Paul Moon avoids “overarching claims” and literary fireworks to produce a good solid history.
In New Zealand in the Twentieth Century: The Nation, The People, AUT University historian Professor Paul Moon offers New Zealanders the first substantial history of the turbulent century that began with “King Dick” Seddon in the saddle 
and ended with Helen Clark putting the long Rogernomics/Ruthenasia experiment firmly into neutral gear.
It is a big book – 672 pages (around 200,000 words of main body text, by my rough calculation) – lightly illustrated by two sets of well-chosen black-and-white and colour images.
That generous length gives Moon room to explore aspects of social history and to illuminate individuals that might rate a line at best in shorter national histories. Examples include a couple of thoughtful pages on AH Reed’s long-distance walks through a rural, almost colonial New Zealand that was dying as the old man walked and wrote; the city-dwelling Kiwis Reed largely ignored were driving the cars he never mastered and splashing out on Tupperware parties, whiteware and American-inspired homes with larger open spaces, ranch slider doors, patios and Decramastic cladding.
Moon writes well, avoiding the academic jargon of many scholars. This is good solid narrative history, tempered by the odd touch of humour. Summing up Geoffrey Palmer’s reply to Rob Muldoon that the forthcoming election would determine whether Muldoon’s “style of conducting our political business will take root or be extirpated”, for example, Moon adds “Extirpated?”, before going on to observe that the law professor’s choice of word “highlighted something of a cerebral divide between the remote intellectualism of Citizens for Rowling and the more rough-and-ready popular opposition Muldoon was cultivating”.
New Zealand in the Twentieth Century inevitably invites comparison with the second volume of James Belich’s national history, Paradise Reforged, which covers broadly the same period. Disappointing to me – but perhaps not for general readers – the new book lacks the literary fireworks of Paradise, Belich’s joyous engagement with theory in which he created such terms as “protein ports”. Indeed, Moon takes pains to explain that he “avoided making any overarching claims about the nature of New Zealand and New Zealanders in the 20th century, and have similarly exercised reluctance when exploring themes relating to the country’s social and cultural identity”. There is no introduction, no conclusion, just a short preface. “If a few shoots of insight sprout from its contents, then it [the book] will have achieved its purpose,” he writes.
That hands-off approach is matched by the disappointing decision to take a decade-by-decade approach to the structure. Decades may interest the chronologically obsessed, but one of the most interesting things about reading a historian’s work is seeing their selections of turning points and how they group and label periods – “The Holyoake Years”, “The Libertarian Revolution” and so on. Is 1980 more important than, say, 1975 (Muldoon’s election), 1981 (the Springbok Tour) or 1984? I think not.
My other impression is that this often reads more like a history of the North Island than of New Zealand. Some imbalance would be expected given the demographic drift north that characterised last century, but although events such as the New Zealand International Exhibition at Christchurch over the summer of 1906/07 get their space, New Zealand in the Twentieth Century is overwhelmingly centred on events in Auckland and Wellington. Northerners have written all our major national histories. Perhaps it is time for a southerner to hit the keyboard.
NEW ZEALAND IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE NATION, THE PEOPLE, by Paul Moon (HarperCollins, $49.99).
Gavin McLean is a historian whose books include Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand, which he co-edited with Bronwyn Dalley.