Alex Calder examines the palimpsest of Pakeha settlement in New Zealand.
If nothing else, last year’s Rugby World Cup fever confirms it is still primarily in watching and talking about rugby that we feel most united as a people, with the All Blacks’ chilling haka exemplifying the readiness with which we celebrate Maori culture as “ours” when it serves to showcase “brand New Zealand”, as distinct from elsewhere.
Hosting the World Cup was a big national project – the very type that often betrays a country’s deepest insecurities. Very likely the great show of ferns and flags belies a more usual sense of lacking cultural affinity. This lack for Pakeha is the genesis for Alex Calder’s The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand. “We Pakeha are at home here, we identify as New Zealanders, this is our place, we belong,” Calder allows, before suggesting, “without denying any of those things, there is another degree of belonging that we do not have that is available to Maori.”
Calder’s book examines our “tacit cultural knowledge” of the history of Pakeha settlement in New Zealand through discussions of selected, roughly speaking, 19th-century non-fictional and 20th-century fictional texts. The book’s proclaimed purpose is “cartographic”, mapping the ways we write, read and interpret place and ways of belonging.
A senior lecturer in English at the University of Auckland, Calder was the project leader for the Marsden-funded research into “Settlement Studies” in 2000, and his book is the fruit of over a decade of scholarship, publications and lectures on the subject. Grouped into four parts called “Belonging”, “Landing”, “Settling” and “Looming”, each of the 12 chapters easily stands alone, but there is much to be gained from reading the complete work.
A good illustration of Calder’s thesis is his observation “you come to a place where you might expect the past to be remembered, but what you actually encounter is the record of a kind of forgetting going on”, and his book probes historical erasures and silences to unearth buried signposts and muffled articulations. What The Settler’s Plot focuses on is as much the trace of what has not been written down as the writing that has lasted. It scrutinises the “effulgent rhetoric of settlement” to show how stories we discard or distort, as well as tell, determine history and culture.
Although the book is framed by women – Lady Barker and Blanche Baugh open and the last word is given to Janet Frame – the picture of (un-?)settlement presented here is largely masculine. The best close readings are of the male literary giants: Frederick Edward Maning, John Mulgan, Frank Sargeson and Allen Curnow.
Each is heavily inflected with critical theory – readers versed in the big isms (poststructuralism, new historicism and postcolonialism) are in good company here – and ebullient with references; The Settler’s Plot assumes a generally well-read audience and one that likes to read. As well as theory, there are long quotations of primary texts (some of which Calder himself calls “twaddle”), and the diligent are rewarded with discoveries of the surprising ways cultural myths and norms – such as the Pakeha “Man Alone” – are scripted, rehearsed and ultimately “forgotten as obvious”.
But The Settler’s Plot is intended for a broader audience than only academic. Guiding us through the often difficult terrain is a very friendly narrative voice, careful to set up complex deconstructions of history with personal anecdote and to leaven knotty exercises in critical thinking with analogies to pedestrian pleasures such as music and musicals (The Sound of Music comes up several times), food, travel and tennis. Calder nudges and winks at us along the way, and in parts The Settler’s Plot is laugh-out-loud funny.
Not least, this is a timely book, after an election year with a large part of the political spectrum calling for “One New Zealand”, in that one of its many functions is to hold up a mirror to our at times “affronted monoculturalism” and “smug biculturalism”. For Calder in particular and Settlement Studies in general, the “problems of settlement … are not a phase to outgrow or … to be superseded so much as a set of relations that persist, even as we are conscious of inheriting a world that is no longer new, and not of our making.” What remains unsure and perhaps most interesting, however, is the extent to which the persistence of these “problems” is a warning or a promise. z
THE SETTLER’S PLOT: HOW STORIES TAKE PLACE IN NEW ZEALAND, by Alex Calder (AUP, $45.99).
Isabel Michell teaches in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University’s Auckland campus.