Book: Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand

Stachurski, C. (2009). Reading pakeha? : fiction and identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Rodopi.

“I’m Polish.”
“I’m half English and half Irish.”
“I’m Scottish.”

At primary school, this sort of conversation came up often. There, in the playground in the 1960s, no one thought to say “I’m a New Zealander” or “I’m Pakeha.” We knew about New Zealand from the native birds and creatures on Weetbix cards and coins, and the coloured pictures of scenic wonders inset along our standard-issue wooden rulers. Every year, the class (including its Maori members) studied “The Maoris” as history and made the same models of traditional meeting houses out of ice-block sticks.

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Reading Pakeha? , offers a different approach in considering the role of fictional representations of Pakeha and Maori in shaping notions of who we are.

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First to arrive in Aotearoa New Zealand were the Polynesians around 1350 AD . 6 Tribal peoples, they only began to use the singular ‘Maori’ to refer to themselves after European contact about four hundred years later. 7 Similarly, the Polynesian iwi (or tribes) initially knew and named the islands separately, and it was not until the twentieth century that Maori’s use of ‘Aotearoa’ − to refer to the country as a whole − became commonplace (although today many South Island Maori use it to refer to the North Island only, calling their own island ‘Te Wai Pounamu’, or greenstone waters). 8

6 Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003 ): 46– 47, 54– 60.
7 King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 168.
8 The Penguin History of New Zealand, 41– 42.

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There have always been protests about interpretation and breaches of the Treaty but it is only in the past thirty or so years that the New Zealand Government has seriously addressed historical grievances.

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Who exactly are ‘Pakeha’? While there is no official definition, ‘Pakeha’ has been in use since the early 1800s 13 and still is commonly used to refer to New Zealanders with fair-skinned European ancestors and as an adjective to describe “‘European’ (as distinct from Maori).” 14 Thus, while ‘Pakeha’ is more representative than ‘British’, it does not include all nonMaori or even everyone with European ancestry.

13 King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 168– 69.
14 Elizabeth Orsman & Harry Orsman, The New Zealand Dictionary: Educational Edition (Auckland: New House, 1994 ): 193.

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Common to European colonizers of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada was a general perception of land as blank, available, or to be won by force. 37 In all three countries, too, protests about colonial land grabs strengthened considerably around the same time

37 That said, many Maori were also engaged at times in colonization, gaining possession of land and slaves through intertribal warfare before and after contact with Europeans; for example, Te Rauparaha “fought his way down the west coast of the North Island at the head of his people. […] He battled and defeated such tribes as Ngati Apa, Muaupoko, Rangitane, and Ngati Ira as he led his people to Cook Strait […] Then he and Ngati Toa waged campaigns against Ngai Tahu in the South Island”; King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 83, 91, 138. Maori conquest of other Maori’s land meant complications in negotiations about such land with Europeans, as exemplified in Taranaki in 1848, when nearly 600 Maori – mainly Atiawa – returned from Waikanae, having sold the land they had won by conquest there, to resettle their own land, previously lost in battle with another tribe; Gail Lambert & Ron Lambert, An Illustrated History of Taranaki (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1983 ): 31 . For a full discussion, see Albert Moverley’s “Acquisition of Maori Lands in Taranaki for European Settlement” (doctoral dissertation, University of Otago, 1928 ).

Most simply, colonialism is “the conquest and direct control of other people’s land.” 45 As Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson explain,

Colonialism conceptually depopulated countries either by acknowledging the native but relegating him or her to the category of the subhuman, or simply by looking through the native and denying his/her existence. These were necessary practices for invoking the claim of terra nullius upon which the now-disputed legality of imperial settlement (as imposed to ‘invasion’) was based. Only empty spaces can be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanizing the inhabitants. 46

A colonial mindset also involves cultural identification with the country of origin, and the perception of the colony as peripheral to the central ‘mother’ country.

45 Laura Chrisman & Patrick W Williams, “Introduction” to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Chrisman & Williams (New York: Columbia UP, 1994 ): 2.
46 Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson, “Introduction” to De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Tiffin & Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994 ): 5.

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Speaking generally, then, cultural appropriation of Maoriness by Pakeha likely involves distortion, as the strange and new become known only through the frame of traditional European perceptions and concepts, ingrained as apparently ‘normal’. The possibility of this kind of distortion is exacerbated in writing, in creating and representing the fictional worlds of novels, however much the aim is social realism.

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Man Alone

Often “regarded as New Zealand’s first great novel,” 2 Man Alone’s canonical status is well-documented; 3 it has been “set as a standard text in secondary schools and universities since the 1960s, one generally read avidly by students on the adventure story level while their teachers praised its literary value.” 4

2 Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 2nd ed. 1996 ): 256.
3 Nick Perry, The Dominion of Signs: Television, Advertising and Other New Zealand Fictions (Auckland: Auckland UP, 1994 ): 133. Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987 ): 256. Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 4th ed. 1980 ): 329. Paul Day, John Mulgan (New York: Twayne, 1968 ): 96.
4 Paul Day, “Mulgan’s Man Alone,” in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel, ed. Cherry Hankin (Auckland: Heinemann, 1976 ), 60.

The explorer model

Of course, New Zealand had been colonized by Britain a hundred years or so before Mulgan wrote Man Alone; however, a crisis in settler confidence was brought on by the Depression of the 1930s. World War I had “created a boom and rising employment” in New Zealand, 10 and the end of this war had two effects relevant here. First, the boom peaked in 1920 with a frenzied burst of land speculation. This was fuelled by the massive injection of money into the uncontrolled land market by ex-servicemen, spending their cheap government ‘rehab’ loans on the purchase of farms. 11

10 Miles Fairburn, “The Farmers Take Over ( 1912– 30 ),” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair (Auckland: Oxford UP, 2nd ed. 1996 ): 187.
11 Fairburn, “The Farmers Take Over ( 1912– 30 ),” 187.

By 1921– 22, however, “a third of the soldier settlers, unable to service their debts, and all too frequently settled on poor country or lacking farming experience, walked off the land.” 12

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Man Alone foregrounds this double-edged crisis in farming.

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the bone people

In retrospect, there are some striking similarities between Man Alone and the Bone people regarding representations of sex, gender, and sexuality.

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In comparison to Man Alone’s single implied reader, the bone people has four: an anti-imperialist, someone seeking a local identity, a believer in the New Age, and the liberal feminist. Many individuals are likely to have fitted more than one of these implied reader profiles, given New Zealand’s social and cultural context of the first half of the 1980s.

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Social and cultural context

While the bone people has been dismissed in England as “the most commercially disastrous [Booker] winner ever,” 7 a fact overlooked by the more complacently London-oriented elements in the publishing and even retailing world is quite simply, as we have seen, that a writer such as Keri Hulme sold exceptionally well in New Zealand. 8

Although New Zealand’s role as ‘Britain’s farm’ had been reactivated since the 1930s, Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1972 drastically reduced the market for primary produce. 9 In the same year, OPEC’s several dramatic oil-price rises meant that the second half of the 1970s saw New Zealand “experiencing its greatest economic difficulties since the depression of the thirties,” 10 the standard of living slipping from almost the highest in the developed world to almost the bottom. 11 At the same time, there was a general cultural disengagement from Britain, largely because of the sense of “a somewhat humiliating rejection by the Motherland” 12 and a developing Pacific identity, as evident in the widespread protest against French nuclear testing near Mururoa in 1972– 73; private vessels there were joined by two official state frigates, generating “world-wide publicity.” 13 New Zealand’s “clean and green” image was cemented…

7 Evening Standard ( 13 September 1990 ). Cited by Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996 ): 76.
8 Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions, 120.
9 Edmund Bohan, New Zealand: The Story So Far: A Short History (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1997 ): 101 . Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 3 rd ed. 1980 ): 315 .
10 Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, 313.
11 Bohan, New Zealand. The Story So Far , 102– 104 .
12 Sinclair, A History of New Zealand , 329 . 13 A History of New Zealand, 312 .

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A parallel dynamic underpinned the Maori Renaissance. In 1973, the New Zealand Government “decided to mark Waitangi Day as a national holiday, buy back land, and set up the Waitangi Tribunal to prevent future breaches of the Treaty.” 19 Among Maori, protest swelled against historical wrongs, one example being Ngati Whatua’s occupation of Bastion Point in 1977– 78 , lasting seventeen months and involving two hundred arrests. 20 Further protest, coupled with growing awareness and concern, prompted the Government to widen the Waitangi Tribunal’s powers in 1985 “to consider all grievances since 1840 .” 21 Overall, as Alex Calder puts it, “New Zealand was a more Maori place in 1985 than in 1960 .” 22

19 Bohan, New Zealand: The Story So Far , 111 .
20 New Zealand: The Story So Far, 111 .
21 New Zealand: The Story So Far, 111 .
22 Calder, “Unsettling Settlement,” 175.