The great New Zealand debate about national and cultural identity will always, sooner or later, turn to history for support. Take that speech given in Orewa, where National Party leader Don Brash sought to justify his agenda with an attempt to “look at our past honestly, not through a lens which projects current values onto 19th-century New Zealand, and not by stripping away the context of the past”. Five weeks later, he also lamented to the Northern Club, “Our once vigorous and combative culture has been hijacked by a phoney sense of ‘offend-no-one’ -biculturalism.”
Well, New Zealand literature has a lot to tell us about the desire to look at our past honestly – and how successful it’s likely to be. The Treaty of Waitangi hasn’t been the subject of too many novels, but its 19th-century underbelly – the clearest example of our vigorous and combative culture, the wars between Maori and Pakeha – certainly has.
Among the deep, dark secrets of New Zealand literature, one of the deepest and darkest is the existence of a massive body of novels about the New Zealand Wars (broadly, 1843-72). In fact, the very first New Zealand novel was such a creature: Major Butler Stoney’s Taranaki: A Tale of the War, published in 1861 and – setting a bad precedent – described by a contemporary reviewer as the worst novel he had ever read. According to New Zealand academic Nelson Wattie, since that date “there have been more than 30 novels relating to the Land Wars, ranging from so-called ‘romances’, which use the wars to spice up an otherwise uninteresting love story, to serious novels, which use the literary form as a strategy for examining the moral, social and political questions the conflict raises.”
There have been three times when such novels were especially popular. Comparing them reveals a great deal about how Pakeha in particular have used history to say a whole range of different things about cultural identity in the present.
The New Zealand Wars were a hot topic from the mid-1880s to the turn of the century. Pakeha society was coalescing into a national whole; and although Maori culture was recognised as a distinctive feature of the country, it was thought that Maori would become amalgamated into the settler population, or simply die out. Eight authors wrote novels about the wars – all melodramatic tales involving various combinations of brave soldiers, beautiful Maori women and savage warriors – and their use of that history was entirely consistent with contemporary Pakeha thought.
Take Rolf Boldrewood, who was so impressed by New Zealand during a visit in the 1860s that he returned in 1896 to research War to the Knife, or, Tangata Maori (1899), in many ways the archetypal wars novel of the period. Maori are central to the mystique his protagonist ascribes to New Zealand: “The valour of the Maori people, their chivalry, their eloquence, their dignity, their delight in war and skill in fortification, impressed him deeply. The Australian colonies had but an uninteresting aboriginal population, small in number and scarcely raised above the lowest races of mankind.”
Nevertheless, the settlers are seen as a superior race who will displace them with a kind of Darwinian inevitability: “The colonizing Briton would never have consented to stand idly by and see this great country, fitted to be the home of millions of Anglo-Saxons or other Europeans, held by a handful of barbarians … it cannot be denied that the advance of civilization has mainly depended upon conquests and the doctrine of force.” But some Maori are viewed more sympathetically than others: while those who oppose the settlers are condemned as “barbarians”, those who welcome them are embraced as having the potential to be “civilised”.
One of the most barbaric portrayals of Maori was perpetrated by Robert P Whitworth in Hine-Ra, or, The Maori Scout (1887): “In short, this deformed dwarf resembled nothing so much as a huge chimpanzee, or a gorilla, the likeness being more striking from the fact of his using his hands in locomotion, going, in a manner, on all fours.” Describing a culture made up of such figures, along with detailing countless scenes of violence, torture and cannibalism, reinforced for the reader of these texts the inevitability and necessity of the destruction of Maori society.
That condescension is further exemplified by the gruesome fates ascribed to the jealous Maori admirers of Maori women who have fallen in love with Pakeha men: one is crushed to death in a collapsing cave, one ritually beheaded, and another is thrown into a pool of boiling mud.
Maori are depicted more sympathetically when they readily enter into the ways of the colonists. In Robert H Scott’s Ngamihi, or, The Maori Chief’s Daughter (1895), a trio of sympathetic Pakeha prevail on the title character from “returning to the wild life which she has hitherto led in the forest, for although nature may have its charms, civilisation has far greater permanent attractions”. This process includes her adopting European dress and abandoning her “native way of speaking in the third person”, and its success is attested by Ngamihi herself: “Only a little while ago I felt the greatest hatred for the white people, whom I regarded as my bitterest enemies; but happily that is all past now, and the prejudices I once entertained have long since vanished under the kindness and sympathy which has on all sides been bestowed on me by my European friends.”
All these novels helped encourage the Pakeha reader in their disregard of a distinctive Maori culture in the present.
The subject enjoyed its next resurgence when nine novels were published in the 1960s. At the time, Pakeha openly took pride in what they saw as New Zealand’s excellent race relations; and contemporary fiction of the New Zealand Wars sought to reconcile the conflict with this rose-tinted view. Thus Ned Wynter, a colonial soldier in Frank Bruno’s Black Noon at Ngutu (1960), “found peace fighting for something intangibly tangible: the future amity and tranquillity of the fair green colony he loved, and of the brave happy brownskins he came to love, too”. (Incidentally, brave happy Bruno once earned brief fame for cornering an escaped lion in his garden.)
Although Maori in these novels are not depicted on the brink of extinction, they instead conform to stereotypes of savage leaders and child-like followers that seem to endorse their assimilation. This is certainly the pattern in Errol Brathwaite’s wars trilogy, which began with The Flying Fish (1964). The novel tells of the Maori neighbours of the protagonist, Phipps, and how “familiarity had taught him to look beyond their wild aspect, and now he knew them for what they were – simple, direct, fun-loving, somewhat lazy people with an unmatched happy charm”.
However, throughout the trilogy such “simple” people are readily incited by their far less appealing leaders. The depiction of Titokowaru in the third novel, The Evil Day (1967), is a case in point: “as long as that evil old man is able to sway those deluded people, there’ll be murders and ritual cannibalism and the tearing out of hearts and the parading of smoked heads and all the other disgusting, barbarous practices”.
Another Maori leader singled out for such treatment is Te Kooti in Dorothy Eden’s romance Sleep in the Woods (1960): “He’s bad, but he’s a devastatingly clever war leader, and he uses these horrible pseudo-religious initiation ceremonies to get recruits … The bad thing is, one can’t trust one’s own natives any more. They disappear overnight or steal one’s horses.” By singling out Maori leaders in this way, war and the eventual Maori defeat is presented as necessary for the elimination of extremism (and horse stealing) that allowed the two cultures to live with respect for each other.
The postwar society these novels envisage is remarkably similar to that which Pakeha so proudly claimed to live in. As a character in Olga Stringfellow’s Mary Bravender (1960) prophesies, “This is going to be a great country in the course of time. It’s been having its teething troubles, but they’re gradually disappearing. We’re starting really fresh, with all our mistakes in Colonial policy learned – it’s a wonderful chance to build a bridge between race and race, colour and colour, creed and creed.”
Yet more often than not, such sentiments mask the assimilation of Maori into Pakeha society. Stringfellow’s narrator is befriended by a Maori chieftainess who, like Ngamihi in the previous century, improves her speech and adopts European dress: “Kararaina, the wearer of shapeless Mother Hubbards, flax sandals and dogskin mats, was standing in the centre of the room in her wedding-dress … for the first time, the long line of illustrious ancestors showed in Kararaina to full effect; she was every inch a great chief’s daughter.” The novel appears unaware of the irony that she only becomes truly recognisable as a Maori when she leaves the outward signs of her culture behind.
In a variation upon this theme, Sleep in the Woods features a rebel who is won over by his love for a Pakeha woman: “the memory of that slim pale-skinned woman with hair like fire had stirred strange feelings in him, and he had a great longing to return to her. With this longing had come a sickening of Hauhau brutality. It was wrong and it was bad.”
Such passages are in accord with the observations of David P Ausubel, an American academic visiting New Zealand at this time, who noted “the apparent willingness to accept the Maori as long as but only as long as he conforms completely to European values and standards”.
The turbulent time from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s was the next occasion the New Zealand Wars made it onto the fictional agenda. Eleven novels were written about the subject or incorporated it into a wider historical narrative, and for the first time some were by Maori. They are united by the fact that their moral weighting of history differs markedly from their predecessors, reflecting the increased prominence of Maori culture and the questioning of Pakeha identity occurring in wider society.
For a start, more often than not their heroes are Maori and right is on their side. In Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986), Te Kooti is compared to Moses: “Jehovah chose him at birth to lead His Children of Israel, the Maori nation, out of the land of the Pakeha, out of slavery to Egypt.” Similarly, Maurice Shadbolt’s portrait of Titokowaru – a figure who personified evil in the 1960s – as a wisecracking, charismatic leader in Monday’s Warriors (1990) led W H Oliver to complain in his review of the book that “the moral dice are loaded against the Pakeha by the very manner of writing”. How times had changed.
Maori and Pakeha were most clearly contrasted, however, in depicting their attitudes to the land, an issue that was consistently used to explore the nature of the Pakeha presence. Thus Margaret Blay’s satire Victoria in Maoriland (1990) presents Pakeha as materialists whose sole desire is to exploit the land: “They want nothing but to bring their own greed here and plant it in our soil, where it will grow and grow, till there is no room for the great forest of our god! They chop, and burn, and cheat, and deceive!” This is in contrast to Maori, whose intensely spiritual relationship with the land testifies to the legitimacy of their presence.
Te Apa, a Maori character in Shirley Corlett’s saga The Hanging Sky (1990), compares his tribe with Pakeha settlers and concludes, “Yes, the pakeha used the land … but what did they feel about it?”
These versions of history show Pakeha on the back foot only a century after the same events provided the basis for literature that unquestioningly endorsed their superiority.
What this quick flick through the literary archive reveals is that, while these historical events are clearly significant and of recurring interest, the various attempts at retelling them have been irrevocably influenced by contemporary issues of cultural identity.
But of what relevance is this to Don Brash, and his desire for “objective history”? Merely that it serves as a reminder that when history is deployed in cultural debates it tends to resemble the things we want to say about the present. And that the society he envisages is along lines remarkably similar to those espoused in the novels of the 1960s. Having won his last battle, the colonial protagonist of The Evil Day felt “fewer and fewer believed that causes or differences of race were of first importance”; in the eyes of Dr Brash, “For many people, aspects other than their ethnicity matter much more to them – their religion, their profession, their sports club, their gender, and their political allegiance.”
Perhaps history does repeat itself after all.