one can say reliably is that their primary research made truth-claims possible at the same time as it made them provisional. None of them claimed to be above judgement, but they claimed or aspired to judgement based on a comprehensive and critical examination of those sources agreed to be valid and pertinent.
Objectivity, then, did not mean neutrality. Condliffe's New Zealand in the Making was openly polemical but its claims were grounded in piles of evidence. Beaglehole's New Zealand: A Short History supplied statistics and other evidence, but it was firmly within the genre of the essay. It made no pretence at being a reference book and instead provocatively satirised its subject-matter. Morrell's book on colonial policy was a monograph rather than an explicitly reflective essay (as Beaglehole's 'The Colonial Office' was), but in the course of its narrative it assessed conflicting arguments on particular points.
In this thesis I have used the word narrative in a broad sense, rather than in the sense it is often used by historians and history teachers, as the opposite of 'analysis'. Both narrative in this restricted sense and analysis (assessing arguments, critiquing sources) had a place in academic monographs such as Morrell's. The structure was usually chronological (or, if the book was divided into sections on a number of colonies, each colony's section was chronological) and the analysis was spliced together with the narrative. The same went for the general histories, though at a higher level of generalisation.
Buick's writing was not far removed from this practice of interleaved 'narrative' and 'analysis'. He too wrote chronologically and wrestled with what he regarded as knotty issues as they came up in the material. Thus, the distinction between academic histories written along English academic lines and other New Zealand histories was not that between 'narrative' and 'analysis', but between different kinds of narrative and analysis.
However, some historiographical practices in the interwar period could fairly be described as unanalytical. One of the most common was quoting in bulk and relegating the narrative voice to bridging status between excerpts from sources. Many local historians wrote in this manner. Other writers, such as Acland, and Fildes in his compilation of James John Taine's reminiscences, did the same thing on a larger scale, in much the same mode as their predecessor, McNab. Elder, Hight, Woodhouse and Buick also employed the tactic of extensive quotation, but they bolstered it with a strong authorial voice.
Buick, in addition, wrote sustained oratorical passages. His work was widely praised for its 'romantic' and 'picturesque' qualities. 'Romantic' was a word widely applied to historians' works, by readers and by the writers themselves. It was applied to Cowan's accounts of battle and Buick's recreation of the Bay of Islands in the 1830s, and, in Harrop's first book, the history of Westland. As I argued in the section on Letters and Art in New Zealand, the use of this word as a touchstone for New Zealand history (and 'Maori legends') made history a kind of proxy for literature, at least as a weapon against claims that New Zealand had no distinctive identity because it lacked quality high-cultural artefacts. On a more subtle level, the use of the word 'romantic' discloses associations between history and fiction. If it had any link to early nineteenth-century romanticism it was probably not to Wordsworth but to Walter Scott. Erik Olssen has argued that Otago's 'pervasive historical consciousness' owed much to Scott; Scott was also a popular author elsewhere in New Zealand in the nineteenth century and at least as late as the 1920s and 1930s.Olssen, History of Otago, p. 173; Dulcie N. Gillespie-Needham, 'The Colonial and His Books: A Study of Reading in Nineteenth Century New Zealand', PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1971, pp. 102, 174; Mulgan, Home, pp. 7-8; E. H. McCormick, 'Appendix C: Results of Correspondence', in McCormick, 'An Essay in Cultural Criticism', pp. xxxv-xxxvii. The pages referred to in McCormick's MLitt thesis are the results of a survey (inspired by the work of Q. D. Leavis) on contemporary reading tastes. It draws on questionnaires and information elicited from public librarians.
The romantic picturesque associated with him was evident in a wide range of writings and aesthetic judgements in 1920s and 1930s New Zealand.
Cowan was one of the most persistent exemplars of the 'romantic' strand of writing. His work also contained other generic elements, most notably those of popular fiction. His work had strong American influences, but it also fed on the plot-heavy masculinist short fiction with oral story-structures (and often with yarning narrator figures as well) that was common in New Zealand at the time.Lydia Wevers, The Short Story', in Sturm, ed., Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 222.
Gilkison too worked in this latter tradition, and a chapter of his Early Days in Central Otago would have fitted well into O. N. Gillespie's anthology New Zealand Short Stories. (Elder used much the same anecdotal material for his populist works, but he narrated it in a less excited style and substituted a broader explanatory framework for the oral frames of Cowan and Gilkison.) The overlap in style between yarning, anecdotal histories and some popular Australasian and American fiction is nicely emblematised by the way the Wellington City Library and the PEN Gazette classified separate Cowan collections of historical stories as 'fiction', much to the author's chagrin.Cowan to Lawlor, 30 October 1934; Cowan to Lawlor, 2 May 1938, Lawlor MSS L418 N, folder 1.
'Yarning' histories preserved some of the oral nature of their source material. Characteristics of sources intersected with particularities of style and genre in other kinds of history too. To take one example, the historiography of colonial policy was based on official publications and Colonial Office and New Zealand Company papers; less formal (and more 'romantic') New Zealand sources like settlers' or travellers' reminiscences were of minor importance to this body of work, which retained much of the formal, institutional character of its source material.
The questions peculiar to different traditions of history also shaped the nature of the histories written therein. Working on the terms of academic imperial history, Marais and Harrop discussed 'the colonisation of New Zealand' in relation to the New Zealand Company, the British government, and the agents of both; for local historians, the subject-matter of colonisation was the daily business of settlement. Rutherford's and Buick's accounts of the Treaty of Waitangi formed one of a very small group of cases in which very different historians examined the same sources on the same topic; they produced very different accounts.
As a corollary, historians in the interwar period worked with a variety of metanarratives. Cowan's version of New Zealand was a tragicomedy: through the strife of war Maori and Pakeha came to respect each other, and in partnership save each other from racial degeneration. This achievement through suffering remained in the twentieth century as a memory for all New Zealanders to honour and revel in. Buick and Ramsden also located the heart of New Zealand history in Maori-Pakeha compact, though for them this compact was achieved more peacefully. For Buick, racial unity was secured through the Treaty of Waitangi and its ongoing compact. In Ramsden's work, this state of affairs was threatened by dissolute Europeans in the 1830s and potentially threatened by apathetic Pakeha a century later. In Buick's Treaty of Waitangi and his public speeches, the Treaty was threatened by 'misunderstandings' (by Heke, FitzRoy, and the New Zealand Company) in the nineteenth-century, but never seriously breached; at the time of writing, he said, Pakeha needed to make sure that they did not betray Maori trust.
Buick and Cowan (and Ramsden, with whom I have dealt only in passing) were the only New Zealand historians at this time to work with a metanarrative in which 'race relations' played a significant part. This does not necessarily make them heroic. While I believe that Cowan's texts (and I do mean his texts, because Cowan himself could not subjugate the conflicting currents in his work) came closer than any other Pakeha writings to collapsing the contradictions of Pakeha ideology in on themselves, they certainly did not invent any coherent means of writing outside those frames. Buick skilfully excluded evidence that would have troubled his comforting claims.
Other histories engineered silences without having Maori centre-stage. Books as different as George Rhodes of the Levels and New Zealand in the Making fall into this category. In Woodhouse's book, Maori farm-hands laboured on the sidelines; in Condliffe's, Maori made a minimal contribution to the 'New Zealand' economy. Both books tend to conflate 'Pakeha' and 'New Zealand' (or 'Canterbury'). Several kinds of narrative making this conflation may be discerned. The first is the pioneer legend informing most local histories. This was the story of the transformation of the wilderness into fruitful farms and prosperous towns by honest, hard-working, and public-spirited pioneers. Here the Englishness or Scottishness of the colonists was not bruited much; in some other histories it was. The metanarrative of academic monographs dealing with New Zealand was that of academic imperial history generally—the political and administrative development of the British empire. Consequently, in this framework, New Zealand history's academic validity depended upon New Zealand's relationship with British imperialism. The general histories of Condliffe and Beaglehole went further ahead in time, and in different ways related the imperial framework to the development of New Zealand. Academic histories virtually defined New Zealand history as the history of settlement, a process of definition which reached a peak in the Centennial surveys. The adaptation thesis was the most ambitious initiative in theorising New Zealand history in this way. Not all the Centennial writers accepted it, but all except Cowan endorsed its governing principle: that New Zealand history was a story of European endeavour in which Maori occurred as inconveniences, stage hands, or curtain-raisers to the main drama of European settlement. Both pioneer histories and imperial historiography presupposed a metanarrative of colonisation in which the indigenes were only of incidental significance. The Centennial surveys by McCormick and Wood drew together the very different narratives that shared this assumption.
Alan Mulgan later held the Centennial up as a watershed in the development of a Pakeha interest in New Zealand history.Mulgan, Making of a New Zealander, p. 85.
As did contemporaries and later historians, he yoked the development of an interest in New Zealand history to the development of 'national identity'. To what extent was the writing of New Zealand history a nationalist project? At the very least, whether or not New Zealand historians saw the nation as an existing reality or a feasible goal, they found something in New Zealand's past that made it valid to write about. For some, this required considerable effort. The validity of the task, for instance, could be located in New Zealand's implication in the general problematics of imperial history, or in the need to explain or reform contemporary New Zealand. Despite Beaglehole's claim that he was not a nationalist until the Centennial, he clearly thought that there was something worth fighting for in and through New Zealand historiography.
It is difficult to find the local histories nationalist in any sense other than the minimal one of finding New Zealand worth writing about. They made little attempt to synthesise the national and the local, and they exhibit localism rather than nationalism. They did, however, feed into the wider current of war-related nationalism. Cowan too linked his explicitly 'patriotic' histories to World War I, seeing joint Maori and Pakeha self-sacrifice in this war as the seal on the compact originating in the New Zealand Wars. From this compact arose pride and obligations. Buick too was a purveyor of a national identity that involved racial compact with attendant obligations.
These versions of New Zealand identity were conspicuously absent from the Centennial surveys. This was not simply because the university-trained members of the Centennial staff wanted it that way: things would have been quite different if Ngata had written his survey and had Heenan not been so opposed to explicit treatments of Maori-Pakeha relations. But, as they turned out, the Centennial surveys were much closer to the cultural nationalism of the younger writers of the 1930s. They did not conform absolutely to the agendas of those writers, and they borrowed from the pioneer traditions in which local histories operated. And as an attempt at covering 'the whole field of our national life', their accounts of what was distinctive about New Zealand inevitably settled on more than literature and foreign and domestic policy, the main places where younger academics, like many of the crew-members of Tomorrow and Phoenix generally, sought national identity. But these matters were discussed in detail, and the subjects championed by Cowan, Ramsden and Buick were not. 'There are greater things than literature and art in the making of a young nation', Cowan had rebuked Beaglehole in 1938.Cowan, 'New Zealand History: Its Teaching and Its Uses', p. 56.
In the Centennial surveys, however, 'the spirit of New Zealand' was to be found in prose fiction about Pakeha men.
How much, overall, had things changed by the time of the Centennial? New Zealand history was substantially established as a field of inquiry, though many people, and not just academics, were leery of it for long after 1940. The universities were producing substantial amounts of research work on New Zealand topics, in theses, papers and books. With the universities' expansion came an increasing emphasis on documentary sources, synthetic narrative and analysis, and the problematics of imperial history. In the 1930s and for some time afterwards, the establishment of academic history marginalised Maori and devalued many local sources. This was not a monolithic orthodoxy, as the work of Sinclair, John Miller and others in the two decades after 1940 showed. However, the emphasis of Cowan, Buick, and Ramsden on Maori-Pakeha relations, and the 'romantic' poetics they brought to this subject, were besieged during the 1930s by the academics and graduates, and by the Centennial organisation in which they played a prominent part. The prominence of the latter groups was increased by Buick's death in 1938 and Cowan's incapacitation from 1941. At this time Ramsden had none of the prestige of Cowan and Buick, and the country's most prominent writers of history were now academics.
Consequently, Pakeha strategies of indigenisation that involved Maori people became much less prominent in New Zealand historiography. Pioneer stories of conquering the land remained. In some works by academics, the business of 'settling', of building a 'home in thought' was now much more concerned with the fruits of high culture, with politics and economics, and with New Zealand's changing international persona as the Empire became the Commonwealth.
None of the historians discussed here thought that the past was safely finished. All of them, except perhaps Fildes, saw New Zealand as part of processes that were not yet over or, if fading, recoverable as an ideal. The histories discussed in this thesis were informed by contemporary concerns, and many drew attention to this fact. But none of them was a pure product of its time. They all existed through engagements with texts (first) created long before, from Robert Burrows' diary to Wakefield's tracts on colonisation to Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads. The New Zealand histories written in the interwar period were parts of complex intertextual networks that traversed the boundaries between past and present They complicate the bromide that every 'generation' writes its own history. And if historical texts cannot be satisfactorily explained only in terms of their authors or a 'contemporary' ideology, nor can other texts. If this study has a 'moral' beyond the history of history in interwar New Zealand, it is that an awareness of intertextuality complicates, and thus enriches, the study of texts and contexts, culture and ideology.
Bibliography
I.
Primary Sources
A. Published Official Documents
Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives.
Appendices to the Journals of the Legislative Council.
New Zealand Parliamentary Debates.
Report of Royal Commission on University Education in New Zealand, Wellington, 1925.
Report of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, 1936-41.
B. Unpublished Official Documents
National Archives, Wellington
Department of Internal Affairs. IA1 series (General).
C. Manuscripts
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington
Andersen, Johannes C, Papers. MS Papers 148, Folder 22.
Buick, Thomas Lindsay, Papers. MS Papers 58. Folders 1-2, 8, 19, 22, 25-26, 40-42, 66-68, 94-99, 107-110, 112.
Buick, Thomas Lindsay, 'Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S.: A Lecture Delivered by T. Lindsay Buick, C. M. G., F. R. Hist. S. before the Members of the Yorkshire Society of New Zealand at Wellington 6th June 1934', qMS-0296.
Buick, Thomas Lindsay, Notes on William Swainson. MS Papers 2679.
Buick, Thomas Lindsay, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi. MS-0353.
Buick, Thomas Lindsay, Letter to Francis Edwards Ltd, 15 August 1935, qMS-0298.
Campbell, R. M., Papers. MS Papers 1900. Folder 7.
Cowan, James, Papers. MS Papers 39. Folders 2-3, 6-7, 7C, 31-37, 41A-F, 42A-F, 43A-C, 50, 53A, C-D, 54A-D, 55A-B, 67.
de Thierry, Charles, Baron, 'Historical Narrative of an Attempt to Form a Settlement in New Zealand', ed. T. Lindsay Buick, qMS-2014.
Fildes, Horace, Papers. MS Papers 1503. Folder 1.
Fildes, Horace, Scrapbook on Porirua. MS Papers 1081.
Fildes, Horace, Scrapbook on Joseph Somes, 1931. Micro MS 489.
Fildes, Horace, 'Reminiscences of James John Taine, a Wellington and New Zealand Company Pioneer Settler of 1839, Compiled by H. E. M. Fildes, with Portraits and Illustrations.' Micro MS 218.
Hall, T. D. H., Papers. MS Papers 24. Folder 3.
Harrop, A. J., Papers. MS Papers 1271. Folders 1, 5.
Heenan, J. W., Papers. MS Papers 1132. Folders 16, 30, 42, 48, 60, 89-94, 116, 134, 152, 250, 267, 290, 293, 295-296.
Lawlor, P. A., Papers. MS Papers 4310.
Lawlor, P. A., Papers. MS Papers 450. Folder 11.
Moore, Frederick George, Papers. MS Papers 36. Folder 1.
McCormick, E. H., Papers. MS Papers 166. Folder 14.
Mulgan, Alan, Papers. MS Papers 224. Folders 1, 4-6, 10, 17-19, 31-32.
Ramsden, Eric, Papers. MS Papers 196. Folders 168-171, 173, 178, 183, 186-189, 191, 266.
Ramsden, Eric, Papers. MS Papers 188. Folders 91-92.
Scholefield, G. H., Papers. MS Papers 212. Folders 37-38, 43-45, 58, 67, C1, C3A, C9-C11.
Stevens, Joan, 'Notes Relating to Joseph Somes, James Robert Gown and the Horace Fildes Collection'. MS Papers 609.
Wellington Early Settlers' and Historical Association, Minute Book, 1912-1921. MSX-3559.
Auckland Public Library
Chappell, A. B. NZMSS 135, 138, 166-7, 179.
University of Auckland Library
Airey, Willis Thomas Godwin, Papers. MSS A-201. Folders 4-5, 12-15, 63-65, 25, 35-36, 18-22.
Rutherford, James, Papers, MSS A-42. Folders E23/1; E24/3-4; E25/1-2, 4; E26/8; F27/1-3; F28/1-5; F29/1-2, 4; F30/1-2; G33/1-4; G34/1, 3-4; I39/1-6; I40/1-2.
Note. When I read the Rutherford papers in September 1996 they were sorted in two ways: by numbered boxes containing numbered folders, and by series. The series classification cuts across the box classification. At some stage errors have been made in recataloguing the boxes—there are, for instance, two boxes labelled 'box 20', each containing a number of folders. However, the collection's inventory assigns each folder a code based on the its place in the series and the collection as a whole. These codes are unique; there is no overlap as there is with the boxes. So the contents of the two box twenties have different series classifications: one has items F29/1-4, and the other has items F30/1-4. To avoid further confusion, I have cited the series classifications for each item, rather than the numbers of the boxes they are in. Boxes 28 and 29, however, are not given series codes, but from their place at the end of the collection and within the correspondence series, they would be I39 and I40. That is how they have been referenced in this thesis.
Victoria University of Wellington Library.
Beaglehole, J. C., MSS Papers. Boxes 1, 2, 4.
Beaglehole, J. C., Literary Papers. MSS B 365.
Fildes, Horace, MSS Papers. Boxes 1, 5, 8, 11a, 15-16, 34, 36-37, 39.
Fildes, Horace, Collection. Items 122, 429-30, 467, 1235a, 1522, 1801.
Lawlor, Pat, MSS L418 N. Folder 1.
Private Collection
'God's Judgment Manifestly Deliver'd and Evidently Made Known in Twelve Blasts Blown on a Brazen Trumpet, or An Essay on the History of New Zealand, Lately Set Down and Newly Revis'd and Enlarg'd by J. C. Beaglehole', MS (1936); dossier of reviews of J. C. Beaglehole, New Zealand: A Short History; both in possession of Professor Tim Beaglehole, Wellington.
D. Periodicals
Journal of Public Administration, 1939-40 (incomplete).
Phoenix, 1932-3.
Tomorrow, 1936-9 (incomplete).
National Opinion, 1933-4 (incomplete).
New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1933-6 (incomplete).
Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1940-43.
Journal of the Early Settlers' and Historical Association of Wellington, 1922-3.
New Zealand Centennial News, 1938-41.
Report of the … Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (formerly Report of the … Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science), 1921-39.
Note. No newspapers are listed here because all newspaper items cited in this thesis, and items from periodicals not listed here, were found in archival collections.
E. Books
Note. Because this thesis is a study of non-fiction literature, a number of books, articles and theses which might otherwise be considered secondary sources are listed as primary.
Acland, L. G. D., The Early Canterbury Runs, 3rd edn, Christchurch, 1946 (first pub. 1930).
Alexander, W. F. and A. E. Currie, eds, New Zealand Verse, London, 1906.
Alexander, W. F. and A. E. Currie, eds, Treasury of New Zealand Verse: Being a New Edition of New Zealand Verse, Auckland, 1926.
Alley, G. T., and D. O. W. Hall, The Farmer in New Zealand, Wellington, 1941.
Andersen, Johannes C., Maori Life in Ao-tea, Christchurch, 1907.
Andersen, Johannes C., One Hundred Representative New Zealand Books, Wellington, 1925.
Andersen, Johannes C., The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, Auckland, 1936.
Andersen, Johannes C., ed., Annals of New Zealand Literature: Being a Preliminary List of New Zealand Authors and their Works with Introductory Essays and Verses, Wellington, 1936.
Auckland Provincial Centennial Council, Roll of Early Settlers and Descendants in the Auckland Province Prior to the End of 1852, Auckland, 1940.
Auckland University College, Lectures in Journalism: Digest of Extension Course, Auckland, 1934.
Babbage, S. Barton, Hauhauism: An Episode in the Maori Wars 1863-1866, Wellington, 1937.
Barr, John, The City of Auckland, New Zealand, 1840-1920, Auckland, 1922.
Baucke, William, Where the White Man Treads, Auckland, 1928 (first pub. 1905).
Beaglehole, J. C., New Zealand: A Short History, London, 1936.
Beaglehole, J. C., The University of New Zealand: An Historical Study, Auckland, 1937.
Beaglehole, J. C., The Discovery of New Zealand, Wellington, 1939.
Beaglehole, J. C., ed., New Zealand and the Statute of Westminster, Wellington, 1944.
Beattie, James Herries, Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori: The Otago University Museum Ethnological Project, 1920, ed. Atholl Anderson, Dunedin, 1994.
Beeby, C. E., The Biography of an Idea: Beeby on Education, Wellington, 1992.
Bell, Kenneth, and W. P. Morrell, eds, Select Documents on British Colonial Policy 1830-1860, Oxford, 1928.
Bidwill, William Edward, and Airini Elizabeth Woodhouse, Bidwill of Pihautea: The Life of Charles Robert Bidwill, Christchurch, 1927.
Bledisloe, Charles Bathurst, Lord, Ideals of Nationhood: A Selection of Addresses Delivered in New Zealand by the Right Hon. Lord Bledisloe, P.C, G.C.M.G, K.B.E, F.S.A., M.A., F.C.S., M.R.A.C, during His Governor-Generalship of the Dominion, ed. T. Lindsay Buick, New Plymouth, 1935.
Bradshaw, Muriel, The Flight of Time in a Changing World: Reminiscences, Christchurch, 1993.
Brett, Henry, and Henry Hook, The Albertlanders: Brave Pioneers of the 'Sixties, Auckland, 1927.
Bruce, A. Selwyn, 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.
Buick, T. Lindsay, The Treaty of Waitangi: How New Zealand Became a British Colony, 1st edn, Wellington, 1914; 2nd edn, New Plymouth, 1933.
Buick, T. Lindsay, New Zealand's First War, or, The Rebellion of Hone Heke, Wellington, 1926.
Buick, T. Lindsay, Waitangi: Ninety-four Years After, New Plymouth, 1934.
Campbell, A. E., Educating New Zealand, Wellington, 1941.
Chappell, A. B., An Appreciation of the Late H. D. Bedford, M.A., L.L.D., Professor of Economics, Wellington, 1918.
Chappell, A. B., Across a Hundred Years 1841-1941: A Brief Story of the Beginning and Early Progress of Methodism in Auckland, N.Z. [Auckland, 1941].
Cholmondeley, Thomas, Ultima Thule; or, Thoughts Suggested by a Residence in New Zealand, London, 1854.
Coleridge, S. T., Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols, Oxford, 1907.
Condliffe, J. B., A Short History of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1929 (first pub. 1925).
Condliffe, J. B., New Zealand in the Making: A Survey of Economic and Social Development, London, 1930.
Cowan, James, Maori Biographies: Sketches of Old New Zealand Compiled by James Cowan: Descriptive Catalogue of Maori Portraits Painted by Herr G. Lindauer, Auckland, 1901
Cowan, James, The Maoris of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1910.
Cowan, James, The Adventures of Kimble Bent: A Story of Wild Life in the New Zealand Bush, London, 1911.
Cowan, James, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period, 2 vols, Wellington, 1983 (first pub. 1922-23).
Cowan, James, The Maori Yesterday and Today, Auckland, 1930.
Cowan, James, Tales of the Maori Coast, Wellington, 1930.
Cowan, James, Tales of the Maori Bush, Wellington, 1934.
Cowan, James, Hero Stories of New Zealand, Wellington, 1935.
Cowan, James, A Trader in Cannibal Land: The Life and Adventures of Captain Tapsell, Dunedin, 1935.
Cowan, James, Suwarrow Gold and Other Tales of the Great South Sea, London, 1936.
Cowan, James, Settlers and Pioneers, Wellington, 1940.
Cowan, James, Sir Donald Maclean: The Story of a New Zealand Statesman, Dunedin, 1940.
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Fulton, Robert Valpy, 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.
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Gudgeon, T. W. [W. E. Gudgeon], The History and Doings of the Maoris, from the Year 1820 to the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Auckland, 1885.
Guthrie-Smith, H., Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1926.
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Hargreaves, Ray, and Peter Holland, eds., The Duel on the Creek and Other Tales of Victorian New Zealand, Dunedin, 1995.
Harrop, A. J., The Romance of Westland: The Story of New Zealand's Golden Coast, Auckland, 1923.
Harrop, A. J., England and New Zealand from Tasman to the Taranaki War, London, 1926.
Harrop, A. J., The Amazing Career of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, London, 1928.
Hight, James, Canterbury College: Commemoration Day: Thursday, March 22, 1928, Christchurch, 1928.
Hight, J. and H. D. Bamford, The Constitutional History and Law of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1914.
Hight, James, and Alice M. F. Candy, A Short History of the Canterbury College (University of New Zealand) with a Register of Graduates and Associates of the College, Auckland, 1927.
Hocken, T. M., A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand, Wellington, 1909.
Holcroft, M. H., The Deepening Stream: Cultural Influences in New Zealand, Christchurch, 1940.
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Irvine-Smith, F. L., The Streets of My City: Wellington, New Zealand, Wellington, 1948.
Jackson, Mrs J. Howard, Annals of a New Zealand Family: The Household of Gilbert Mair, Early Pioneer, Dunedin, 1935.
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Lawlor, Pat, Confessions of a Journalist: with Observations on Some Australian and New Zealand Writers, Auckland, 1935.
Lawlor, Pat, The Best New Zealand Books: A List for Libraries, Students and Collectors, Wellington, 1948.
Lawlor, Pat, Books and Bookmen: New Zealand and Overseas, Wellington, 1954.
Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit, Harmondsworth, 1962 (first published in 1952).
Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public, London, 1932.
McClymont, W. G., The Exploration of New Zealand, Wellington, 1940.
McCormick, E. H., Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington, 1940.
McCormick, E. H., An Absurd Ambition: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Dennis McEldowney, Auckland, 1996.
McKenzie, N. R., The Gael Fares Forth: The Romantic Story of Waipu and Her Sister Settlements, 2nd edn., Wellington, 1942.
McNab, Robert, The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840, Christchurch, 1913.
McNab, Robert, From Tasman to Marsden: A History of Northern New Zealand from 1642 to 1818, Dunedin, 1914.
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F. Articles and Sections of Books
Airey, W. T. G., 'Past, Present and Future: Memorandum on the Teaching of History', National Education, 10, 109 (1 December 1928), pp. 493-4.
Airey, W. T. G., review of Leicester Webb, Government in New Zealand, in Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 2, 5 (April 1942), pp. 56-8.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'An Old Diary', The New Nation, 1 June 1925, pp. 25-8.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The Cinderella of the Syllabus: Some Observations on a History Project', National Education, 7, 68 (1 June 1925), pp. 165-7.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The Maori Situation', Tomorrow, 1, 44 (28 August 1935), pp. 5-7.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'Centennial Meditations', Spike, 39, 68 (1940), pp. 18-19.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The New Zealand Mind', Australian Quarterly, 12, 4 (December 1940), pp. 40-50.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The Colonial Office, 1782-1854', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 3 (April 1941), pp. 170-89.
Beaglehole, J. C., review of Allen Curnow, Island and Time, Book: A Miscellany, 3 (August 1941), p. 17.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'Some Philosophies of History', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 2, 6 (November 1942), pp. 95-113.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The Writing of Imperial History', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 2, 7 (May 1943), pp. 129-40.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'History and the New Zealander', in Ernest Beaglehole et al., The University and the Community: Essays in Honour of Thomas Alexander Hunter, Wellington, 1946.
Cowan, James, 'New Zealand History: Its Teaching and Its Uses', National Education, 20, 210 (1 March 1938), pp. 56-7.
Elder, J. R., 'The Renaissance of History as a Human Interest and an Australasian Instance', in Report of the Twentieth Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Brisbane, 1931.
Hall, D. O. W., 'The Centennial', Tomorrow, 4, 24 (28 September 1938), pp. 765-6.
Hall, D. O. W., 'New Zealand Centennial History', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 1 (April 1940), pp. 21-30.
James, G. F., 'Recent Advances in Modern Historical Scholarship', in Report of the Twenty-fourth Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Sydney, 1939.
James, G. F., review of Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 3 (April 1941), pp. 196-200.
Kowhai Ngutu Kaka [Thomas McDonnell], 'A Maori History of the Pakeha-Maori Wars in New Zealand', in T. W. Gudgeon, The Defenders of New Zealand, Auckland, 1887.
Lipson, Leslie, review of Leicester Webb, Government in New Zealand, Journal of Public Administration, 2, 2 (December 1939), pp. 62-5.
Mills, Tom L., 'Katherine Mansfield: How Kathleen Beauchamp Came into Her Own', New Zealand Railways Magazine, 8, 5, September 1933, pp. 6-7.
Parkman, Francis, 'The Sack of Deerfield', in The Parkman Reader, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, Boston, 1955, pp. 371-90.
Preece, G. A., 'Pursuit of Te Kooti through the Urewera Country', in F. J. W. Gascoyne, Soldiering in New Zealand: Being Reminiscences of a Veteran, London, 1916.
Scholefield, G. H., 'Writings on New Zealand History, 1938-41', Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 2, 5 (April 1942), pp. 50-53.
Smith, Sylvia R., review of Helen M. Simpson, The Women of New Zealand, and James Cowan, Settlers and Pioneers, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 2 (October 1940), pp. 142-3.
Taylor, C. R. H., 'The Alexander Turnbull Library', New Zealand Official Yearbook, 1946, pp. 914-7.
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History', in Turner, The Frontier in American History, New York, 1920.
Williams, Trevor, 'James Stephen and British Intervention in New Zealand, 1838-40', Journal of Modern History, 13, 1 (March 1941), pp. 19-35.
Woods, N. S., 'A Survey of the Advent of Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration in New Zealand', in Report of the Twenty-second Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Melbourne, 1935.
G. Theses
Every, Annette Julia, 'The War in the North, 1844-1846', MA thesis, Auckland University College, 1940.
McCormick, E. H.'Literature in New Zealand', MA thesis, Victoria University College, 1929 (MSX-4251, ATL).
McCormick, E. H.'Literature in New Zealand: An Essay in Cultural Criticism', MLitt thesis, Cambridge University, 1935 (MSX-4250, ATL).
Turner, Rae, 'History Teaching in the New Zealand Secondary School System, 1877-1944', MA thesis, Victoria University College, 1944.
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Bagnall, A. G., 'A Troubled Childhood: "The Nucleus of a National Collection"', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), pp. 92-111.
Bagnall, A. G., 'Sir Alister McIntosh KCMG 1906-1978', Turnbull Library Record, 12, 1 (May 1979), pp. 5-9.
Bagnall, A. G., 'Ruth Miriam Ross, 1920-1982', Turnbull Library Record, 16, 1 (May 1983), pp. 54-60.
Beaglehole, J. C., 'The Library and the Cosmos', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2, August 1970, pp. 65-77.
Beaglehole, T. H., '"Home"? J. C. Beaglehole in London, 1925-1929', Turnbull Library Record, 14, 2 (October 1981), pp. 61-82.
Boyd, Mary, 'Women in the Historical Profession: Women Historians in the 1940s', Women's Studies Journal, 4, 1 (September 1988), pp. 76-87.
Burnett, R. I. M., 'John Beaglehole', Turnbull Library Record, 5, 1 (May 1972), pp. 4-8.
Calder, Alex, review of Sturm, ed., The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, Landfall, 46 (March 1992), pp. 98-109.
Carr, David, 'Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity', History and Theory, 25 (1986), pp. 117-31.
Chapman, Robert, 'Fiction and the Social Pattern: Some Implications of Recent N. Z. Writing', Landfall, 7, 1 (March 1953), pp. 26-58.
Chapman, Robert, and Keith Sinclair, 'Willis Thomas Goodwin Airey', in Chapman and Sinclair, eds, Studies of a Small Democracy: Essays in Honour of Willis Airey, Auckland, 1963.
Clifford, James, '"Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners": Ethnobiographical Prospects', in Daniel Aaron, ed., Studies in Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.
Coleridge, K. A., 'Horace Fildes and His Collection', New Zealand Libraries>, 38, 5 (October 1975), pp. 254-69.
Dalziel, Raewyn, 'The Colonial Helpmeet: Women's Role and the Vote in Nineteenth Century New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of History>, 11, 2 (October 1977), pp. 112-23.
Davidson, J. W., 'The New Zealand Scholar: A Note on J. C. Beaglehole, 1901-1971', Journal of Pacific History, 7 (1972), pp. 151-54.
During, Simon, 'What Was the West? Some Relations between Modernity, Colonisation and Writing', Meanjin, 48, 4 (Summer 1989), 759-76.
Eldred-Grigg, Stevan, 'A Bourgeois Blue? Nationalism and Letters from the 1920s to the 1950s', Landfall, 41 (September 1987), pp. 293-311.
Gardner, W. J., 'Grass Roots and Dredge Tailings: Reflections on Local History', Landfall, 11, 3 (September 1957), pp. 221-33.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 'Writing "Race" and the Difference It Makes', Critical Inquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985), pp. 1-20.
Gibbons, P. J., 'A Note on Writing, Identity, and Colonisation in Aotearoa', Sites, 13 (Spring 1986), pp. 32-8.
Harlan, David, 'Intellectual History and the Return of Literature', American Historical Review, 94, 3 (June 1989), 581-609.
Healy, Chris, 'Histories and Collecting: Museums, Objects and Memories', in Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds, Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, Melbourne, 1994.
Hoare, Michael E., 'The Board of Science and Art 1913-1930: A Precursor to the DSIR', in M. E. Hoare and L. G. Bell, eds, In Search of New Zealand's Scientific Heritage, Wellington, 1984.
Hollinger, David A., 'The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing', American Historical Review, 94, 3 (June 1989), 610-21.
Jacoby, Russell, 'A New Intellectual History?', American Historical Review, 97, 2 (April 1992), 405-24.
LaCapra, Dominick, 'Intellectual History and Its Ways', American Historical Review, 97, 2 (April 1992), pp. 425-39.
LaCapra, Dominick, 'History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon', American Historical Review, 100, 3 (June 1995), pp. 799-828.
Lamb, Jonathan, 'The New Zealand Sublime', Meanjin, 49, 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 663-75.
Madden, Frederick, 'The Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford, 1905-1971', in Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse, eds, Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams, London, 1982.
McAloon, Jim, 'The Colonial Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago: No Idle Rich', New Zealand Journal of History, 30, 1 (April 1996), pp. 43-60.
McIntyre, W. David, 'Imperial Jubilee: W. P. Morrell's Contributions to Imperial History', New Zealand Journal of History, 16, 1 (April 1982), pp. 56-67.
McIver, Helene, 'Airini Elizabeth Woodhouse (Rhodes)', in Anna Rebecca, ed., Notable South Canterbury Women, Timaru, 1993.
Megill, Allan, and Donald N. McCloskey, 'The Rhetoric of History', in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, eds, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Madison, 1987.
Menzies, Trixie Te Arama, 'Kowhai Gold—Skeleton or Scapegoat?', Landfall, 165 (March 1988), pp. 19-26.
Nightingale, Tony, 'Shirley Tunnicliff: Nelson Historian', Phanzine, 2, 2, July 1996, pp. 5-7.
Olssen, Erik, 'Where to from Here? Reflections on the Twentieth-Century Historiography of Nineteenth-Century New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of History, 26, 1 (April 1992), pp. 54-77.
Pearson, W. H., 'Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist', Landfall, 6, 3 (September 1952), pp. 201-30.
Phillips, J. O. C., 'Musings in Maoriland—or Was There a Bulletin School in New Zealand?', Historical Studies, 20, 81 (October 1983), pp. 520-35.
Phillips, J. O. C., 'Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips and Footie on Saturday Afternoon: Reflections on 100 Years of New Zealand Historiography', New Zealand Journal of History, 24, 2 (October 1990), pp. 118-34.
Pickens, K. A., 'The Writing of New Zealand History: A Kuhnian Perspective', Historical Studies, 17 (April 1977), pp. 384-98.
Reilly, Michael, 'John White: The Making of a Nineteenth-century Writer and Collector of Maori Tradition', New Zealand Journal of History, 23, 2 (October 1989), pp. 157-72.
Renwick, W. L., '"Show Us These Islands and Ourselves … Give Us a Home in Thought"', New Zealand Journal of History, 21, 2 (October 1987), pp. 197-214.
Scholes, Robert, 'Canonicity and Textuality', in Joseph Gibaldi, ed., Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, New York, 1992.
Sharpe, Maureen, 'Anzac Day in New Zealand, 1916-1939'New Zealand Journal of History, 15, 2 (October 1981), pp. 97-114.
Sherrer, Johannah, '"The Most Amusing Book in the Language": The Dictionary of National Biography', in James Rettig, ed., Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing, Phoenix, 1992.
Sinclair, Keith, 'New Zealand', in Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations, and Resources, Durham, North Carolina, 1966.
Sinclair, Keith, 'New Zealand Literary History', New Zealand Journal of History, 12, 1 (April 1978), pp. 69-74.
Sinclair, Keith, 'The Beginnings of a Colonial Nationalism: Richard Jebb in New Zealand, 1899' in John Eddy and Deryck Schreuder, eds, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa First Assert Their Nationalities 1880-1914, Sydney, 1988.
Stenhouse, John, 'The Darwinian Enlightenment and New Zealand Polities', in Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds, Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu, 1994.
Stenson, Marcia, 'History in New Zealand Schools', New Zealand Journal of History, 24, 2 (October 1990), pp. 168-81.
Strachan, S. R., 'The Turnbull: A Review Essay', New Zealand Libraries, 48, 7 (September 1996), pp. 130-2.
Sturm, Terry, 'New Zealand Poetry in the Depression', in Wystan Curnow, ed., Essays on New Zealand Literature, Auckland, 1973.
Thomas, Julian, '1938: Past and Present in an Elaborate Anniversary', Australian Historical Studies, 23, 41 (October 1988), pp. 77-89.
Toews, John E., 'Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience', American Historical Review, 92, 4 (October 1987), pp. 879-907.
Wilson, T. G., 'The Writing of History in New Zealand: Some Observations', Landfall, 9, 3 (September 1955), pp. 213-33.
Woodhouse, Alice, 'Early Days in the Turnbull Library', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), pp. 112-19.
C. Theses and Resarch Essays
Belgrave, Michael, 'Archipelago of Exiles: A Study in the Imperialism of Ideas: Edward Tregear and John Macmillan Brown', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1979.
Booker, Antony James, 'The Centennial Surveys of New Zealand, 1936-41', BA (Hons) research exercise, Massey University, 1983.
Byrnes, Giselle, 'Savages and Scholars: Some Pakeha Perceptions of the Maori 1890s-1920s', MA thesis, University of Waikato, 1990.
Byrnes, Giselle, 'Inventing New Zealand: Surveying, Science, and the Construction of Cultural Space, 1840s-1890s', PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 1995.
Colquhoun, David, '"Pakeha Maori": The Early Life and Times of Frederick Edward Maning', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1984.
Dale, Stephanie M., 'Gentleman of Politics: A Life of William Downie Stewart 1878-1949', MA thesis, University of Otago, 1981.
Gibbons, Peter, '"Going Native": A Case Study of Cultural Appropriation in a Settler Society, with Particular Reference to the Activities of Johannes Andersen in New Zealand During the First Half of the Twentieth Century', 3 vols, DPhil thesis, Waikato University, 1992.
Gillespie-Needham, Dulcie N., 'The Colonial and His Books: A Study of Reading in Nineteenth Century New Zealand', PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1971.
Hamer, Paul Allan, 'Nature and Natives: Transforming and Saving the Indigenous in New Zealand', MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1992.
McClure, Margaret A., 'On Work: Perceptions of Work in Late Nineteenth Century New Zealand 1870-1900', MLitt thesis, University of Auckland, 1993.
Pugh, Michael C, 'The New Zealand Legion and Conservative Protest in the Great Depression', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1969.
Russell, Matthew, '"Had I but a Trumpet Tongue": George Rusden and His Imperious Duty', MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 1995.
Shuker, Roy Gordon, 'History in the New Zealand Secondary School: A Study in Aspects of Curriculum Development', PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1978.
Stuart, Margaret Joan, 'A Space of One's Own: Roles and Images of Women in Historical Society Serial Publications', MA thesis, University of Waikato, 1986.
Taylor, I. G., 'Women at Auckland University College 1930-1935', MA oral history paper, University of Auckland, 1985.
D. Unpublished Papers
Barrowman, Rachel, notes for a talk given at the Government History: Past, Present, Future seminar at the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, 10 November 1995.
Colquhoun, David, 'James Cowan 1870-1943: Historian and Journalist', unpublished paper for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.
Colquhoun, David, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making in New Zealand 1840-1930', draft of a research essay for Diploma in Museum Studies, Massey University, 1996.
Phillips, Jock, '1940—The Centennial', unpublished paper.