History, heritage, and colonialism: Historical consciousness, Britishness, and cultural identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940 9781784991920

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STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

History, heritage, and colonialism Historical consciousness, Britishness, and cultural identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940 KynAn Gentry

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General editor: Andrew S. Thompson Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

History, heritage, and colonialism

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson

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MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities John M. MacKenzie MISSIONARY FAMILIES Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier Emily J. Manktelow THE COLONISATION OF TIME Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire Giordano Nanni BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE Britain, 1870–1914 Douglas A. Lorimer GENTEEL WOMEN Empire and domestic material culture, 1840−1910 Dianne Lawrence EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy ed. John M. MacKenzie SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ed. Saul Dubow

History, heritage, and colonialism Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

historical consciousness ,

britishness , and cultural identity in new zealand ,

1870–1940

Kynan Gentry

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Kynan Gentry 2015 The right of Kynan Gentry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 8921 3  hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow TJ International Ltdow

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For Tommy

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C ONT E NT S

List of figures  viii Acknowledgements x List of abbreviations  xii Glossary of Maori terms  xiii Map of New Zealand  xv Introduction

1

1 Entangled objects: tourism and the exhibition of Maori material culture

24

2 Throwing stones at Napoleon: Pakeha identity and the preservation and neglect of Maori material culture

58

3 The art of forgetting: history, myth, and the New Zealand Wars93 4 History from below, or, When did parochialism become a dirty word?

125

5 In pursuit of a national past: ‘New Zealand is putting her historical house in order’

159

6 New Zealand in context: history and heritage in late nineteenth-century Canada and Australia

189

Conclusion 230 Select bibliography  235 Index 263

[ vii ]

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L IS T OF F IGURES

 1 William Jenkins and the group of Maori he took to England in 1863 (Ref: A-018–001, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 25  2 New Zealand Department of Tourist and Health Resorts poster (ca. 1920) advertising the Maori attractions of the North Island’s thermal district (Ref: Eph-E-TOURISM1920s-01, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 30  3 Hongi at the inner pa at the New Zealand Exhibition, Christchurch, ca. 1906–7 (Ref: 1/1–022026-G, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, 40 New Zealand)   4 The pataka Puawai-O-Te-Aroha at the Auckland Museum, 1905 (Ref: 1/1-007041-G, by permission of the Alexander 68 Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)  5 The Maori Hall at the new Dominion Museum in Buckle Street, Wellington, ca. 1936 (Ref: 1/1-003855-G, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)  72  6 Interior view of the premises of Thomson & Co., aerated water and cordial manufacturers in Dunedin, ca. 1920. (Ref: APG-1028-1/2-G, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 79   7 Makereti Papakura seated in the carved wooden doorway of Te Rauru meeting house, ca. 1905-10 (Ref: 1/1-006417-G, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, 81 Wellington, New Zealand)  8 Moutoa Gardens memorial ‘to the heroes of the Battle of Moutoa’ in 1868. (Ref: PA1-f-027-12-2, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 95  9 A depiction of an incident at the Battle of Gate Pa, 1864, where Wiremu Taratoa ran a calabash of water to his ­mortally wounded enemy Lieutenant Colonel Booth (Auckland Weekly News, Christmas number, 14 December 1895)102 10 The reconstructed (in concrete) look-out tower of the Manaia Redoubt, ca. 1930 (Ref: APG-1681-1/2-G, by [ viii ]

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List of figures

permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 11 The memorial statue of Robert Burns, uncle of Dunedin’s co-founder, the Reverend Thomas Burns, in The Octagon, Dunedin, ca. 1910 (Ref: 1/2-106904-F, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 12 The Canterbury Provincial Buildings, ca. 1880 (Canterbury Heritage, http://canterburyheritage.blogspot.com.au/) 13 Tableau, re-enacting the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1923 (Ref: 1/1-017341-F, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand) 14 Treaty House, Waitangi, photographed in the early 1930s prior to its ‘restoration’ and reinvention (Ref: PA1-f-015-03, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)   15 ‘Quebec Improvements’ – Lord Dufferin’s 1875 plan for the preservation of Québec fortifications and for construction of a new Château St Louis (Ref: Maps, Plans and Charts ­collection/N0004959, by permission of Library and Archives Canada) 16 James Dawson’s memorial obelisk to the Aborigines (The Sydney Mail, 12 December 1885) 17 John Eldershaw, Historic Tasmania, Port Arthur, Tasmanian government Tourist Bureau, Hobart, ca. 1940 (Ref: pic-an13681818, by permission of the National Library of Australia)  

[ ix ]

116

137 143 147

150

194 205

221

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A C K NOWL E DGEMEN TS

I am under no illusions that a book is a project one accomplishes alone, and I have been particularly fortunate in the many people who have helped me along the way. First off, I must thank the late Professor David Hamer for suggesting the topic in the first place. I must also thank David for fatefully introducing me to Dr Gavin McLean, who, in addition to giving feedback from the first rough drafts, has both seen the project evolve and saved readers further down the track from the worst of my writing! At the Australian National University I must thank my colleagues for putting up with my incessant and often inane questions – and none more so than Professor Tom Griffiths. Particular thanks also need to go to Professor Angela Woollacott and Associate Professor Doug Craig for their support. At the University of Melbourne a debt of gratitude is owed to Professor David Goodman, Associate Professor Andrew May, and Professor Kate Darian-Smith for their advice, feedback, and guidance at various times. A similar debt of gratitude is owed to everyone from History Group of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in Wellington, New Zealand, for all of their help and support. Particular thanks must go to Dr Bronwyn Dalley here, who in addition to advice, arranged periods of study-leave for me to complete research, and also gave comment on a number of early drafts. Similar thanks for advice, guidance, and commenting on drafts goes to Dr Conal McCarthy at Victoria University; Professor Giselle Byrnes at Charles Darwin University; Professor Paul Tapsell and Emeritus Professor Erik Olssen at Otago University; Professor Scott Poynting at the University of Auckland; and Associate Professor Jannelle Warren-Findley from Arizona State University – all of whom took the time to offer their wisdom to the project at various times. In Britain, Professors Rosaleen Duffy, Feargal Cochrane, Cynthia Weber, Distinguished Professor John Urry, Dr Anne-Marie Fortier, and Dr Kent Fedorowich all also gave invaluable feedback. A depth of appreciation also goes to the many talented and helpful library and archive staff members who have assisted me in the various facets of my research. In particular I would like to thank the staff of the New Zealand Room at Wellington Public Library and Elaine Marland, librarian extraordinaire at the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. Similar thanks must also go out to Archives New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library, Hocken Library, Auckland Public Library, [x]

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A cknowledgements

Christchurch City Libraries, Archives New Zealand, Wellington City Council Archives, Te Papa Archive, Napier Public Library, the Wellington Early Settlers’ Association, Auckland University, Victoria University, University of Otago, and Canterbury University. In Australia, the Melbourne University archive, Public Record Office of Victoria, and State Library of Victoria; the Mitchell Library, and the State Records Authority of New South Wales; the Tasmanian Archives; the National Library, and National Archives of Australia. In the UK, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and National Archives, and in Canada, Archives Canada, and the Ontario Historical Society. I would equally like to offer my profound thanks and gratitude to everyone at Manchester University Press for ultimately making this book happen. In addition to being a pleasure to work with, they have been both patient and insistent with me when needed. On a more personal level, I also need to thank my friends and family for their support. Special thanks must also go to our dogs Duchess, Crockie, and Milo for their daily demands for walks during which many important insights came. Lastly, and most importantly, my greatest gratitude goes to my wife Dr Victoria Mason. There are few, if any, areas of this book that she has not contributed to significantly. Similarly to our toddler Tommy for not letting me sit in front of the computer for too long without play time.

[ xi ]

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L IST OF AB B R E VIATIO N S

AJHR ANZ ATL DTHR HPTA JPS MHR NCC NHC NSW NZJH NZPD NZIM NZRM TPA TPNZI

Appendix to the Journal of the House of Representatives Archives New Zealand Alexander Turnbull Library Department of Tourism and Health Resorts Historic Places Trust archive Journal of the Polynesian Society Member of the House of Representatives National Centennial Committee National Historical Committee New South Wales New Zealand Journal of History New Zealand Parliamentary Debates The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine New Zealand Railways Magazine Te Papa Archive Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute

[ xii ]

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G L OS S AR Y OF MAORI TERMS

The following glossary is intended as an indicative guide only, and is compiled from major published sources including Cleve Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Maori Culture (Auckland 1991), Roger Neich, Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngati Tarawhai Woodcarving (Auckland 2001), and Anne Salmond, Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings (Auckland 2004). posture dance haka hapu a social division below the level of tribe hei-tiki neck pendant in the form of a human figure hongi The hongi is a ritual of greeting, blessing, and unity. The two parties press noses against one another and exhale. kainga unfortified Maori village kaumatua elder, old man or woman kowhaiwhai curvilinear pattern maihi bargeboard of a house mana  psychic force, authority, control, prestige, power, influence mana whenua the power associated with the possession of lands Maoritanga concept of Maori identity, Maori culture marae courtyard in front of a meeting house moko incised body adornment, tattoo pa fortified Maori village pah  common nineteenth and early twentieth-century European spelling of ‘pa’ Pakeha Person of European descent, as opposed to a Maori pataka raised storehouse poupou side wall panel on the inside of a house raupo a swamp reed tangi funeral ceremony taonga property, treasure, highly prized object tapu sacred, under religious restriction tekoteko carved figure atop the gable of a house tikanga customary rules or habits, a set of beliefs associated with Maori cultural practices toe-toe a large native grass traditionally used for weaving tohunga expert, in either religious or practical matters [ xiii ]

G lossary of M aori terms

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urupa burial place waka canoe, vessel or container whare house whare runanga meeting house whare whakairo carved house

[ xiv ]

N

Bay of Islands

Kerikeri Waitangi

(SKororarekav

Auckland Bay of Plenty

Ngaruawahia (

Hamilton Rotorua

Whakarewarewa

Taupo

Pukearuhe

Tologa Bay

Gisborne Poverty Bay

Turangi

( Mt. Taranaki

Napier

Hawera

o ug or

h So u n d

Marl

b

Whanganui3Wanganui

s

(

Nelson

( (

Wellington Blenheim

B

R

Y

Christchurch

CA

N

T

E

R

U

Dusky Sound

(

O AG

Queenstown

Banks Peninsula

Oamaru

OT

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(

Tauranga

Dunedin

4((((((((((((((((((544(((((((((((((((((44(((((((((((((((((44((((((((((((((((44((((((((((((((((((44km

Map of New Zealand, including key locations mentioned in the text (author-generated map using imaging from www.worldofmaps.net)

[ xv ]

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INT R ODUCT ION

English institutions have century upon century of the past, lying fold upon fold within them … Because we English have maintained the threads between past and present we do not, like some younger states, have to go hunting for our own personalities. We do not have to set about the deliberate manufacture of a national consciousness, or to strain ­ourselves … to create a ‘nationalism’ out of the broken fragments of tradition, out of the ruins of a tragic past … Our history is here and active, giving meaning to the present. Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History, 1944 There are, throughout the country, dwellings and shops, cemeteries and headstones, whose grace, calm, and sometimes extravagant fancy should be the more highly valued – in a country prone both architecturally and intellectually to mediocrity. No cabinet minister was either born in them or buried under them; no embattled settlers prepared to fire upon the Maoris from them; no church, lodge or local body held its first meeting in them. People simply built them, and we are the richer for it. W. H. Oliver, Landfall, 1957

History, place, and colonialism Published in the same year he was appointed as the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Herbert Butterfield’s The Englishman and His History (1944) provided a remarkable illustration of the strength of a nationalist interpretation of history – Butterfield concluding that the richness of England’s past was both an all-pervasive influence on the present and a unique source of strength. Writing thirteen years later, the young New Zealand historian William Hosking Oliver’s ­description of the New Zealand past would seem to be as stark a contrast as one could image – highlighting the apparent lightness of history’s touch on the New Zealand landscape, but a landscape worthy of preservation none the less. Seventy-seven years earlier, however, the prominent New Zealand collector and bibliophile Thomas Hocken had  taken a strikingly different position to Oliver, arguing in a lecture to the Otago Institute on the country’s early history that New Zealand’s youth made it luckier than many older countries. ‘The thin mists of two or three ages, or of a century,’ he began: [1]

H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M

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are quite sufficient, to my way of thinking, to invest the past with the desired halo. When thicker, they become more impenetrable, and it is then difficult to conjure through them visions of the dead, and of their deeds. When treading the steps that Captain Cook and Samuel Marsden and these old missionaries trod, I can readily see what they saw, hear what they said, and look upon the life that was around them. But the old abbey does not so readily recall to me the procession of cowl-clad monks whose solemn chants once filled its aisles.1

While Hocken duly noted that ‘a prejudiced fondness for anything New Zealand may partly blind [him]’, both he and Oliver had an intimate knowledge of the English historical landscape – Oliver having completed his doctorate at Oxford in the early 1950s, while Hocken spent his youth in northern England and Dublin before departing for the Australasian colonies in 1860 at the age of twenty-four as a ship’s surgeon. Writing four years after his return to New Zealand, Oliver’s experience of the English historical landscape thus saw him plead for New Zealanders to see the material remnants of the country’s past on its own terms rather than by direct comparison to the depth and richness of Britain’s history and aesthetic and historical sensibilities. He recognised how much such sensibilities shaped the New Zealand cultural psyche. Yet as Hocken – noting the shallowness of New Zealand’s historical roots – concluded, ‘To my mind associations make antiquities, rather than great lapse of time’.2 Tempting as it may be to dismiss Hocken’s enthusiasm, his and Oliver’s perspectives raise some interesting questions about how colonial societies rationalised the conflicting perspectives of themselves as being socially and culturally rooted in Europe, while also having their own distinct pasts. James Belich touches on this question in his idea of ‘neo-Britains’, where he suggests that colonists did not simply seek to imitate the ‘mother country’, but to adapt and rework notions of Britishness to their own ends.3 Refining and expanding this idea, Pocock suggests that underlying this remaking of Britishness was a perceived need amongst colonial societies to rewrite British history ‘in order both to enhance their understanding of their own and to point out to the United Kingdom British that there is a history of common substance’.4 These colonial conceptions of self, most importantly, were culturally and politically pluralistic – Fedorowich and Bridges summing the situation up: ‘Just as in Britain one could be a Liverpudlian, Lancastrian, Englishman and Briton, so in New Zealand one might be an Aucklander, North Islander, New Zealander and Briton’.5 Binding these multiple identities together were shared institutional values, and a ‘web’ of personal, cultural, economic, political, and technological networks. The role of education, literature, tourism, [2]

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I ntroduction

and the wider production, consumption, and infusion of imperial ‘texts’ into the cultural life of the metropole and the periphery was especially important here, with stories of imperial adventure, racial ‘others’, and nationalising narratives dominated the English elementary school system from the 1880s. History, within this frame, was increasingly conceived, structured, and taught as a moral tale.6 The pedagogical significance of this to the wider empire was fundamental, with the perceived power of historical narrative to instil civic values and produce good imperial citizens being at the heart of primary and secondary education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Indeed, well into the first half of the twentieth century the majority of school readers in Australia and New Zealand, and many in Canada, were adaptations of British readers – Ernest Scott, for example, conceiving his textbook A Short History of Australia, which passed through six editions from 1916 to 1936, ‘to elucidate the way this country was discovered, why and how it was settled, the development of civilised society within it, its social and political progress, mode of government, and relations, historical and actual, with the Empire of which it forms a part’.7 The prevalence of British-trained historians in colonial university historyteaching posts similarly resulted in the entrenchment of the dominant view that the history of colonies needed to be contextualised within an imperial framework. Indeed, as the Scotsman and Professor of History at Otago University John Rawson Elder responded as late as 1936 to the suggestion that a chair in New Zealand history be established, to do so ‘would be to emphasise a narrow and parochial view of history, which New Zealand, in its essential isolation, should strive to avoid’.8 The connection between imperial ideals and pedagogy was promoted just as strongly outside of formal institutions, with women’s organisations such as the Victoria League, Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, and the Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire promoting educational reform and the establishment of memorials, commemorative sites, and museums.9 The museum, of course, has been a key point of colonial and ­postcolonial history’s focus in recent years, with an extensive body of work exploring the centrality of the museum to the promotion and consolidation of racial discourse; as a tool of colonial possession, ordering, and indigenous dispossession; and the museum’s and ­exhibition’s importance to the transfer of knowledge, power, and money both domestically and across the empire. Complementing this, the nuanced, interdisciplinary perspective of heritage and museum studies has challenged postcolonialism’s focus on hegemony by exploring themes of cross-cultural dialogue and hybridity, highlighting indigenous agency and counter-colonial resistance.10 Outside of the museum, meanwhile, [3]

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M

work such as Thomas Richards’s Imperial Archive (1993) and Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain (2009) has cast new light on the cultural geographies of colonialism through their explorations of the colonial state’s epistemic power and self-representation.11 History, Heritage, and Colonialism builds on this body of work, but also takes a much wider perspective on the place of ‘the past’ in colonial society. Focusing on New Zealand, but drawing on examples from a host of colonial contexts, it explores the circumstances in which colonists begin to recognise, identify with, produce, and ultimately use the past in their new homes, and how such narratives are rationalised within wider conceptions of their cultural heritage. In doing so it is centrally concerned with the idea that the preoccupation of historians of colonial history with ‘the nation’ has detached this history from its imperial contexts, homogenising identity and blurring regional boundaries. Certainly in the New Zealand instance ‘the local’ has since the end of the Second World War generally been seen to have had contributed little of historiographical significance, with the academy effectively taking the position that there was little ‘real’ history published until there were academic historians to write it. Indeed, as the historian Eric McCormick concluded in Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), prior to the 1930s New Zealand high culture was largely provincial, imitative and undistinguished, with the local historian’s obsession with collecting historical fragments and oral testimony seen as uncritically antiquarian, and even ‘promiscuous’.12 In recent years this view has been challenged by a handful of revisionist scholars whose work has highlighted the place of both local and nation histories as colonising texts in which the efforts of amateur and academic historians alike were focused on peopling New Zealand’s Pakeha past with noble pioneers and their deeds; however, ‘the nation’ remains dominant.13 According to the champion of regional history Jim Gardner, behind the blinkered scholarly focus on the nation lies an assumption ‘that the only way to make sense of a small country’s history is to deal in the largest possible units and patterns’.14 It is tempting here to read Gardner’s rationale not as ‘a small country’s history’, but as ‘a country’s small history’ – New Zealand, after all, being a marginally larger geographical entity than the United Kingdom, but an entity that, as Butterfield’s opening quotation implies, has suffered under a historical inferiority complex. The centrality of the past to identity has deep roots, with the connection between historical continuity and legitimacy laying at the heart of notions of kinship, heritage, belonging, and nationalism.15 Indeed, so important is the notion of ‘the past’ to ideas of national unity, [4]

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state legitimacy, moral obligation, and political consensus, that the notion of a ‘national heritage’ – a body of folkways and political ideas – ­necessarily resides at heart of the expansionist imperative. In Nation and Commemoration – a comparative study of national centennial and bicentennial celebrations in Australia and the US – for example, Lyn Spillman concludes that: Past, progress, and future were often important features of imagined national community in the centennials, symbolizing shared experience. When people in both countries imagined shared qualities which bound their communities, they also thought frequently of their political values and institutions, and prosperity or a close analog of prosperity: wealth, resources, productivity, or development.16

With this in mind imperial historians have begun to appreciate how Britishness as an identity often meant more in the colonies than it did in Britain itself, where there was a tendency to think more along the demarcations of the ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, and ‘Welsh’.17 While Smith explains such actions with the simple conclusion that ‘no “nation-tobe” can survive without a homeland or a myth of common origins and descent’, the geographer Doreen Massey offers a more nuanced explanation, suggesting that the establishment of the feeling of ‘home’ is dependent upon the notions ‘of recourse to a past, of a seamless coherence of character, of an apparently comforting bounded enclosure’. Most importantly, she concludes, as boundaried spaces, the identity of such places is established ‘through negative counterposition with the Other beyond the boundaries’.18 The frequent description of the empire in familial terms – of the ‘mother country’ and colonies being ‘under parental care’ – was thus useful for its highlighting that Britain and its colonies were naturally related to one another.19 Massey’s ideas – which are central to this book’s core arguments – plug into a growing body of scholarly work on space and place. Led by the work of historically minded scholars such as Henri Lefebvre, Paul Carter, Michel de Certeau, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, in recent decades the ‘spatial turn’ has had a wide-ranging influence on academic history. Lefebvre’s work has been particularly influential, with his The Production of Space (1974) having introduced a generation of historians to the idea that space is not simply natural geography but something that human beings produce over time. Space is itself historical, with spatial relations shifting and changing. Yet while historians have enthusiastically embraced the spatial – especially within postcolonialism, where notions of empire and imperialism are seen to have had uneven spatial and historical consequences – they have also been concerned more with the idea of ‘space’ than ‘place’, [5]

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M

paying more attention to the language and practice of spatiality than to the spatial experience. Having become one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography, however, ‘place’ has much to offer historical research. Yet it can be a complex idea. While the notion of ‘place attachment’, for example, which lies at the heart of Massey’s argument, posits that attachment is inextricably tied to proximity, physical and social proximity do not have to coincide. Individuals who live geographically close to a ‘place’ may have little or no attachment to it, while for others with little or no geographical connection, ‘imagined’ links may be pervasive.20 Environmental psychologists, furthermore, have explored how children bond emotionally with places as they grow, and how memories of childhood places remain crucial anchors throughout life, while ‘sense of place’ has been shown to be reinforced by the social networks of adulthood – the argument being that the longer a person lives in a place, the more likely the environment is to become saturated with significant memories.21 As the historian Becky Taylor and the geographer Ben Rogaly’s recent study of identity, place, and belonging in the English council estate has also forcefully demonstrated, it is place as context that ultimately defines our attachment to them.22 Research has also been undertaken into the emotional consequences of person – place bonds being broken, such as the grieving for a lost home that occurs among exiles deprived of their familiar environment and memory sites, or with people who remain in situ while sacred and significant sites are destroyed or profaned.23 Human geographers and sociologists meanwhile have explored issues to do with community development such as social capital, sense of community, and citizen participation.24 A small number of historical schools have, to be fair, long been sensitive to notions of place beyond the simple locational; however, the bulk of these – such as Annales and Microstoria – have been outside of the Anglo-American traditions.25 The key exception perhaps was the British Communist Party Historians’ Group, who in the early 1950s recognised the importance of place in shaping attachment, with Raphael Samuel subsequently making place a central thread of the early History Workshop movement.26 Arguably the most influential historical intervention into place in recent decades, however, has been the seven-volume Les Lieux de Mémoire published between 1984 and 1993 under the direction of the Annales historian Pierre Nora.27 At the heart of Nora’s work is a reformulation of Maurice Halbwachs’s distinction between memory and history – Halbwachs emphasising the separateness of memory and history, while Nora sees memory and history as ‘in many respects opposed’.28 Nora, however, also seeks to [6]

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highlight the changing relationship between the two arenas. Indeed his recognition that ‘sites’ of memory do not simply arise out of lived experience but instead have to be created, together with his emphasis on the plurality and fluidity of meaning and uses of memory sites, have been immensely influential, residing at the core of academic commentary on the history of heritage in western society that has emerged since the mid-1980s. Nora’s ideas have also been hotly contested, with critics arguing that his concept of history is highly nostalgic; his approach to the idea of nation reverential; and his claims of the death of collective memory premature and misleading.29 Particularly strong criticism has also been levelled at his focus on ‘official’ places of memory, with Raphael Samuel, David Lowenthal, Nancy Wood, Peter Carrier, and John Bodnar all arguing that the locus of heritage is much less about grand monuments and coercive national memory than it is about the vernacular and the typical, with Samuel rightly noting that the twentieth century in particular saw a ‘dissevering’ of the link between heritage and the idea of national or collective destiny.30 Underlying this is the simple reality that people rarely conduct themselves in the manner that national histories and monuments suggest they should. All sorts of geographic considerations, social conflicts, and economic forces create a multiplicity of local issues which impact decisions. Indeed, echoing Samuel’s contention, Bodnar, Chris Healy, and Tom Griffiths have each suggested that, in relation to the formation of identity in Australia and the United States, local rather than national perceptions of place and history have provided the model of historical imagination through which people have made sense of their own time in places that were still new to them.31 The same can be argued of New Zealand, where, as one historian has recently observed, local communities were connected to a ‘national’ past through the rhetoric of public commemoration, while local and provincial identities remained dominant.32 With this in mind, the ‘obliteration of local and provincial jealousies’ was seen as one of the express aims of nationally oriented groups such as the New Zealand Natives Association, which was established in 1890 to create a feeling of patriotism and nationality among the New Zealand-born community.33 Highlighting the pervasive power of the local, in the long run provincial identities remained strong while after a few years the Natives Association was gone. Eighty years later little had changed – Erik Olssen noting that in the process of writing his A History of Otago in the early 1980s ‘I quickly identified some 20 subregions [of Otago], most of them with different histories, which at best could be reduced to seven larger sub-regions … [each with] distinctive characters’.34 [7]

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As Samuel has suggested, herein lays the disturbing paradox – that because local history does not have to stretch over such diverse and wide-ranging collectives, it is in effect more nationalistic.35 Because it is comprised of more personal histories, it implies the history of larger communities to a much greater extent than national history implies the local community. This is not to suggest that local and national history are mutually exclusive, but that as the Canadian historian Douglas Cole argued in the early 1970s a sharper distinction often needs to be made between ‘nationalism’ – which he saw as embodying an ethnic and cultural community – and the more localised ‘patriotism’, which he argued took the form of affection for a homeland, but was not ethnically exclusive.36 Arguing that Canadian and Australian society had traditionally located their identities not in Britain itself but in the worldwide community of ‘Britannic nationalism’, Stuart Ward has recently similarly concluded that ‘What had often been mistaken for “colonial nationalism” … was really an expression of pride of place and community of interest’.37 Irrespective of whether or not we are convinced by Cole’s argument, the issue of place that he, Samuel, and others tap into raises a fundamental question about the place of ‘the local’ and ‘translocal’ in shaping settler-British identities. Indeed, as Doreen Massey concluded in her contribution to the 1995 History Workshop Journal edition ‘Rethinking the idea of place’, locale is a ‘product of wider contacts; the local is always already a product in part of “global” forces’ or ‘the world beyond the place itself’.38 Flipping this idea on its head, Jim Gardner argues that ‘[t]he normal ambit of the individual is regional and not national, and local rather than regional. Of course, the wider trends in events and in public opinion impinge on the individual’s daily sphere, but his [or her] reaction to them is usually expressed within or through the local framework’.39 It is this conviction that gives the local value. Philippa Levine makes a similar case in her analysis of the popularity of local history in late nineteenth-century Britain, which she argues cannot be explained by nostalgia alone, but must be understood as a response to attachment to local identity that in many ways mirrored other expressions of civic pride, while also being a response to emergent social, cultural, and political threats.40 Nineteenth-century Scottish nationalists similarly turned to the past as a defence against the cultural and political hegemony of England, as did the Southern and Western United States against the Eastern States. Intricately linked to place attachment, place identity is bound up with the idea that people’s identity and values are informed by the places they attach to.41 As Tony Ballantyne concludes in his recent study of the New Zealand township of Gore, for example, ‘place’ had a profound impact on the development of colonial knowledge, the [8]

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shaping of which he suggests is generated by everyday practices ‘deeply embedded in the structure of local life’.42 This is to suggest not that landscapes and places have ‘voices’, or that they are ‘charged’ with meaning or emotion but that the identities of places are bound up with the histories which are told of them, and the strengths and weaknesses of networks between communities.43 With this in mind, the American urban historian Dolores Hayden suggests that both natural and man-made places can be seen as storehouses of social memories, framing the lives of many people and often transcending generations. It is the stabilising persistence of place that makes it such a powerful container for memory.44 Indeed, among historians of historic preservation, the obliteration of collective memories that resulted from rapid post-1950 urban renewal is typically cited as a key factor behind the subsequent rise of the preservation movement – the suggestion being that the multi-sensory experience of place that comes with landscape, more than any other form in event memory, produces the sensation of bridging the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such ‘experience’, none the less seek to share the memory.45 This was certainly the case for the New Zealand historian Michael King, who in describing his own childhood in Being Pakeha (1985) noted that there was a certain thrill when, as a ten-year-old, he discovered that James Cowan’s The New Zealand Wars (1922–1923) contained a detailed account of a battle between Maori and government troops that had taken place in his neighbourhood 140 years earlier: The book included maps, photographs and descriptions of combat that enabled me to pinpoint and stand on each site, and once standing there, to imagine that I was experiencing what had happened there … I lay in the earthworks behind the Anglican Church which had been built over Rangihaeata’s pa … climbed Battle Hill to find the Maori rifle pits, and the graves of Imperial troops killed fighting there. These experiences made history come alive for me. I felt the presence of people who had gone before. I saw them in a kind of Arthurian world that was not in Camelot but (literally) on my own doorstep.46

Cowan himself had a similar childhood, having grown up near Rangiaowhia, close to the sites of the Waikato Wars. As a recent environmental psychology study has shown, such attachments to place can also have a significant influence on the desire to preserve the historic landscape.47 Nor need there necessarily be a pre-existing relationship with a given place, as the antiquarian Thomas Hocken, for example, noted in a lecture on the country’s early mission stations to the Otago Institute in 1880: [9]

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I have visited many of these old stations, now deserted or desolate spots, or else converted to purposes of a far different character. Nothing brought back to me so vividly the bygone past of New Zealand as wandering though these ruined remains. The once pretty garden – record of the missionary’s taste and solace – choked with weeds and undergrowth; the fences and hedges destroyed; the quaint little church, with small overhanging belfry, locked, silent, and rapidly going to decay – the house silent, too, damp and mouldy, overrun and darkened with vines and creepers, now disorderly, once trim and well cared for as they clustered round the low verandah – the author and occupant of all this himself laying somewhere near, dear, and perhaps forgotten.48

Recent scholarly emphasis on ideas of place, however, is not to suggest that as a concept it is new, with both western and non-western cultures having used place memory as mnemonic devices for millennia. For Maori, for example, the landscape and the people are believed to be inseparable, with landscape central to spiritual nourishment. Maori history and cultural identity are in fact inextricably infused into the land through waiata (song), whakapapa (genealogy), whaikorero (speech making), and narratives.49 Within whakapapa, people’s connections are a reflection of who they are, where they come from, who they are related to, the mountain and river they associate with, and the lands they can stake claim to. Shared whakapapa can thus be seen as ‘all things are from the same origin and that the welfare of any part of the environment determines the welfare of people’.50

Structure of this book As an area of historical enquiry, the production of historical narrative and the ideas of historical and heritage consciousness offer a valuable critique of the dominant idea of ‘the nation’ and the emphasis placed on the production of so-called ‘high’ cultural forms such as art, literature, and poetry within nationalism. While this emphasis reflects the perception that such forms of cultural capital are themselves a necessary component of ‘healthy’ national identity, such approaches privilege the views of writers and artists who represent but a narrow, and often idealistic, group within the larger society. While similar accusations are commonly made of those involved in historical societies and early preservation movements, one of the arguments posed in this book is that, while such societies were indeed magnets for elites and arenas for the manipulation of historical narrative, this alone fails to explain the nature and diversity of historical consciousness and interest in collection and preservation that took place. It must equally be understood as a response to attachment to cultural identities that in many ways [ 10 ]

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mirrored other expressions of civic pride. The intersection between history and civics was central to the definition and dissemination of imperial iconographies. Architecture was a central component of this, as owing to its visibility it was an especially effective device for communicating notions of imperial power – as were monuments, perhaps the most obvious sites for iconographic messages. The interconnectedness of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world enabled such iconographies to travel considerable distances, with resultant collages of fragments from unlikely contexts. More generally, the idea of a ‘national heritage’ has been a primary instrument in both the discovery and creation of political nationalism’s conception of a homeland and a homogeneous people – existing as a necessary consolidation of national identification, while neutralising the potential threat of competing heritages of groups or regions both domestically and transnationally.51 Indeed, the political power of such symbols was only too clearly demonstrated in the early 1990s when Serbian troops besieging cities in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina set about destroying important cultural sites, as well as museums, monuments, libraries, archives, mosques, and churches. Not content merely to conquer their enemies, the aim of Serbian hyper-nationalists was to remove material cultural claims that the Croat and Muslim populations had to the landscape. It was similarly difficult to find an intact historic synagogue in Germany in the aftermath of the pogrom that occurred throughout Nazi Germany during 9–10 November 1938, and resulted in the destruction of more than a thousand synagogues. More recently it has been argued that archaeological practice in Israel has been dominated by an overwhelming need to legitimise the national ethos, one result being the obliteration of the Palestinian cultural landscape.52 In New Zealand a similar rationale lay behind the destruction of Maori carved houses by government forces during the New Zealand Wars – the houses being recognised as both cultural anchors and monuments of counter-colonial resistance. Indeed destruction often accompanied imperial conquest, with the removal of old symbols of authority constituting a conscious effort to pacify local populations and undermine the potency of traditional cultural and political practices. As William Logan concludes of the French destruction of the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long in Hanoi in the 1890s, for example, the citadel posed no military threat to the French, but ‘seems to have been destroyed because it represented the wrong symbolism – old Vietnamese ­imperial regime’.53 Indeed, heritage and politics are arguably inseparable, with heritage constituting a core arena for colloquy and debate between various social groups as they seek to harness the past in support of competing visions [ 11 ]

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of identity and memory.54 The moral origins of the British preservation movement (which are also seen as the progenitor of colonial historic preservation movements), for example, are generally seen to lie in the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris as a criticism of the standardising effects of mass production and the dehumanising effects of factory labour. The suggestion is that Ruskin and Morris loved, and sought to conserve, the architecture of the Middle Ages because it represented a golden age of high craftsmanship and social harmony. Here, Ruskin’s famous quotation that ‘We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us’ is read as a claim for the value of buildings as precious artefacts, and the ‘problem’ of restoration, which threatened to peel away the layers of history.55 Such oversimplification, however, presents a fundamentally misleading image, and fails to acknowledge the inherently political basis of both men’s views of heritage as a means to encourage social and economic revolution. Behind Ruskin’s warnings of the dangers of restoration, for example, lay a moral pronouncement about the use of the past that was itself a comment on the political appropriation of the past then taking place within Britain. As Chris Miele has argued, Morris’s formation of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1877 similarly emerged not so much as a reaction to the aesthetics of restoration but as a political response to instructional reforms then taking place within the Church as it attempted to stem the erosion of its traditional privilege and power.56 Influenced by the Cambridge Camden Society, the Church’s efforts here included the restoration of hundreds of medieval churches in England and Wales – the idea being that, from a perspective of power and influence, smartly restored structures that sought to recapture the piety and beauty of the Middle Ages were far more valuable than weathered originals. Playing on Ruskin’s idea of historic buildings ‘not being ours’, Morris thus sought to maintain ‘tradition’ for the masses rather than have it employed and controlled by elites.57 In socio-political terms, early heritage preservation in the colonial and New World contexts unfolded in a similar – albeit more complex – way. In the United States (which also influenced early preservation practice in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia), the earliest concerted efforts to preserve the material remnants of the past emerged both as a part of broader efforts to assert national legitimacy and through the efforts of groups and communities looking to consolidate their own positions within a wider narrative of nationhood.58 As the nineteenth century progressed, preservation was also increasingly deployed in class-based terms, with established families turning to genealogy and the preservation of historic sites in an attempt to restore their ­positions as [ 12 ]

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assumed custodians of the American inheritance in the face of growing challenges from the ‘new moneyed’ classes. The traditional narrative behind the efforts of Ann Pamela Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association to preserve George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate as a national historic site, for example, is that they were driven by the belief that pilgrimages to Washington’s home and tomb might help to heal sectional animus and foster citizenship. However, comprising descendants of the prosperous antebellum planter class, the Ladies’ Association was also motivated by a nostalgic image of a golden time when their ancestors had been masters of the region.59 It was also not just the upper classes employing the past, with the growth of interest in heritage at the beginning of the twentieth century equally tied to middle-class anxieties about the waves of new immigrants pouring into the country. Here monuments, historic sites, material culture more generally were valued for their transcendent more than their intrinsic worth, introducing and familiarising new arrivals to the nation’s collective past and its ideals, ensuring that new members identified with and attained the required social identity.60 Such processes of mnemonic socialisation are an important – be it subtle – part of all groups’ general effort to incorporate new members. Yet unlike in Old World nations, where the pursuit of national identities was typically grounded in attempts to harness pre-existing suband supra-state identities and connections to the land, this was not so straightforward in settler-colonial populations. Since they had – by the very processes of migration – left behind much of what gave their world meaning and stability, the construction of identity in settler societies initially focused instead on the employment of existing connections with ‘Home’ and the redefining of the landscape through the removal of elements of the ‘alien’ indigenous landscape, and the acclimatisation of familiar plants and animals; the transplanting of European names, tradition, institutions, architecture, and even the stylistic interpretation of the landscape through art.61 The incorporation of new traditions and attachments typically did not begin until indigenous threats were diminished and settlers began to feel more ‘at home’. Despite such adoption and invention, however, the dominance of western perceptions of culture and historicism meant that most colonial societies laboured under historical inferiority complexes. ­ Unable to boast the histories of Old World cities and countries, as civic tourism demonstrated, their novelty rested on their newness – with early colonial historians typically responding by narrating the success of transplanting European values and ruminating on future colonial greatness. Efforts to mark history in the landscape followed a similar course, with the earliest historic reserves in both Australia and New [ 13 ]

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Zealand emphasising British ties – in both cases through the landing sites of Captain James Cook.62 Statuary was more common, with classically formed monuments to ‘great men’ and founding moments dually serving as patriotic instruction and beautification of the townscape. The idea of preserving the fabric of their own history, however, was seen to be fraught with contradiction. How, after all, could a nation ‘without a past’ have anything to preserve?63 Even for those aware enough of the importance of history to a new nation, the perceived value of preserving the historical record typically lay in its use to future generations. As the English author Thomas Cholmondeley pondered in Ultima Thule (1854) – a narrative of his own experience of the young colony – about the form that a national history of New Zealand might take: in the history of ‘beginnings’, especially, are minute accounts and descriptions valuable for instruction, and powerful to awaken passions. So dear are they to the nations, that, if wanting, their place must be supplied by legends and mythical stories, for society loves to provide itself with illustrations – of its childish adventures, of its early struggles, and of the strange romances which ushered in maturity … all these will be read with avidity, and invested with importance by the New Zealander of the year 2000 … Little as they command attention now … it is the duty of those who have been actively engaged in such scenes to set them clearly and truly down in black and white.64

Indeed as a number of historians have suggested, the perceived absence of a ‘past’, coupled with the complexity of ethnicities and cultural influences in colonial societies, often resulted in early notions of shared identity being grounded in abstractions such as landscape or nature. This was also a conscious strategy – at least in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States – where claims to legitimisation were aided by assigning the landscape primacy in the important work of national subject formation.65 The scarcity of European history in the colonial landscape could be remedied also by drawing on indigenous history. Yet with colonial perceptions (let alone recognition) of indigenous history and culture shaped by western racial and cultural discourses, this was anything but a foregone conclusion. In Australia, for example, where Aboriginal culture lay outside of (or was not even visible to) Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic sensibilities, colonial adoption and adaption would be minor. In New Zealand it was quite the opposite, with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seeing elements of Maori culture and history heavily drawn into Pakeha society’s conception of self in part in an effort to create a richer past for the young nation.66 The employment of such elements as national symbols here acted to further legitimise the [ 14 ]

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existing colonial state by linking it to a distant indigenous past, while aiding Pakeha indigenisation and civilisation through the attempt to portray the country as racially homogeneous. This in turn influenced scholarly interest in Maori history and the collection and ordering of Maori culture. It also had a profound impact on the preservation of the Maori historic landscape, with early preservation efforts, in fact, focusing almost exclusively on sites of Maori origin. Interest in the collection and preservation of Maori material culture is also interesting for the transnational influences that affected it, with one of the arguments posed in this book being that interest in tikanga Maori from outside of New Zealand – and notably under the influence of tourism – was the single most important factor behind the emergence of a wider desire within New Zealand to preserve it. Behind this lay the Victorian fascination with ‘earlier civilisations’, and the social evolutionary ideas of continuous human and societal progress which effectively made the study of ‘primitive cultures’ the study of ‘self’.67 Yet while the heritage of subjugation tied up with this was undoubtedly central to the colonising objective and was an ongoing part of the colonisation of New Zealand, to suggest that this – or for that matter Renato Rosaldo’s ‘imperialist nostalgia’ – alone was the primary motivation behind the collection, preservation and appropriation of indigenous culture is to deny the complexity of the settler-colonial relationship with the land and landscape, and perceptions of the place of Maori culture and history within this.68 As Pakeha increasingly identified with their new home, the preservation of elements of the Maori landscape was thus in part about the maintenance of reference points and cultural markers of what was increasingly being identified as their own history. Indeed, the scale of Pakeha adoption and adaption of Maori history and material culture, and the transnational influences behind this – something that was unparalleled within the history of European imperialism – is a key reason for this book’s focus on New Zealand as a topic of enquiry. The peculiarities of the British settlement of New Zealand, coupled with dominant colonial myths of origins, are equally intriguing. First off is the country’s small size and geographical isolation, with New Zealand in the early 1880s being twelve to sixteen weeks’ sail from Britain and five days from its nearest colonial neighbour, New South Wales. The relative youth of New Zealand – the first European settlement being established at Kerikeri in 1822, and British annexation of the country occurring in 1840 – similarly raises the question of what influence (if any) such ‘shallow’ historical roots had on notions of historical consciousness in the young country, and the perceived need to draw more heavily on ideas of British heritage to fill this gap. This process, furthermore, was taking place parallel to the [ 15 ]

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emergence of the modern pursuit of heritage in Europe – a movement which demanded that a unified historical consciousness was a prerequisite of the modern nation state. The significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s post-Enlightenment vision of colonisation on colonial perceptions and mythologies of the ‘New Zealand ideal’ is a second thread.69 This was especially important in the Otago and Canterbury settlements, where even today notions of English and Scottish heritage and identities remain particularly strong – Christchurch typically referred to by Cantabrians as ‘the most English of New Zealand cities’, while Dunedin is ‘the most Scottish city outside of Scotland’. Yet, while on the one hand such cultural links can be seen as conscious cultural constructions, the significance of the subconscious also needs to the acknowledged. This is not to discount the usefulness of the new British history’s embracing of transnationalism, but to suggest that the nature of identity needs to be understood as a consequence of locale as much as a result of cultural, political, and economic influences. To use a more recent and politically potent example, since the 1990s ‘recolonisation’ (to use Belich’s term) has seen the New Zealand Geographical Board recognise many Maori place names as the official names, peeling back colonial claims to cultural dominance over the landscape. Yet to explain the resultant cries of outrage from some Pakeha simply as recolonisation, or, for that matter, as a protest against counter-­colonialism, is over-simplistic, denying the reality that that it is not just Maori that boast attachment to place, and discounts the very real attachment of Pakeha to certain locations. Far from attempting to hammer home the constructedness of history, however, as this example suggests, the overriding theme to this book is that in looking at how societies use the past, the ‘local’, the ‘nation’, and the ‘transnational’ cannot be considered outside of the context of one another. While broadly chronological in structure, this study is presented in three main sections. The first examines Pakeha interest in the preservation of Maori material culture and historic landscape. Focusing on Pakeha efforts to employ Maori history, material culture, and cultural sites into tourism, into their own burgeoning conceptions of a distinctly New Zealand identity, and simply to protect sites through the broader act of preservation, it argues that colonisation persisted in New Zealand settler society long after what is customarily designated the ‘colonial’ period. Within this, Chapter 1 focuses on the place of Maori material culture, performance, and the Maori historic landscape within the emergent New Zealand tourism industry between the beginning of the 1880s and the early 1920s. It argues that the image of Maori culture presented through tourism was inseparable from colonising practice, resulting in a prescribed view towards Maori culture that both [ 16 ]

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conformed to tourists’ expectations and simultaneously reinforced racial hierarchy and the ideals of colonisation. Chapter 2 builds on this through an examination of the broader position of Maori culture within Pakeha notions of New Zealand identity during the period – the core argument being that, as popular images and representations of Maori culture grew to become a primary local cultural form, Pakeha New Zealand increasingly came to view Maori culture as part of the ‘national patrimony’. As this occurred, efforts were made to possess and control it. Constructed as this view of Maori culture and society was, however, it ultimately reinforced an increasingly prescribed place for Maori culture in New Zealand society. Chapter 3 considers how, from the late nineteenth century, efforts were made to render the New Zealand Wars – a series of conflicts between the Crown and Maori that began in the mid-1840s – at the heart of Maori–Pakeha shared identity, and as the wellspring of the country’s ‘wonderful’ race-relations. With the wars being viewed by many as New Zealand’s equivalent of the American Indian Wars, as they were increasingly seen as a cornerstone of New Zealand’s rich and romantic colonial past, this in turn resulted in increasing efforts to preserve the material remnants of this period of the country’s history. The second section of the book explores Pakeha interest in the history and heritage of European New Zealand. Focusing on the period from 1890 to the mid-1930s, Chapter 4 explores the central place that amateur and local historical societies played in shaping both the direction of New Zealand historical writing and the early collecting of material culture associated with New Zealand’s European past. Chapter 5 continues the theme of the growth of interest and understanding in the European past in New Zealand, focusing on the national Centennial celebrations of 1940. Intended to celebrate European progress in New Zealand, and viewed by the government as an opportunity to consolidate notions of national character and heritage, historical research – which was undertaken on an unprecedented scale – would be the cornerstone of the event. While most historical analyses of the Centennial have emphasised the significance of the event in national terms, however, this chapter argues that its most profound impact was actually local, and that, as local identities grew on the back of this new research, they often did so at the expense of national identity. The final chapter steps outside of New Zealand to explore the ‘use and abuse’ of history and heritage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada and Australia – both offering a wider ­ context to the New Zealand experience and broadly highlighting how the places of history and heritage within the colonial mind were at once both part of a wider racial, political, and cultural politics of [ 17 ]

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empire, and unique to the subtleties of the cultural and political environments of the individual colonial context. The Canadian section accordingly focuses on how the dominance of conflict between AngloCanadian and French-Canadian cultures and pasts shaped historical narrative and preservation, while also effectively writing the indigenous Canadian past out of the narrative of wider Canadian history. The Australian section explores how Australians negotiated the stains of continent’s sordid convict past and ‘stone-age’ Aborigines who ‘had no past’ in the pursuit of rich and uniquely Australian historical narrative and heritage.

Notes 1 Thomas Hocken, ‘The Early History of New Zealand’, Otago Witness, 18 September 1880. 2 Ibid. 3 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland 1996), pp. 278–312, 446–50. 4 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, The American Historical Review, 104:2 (1999), p. 499. 5 Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity (London 2003), p. 5. This is further elaborated in Kent Fedorowich and Andrew Thompson, ‘Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Migration and Identity’, in Kent Fedorowich and Andrew Thompson (eds), Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester 2013), pp. 1–25. 6 Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto 2000), p. 211; Reba Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford 1994), pp. 178–203. More widely, see Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge 2010); Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester 2005); John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester 1984); John MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester 1986); Chandrika Kaul (ed.), Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke 2006); Simon Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford 2003). 7 Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia (London 1916), p. v. For more on education and empire see Paul Phillips, Britain’s Past in Canada: The Teaching and Writing of British History (Vancouver 1989); Alan Penn, Targeting Schools: Drill, Militarism and Imperialism (London 1999); Elizabeth Galway, From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity (London 2008); Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing (Toronto 2010); Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism Through Children’s Books (Manchester 1996); James Mangan, ‘Benefits Bestowed’: Education and British Imperialism (Manchester 1988); Robert Philips, History Teaching, Nationhood and the State: A Study in Educational Politics (London 1998); Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester 1989). 8 Auckland Star, 2 September 1936.

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I ntroduction 9 Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Manchester 2001); Eliza Reidi, ‘Women, Gender, and the Promotion of  Empire: The Victoria League, 1901–1914’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 569–99; E. van Heyningen and P. Merrett, ‘“The Healing Touch”: The Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, 1900–1912’, South African Historical Journal, 47 (November 2002), pp. 24–50; Katie Pickle, ‘A Link in “the great chain of Empire friendship”: The Victoria League in New Zealand’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33:1 (2005), pp. 29–50; Lisa Gaudet, ‘The Empire Is Woman’s Sphere: Organized Female Imperialism in Canada, 1880s–1920s’, PhD, Carleton University (Ottawa), 2001; Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London 2000); Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan, Heroines and History: Representations of Madeline de Verchères and Laura Secord (Toronto 2007). 10 See, for example, Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change (Oxford 2001); John McAleer and Sarah Longair (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester 2012); Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven 1994); Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display (Oxford 2007); John MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester 2009); Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham 2007); Pramod Nayar, Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Chichester 2012); H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill 2003); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley 1998) Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley 2001); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester 1988); Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London 1999); Martin Evans (ed.), Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830–1940 (Basingstoke 2004); Kate Darian-Smith, Richard Gillespie, Caroline Jordan and Elizabeth Wills (eds), Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World (Melbourne 2008); Amiria Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (Cambridge 2005); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge 1991). 11 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London 1993); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton 2009). Also see Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), Refiguring the Archive (London 2002); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Archives, Empires and Histories of Colonialism’ in Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington 2012), pp. 178–89. 12 McCormick’s verdict that the 1930s gave rise to the first discernable signs of ‘adult nationhood’ was upheld by Keith Sinclair, who from the late 1950s led the wave of emerging interest in national identity. E. H. McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand (Wellington 1940), p. 170; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (London 1961), pp. 191–6, 269–73; Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity (Wellington 1986), pp. 29–76. 13 See Peter Gibbons, ‘A Note on Writing, Identity, and Colonisation in Aotearoa’, Sites, 13 (1986), pp. 32–8; Peter Gibbons, ‘Non-fiction’, in Terry Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (Auckland 1999), pp. 31–118; Peter Gibbons, ‘Cultural Colonization and National Identity’, NZJH, 36:1 (2002), pp. 5–17. Gibbons’s work has been picked up by a number of scholars exploring the textual construction of New Zealand, notably Giselle Byrnes’s work on surveying and the ‘geography’ of colonisation; Conal McCarthy’s on the museum and crosscultural interaction; and Chris Hilliard’s on the literary nationalism of the early twentieth century.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 14 W. J. Gardner, ‘New Zealand Regional History and Its Place in the Schools’, NZJH, 13:2 (October 1979), p. 183. 15 Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Oxford 1983), Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983), and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London 1983), for example, are all concerned principally with the continuity between past and present in establishing social cohesion and legitimising authority, while Anthony Smith’s more essentialist Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford 1987) focuses on the continuity of pre-existing ethnic identities. 16 Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge 1997), p. 82. 17 See, for example, Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds), The British World, pp. 2–6; Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, 32:116 (2001), pp. 76–90; Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31:2 (2003), pp. 121–35. 18 Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, p. 149; Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge 1994), pp. 168–9. 19 See Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily Manktelow, ‘Imperial Relations: Histories of Family in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14:1 (Spring 2013); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford 2004). 20 Edward Relph in particular is key to the interests of this book, having emphasised a more experiential approach that suggests that the essence of place lays not in its location but ‘in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centers of human existence’. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London 1976), p. 43. 21 Harold Proshansky, Abbe Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff, ‘Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3:1 (1983), pp. 57–83; Irwin Altman and Joachim Wohlwill (eds), Human Behavior and Environment: Advances in Theory and Research, vol. 12: Place Attachment (New York 1992), pp. 79–84; Fritz Steele, The Sense of Place (Boston 1981), p. 9. 22 Becky Taylor and Ben Rogaly, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Basingstoke 2011). 23 See Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge 1996); Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London 2000), pp. 173–186; Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London 1996); Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson (eds), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (Oxford 1998); Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford 2000). 24 Cornelia Flora and Jan Flora, ‘Creating Social Capital’, in William Vitek and Wes Jackson (eds), Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (New Haven 1996), pp. 217–25; Douglas Perkins and D. Long, ‘Neighborhood Sense of Community and Social Capital: A Multi-level Analysis’, in Adrian Fisher, Christopher Sonn, and Brian Bishop (eds), Psychological Sense of Community: Research, Applications, and Implications (New York 2002), pp. 291–316; Douglas Perkins and Lynne Manzo, ‘Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning’, Journal of Planning Literature, 20:4 (2006), pp. 335–50. 25 On ‘place’ and the Annales school, see Alan Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge 2003), pp. 20–3. 26 See Kynan Gentry, ‘Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel: Politics, Pedagogy and the Origins of the History Workshop’, History Workshop Journal, 76 (Autumn 2013), pp. 187–211. 27 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris 1984–93). For a key early work in English see Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–25.

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I ntroduction 28 Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, vol. 1 (New York 1996), p. 3. For Halbwachs’s ideas see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis Coser (Chicago 1992). 29 Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge 1992); Steven Englund, ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, Journal of Modern History, 64:2 (June 1992), pp. 299–320; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Setting the Framework’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1999), pp. 3–29; Dorothy Noyes and Roger Abrahams, ‘From Calendar to National Memory: European Commonplaces’, in Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (eds), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit 1999), pp. 77–98; Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford 1999), pp. 38–66. 30 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London 1994), pp. 205–21; David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge 1996), pp. 6–16, 63; Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford 1999), pp. 31–3; Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York 2005); John Bodnar, ‘Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy’, The Journal of American History, 87:3 (December 2000), pp. 951–63. 31 Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism (New York 1997), pp. 5–7. 32 Fiona Hamilton, ‘Pioneering History: Negotiating Pakeha Collecting Memory in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, NZJH, 36:1 (2002), p. 76. 33 New Zealand Herald, 12 September 1894. 34 Erik Olssen, ‘Where to From Here?: Reflections on the Twentieth-century Historiography of Nineteenth-century New Zealand’, NZJH, 26:1 (1992), p. 76. 35 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Vol. II, Island Stories, Unravelling Britain (London 1998), p. 83. 36 Douglas Cole, ‘The Problem of “Nationalism” and “Imperialism” in British Settlement Colonies’, Journal of British Studies 10:2 (May 1971), pp. 160–82. 37 Stuart Ward, ‘The “New Nationalism” in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: Civic Culture in the Wake of the British World’, in Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne 2007), p. 233. 38 Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), p. 183. 39 Gardner, ‘New Zealand Regional History and Its Place in the Schools’, p. 183. 40 Phillipa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge 1986), p. 61. 41 Grace Pretty, Heather Chipuer, and Paul Bramston, ‘Sense of Place Amongst Adolescents and Adults in Two Rural Australian Towns: The Discriminating Features of Place Attachment, Sense of Community and Place Dependence in Relation to Place Identity’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23:3 (2003), pp. 273–87. 42 Ballantyne, Webs of Empire, p. 262. 43 Uneven development and geographical isolation, for example, with impact the flow of economies within the webs of empire. 44 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge 1995), p. 9. Also see Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington 2000), pp. 186–7. 45 See Jill Bennett, ‘Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the Affective Image’, Art History, 24:1 (March 2001), pp. 1–16; Jules Prown, ‘Style as Evidence’, Winterthur Portfolio, 15:3 (1980), pp. 197–210; Kate Gregory and Andrea Witcomb, ‘Beyond Nostalgia: The Role of Affect in Generating Historical Understanding at Heritage Sites’, in Sheila Watson, Suzanne MacLeod, and Simon Knell (eds), Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed (London 2007), pp. 263–75. Such ideas have also notably been developed by the architectural theorist Aldo Rossi, who in his enormously influential The Architecture of the City (1966) argued that cities remember through their buildings, while the philosopher Walter

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Benjamin suggested that human landscapes could be read as topographies of collective memory in which buildings were mnemonic symbols which could reveal hidden and forgotten pasts. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York 1968). Michael King, Tread Softly, for You Tread on My Life: New & Collected Writings (Auckland 2001), pp. 121–2. Barbara Brown, Douglas Perkins, and Graham Brown, ‘Place Attachment in a Revitalizing Neighborhood: Individual and Block Levels of Analysis’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23 (2003), pp. 259–71. Thomas Hocken, speaking before the Otago Institute, Otago Witness, 18 September 1880. Lani Teddy, Linda Waimarie Nikora, and Bernard Guerin, ‘Place Attachment of Ngai Te Ahi to Hairini Marae’, MAI Review, 1 (2008), p. 1. Waiata can be understood as ‘song’, whakapapa as ‘genealogy’, and whaikorero as an ‘oration or formal speech’. Alex Trapeznik, ‘Heritage and Public History in New Zealand’, Public History Review, 5 (1996–97), p.64. Simon Schama suggests that nationalism ‘would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London 1995), p. 15. See Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (London 2006); Nadia Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial ­Self-fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago 2001); Sandra Sufian and Mark LeVine (eds), Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel– Palestine (Plymouth 2007); Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford 2006). William Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City (Sydney 2000), p. 80. See, for example, Joshua Hagen, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism: The Jewel of the German Past (Aldershot 2006); Amy Mills, ‘Boundaries of the Nation in the Space of the Urban: Landscape and Social Memory in Istanbul’, Cultural Geographies, 13:3 (2006), pp. 367–94; Robert Morris, ‘The Capitalist, the Professor and the Soldier: The Re-making of Edinburgh Castle, 1850–1900’, Planning Perspectives, 22:1 (January 2007), pp. 55–78. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London 1855), p. 245. Chris Miele, ‘The First Conservation Militants: William Morris and the SPAB’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (Stroud 1996), pp. 17–37; Chris Miele, ‘Real Antiquity and the Ancient Object: The Science of Gothic Architecture and the Restoration of Medieval Buildings’, in Vanessa Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford 1998), pp. 103–24. This was a key argument presented by Edward Thompson in his biography William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London 1955). William Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (New York 1997), p. 30. Cunningham was also driven by the perceived danger of ‘crass commercialisation and industrialisation’ that threatened to destroy the property in the form of the showman P. T. Barnum. See Scott Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (New York 2009), pp. 31, 66–8. Robert Stipe and Antoinette Lee (eds), The American Mosaic: Preserving a Nation’s Heritage (Washington 1988). See, for example, Paul Shepard, The English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape Before 1850 (Wellington 1969); Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge 1976). In 1822 the Philosophical Society of Australasia marked the spot in Botany Bay where Cook and Joseph Banks first landed, while in New Zealand Cook’s first landing site in Queen Charlotte Sound was reserved in 1896.

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I ntroduction 63 This of course cannot be considered outside of colonialism’s negation of indigenous claims to history. 64 Thomas Cholmondeley, Ultima Thule, or, Thoughts Suggested by a Residence in New Zealand (London 1854), pp. 326–7, 330. 65 Historically the most obvious example here would be Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 ‘frontier’ thesis, that American culture and democracy was formed by the frontier experience. The perception of landscape as a formative cultural device, however, is arguably at its most potent in Australia, where the role of ‘the bush’ is still very much given a central (be it mythical) role in the supposed development of the ‘Australian character’. Russell Ward’s The Australian Legend (Melbourne 1958) is the key work here. 66 James Belich, ‘Myth, Race and Identity in New Zealand’, NZJH, 31:1 (April 1997), p. 11. 67 Peter Bowler (ed.), The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford 1989), pp. 1–14. In Australia, for example, John Mulvaney has argued that scholarly interest in the Australian Aborigines grew dramatically under the influence of evolutionary ideas. See John Mulvaney, ‘The Australian Aborigines 1606–1929: Opinion and Fieldwork’, Historic Studies, 8 (1958), pp. 131–51, 297–314. In his work on the western fascination with Egyptology, Donald Reid has similarly shown how this view of earlier civilisations as forerunners to Western civilisation also lay behind the West’s desire to control Egyptian history in the nineteenth century. See Donald Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley 2002), pp. 4–5. 68 Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston 1989), pp. 68–87. 69 See Erik Olssen, ‘Mr. Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment in PostEnlightenment Experimental Practice’, NZJH, 31:2 (1997), pp. 197–218; Rebecca Durrer, ‘Propagating the New Zealand Ideal’, The Social Science Journal, 43:1 (2006), pp. 173–83; Patricia Burns, Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland 1989); Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland 2002); Friends of the Turnbull Library (eds), Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington 1997).

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C HAP T E R O N E

Entangled objects: tourism and the exhibition of Maori material culture In late 1862 the former lay preacher William Jenkins secured financial and moral support for a travelling exhibition of Maori chiefs to England. Within months he had signed up thirteen Maori volunteers from six different tribes to participate in the venture. As curator of the exhibition, Jenkins chose his living ‘objects’ carefully, with all but two of the Maori wearing facial moko. During the passage to England, Jenkins developed his exhibition from an ethnographic text – probably Charles Davis’s Maori Mementos.1 Clad in their native costumes, the Maori were to present themselves as Davis’s text dictated. Having spent quite some time among Maori working as a native interpreter, Jenkins was well aware that many of these practices had been discarded by the Christianised Maori that made up his troupe. One of the party, Te Wharepapa, later complained in a letter that ‘Jenkins wished us all to practice those wrong things. I never did it in my own country nor did Paratene [his son] since he was baptised. The soldiers came looking on and Jenkins often came and said practice all these things, for you do not seem perfect in these Maori ways.’ According to another Maori who complained about having to wear native attire, Jenkins told him ‘You must wear the mats, people like it’.2 In his role as curator, Jenkins had framed Maori as exotic ‘noble savages’ who were sure to excite the attention of English audiences, who judging by comments published in newspapers endorsed his presentation. The popularity of Jenkins’s notion of Maori social identity lay in its conforming to pervading scientific, social and political paradigms of the era that supported the concept of unilinear evolution, and ultimately colonial authority. This intersection between ethnographic exhibition and colonisation is the key theme of this chapter. While considering Maori material culture more broadly, it focuses on the place of Maori historical and cultural sites, and immovable material culture, within tourism, exhibition, and museum practice. It explores what governed how and why [ 24 ]

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1  William Jenkins (in profile at the back) and the group of Maori he took to England in 1863, as depicted at the time in the Illustrated London News

such sites and structures were deemed significant by Pakeha; how they were displayed and interpreted; how this fitted into the broader pattern of colonisation, and how – much like Jenkins’s efforts to curate Maori performance – the preservation of the sites and material culture was itself defined by western cultural and political paradigms.

Exhibiting Maori By the time the systematic colonisation of New Zealand began in 1840, Maori material culture had been collected and exhibited for more than fifty years. On his first voyage to New Zealand in 1769, for example, James Cook had been instructed to ‘cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with [the natives], making them presents of such Trifles as they may value, and inviting them to Traffick’.3 From the early nineteenth century Maori also travelled to England, beginning with the young Ngapuhi warrior Moehanga, who in 1805 travelled on the whaler Ferret to gain an audience with George III. Others travelled to Asia, America, and Europe as merchants and sailors aboard European [ 25 ]

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vessels, such as the Ngati Toa chief Te Pehi Kupe, who in 1824 went to England aboard the Urania in his quest for arms. Te Pehi was received well, creating a stir with his full-face moko. When the Urania’s captain – Richard Reynolds – was approached by showmen proposing to exhibit the tattooed Maori for money, Reynolds declined, the two men having become firm friends after Te Pehi had saved Reynolds from drowning on the voyage out.4 Such was the English intrigue, however, that at least one showman was convinced to bring Maori to England as a commercial venture. Although that speculation failed when his troupe fell ill during the tour, a western passion for ethnographic exhibition of Maori was ignited. Such interactions were crucial to the early western formulation of notions of Maori social identity. Modelled on the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1865 Exhibition in Dunedin was the first international exhibition held in New Zealand. It was intended to symbolise progressive colonisation and express the ambitions of the young colony. The inclusion of a Maori section reflected several things, the most important being the desire for demonstrations of imperial prowess. As the Great Exhibition begat the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Dunedin Exhibition stimulated public interest in museums in New Zealand, and by 1875 at least ten public museums were in operation.5 The most important of these was the Colonial Museum in Wellington, whose first director, the Scottish geologist and naturalist Dr James Hector, was the most prominent scientist in government employ and one of the commissioners of the Dunedin exhibition. In addition to Hector’s own collection, the new museum brought together the collections of a number of shorter-lived bodies, including the Wellington Philosophical Institute and the New Zealand Society.6 With the colony a mere twenty-five years old, under Hector’s directorship the museum’s principal focus would be the advancement of colonisation through exploration and classification of the colony’s natural resources – a somewhat typical phase in the development of most colonial museums.7 Surviving evidence accordingly suggests that the early museum contained few Maori objects, and that the few it did have were exhibited with geology, flora and fauna, placing them in the broadly based ‘New Zealand collection’ housed in the main hall. When, from the later 1870s, Maori objects were viewed as ethnological materials, no distinction was made between New Zealand and foreign objects.8 At the same time, however, the early Colonial Museum’s most prized possession was Te Hau ki Turanga (the breath, or vitality, of Turanga). Renowned for the beauty of its carvings, and representing a high point (if not a final flowering) of the great carving tradition of Turanganui-a-Kiwa, Te Hau ki Turanga had been built in the 1840s [ 26 ]

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by the Rongowhakaata chief and master carver Raharuhi Rukupo as a memorial to his elder brother.9 When James Richmond was sent to the East Coast in 1867 to implement land confiscations following the siege of Waerenda-a-hiki, it seems he was equally determined to secure the house for the Colonial Museum, no doubt aware of its reputation. The taking of the whare had been strongly protested against by the Rongowhakaata people, who later petitioned for its return as it was a ‘great taonga’, but, as Richmond noted at the time, ‘the House could have been, strictly speaking, forfeited on the basis that the owners were rebels, but a generous amount of money had been paid’, adding that the motive for the acquisition was to preserve the house from decay.10 When the whare was eventually re-erected in Wellington, it was as an intimate space for the display of other Maori objects, with Maori flags draped from the ceiling and carvings placed casually against the poupou.11 It also served for at least a decade as the meeting place for the newly reformed Wellington Philosophical Society, and was periodically ‘dressed up’ as an exotic refreshments room for talks and meetings in the museum.12 Similar liberties were taken by the Canterbury Museum in the displaying of its carved house Hau-te-Ananui-o-Tangaroa (the sacred great cave of Tangaroa). Acquired by the museum from the Ngati Porou chief Henare Potae in 1873, it arrived the following year, together with its designer Hone Taahu, and the East Coast carver Tamati Ngakaho, who were to complete and erect the building.13 In its reconstruction a number of changes were pursued by the museum’s director Julius von Haast – mostly driven by cost-saving and the desire to protect the building from the elements. The laying of a concrete foundation was followed by the construction of a European-style framework, to which the Maori work was fastened. With the focus being on the house’s interior, and the argument that the intention was to use it as a storehouse for Maori artefacts, the raupo and toe-toe exterior was replaced by corrugated iron.14 The naturalist Thomas Potts and the missionary James Stack both made their views on such liberties known – Potts concluding that ‘such a departure from the original building will only be accomplished at the costly price of losing a valuable and most interesting ethnological study, illustrating the old habits, manners and customs of so many of our fellow subjects’.15 Yet as Paul Walker concludes in his research on the house, with Maori seen as a coherent and singular ‘other’, the particulars were not so important, with the building simply designated ‘the Maori House’ as opposed to ‘the Ngati Porou house’.16 Such displays of Maori material culture became increasingly common in the wake of the New Zealand Wars when there was a rapid expansion in the transfer of ‘trophies’ from Maori custody to the museums. As [ 27 ]

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McCarthy suggests, their exhibition implied the possession of a people apparently doomed to extinction.17 Displayed as ‘specimens’ or ‘works of art’, such arrangements gave little sense of the original function of objects or their meaning to Maori. At the 1872 Colonial Exhibition in Christchurch, for example, many of the carvings on display had been ‘borrowed’ from Te Hau ki Turanga, but were displayed in a way that divorced them from the context of the house. For Isaac Featherston, then Agent-General in London, the Vienna Universal Exhibition the following year was an opportunity to advertise New Zealand as an exotic destination alongside the more traditional exhibition of the country’s wares and the promotion of immigration.18 Maori and Maori material culture were part of this ‘decorative exotica’ – displayed among potted flax, stuffed birds, scenic views of the country, and a moa from the Canterbury Museum. This form of display was extended at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition with the introduction of an ethnological exhibition, apparently at Hector’s suggestion. The court was designed around the Ngati Awa house Mataatua (The Face of God), the government having earlier approached Ngati Awa with the plan to ‘show to the world the work which the Maori people were doing in the erection of carved dwellings’.19 The building of Mataatua in the early 1870s had been intended to cement alliances between Ngati Awa and Urawera and to heal divisions created during the war with the government a few years before. After its completion in 1874, it had hosted a number of large political gatherings, receiving visits from tribes belonging to the King Movement and others aligned with the Rongowhakaata leader and prophet Te Kooti.20 With the government’s proposal to put the house on display this political role was brought to an end – its offer of £300 in exchange for the right to exhibit Mataatua it seemed being too good to refuse.21 No doubt aware of the unsympathetic exhibition of other Maori buildings on the part of the government, Ngati Awa requested that a group go to Sydney with the house ‘in order that it might be put up in proper Maori style’.22 Predictably this did not e­ ventuate, and Hector’s reconstruction of the whare with the decorative interior facing outwards was anything but sympathetic. Indeed, the turning  of Mataatua inside out was its depoliticisation and appropriation – the house becoming an ‘object’ produced by colonial subjects on the p ­ eriphery of empire; an example of a dying art form worthy of p ­ reservation, even if the artists themselves were destined to disappear. Immediately after the Sydney exhibition, Mataatua was dismantled and shipped to the centre of the British Empire where it was briefly displayed (first inside out, and then as originally conceived) before being stored in the cellars of the Victoria and Albert Museum.23 [ 28 ]

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Important as Maori culture was becoming to New Zealand’s international image, however, its maintenance remained a fragile balancing act. Soon after the naturalist Walter Buller purchased the pataka Te Maramataeahoaho (which he renamed Te Takinga) in late 1886 he took it – along with other carvings from his private collection – to England to show as part of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London.24 The Exhibition was a showcase of Empire and social Darwinism – von Haast having designed the New Zealand Court to ‘picture the development of New Zealand’s civilisation by contrasting it with the primitive condition of the Maori’.25 It was a resounding success, as the London Times described: Let us take leave of Dr. Buller’s friends with tenderness and pity. The inevitable has come upon them, and although they and their works are to some extent still among us, they belong to a past which is as dead as the age of the cave-men and lake-dwellers. To be jubilant would be mean and pitiable; but emerging from the little court which contains all that the Maori has to show for his many-centuried occupation of New Zealand, one cannot help contrasting with that the spacious courts filled with the results of half a century occupation by the European. Would the Maori ever have advanced beyond the stage represented by Dr Buller’s interesting collection – a high stage when compared with, that of the Pacific Islanders? We doubt if he would unless stirred by powerful outside influences. These influences have come upon him, and have been too stupendous for him. He cannot cope with them, and he can but imperfectly assimilate them; and, wanting the grit and bluntness of nerve of the negro, he succumbs before this irresistible power, and his years are numbered.26

Two years later the pataka was exhibited in a similar style at the Melbourne Industrial Exhibition – where it was confined to the natural history court – and again in 1889 at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin – where it was part of a modest Maori court.

Tourism and the construction of the ‘authentic’ Maori The arrival of new ways of exhibiting Maori in the late 1870s coincided with the growth in importance of New Zealand tourism as an industry, and in particular the role that Maori and Maori culture played within this. Trophy displays of Maori material culture provided excellent devices for attracting tourists (and ethnographers) and within the museum Maori collections were central attractions, providing an exoticism central to the kind of racial ideology underpinning imperial displays. By the end of the 1880s, the Auckland and Canterbury museums had dedicated ethnographic halls, both of which proved [ 29 ]

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2  New Zealand Department of Tourist and Health Resorts poster (ca. 1920) advertising the Maori attractions of the North Island’s thermal district

extremely popular with tourists and local visitors alike.27 The development of an ethnographic section in Auckland began with the museum’s move into a purpose-built building in 1876 – nurtured as it was by a number of leading collectors gifting their collections to the Institute through the late 1870s and 1880s.28 After the building of a dedicated ethnographic hall in 1892 the collection developed rapidly, the most substantial accessions being the extensive collection of the famed soldier and surveyor Gilbert Mair, which was loaned in 1891, and the [ 30 ]

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elaborately carved Te Oha and Te Puawai o Te Arawa patakas which were added three years later.29 In Wellington, the Colonial Museum’s only major attraction at this stage was Te Turanga. Indeed, when Rudyard Kipling visited in 1891 he found the Colonial Museum monotonous, and probably ‘the worst managed institution of its kind in the whole of the Southern hemisphere’ – something that the Cyclopedia of New Zealand agreed with, when, a few years later it noted that the institution’s only worthwhile attraction was its meagre Maori collection.30 The romanticised pre-contact Maori provided a reservoir of images for the burgeoning tourism industry, especially through popular depictions of ‘old time warriors’ and ‘Maori beauties’.31 Illustrations featuring Maori pa or kainga were equally romantic in their construction, with the villages often placed overlooking rivers, atop cliffs, or as part of magnificent vistas. Similar to the Cartes de visite of Maori warriors or battle scene re-enactments that had been fashionable during the New Zealand Wars, the popularity of such images grew rapidly in the face of the expanding market for cultural commodities in the late nineteenth century. By the early 1890s travel guides such as Thomas Cook and Sons’ handbook New Zealand as a Tourist and Health Resort were inviting tourists to ‘Visit the home of the Tattooed Maori Warriors and their handsome, dusky daughters’, while the postcard craze saw images of Maori New Zealand sent back to Britain to show relatives and friends ‘at Home’ the outstanding scenery in the new country.32 Postcard sales peaked in 1909, when just over eight million postcards were sent from New Zealand, from a population of less than one million.33 Driven by tourism as they may have been, such representations were also central to the confirmation and reproduction of racial theories and stereotypes that assisted colonial expansion.34 With such scenes capturing the European fancy as they did, it was not long before European tourists arrived in the colony looking for the same kind of scenes that exhibitions, postcards, and travel guides had raised in the imagination – scenes that they believed accurately represented Maori.35 Accordingly, when the English novelist Anthony Trollope arrived in New Zealand in August 1872, he did so, as one historian put it, with ‘his mind full of Maori warriors and exotic scenery, about missionaries and the cannibals who ate them’, and departed with the belief that the scenery (which included Maori) was one of the country’s greatest qualities.36 The backbone of the expansion of tourism to New Zealand, however, was technological change. In 1889 Thomas Cook advertised a ‘Round the World’ package to New Zealand from London that took a minimum 130 days and cost £200, while its tour from Sydney or Melbourne took just a month, at the cost of £47 – an affordable prospect for the rising [ 31 ]

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upper-middle and professional classes.37 Modern travel had pulled New Zealand into the realm of possibility for tourist travel, and drew the country into a new ‘world picture’. The thermal region of the central North Island was the centre of activity, delivering the greatest experience of the exotic in both geophysical and ethnic terms, and many tourists did not travel further south than Rotorua. Here the key attractions were the Pink and White Terraces at Rotomahana, dubbed by Pakeha the eighth wonder of the world, and the nearby Maori village of Ohinemutu, where tourists could walk among raupo houses and thermal activity, and most visitors spent at least a day sightseeing or relaxing in the hot springs.38 The bold could even rent a whare. Tourism to the Terraces and surrounding area grew rapidly after 1870, when the Duke of Edinburgh visited the area on a well-publicised tour orchestrated to showcase Pakeha control of the region following Gilbert Mair’s routing of Te Kooti.39 Max Buchner, a German doctor who visited in 1876, described the area as the most interesting place in the world because of its Maori inhabitants and ‘boiling under-ground’.40 At this stage the Terraces were firmly under the control of Tuhourangi, with the collective annual income from tourist traffic estimated at being between £4000 and £6000.41 As traffic to the region grew, Maori sought to develop tourism, and the government moved to nationalise the industry.42 The cornerstone of this was the 1881 Thermal Springs District Act, which in addition to establishing a government resort at Rotorua, further alienated Maori lands on which attractions existed, and effectively framed Maori as a national asset. Inextricably bound as Maori culture was to this image of scenic New Zealand, advertisers similarly made good use of the ‘vanishing Maori’ sentiment, and visitors generally responded by making Maori an important part of their wilderness experience. The female Maori guides were a cornerstone of the experience, represented both as tokens of an exotic, primitive past and as angelic guides, ushering Pakeha through a gateway into an elusive and escapist ‘other world’ only they could find.43 Stories of tourists being washed away by geysers or meeting gruesome ends in boiling mud pools were similarly played up, as were graves, ruins, and other ‘black’ places, with several guidebooks recommending a visit to the grave of Hinemoa Wilson, an Ohinemutu child who died when she accidentally fell into a hot pool. Mokoia Island, where Nga Puhi had massacred Tuhourangi in an 1823 raid was another popular site, as was the buried village of Te Wairoa. Yet not everyone was captivated by their interactions with the Maori they encountered in resorts and attractions. When Pictorial New Zealand was published in 1895, for example, the author noted, ‘Unfortunately our ­recollections of Whakarewarewa are not of the most pleasant character. It is a kind of [ 32 ]

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private reserve, whose owners are absurdly extortionate natives.’44 His was not a lone voice, and the apparent need for ‘better management’ of attractions would be one of the factors leading to the establishment of the Tourist and Health Resorts Department in 1901. By 1900 the Railways Department already served resorts at Rotorua and Te Aroha in the North Island, and railheads in the South Island gave access to Hanmer Springs, the Hermitage at Mount Cook, and Queenstown. About this time, Thomas Donne, a senior Railways official, took charge of the Tourist Traffic Branch of the Railways Department. With the support of Joseph Ward – then Colonial Secretary and Minister of Trade, Customs, and Railways – he set about forming the nucleus of a separate department catering for both the local and the international visitor and promoting the country’s diverse ­attractions. The outcome was the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts (DTHR), established on 1 February 1901, under Donne’s directorship. Such was the importance of the ‘picturesque Maori’ to New Zealand tourism that upon the DTHR’s formation the maintenance of this image became one of its stated objectives.45 Here, after all, was a way of marking the country as a unique destination, and of overcoming the distance of the country from its target tourist markets. As the ­journalist George Bell summed it up, the picturesque Maori presence lent ‘a seasoning of romance to be studied and enjoyed in no other land’.46 Maoritanga was symbolically and economically assumed to be part of the national patrimony – an asset which the state must protect and preserve. This belief was only further strengthened by the Maori population reaching a statistical low of six per cent of the population in 1896, inciting fresh waves of ‘dying race’ rhetoric. Paradoxically, the dying race myth also raised the value of the romantic Maori within tourism practice and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, tourists – like ethnologists – were searching out the clichéd ‘authentic’ Maori of postcards. Nothing was sacred to tourism, and when the Ngati Rangiwewehi chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke died in 1895, the Hot Lakes Chronicle advised tourists to include his tangi (Maori funeral rite) in their itinerary, and identified the marae on which it was being held.47 Writing about the Ruatahuna Valley near Lake Waikaremoana for the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine early in his journalistic career, James Cowan presented a similar image: ‘the frequent little villages of low-eaved, bark roofed whares with their adjacent cultivations of potatoes, maize and tobacco, are a peaceful pretty sight … Kind and hospitable, too, are these mountaineers, men and women who but a few years ago were the fiercest followers of Te Kooti, and who swore undying hatred against the white man’.48 [ 33 ]

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Perhaps the most important travel writer working in New Zealand at the turn of the century, over the next forty years Cowan rewrote New Zealand’s history around Maori in the guidebooks, articles, and travelogues he produced for the Tourist Department, and in his own works. In New Zealand or Ao-Tea-Roa, written for the Tourist and Health Resorts Department in 1907, for example, he effortlessly drew together Maori legend and the idea of the romantic poetic Maori, to present ‘tales’ of the wonders and mystery of the New Zealand cultural landscape. Such a story said a number of things; it was about progress and the work that had been done in the country, but equally it was an advertisement for New Zealand as a tourist destination. The South Island was a land of wild, untamed scenery, while the North Island was scenic ‘Maoriland’ – Maori life being ‘a picturesque feature of many districts in the interior and on the coast of the North Island’. In his writing about ‘Geyserland’ and Rotorua, the district was presented as little more than the setting for Maori cultural performance, where ‘Maoris [paddle] their canoes over the calm blue lakes, and [spend] their untroubled days lounging in baths of Elysian warmth and softness!’49 The commissioning of travel guides soared following the establishment of the DTHR, and by 1907 the department had circulated in excess of 103,000 books and pamphlets.50 The boom in print media also coincided with the department’s establishment of overseas tourism agencies, the corporate brand of which made liberal use of Maori iconography in printed work, and Maori carving and design in its branch offices – with Donne commissioning the Ngati Tarawhai carver Tene Waitere to produce pieces for such use on a number of occasions.51 Such practices continued well into the 1930s, when the department was purchasing carvings for its overseas offices and as a backdrop to its new travelogue film Romantic New Zealand – The Land of ‘The Long White Cloud’.52 With Maori culture this important to New Zealand’s tourist image, no sooner had the DTHR been established than Donne was voicing concerns that efforts should be made to ‘preserve and revive the picturesque Maori – to dress modern Maori in the “old time” garb to maintain the image that the tourists had come to expect’. Behind this lay the simple fact that as the department’s 1903 report stated, ‘the study of Maori types and curious ways and customs comes second only to the geysers in their interest for visitors, particularly foreign travellers’.53 Yet, as one ‘letter to the editor’ argued, unless steps were taken to address the current state of affairs, there would soon be ‘less “picturesque Maori life” for the visitor to study, and before long there will be none at all’.54 A popular travel account written a few years later put it [ 34 ]

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another way. Taking the position of tourist-as-voyeur, the author finds disappointment, even offence, at Maori attired in European clothes: I had imagined soldierly-looking man and graceful houri-eyed women, whereas most of them proved to be unwieldily fat, and the women pretty only while they were young. And the European dress, adopted almost universally by both men and women, emphasised the peculiarity of their figures, the very short backs and short legs, which would probably not be noticeable in their native attire. But this they only don nowadays on special occasions and when they want to be photographed, when they put it on over the European clothes!55

Such opinions were by no means new. As early as 1827 Augustus Earle had edited out European dress from his sketches of Bay of Islands Maori, complaining that the missionaries, who encouraged the use of European garments, ‘had no taste for the picturesque’.56 Writing about Maori in the New Zealand Wars forty-five year later, James Alexander noted that ‘they look best in their native attire. I tried to introduce for the men the kilt and knickerbockers, instead of trousers, where I was stationed.’57 As John Frow points out, at the root of this is the fact that, for the tourist, reality is figural rather than literal. The tourist’s view is coloured by the ‘ideal’.58 In a similar capacity, Annie Butler’s account of travels through New Zealand Glimpses of Maori Land (1886) harked back to the ‘old time Maori’, and, like many other texts of the time, argued that the modern ‘civilised’ Maori was inferior.59 While a pseudo-religious agenda lay behind Butler’s argument, this perspective on Maori fitted neatly with the views of the scientific community, who generally agreed with the Polynesian scholar Edward Tregear’s view that ‘the degraded natives who hang about our towns have little of the appearance or character of the true Maori’.60 Such views were far from unique to New Zealand, with similar perspectives being presented in Australia, Canada, and America – Michael Johnson arguing, for example, that travellers to the American West who visited reservations ‘found what [Ray Allen] Billington describes as “maladjusted discontent”’. 61 Yet, ironically, tourism was also one of the primary factors contributing to this alleged degradation of Maori society through its stimulation of demand for Maori material culture. By the end of the nineteenth century businesses supplying curios and tourist trinkets were doing a roaring trade, selling everything including artefacts, cloaks, weapons and carvings, whare or marae ornament or waka prows, and even entire buildings.62 To the alarm of some Pakeha, as Maoritanga became increasingly absorbed into tourism practice, some Maori moved to manufacture carvings specifically for the tourist market. Indeed, Ngati Tarawera had been supplying pieces for the [ 35 ]

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Rotorua tourist industry since the 1860s. From the early 1890s, Tane Waitere, already an established carver, similarly produced large pieces for the Geyser Hotel and surrounding areas, as well as small articles such as bowls, pipes, walking sticks, and replicas for sale to visitors.63 As such interactions occurred, the nature and style of carving changed, as was intended by the carvers who believed they were producing the ‘art’ that the commodity trade was seeking. Many Pakeha, however, believed that they were purchasing ‘authentic’ works, and no doubt some Maori capitalised on Pakeha ignorance by passing off touristtrade trinkets as authentic. The demand for ‘authentic’ Maori artefacts from tourists was one of the driving forces behind the introduction of the Maori Antiquities Act in 1901. Many ethnologists also felt that the fickle interest of the tourist trade had only exacerbated the demise of Maori carving – James Cowan later commenting that the Maori response to ‘play up’ to the demands of the tourist was responsible for the current ‘degenerate days [in which] the Maori often falls back on the pakeha timber mill’.64 Ethnologists might have harrumphed that Maori culture was in danger of becoming a cliché of itself, but the influence of the tourist trade cannot be overestimated. It was overwhelming and it was global. To consider the American experience, for example, Patricia Albers suggests that, by the early twentieth century, postcard and tourist images of Plains Indian tribes were so pervasive that characteristics such as the feathered war bonnet and use of the horse and tipi were adopted by tribes across the country in order to identify themselves as Indians to their fellow Americans.65 The first meeting house produced by Ngati Tarawhai specifically for the tourist market was commissioned by Charles Nelson, manager of the largest hotel in Rotorua. Nelson, who liked to think of himself as a ‘white tohunga’, was the son of a prominent Swedish anthropologist. Seeing himself as an expert on Maori culture, he pursued a traditionalisation project in close co-operation with artist and director of the Dominion Museum, Augustus Hamilton, and together they established an orthodoxy of what ‘unchanging traditional Maori culture’ should look like. Furthermore, they had the economic power and influence to enforce this orthodoxy at the same time as other European experts were constructing orthodox accounts of the traditional Maori discovery and settlement of New Zealand. Carvers were thus instructed to use Hamilton’s Maori Art for guidance, in the belief that they should strive for the highest and purest aesthetic standards. Indeed, as the anthropologist Roger Neich argues, ‘Their encouragement of copying a form divorced from its context produced “a truly representative work of Maori Art” spelt with a capital A’.66 [ 36 ]

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Nelson went to particular lengths to develop his whare’s mythology, several of the carvings for which had been bought from a chief of a neighbouring hapu who had broken the tapu imposed while carving was under way, thus cursing both the project and anyone who came into contact with the panels themselves.67 After completing the house, which was later sold to a German museum in 1903, they received orders for similar ones, soon developing a ‘fairly standard, small size, model meeting house that satisfied their European customers’.68 The idea similarly translated to larger forms, and by the early 1900s was being employed not just in the construction of individual buildings but for complete villages. The most significant of these was the model village at Whakarewarewa. Between March 1904 – when construction began – and 1906, the building of Whakarewarewa was left almost entirely in the hands of the Ngati Rangitihi guide and local personality Alfred Warbrick, who had recently been appointed district tourist agent by the DTHR. Construction proceeded quickly, with little communication between Warbrick and the department. In early August 1904, however, the pa hit the headlines when claims of ‘inauthenticity’ in its design surfaced. Within days the matter was taken up nationally, resulting in a flurry of complaints that the government had a responsibility to engage Maori elders and Pakeha experts on the matter.69 The highly respected interpreter and soldier Gilbert Mair was convinced that the ‘miserable sham’ of a pa was an ‘utter burlesque’ of native design, a waste of public money.70 Such accusations stuck, and more than a year later one Maori commentator noted of the pa that, ‘there is no greater farce in the colony. The thing no more resembles the old fortifications than a European villa residence does a Maori whare.’71 According to critics, the pa was of regular shape (a rectangle) and built upon level ground – failing to take advantage of the natural contours of the territory. The stockade work was also completely wrong, the earthwork walls all being too uniform and upright, while there was no stockade outside them as there should have been, with only main posts (tukuwaru) erected, the intermediate posts (tumu) having been forgotten, together with fighting platforms over the waharoa (gateway). Putting his scorn for the design on record, ‘Old Tarakawa of Te Puke’ concluded ‘the whole place looked more like a stockyard than a native fort’.72 When work began again at the end of 1906 under the direction of Lawrence Birks – the newly appointed government engineer at Rotorua – he fell back on the ‘authoritative’ works of Hamilton and the Maori scholar John White. Pleading for an ‘expert’ to supervise the ­construction, he initially rejected the help of Maori elders on the matter, declaring that ‘the Maoris themselves have no conception [ 37 ]

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of the importance in such matters of excluding modern tendencies unless supervised by an enthusiast’. The apparent gulf between Pakeha ‘experts’ and Maori on the issue of ‘authenticity’ reflected different attitudes towards ‘culture’. For Pakeha, culture was essentially fixed to particular objects and practices, and the relationship that these had to a particular people. For Maori, however, culture was far more complex, built around the notion that taonga possess a life force, the relevance of which depends on the maintenance and transference of knowledge and value, and the performance therein. Accordingly, when consultation with local Maori was eventually established in late 1907, it only aggravated concerns over authenticity. Meetings were held with leading Maori of the region, who in turn consulted with their elders. The outcomes of these meetings were then checked against the ‘authoritative’ sources sanctioned by Pakeha institutions.73 ‘The old men here differ in opinion on the most important details’, Birks complained, ‘in which a glance at a few old models would settle the point at once and in case questions were raised afterwards, we could quote our precedents and authorities’.74 In attempting to present a particular accepted form as ‘authentic’ in pa construction, however, Birks failed to recognise the most basic of facts – that pa construction varied widely according to the terrain, tactics, uses and available resources. Warbrick had pointed out as much in a letter to the acting superintendent written in his own defence back in 1904, noting that ‘Maori Pahs [sic] in former times were not constructed on any cast iron plan. The formation depended on the contour of the position, and the position itself would be picked from a strategic point of view. Besides, different tribes had different ideas.’75 Similarly, in assembling his committee of Maori consultants, Birks had sought a group representative of the different hapu.76 In doing so he also failed to understand that what was at stake here was not only the mana of any respective group but the economic prosperity as well, with the amount of sway their kaumatua held in the planning of the pa likely to determine their share in its construction. Mana and economic status were, in fact, inseparable. Yet Donne was never interested in historical authenticity at Whakarewarewa. The model pa stood beside the still visible remains of the real fighting pa Rotowhio, and an early suggestion that the department simply clear these earthworks and rebuild the pa was rejected in favour of the ‘model’ pa.77 Donne also had little concern for fostering traditional techniques or conventions within the pa – his primary concern being the evocation of an exotic ‘Maoriland’ experience for European tourists.78 Traditional designs, he noted, would have little significance for most visitors, and as they were merely ‘looking for advertisement’, there was ‘no need to adhere strictly to [ 38 ]

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Maori usages’.79 He made little pretence that he was doing anything but maintaining the integrity of a Pakeha viewpoint and expectations of what a primitive military fortification would look like. This, Warbrick’s design no doubt did admirably. Accordingly, when in 1905 a petition from the Reverend Charles Kreymberg complained that some of the carvings at the pa were ‘unnecessarily indecent’, it was no surprise that they too were replaced with something more acceptable to European sensibilities.80 As contradictory as these ideas were of what Whakarewarewa was or could be, one area of general agreement was that there was little place for modern carving. Such views not only acted to reinforce the notion of ‘true’ Maori culture as something from the distant past but also highlighted the narrowness of the Pakeha ‘expert’ understanding of the social and cultural place of carving as a living practice. In 1904, for example, the leading Ngati Tarawhai carver Tene Waitere was commissioned to carve a gateway for the western entrance to Whakarewarewa. Apparently given little direction, his composition was severely criticised by European ‘experts’ for its lack of conformity to their perception of traditional carving. When, six years later, he was employed to carve a gateway for the northern entrance to the pa, this time Hamilton took care to supply Tene’s manager with a copy of Robley’s paintings of one of the famed Maketu gateways. Apparently expecting Tene to produce a faithful copy, the two men were again disappointed to find that Tene had produced a carving in a different style. Yet, as Neich notes, while Tene’s 1904 carving was innovative, it also conformed to an earlier Ngati Tarawhai composition. As a living practice, rather than simply copying a gateway structure that had been out of date for sixty years, Tene also gave his composition a modern twist. In the case of Tene’s 1910 carving, there was another dimension to the gateway’s unexpected composition, with Hamilton not aware of (or failing to recognise) the different gateway carving styles within the Bay of Plenty. They had, in fact, asked a Ngati Tarawhai carver to faithfully reproduce a Ngati Pikiao-style gateway.81 By late 1909 the pa was largely complete, and two of the whares were occupied by local Maori who had been offered the use of the dwellings by Birks.82 For the most part, however, the pa failed to satisfy the department’s ambition to have it operate as an immersive environment for heritage performance. Resident families did not stay long, finding themselves drawn back to the real village of Whakarewarewa, highlighting the problems for the government of alienating Maori performance from the social fabric of living communities. Maori reformers also tended to look at the pa as an instructive exhibit for education and science rather than entertainment.83 [ 39 ]

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3  Hongi at the inner pa at the New Zealand Exhibition, Christchurch, ca. 1906–07

Planning Whakarewarewa, Donne had been profoundly influenced by the 1904 St Louis exhibition, where he had been impressed by the way the Americans had displayed their colonial peoples. Returning to New Zealand critical of the native village at Ohinemutu, he noted that, while some of the houses were ‘typically Maori’ ‘the majority are obtrusive ugly little weatherboard cottages, often unpainted and quite disfiguring what would otherwise be pretty kaingas’.84 His position here highlighted the fundamental contradiction between tourism’s ‘old time Maori’ and the ideas of both the ‘whitening’ or Aryan Maori, and the earlier ‘superior savage’. While tourism lauded the romantic construction and artistry of the pre-contact whare, in public discourse this was a dark, vermin-filled space. By the beginning of the twentieth century calls for change were coming from a broad spectrum of Pakeha society, convinced of the degeneracy of contemporary Maori and the need for more rigorous assimilation practices. As a symbol of traditional Maori communalism, the Maori nationalist reform movement similarly demanded that the whare be opened up to modern medical knowledge, ventilated, furnished, enlarged and potentially internally divided.85 Acknowledging [ 40 ]

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the excellent work that the Maori councils had done in improving the sanitary conditions of the dwellings and villages, Donne none the less thought it a pity that, in carrying out reform, the old-style whares were being swept away only to be replaced with unsightly Pakeha-style houses. Could not a compromise be made, he proposed, between the old and the new order of things by retaining the ‘effective and highly picturesque’ exterior, while avoiding the ‘unsanitary and unwholesome’ aspects of the low, earthen floor dwelling? ‘A village consisting of clean and neat buildings of this sort, with a palisade surrounding the marae and the carved meeting-house “Tama-te-kapua” would be an immense attraction to visitors and a decided ornament to the foreshore of the lake.’86 Far from being restricted to the whare, such attitudes could be found in relation to almost every aspect of Maori culture that was of interest to Pakeha. The extreme of this was perhaps Birks’s 1909 proposal that Maori guides around Whakarewarewa and Ohinemutu be required to pass an examination before gaining a ‘licence’, the key text for which would be Grey’s Polynesian Mythology.87 In the end the issue was sent to a Royal Commission to investigate, the primary question being how to restructure the village to better suit the target market’s desire for an authentic experience, while also including the modern conveniences that tourists demanded. Taken as Donne was with the 1904 St Louis Exhibition, upon returning to New Zealand he concentrated on arranging a similar presentation at the New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch, then being planned. The Maori Court was expected to be a focal point of the exhibition. While Donne principally viewed Whakarewarewa as an entertainment-based location, at Christchurch the organising committee’s proposal was to replicate an ‘authentic’ pre-European fighting pa, within the grounds of which would be numerous buildings illustrating the different kinds of whare constructed by Maori. The Maori politician and Minister of Native Affairs James Carroll took ultimate responsibility, appointing Hamilton to organise the planning and construction of the pa buildings and fortifications. The Ngati Tarawhai master carver Neke Kapua and his sons Tene and Eramiha were hired to produce the major carvings, and work began in Wellington, where Hamilton encouraged Neke to base his work on specimens from the Colonial Museum and illustrations from his book Maori Art.88 Hamilton also saw that the main meeting house was constructed along the lines of the ‘standard’ whare that he and Nelson had earlier designed.89 In an effort to add to the air of authenticity, actual museum specimens were built into other structures, and a number of buildings were also brought in from other locations, including the pataka being carved by the Kapuas for Whakarewarewa, and several whares that had been [ 41 ]

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‘rescued’ from the banks of the Whanganui River by the ethnologist Thomas Downes.90 Despite Maori protest to Premier Richard Seddon, Donne also had the famous Wharepuni carved house near Tablelands, Martinborough, carted down to the exhibition. Seddon’s nonchalant response to Maori was simply ‘I feel sure you will agree with me in thinking that this is the greatest honour that could be shown to those interested in the celebrated Wharepuni House’.91

History as scenery As recognition of the tourist potential of the New Zealand landscape grew, in the early 1880s changes to the Land Act gave the Department of Lands and Survey power to reserve land that contained ‘natural curiosities’.92 Power to reserve lands for ‘scenic’ value was added in the 1892 Land Act.93 There was no mention of the word ‘historic’, but the word ‘scenery’ brought with it associations that were traditionally picturesque in visual and literary expression.94 The introduction of such measures was in part an attempt to preserve the source of New Zealand’s growing tourist trade from the excesses of land clearance. Two years later, further support for tourism was added when the Legislative Council approved measures to preserve pieces of native bush – also expressing the wish that such reserves would ‘not [be] on the top of hills, and inaccessible places, but somewhere where they would be of use to inhabitants and attractive to tourists’.95 Yet there was also more to it than tourism alone, with interest being shown in places and landscapes associated with New Zealand’s earlier Maori and European history among many local scenery preservation groups and societies by the late 1880s. Formed in 1888, the Dunedin and Suburban Reserves Conservation Society, for example, was modelled on Edinburgh’s Cockburn Association – a society for the protection and enhancement of Edinburgh’s beauty – while the Taranaki Scenery Preservation Society sought to preserve scenery and historic sites, whether public or private property.96 Such groups generally comprised leading members of the community such as lawyers, businessmen, politicians, scientists and teachers, with their inspiration for preservation ranging from an inherent love of the natural landscape to an interest in history or the perceived recreational or tourist value of sites. In Wellington, for example, the intention was to retain beautiful natural areas for recreation and picnics, as ‘haunts of peace wherein tired men and women may find the rest of charged and happy thought’.97 While such bodies had no statutory position, by the turn of the century they were considered by the Minister of Lands Robert McNab to have ‘quasi-official status’.98 [ 42 ]

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Formed in 1891 by the ethnologist and surveyor Stephenson Percy Smith, the Taranaki Society was by far the most active, particularly when it came to places of historic interest, holding fast to the local belief that Taranaki led the country in the number and calibre of historic sites.99 The Society soon began compiling a catalogue of ‘leading landmarks or historic corners’ within the Taranaki region, conceived around the romanticised story of the founding of the New Plymouth settlement, and the constant friction between Maori and Pakeha that culminated in the Taranaki Wars. Other sites were familiar to the Society as exceptional examples of ‘ancient Maori methods of fortification’, and even as favourite picnic spots.100 ‘[N]ow that an interest is being taken all over the Colony in such matters,’ noted the catalogue’s principal author James MacKenzie, the list: let it be known ‘lest we forget’ if only by the very meagre description given, that in this district there are a few places worthy of notice and consideration, ancient battle-fields, where in days gone by the fallen were counted by thousands. It is a country also rich in old legends, and the memories of centuries ago, and, in such a light, the days of the white man’s advent in comparison, was but as yesterday.

In Taranaki, he concluded, ‘the historian, the antiquarian or lover of Maori folk lore has a wide and fertile field to work over and cull from.’101 Yet with the purchasing of sites well beyond the Society’s modest means, effort was instead directed into civil action and lobbying the government to protect sites, or, as was the case with Whakarewa, Kairoa, and Te Koru pas, securing funds from the colonial secretary to fence off land on which the site was located.102 The issue of historic places had first been brought to the attention of the government in late 1894, when Percy Smith, in his capacity as Secretary for Crown Lands and surveyor-general, instructed provincial commissioners of Crown lands to keep an eye out for places of historical interest connected with both European and Maori occupation.103 ‘This is a decided step in the right direction,’ noted an editorial in the Evening Post soon after, ‘and it remains for widespread, popular, and powerful voluntary organisations to support it’.104 Two years later, the first historical reserve was made in the form of 2000 acres at Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound, where James Cook had first anchored the Endeavour on 15 January 1770. By 1897 the Department of Lands had also adopted a policy of reserving sites of scenic and historical interest from sale when opening up new lands for settlement. Recognising that many sites ­connected with both Maori and European occupation had been lost, it hoped that those remaining could be ‘[kept] intact for future generations in the belief that they will increase in interest as time goes on’.105 In [ 43 ]

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theory this was a step forward, but within a couple of years the scenic and historical dimensions of the policy were effectively null as departmental efforts focused on the development of forestry reserves, which expanded from 6500 acres in 1897 to 693,000 in 1900.106 The turning point, however, seems to have been the unveiling of James West Stack’s monument at Kaiapoi Pa in early April 1899. A missionary and member of the Canterbury Philosophical Institute, Stack wrote extensively on southern Maori, and in particular those of Banks Peninsula and Kaiapoi. Published in 1893, his Kaiapohia: The Story of a Siege told the story of the site central to the conflict between Ngai Tahu and Ngati Toa which dominated South Island history in the 1820s, culminating in Te Rauparaha’s sacking of the pa in 1831. The unveiling of a monument as opposed to preservation resulted from the lack of physical remains of the pa – the site having been fenced as an enclosure for cattle which had destroyed much of the remains. When, during the monument’s unveiling the suggestion was made that wider steps ought to be taken to preserve sites of historic interest, the cry was taken up on a number of fronts, including by the editor of the Christchurch Press, who called for the ‘making tapu’ of sites of both Maori and European history throughout the country: In New Zealand the government should set apart as reserves the most important historic sites, where these are on Crown property, or can be acquired at modest cost. Where the matter has already been delayed too long, and the land has become settled and valuable, at least some memorial should be set up to keep in remembrance the ‘locus in quo’ of each of these most striking events in our history.

Preservation, the editorial concluded, would also have benefits for the country’s burgeoning tourism industry, the claim being that, while many tourists admired New Zealand’s scenery, they also shook their heads pityingly at the apparent lack of ‘interesting associations’.107 Although no response from government was recorded, the comments probably struck a chord with Ward, who had long appreciated the value of the country’s scenery in attracting overseas visitors. When, in 1901 the DTHR was established, he accordingly transferred all functions relating to the development and maintenance of the country’s natural attractions to the new department. The following year he also introduced the Scenery Preservation Bill – the objective of which was the establishment of a commission that would traverse the colony considering and suggesting scenic, historic, and thermal sites for reservation. Recommendations would be considered, and reserved as appropriate by the Governor. Crown lands unsuitable for development but well suited for scenic conservation could be reserved quickly [ 44 ]

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at no cost to the Crown, while the 1894 Public Works Act allowed for the compulsory purchase of sites in private or native ownership, providing compensation was paid. Funds for such purchases were to be drawn from a vote of £100,000 specifically for the purpose. Driven by the demands of tourism, scenic sites adjacent to main routes were to receive the greatest attention. Once these had been dealt with, more remote areas could be safeguarded and developed. Historic and thermal sites were to be dealt with on a more piecemeal basis. In its path through the House, the Bill received strong support – ­especially for what was the growing recognition of the tourist potential of New Zealand’s scenic endowment, accompanied by a belated regret at the amount and rate at which land was being cleared and scenic sites lost.108 There was also a profound enthusiasm for the historical landscape, with several members speaking of old pa and battle sites in their constituencies that they considered worthy of attention.109 Seddon was particularly enthusiastic, taking an inherently culturalist stance that viewed historic spots as ‘the heritage of the people’: We are only in our infancy now. As time rolls on and [the] population increases greater interest will be taken in our history, and unless we preserve these spots we will be wanting in our duty not only to ourselves, but also to future generations … the time has arrived in the history of our colony when our scenery should be preserved, when the historic and beautiful places should be for all time conserved.110

Their importance was more than just economic. The Scenery Preservation Commission established under the Act was a well-rounded group, with a strong collective background and interest in surveying, resource conservation, ethnology and history. Maori were represented by the Ngati Kahungunu and Rangitane leader and politician Hoani Tunuiarangi. Recognising the pioneering nature of its work, the Commission set itself an intense schedule, and in 1905 – its only full year of operation – it visited over seventy-four different locations, where it surveyed hundreds of sites.111 In the little more than two years it was in existence it recommended some 381 sites for reservation. While scenic sites constituted the bulk of recommendations, historic sites received strong representation, with eighty-five being recommended for preservation.112 Within these there was an emphasis on sites of Maori origin, with only a handful of European sites, and almost all of those being associated with the earliest European exploration of New Zealand such as Cook’s landing sites, early mission stations, and the site of the explorer Marion DuFresne’s death.113 The few post-1840 European sites recommended were seen to have significance because of associations with key events in the New Zealand Wars.114 Yet within the focus on [ 45 ]

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Maori sites the exact opposite was the case, with the emphasis not on early sites but on sites associated with the period of European occupation of New Zealand. Percy Smith’s 1904 report ‘Tracing Taranaki Pa’, for example, which formed the basis of his proposals for reservation in the area, consists almost exclusively of pa that were built or in use after 1840.115 A number of factors were at play here. First, few intact pre-settlement sites remained, a fact that only served to highlight the urgency of collecting and preserving what remained before they too disappeared. Second, the Maori sites recommended for preservation were strongly representative of the interests and influence of the Tourist Department, with the evaluation of sites rarely a case of simple historical significance or a focus on representative or intact examples of Maori architecture. Rather, it was a complex consideration involving the site itself, issues of access, tourist potential, scenic value, representative value, and historical significance. Visiting Tauranga in mid-January 1905, for example, Percy Smith noted that while there were numerous pa still in perfect condition in the area, the romantic and scenic qualities of Rock Pa at Maugakohutu made it the best candidate for reservation.116 This approach also flowed over to European sites, with the old whaling station at Hamuri Bay, Marlborough, recommended principally for the romance of its ruins and because it was ‘now a very popular picnic area’.117 Finally, and most significantly, this focus on Maori sites of the early colonial period reflected a growing perception among Pakeha that Maori history was their own prehistory, and that there was little of European origin worthy of preservation in such a young colony. In early 1906 the Scenery Preservation Act was amended with profound implications. Key here was the transference of responsibility for scenery preservation from Tourism to the Department of Lands and Survey, and the replacement of the Commission with a Board consisting of the surveyor-general, the superintendent of Tourist and Health Resorts, and the commissioner of Crown lands.118 The reasons behind disbanding the Commission are complex, but were ultimately grounded in the clash between the Commission – which felt its efforts were constantly being restricted – and the Department of Lands, which was uncomfortable with the Commission’s apparent enthusiasm for creating reserves. Indeed, these changes need to be understood as evidence of colonial land policy and the emerging interests of tourism coming to a head – the general mood of the 1906 Amendment reflecting the views of opponents of scenery preservation, and especially the saw-millers, farmers, and local bodies, who saw it as depriving them of timber, land, and revenue. Nor had the Commission been happy. With only sixty-one of its more than 380 recommendations actually reserved, and much of the [ 46 ]

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country yet to be surveyed, as far as it was concerned its work was far from complete. The small number of reservations made was a point of particular agitation for Percy Smith, who by the end of 1904 had become frustrated at what he saw as the constant bullying of the Department of Lands. Indeed, frustrated by his complaints repeatedly falling on deaf ears, news of the Commission’s disbanding was met by Percy Smith with something akin to relief: ‘I beg to say that I am delighted to hear it’, he noted in a letter to Donne.119 The influence of land policy only increased with the transfer, with sites of ‘historical significance’ being a particular casualty, as the case of the Whanganui River illustrated. Earlier framed as a journey through an isolated wilderness, by the beginning of the twentieth century the Whanganui River had become a panorama on Maori life – a ‘noble water-way through the Heart of Maoriland’, as the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts sold it.120 The river had accordingly been a key area of interest for the Scenery Preservation Commission, which in 1905 had recommending the reservation of 20,000 acres along its banks. Working from the Commission’s survey of the river, however, the Board heavily pruned the original list of sites, giving scant weight to sites’ innate historical value. While in part this stemmed from the Board’s mandate to focus on major scenic sites, historic sites that were retained were most importantly ‘scenic’ and accessible, and valued primarily for the ‘air of romance’ and human association they added to the river scenery.121 This, of course, was not the first time this had occurred, and as Geoff Park has noted, myriad remnants of Maori New Zealand are still today called ‘scenic reserves’.122 In an effort to see more historic sites protected under the Act, in 1911 the historian and ethnographer William Henry Skinner submitted an account of historic sites in the Taranaki district. Describing the area as the ‘home of the ancient New Zealand pa’, Skinner warned that, unless action was taken soon, the few essentially intact specimens remaining would be lost.123 Murmurs of agreement emerged from the Board, but little else. Heritage advocates must have become increasingly disillusioned at this state of affairs, all the more so when they saw the last of the original £100,000 dwindle away with fewer than ten historic sites on the books. Of those that were reserved, the majority were in the Taranaki area, and as such, the driving force behind these was most probably the Taranaki Scenery Preservation Society. In fact, in the thirty-five years that the Board was in operation, between its first meeting in 1907 and its dissolution in 1941, it was responsible for the reservation of only fifteen historic sites, to which the Crown gifted a handful more.124 Of these, the only site associated specifically with the European history of New Zealand was Ship Cove in the Marlborough [ 47 ]

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Sounds, which was gazetted in 1913, having earlier been scheduled as a historical site in 1896 ‘in memory of its occupation by Captain Cook’.125

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Rock art While interest in protecting Maori material culture grew steadily in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, one area absent from the broader public consciousness was rock art. Yet rock art was clearly known about. In 1868 the naturalist Walter Mantell had referred to pictographs at Takiroa, North Otago, in his address to the New Zealand Institute, and within a decade cave drawings commonly graced the pages of the Institute’s Transactions and Proceedings.126 Interest was further stimulated by Stack’s examination of the drawings on the banks of the Opihi River in 1875 and von Haast’s examination of those at Weka Pass the following year. Such interest, however, focused principally on the question of their origins rather than issues of preservation, with diverse theories emerging ascribing them to shipwrecked Tamil mariners, to the ‘somewhat mythical Ngapuhi’, and even to Buddhist missionaries.127 While a minor consideration, the question of preservation was on the radar of the New Zealand Institute and the Polynesian Society in the early 1890s, as both organisations became aware of the scale of natural deterioration and wanton destruction of rock ­painting shelters. The most notable survey of damage was undertaken by Hamilton during his investigations of South Canterbury ­shelters in 1897, but little public sympathy for their fate was registered.128 The problem was that rock art was not seen as relevant to any of the dominant understandings of New Zealand’s ‘exotic’ past. Certainly its unusual character would have had some value to tourism, but its general isolation and inaccessibility no doubt put an end to any ideas of developing this market. Nor did it fit neatly within dominant romantic narratives of the ‘old time Maori’. Indeed, one author in 1902 noted it was nothing short of ‘alien’ to what might be called Maori life.129 In 1916 the noted American anthropologist James Lee Elmore visited New Zealand as a part of his world tour to view and copy rock shelter art. In the course of his initial surveys of then known shelters in Canterbury and North Otago, Elmore found that the paintings were more numerous than either Mantell or Hamilton had suggested.130 Noting, however, that many of the paintings were in danger of destruction by weathering, Elmore suggested that it would be possible to e­ xcavate and remove many of them. Impressed with Elmore’s enthusiasm and apparent knowledge, William Benham, the president of the New Zealand Institute, agreed, suggesting that it would be ‘most desirable that the museums should have, if possible, some of the actual objects’.131 Recognising both the [ 48 ]

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limitations of the Scenery Preservation Act and the ongoing vandalism and stock damage from which cave paintings were suffering, the Director of the Dominion Museum, James Allan Thomson, also believed that this was the best course.132 James Speight, the curator of the Canterbury Museum, however, did not, arguing that, if the paintings were as valuable as Elmore and Thomson claimed, they should be preserved in situ, and that this should be the responsibility of the state.133 Yet with little in the way of existing legislative preventing their removal, the Otago Museum was soon helping Elmore hack them out of cave walls. In the ensuing outcry petitions were made to government for the extension of legislation to avoid similar future transgressions, but to little effect. The government, for its part, recognised the shortcomings of both the Scenery Preservation and the Antiquities Acts, but with the scale of amendment requiring considerable difficulties to be overcome – and both Internal Affairs and Lands already overcommitted first to the First World War, and then to soldier resettlement – the government spent the better part of the next two decades sitting on the fence.134 The addition of the burgeoning archaeological voice to the preservation cause certainly helped to push the issue, however, at the time these developments were taking place in the 1920s, archaeology in New Zealand was in its infancy.135 While excavations of Maori sites had been taking place since at least 1900, they were both crude and predominantly undertaken out of curiosity or for their artefact value, rather than scientific research. Indeed, in this respect the most significant ‘archaeological’ influence was the ‘cross-pollination’ of ethnology through the increasing use of archaeological techniques in the ethnological quest for artefacts.136 Nor was the ethnological community initially very interested in Maori sites beyond their existence as locations at which historical events and cultural practices took place, and as sources of artefacts.137 This began to change only from the later 1910s, firstly through the work of Elsdon Best, who from the late 1920s was joined by Raymond Firth, Leslie Kelly, and later William John Phillipps.

Maori, scenery, and colonisation Much like the nineteenth-century acclimatisation imperative, the notion of land and nature as ‘scenery’ that merits preservation is a highly cultural paradigm. It has also historically served to promote the interests of a particular social group. While from the beginning scenic reserves were promoted as a common natural heritage, it cannot be ignored that they were also cognitively constructed landscapes through which Maori were denied their customary place in the environment. The Scenery Preservation Act fitted neatly into this process. [ 49 ]

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In debate on the Bill in 1903, the only Maori to speak was Hone Heke Rankin, the Member for Northern Maori. Although he supported the Bill in principle, he was critical of the method it outlined for the acquisition of Maori land, believing that the Native Land Court was the wrong body to assess the value of Maori land. Rather, he argued, the task should be undertaken by the same tribunal that assessed the value of all other lands.138 Although he was not explicit in his comments, the implication was that Maori land was assessed for compensation at a lower rate than Pakeha land, something he would have known from a number of assessments – including that of Kapiti Island, where Pakeha owners had received five times the compensation of Maori owners. Seddon responded that the very inclusion of a Maori member on the Commission would ensure fairness on such issues; however, during debate on the 1906 Scenery Preservation Amendment Bill, Apirana Ngata, the Member for Eastern Maori, confirmed Maori suspicions of injustice in the compensation system.139 Not surprisingly, the Commission’s early attempts at acquisition led some Maori to petition Parliament, their grievance being that the creation of reserves took away their mana whenua – referring principally to customary birding rights, burial rights, and at times also the right to work timber resources on such lands. The application of the Scenery Preservation Act to Maori land was also protested against, with explicit reference made to the cultural insensitivity of the Commission in its choice of sites, and its voyeuristic treatment of Maori and Maori culture. ‘The Maori lands that will be taken under the Scenery Preservation Act 1903’, it was noted, ‘are, the famous places, the lands containing thermal springs, the famous pas, the canoe landing places of former days, the sites of the famous whares, the sacred whares, the bird snaring places of olden times, that is to say all such places as are understood by this Act as likely to be much frequented by the tourist.’140 A second petition at the end of 1905 was more direct, complaining that the majority of the sites marked for reservation were burial sites, ‘of which there is nothing so precious to Maoris as their kaupa’.141 During debate on the Amendment the following year Ngata put the Crown’s scenery preservation imperative in a cultural context. While himself supportive of the protection of indigenous environments, historic spots, and old burial grounds – believing that under such control their protection from acts of vandalism in the future could be ensured – he felt that the methods the Crown used to obtain sites in Maori ownership seriously disadvantaged Maori.142 There was also dissatisfaction with the process employed by the Commission under the 1903 Act – a reference to the fact that the [ 50 ]

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Commission often made recommendations for reservation without even viewing the proposed spots or, more importantly, without consulting Maori. As a result of this, Ngata claimed, ‘a great many spots that should have been reserved had been deliberately destroyed by the Natives as a sort of protest against the methods of the Scenery Preservation Commissioners’. Maori, Ngata suggested, should be approached ‘in a proper way’, as Pakeha were, for consent. Legislative policy should be explained and consent requested, as ‘from time immemorial [Maori] had been accustomed to give it in a meeting in his own way’.143 Despite the Minister of Lands professing concern at apparent injustice towards Maori, the 1906 Bill was significantly amended during its passage through Parliament, omitting the sections of particular interest to Maori. In its original form, it had granted rights to the former Maori owners of reserved lands, including the right to hunt birds not specially protected in the reserves created from their lands. Similarly, where lands contained urupa, the governor could grant Maori the right to bury their deceased in associated burial grounds. Pressed for time, and with their inclusion requiring the legislature to translate the Bill into Maori, the clauses were instead removed, along with Maori representation on the Board. Some Maori Members of the House interpreted the clauses’ omission as meaning that the Act would not apply to Maori. The reality was quite the opposite, with Maori land becoming the prime focus of the Act – the government feeling it retained the equivalent power under the Public Works Act. Any uncertainly was extinguished in 1910 when further legislative changes proposed to deem retrospectively all native land taken under the various Public Works Acts for the purposes of scenery preservation to have been taken validly. As contentious as it was, the clause passed 36 to 28.144 In its passage through the House the Attorney General framed the changes as a necessary evil, concluding that ‘it would surely be the worst kind of disloyalty to the future people of New Zealand if those of the present generation did not do their best to preserve the beauty to be found along the [Whanganui] river’.145 The interests of tourism were also at stake. After all, as the department’s superintendent had earlier noted: ‘To exempt Native lands from acquisition for scenery purposes would practically nullify the Act as the bulk of the scenic and historic spot … are either native owned or Native Reserves’.146

Conclusion In the half century between 1870 and the early 1920s Maori material culture and historical landscapes were systematically drawn into [ 51 ]

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Pakeha political and economic systems. Driving this were the international and transnational interests of tourism. With the priorities of tourism favouring romantic notions of wilderness and indigenous peoples, Maori were presented to visitors as a unique and interesting product – one that offered experiences that might be gauged in terms of their relative desirability, or that were in some way different to what tourists might expect ‘at home’. Whether meaning to experience the culturally exotic, or simply to ‘get away from it all’, the primary objective appealed to was difference. This image of Maori also ultimately bolstered colonial authority, revering a notion of the Maori past that valued little of the Maori present. Such judgements were reinforced through scientific knowledge and its placing of authority with western ‘experts’ and the use of the museum – the museum in part established to accommodate collections of indigenous heritage as an integral element of the colonising process. The great paradox, of course, was that tourism placed Maoritanga at the centre of the country’s identity at the same time as settler colonialism mandated its erasure. Owing to its innate appeal to Pakeha and European aesthetic sensibilities, the carved house was central to this performative experience, often being positioned as the stage or backdrop to ‘authentic’ Maori cultural performance. Interpreted within dominant museological practices as it was, however, to Europeans the historic carved house was viewed as little more than an ethnological object – an example of primitive ‘art’ or a valuable example of ‘type’. The histories of individual houses were valued for the air of perceived authenticity and romantic associations, but, in almost every instance of preservation, little if any consideration was given to the integrity of the buildings themselves, and even less to their relationship to place. This is all the more telling of Pakeha attitudes towards Maoritanga more generally when considered in respect of the fundamental importance of the link between ‘object’ and ‘place’ in Maori culture. ‘Meaning’ and ‘authenticity’ were culturally and politically loaded terms. The remnants of the Maori cultural landscape were similarly exploited – valued not for any inherent historical worth, but as part of an effort to ensure that the natural, indigenous qualities so vital to the international tourism market were not lost to the land clearances taking place as agricultural settlement consolidated its land base. Efforts to preserve the Maori cultural landscape thus had little to do with sites’ importance to Maori, but more with how they served Pakeha. The near-complete neglect of sites of European association similarly highlights the perceived absence of notable European historic associations in the landscape, and indeed, this would be one of the primary reasons for Pakeha embracing of the Maori cultural landscape. [ 52 ]

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Notes 1 Wellington Independent, 29 November 1862; Daily Southern Cross, 5 February 1863. 2 Brian Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria: An Illustrated History of the Maori Tour of England, 1863 (Auckland 1985), pp. 28, 118. 3 John Beaglehole, (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, vol. 1 (Cambridge 1955), p. cclxxxiii. Also see Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, pp. 31–48. 4 Richard Sherrin, Early History of New Zealand: From Earliest Times to 1840 (Auckland 1890), p. 131; George Craik, The New Zealanders (London 1830), pp. 317–22. 5 These included the Colonial Museum in Wellington, Dunedin, Auckland, Christchurch, New Plymouth, Nelson, Napier, Invercargill, Marlborough, and Hokitika. 6 R. K. Dell, ‘The First Hundred Years of the Dominion Museum’, unpublished manuscript, Te Papa Library, pp. 31–44. 7 Julius von Haast, ‘Origin and Early History of the Canterbury Museum: Being the Annual Address’, TPNZI, 14 (1881), p. 504; MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, pp. 265–71. 8 McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 22. 9 Deidre Brown has recently suggested that the whare is considered the finest example of the Turanga school of carving. ‘Te Hau ki Turanga’, JPS, 105:1 (1996), p. 7. 10 AJHR, G, 1867, p. 12. 11 Hector, 6 June 1867, IA1, 1868/450, ANZ. 12 Evening Post, 26 August 1868; 5 February 1878. 13 Paul Walker, ‘The “Maori House” at the Canterbury Museum’, Interstices, 4 (1998), pp. 6–7. 14 James Stack, ‘An Account of the Maori House Attached to the Christchurch Museum’, TPNZI, 8 (1875), p. 173. 15 Thomas Potts, ‘Letter to the Superintendent’, June 1874, CP349d, ANZ. 16 Walker, ‘The “Maori House” at the Canterbury Museum’, p. 5. 17 McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 13. 18 AJHR, H-5, 1873. 19 MA5, 6/18, ANZ, cited in McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 36. 20 Often referred to by its Maori name of Kingitanga, the King Movement, which arose in the 1850s and included many tribes, was established as a symbolic role similar in status to that of the monarch of the British. Rather than seeking to challenge British authority, the underlying objective was to forge a partnership in which the Maori would govern themselves, while the governor would govern the Europeans, and both peoples would owe ultimate allegiance to the British Crown. 21 Ngapine Allen suggests that fear of further dispossession and deprivation in the face of government policy also effectively meant that Mataatua stood little chance once government interest was stirred. Ngapine Allen, ‘Maori Vision and the Imperial Gaze’, in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London 1998), pp. 147. 22 MU188, 1/122, TPA, cited in McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 36. 23 W. J. Phillips, The Great Carved House Mataatua (Wellington 1956), pp. 4–5. 24 Roger Neich, ‘The Maori House down in the Garden: A Benign Colonialist Response to Maori Art and the Maori Counter-response’, JPS, 112:4 (December 2003), p. 338. 25 Heinrich von Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast (Wellington 1948), p. 908. 26 London Times, 24 July 1886. 27 For example, Otago Witness, 16 October 1901; 6 November 1901.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 28 Such as President of the Institute and Museum, Robert Barstow, who gave his collection of Maori artefacts in 1877; John McKelvie, who gifted a collection of antiquities in 1880; and the Maori scholar C. O. Davis, who upon his death in 1887 willed his collection to the museum. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, p. 196; Thames Star, 28 February 1880. 29 Mair’s collection was purchased by the museum in 1901. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society, 34 (1901), pp. 576–7. 30 Francis Bather, Some Colonial Museums (London 1894), p. 208; The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 1 (Wellington 1897), p. 337. 31 Michael King, Maori: A Photographic and Social History (Auckland 1983), pp. 64–6. 32 New Zealand as a Tourist and Health Resort: A Handbook to the Hot Lake District, the Southern Lakes, Sounds, etc. (Auckland 1893), p. 127. 33 Alan Jackson, Burton Bros and Muir & Moodie of Dunedin: Their Photographs and Postcards (Howick 1985), p. 3. 34 See, for example, Jacqui Sutton Beets, ‘Images of Maori Women in New Zealand Postcards after 1900’, in Alison Jones, Phyllis Herda, and Tamasailau Suaalii (eds), Bitter Sweet: Indigenous Women in the Pacific (Dunedin 2000), pp. 17–32. For material on the broader photographic representation of the South Pacific as romantic tourism, see Nicholas Thomas, ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’, in Ann Stephen (ed.), Pirating the Pacific: Images of Travel, Trade & Tourism (Haymarket: 1993), pp. 44–61; Christraud  M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb (eds), Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington 1998). 35 Briar O’Connor, ‘The Dilemma of Souvenirs’, in C. Bell and S. Matthewman (eds), Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand: Identity, Space and Place (South Melbourne 2004), p. 167. 36 F. L. Wood, This New Zealand (Hamilton 1946), p. 9. 37 Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London 1991), pp. 213–14. 38 Ian Rockel, Taking the Waters: Early Spas in New Zealand (Wellington 1986). 39 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, pp. 189–91. 40 Cited in Roger Steele, ‘Tourism’, in Don Stafford, Roger Steele and Joan Boyd (eds), Rotorua 1880–1980 (Rotorua 1980), p. 200. 41 Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua (Christchurch 1968), p. 17. 42 William Fox, ‘Remarks on the Hot-Springs Districts, North Island’, in New Zealand Thermal-Springs Districts, Papers Relating to the Sale of the Township of Rotorua (Wellington 1882), p. 19. 43 Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Mana Wahine Maori: Selected Writings on Maori Women’s Art, Culture and Politics (Auckland 1991), p. 71. 44 Westby Perceval, Pictorial New Zealand 1895 (London 1895), pp. 85–6. 45 Cited in Ross Galbreath, ‘Colonisation, Science, and Conservation: The Development of Colonial Attitudes Toward the Native Life of New Zealand with Particular Reference to the Career of the Colonial Scientist Walter Lawry Buller (1838–1906)’, PhD, University of Waikato, 1989, p. 364. 46 George Bell, Mr Oseba’s Last Discovery (Wellington 1904), pp. 132–3, 136. 47 Cited in Stafford et al., Rotorua 1880–1980, p. 207. 48 James Cowan, ‘Out in the Wilds’, NZIM, January 1900, p. 264. 49 James Cowan, New Zealand, or, Ao-tea-roa: Its Wealth and Resources, Scenery, Travel-routes, Spas and Sport (Wellington 1907), pp. 58, 97. 50 AJHR, H-2, 1907, p. 6. 51 See BAEO, A259/19b/4/45, ANZ and TO1, 8/6, ANZ. 52 General Manager of Tourism to Masters, 2 August 1934, TO1, 8/6, part 1, ANZ. 53 AJHR, H-2, 1903, p. vi. 54 Wanganui Herald, 10 December 1903. 55 Alys Lowth, Emerald Hours in New Zealand (Christchurch 1907), p. 18. 56 Augustus Earle, A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand in 1827 (London 1832), p. 37.

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E ntangled ob j ects 57 James Alexander, Bush Fighting: Illustrated by Remarkable Actions and Incidents of the Maori War in New Zealand (London 1873), p. 15. 58 John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford 1997), p. 67. 59 Annie Butler, Glimpses of Maori land (London 1886), pp. vi–vii. For other examples see Lydia Wevers, Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809–1900 (Auckland 2002), pp. 198–200. 60 Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington 1885), p. 103. 61 Michael Johnson, Hunger for the Wild: America’s Obsession with the Untamed West (Lawrence 2007), p. 198. For Australia see Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge 2003), p. 56, and Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals (Adelaide 1928), p. 8. 62 New Zealand as a Tourist and Health Resort, p. 156. 63 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: ludigenous Art, Colonial Cuture, (New York 1999), pp. 46–7. 64 James Cowan, ‘The Art Craftsmanship of the Maori’, Art in New Zealand, 1 (December 1929), pp. 122–3. 65 Patricia Albers, ‘Symbols, Souvenirs, and Sentiments: Postcard Imagery of Plains Indians, 1898–1918’, in Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb (eds), Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington 1998), pp. 65–89. 66 Roger Neich, ‘The Veil of Orthodoxy: Rotorua Maori Woodcarving in Changing Context’, in Sidney Mead and Bernie Kernot (eds), Art and Artists in Oceania (Palmerston North 1983), p. 257.  67 Margaret Werry, ‘Tourism, Ethnicity, and the Performance of New Zealand Nationalism, 1889–1914’, PhD, Northwestern University, 2001, pp. 114–15. 68 Neich, ‘The Veil of Orthodoxy’,in Mead and Kernot (eds), Art and Artists in Oceania, p. 259. 69 New Zealand Herald, 9 August 1904, 17 August 1904. 70 Robieson to Ward, 27 August 1904; Mair to Robieson, 16 May 1904, TO1, 1904/288, ANZ. 71 Tarakawa to Ngata, 21 August 1909, BAEO, A259/44a/244, ANZ. 72 New Zealand Herald, 30 January 1937. 73 Birks to Donne, 4 June 1907; Birks to Donne, 22 November 1907, BAEO, A259/44a/244, ANZ. 74 Birks to Donne, 22 January 1908, ibid. 75 Warbrick to Acting Superintendent, 24 August 1904, TO1, 1904/288, ANZ. 76 Birks to Donne, 27 November 1907, BAEO, A259/44a/244, ANZ. 77 Andrews to Donne, 11 September 1902, TO1, 1904/288, part 2, ANZ. 78 See AJHR, H-2, 1909. He similarly noted in the 1903 report that the paramount consideration was ‘to enhance the picturesque character of the geyser-valley’ by the construction of ‘carved houses and patakas, and some whares constructed after the old style’. Donne, AJHR, H-2, 1903, p. ix. 79 Donne to Birks, 21 September 1906, BAEO, A259/19b/4/45, ANZ. 80 Robieson to Donne, 7 June 1905; Robieson to the Rotorua People’s Association, 14 June 1905, TO1, 1904/288, part 1, ANZ. 81 Roger Neich, ‘The Gateways of Maketu: Ngati Pikiao Carving Style and the Persistence of Form’, in Anita Herle, Nick Stanely, Karen Stevenson and Robert Welsch (eds), Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning (Honolulu 2002), pp. 264–7. 82 Birks to Robieson, 22 October 1909, BAEO, A259/44a/244, ANZ. 83 Rev. Bennett to Birks, 12 July 1909, ibid. 84 AJHR, H-2, 1904, p. 9. 85 Raeburn Lange, May the People Live: A History of Maori Health Development, 1900–1920 (Auckland 1999). 86 AJHR, H-2, 1904, p. 9. Perhaps the most famous of the early examples of this new design were Makereti Papakura’s whares Tukiterangi and later Tuhoromatakaka,

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M which overall conformed to the romantic anti-modern vision that defined much of Whakarewarewa. Both were designed as ‘modernised’ single-room dwellings. Unlike the whare of the pre-contact era, both were raised on foundations – in accordance with Health Department prescriptions – and both had wooden rather than dirt floors. 87 Birks to Donne, 19 October 1909, TO1, 1904/288, part 2, ANZ. 88 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, pp. 220–4. 89 B. Dibley, ‘Telling Times: Narrating Nation at the New Zealand International Exhibition, 1906–7’, Sites, 34 (1997), p. 15. 90 W. J. Phillips, Carved Maori Houses of Western and Northern Area of New Zealand (Wellington 1955), p. 73. 91 Parata to Seddon, 8 February 1906; Hieremaia to Seddon, 3 April 1906; Seddon to Hieremaia 17 April 1906, MU136, box 2, item 2, TPA. 92 See Paul Star, ‘From Acclimatisation to Preservation: Colonists and the Natural Works in Southern New Zealand, 1860–1894’, PhD, University of Otago, 1997, pp. 187–201. 93 Section 235 of the 1892 Land Act enabled the Governor to reserve any land containing ‘thermal, mineral or other springs which … should be reserved for the public health, or any land wherein or whereon natural curiosities or scenery may exist of a character of national interest’. 94 NZPD, 72, 22 July 1891, pp. 399–409. 95 NZPD, 86, 10 July 1894, p. 365. 96 Thelma Strongman, City Beautiful: The First 100 Years of the Christchurch Beau­ tifying Association (Christchurch 1999), p. 2; Taranaki Herald, 20 October 1891. 97 Lyn Lochhead, ‘Preserving the Brownies’ Portion: A History of Voluntary Nature Conservation Organisations in New Zealand 1888–1935’, PhD, Lincoln University, 1994, p. 140. 98 McNab, NZPD, 126, 22 October 1903, p. 707. 99 In his rather self-congratulatory Reminiscences of a Taranaki Surveyor, W. H. Skinner discusses at least ten historic sites that the Taranaki Scenery Preservation Society attempted to have protected. W. H. Skinner, Reminiscences of a Taranaki Surveyor (New Plymouth 1946), pp. 91–3. 100 Taranaki Herald, 24 August 1900. 101 James MacKenzie, ‘Stray leaves form the History of Old Taranaki’, Scenery Preservation Correspondence, n.d., LS 70/11, ANZ, pp. 1–2. 102 Taranaki Herald, 14 August 1899 and 24 August 1900. 103 Circular 267, 19 October 1894, cited in LS70/20, ANZ. By the end of the following year some 17,000 acres had been reserved as a consequence of the memo, the focus being on the scenery and thermal sites around Lake Waikaremoana and up the Nuhaka River in Hawke’s Bay. AJHR, C-1, 1896, p. vii. 104 Evening Post, 14 February 1895. 105 AJHR, C-1, 1897, p. vii. 106 Ibid., p. vi; AJHR, C-1, 1898, p. vii; AJHR, C-1, 1899, p. vii; AJHR, C-1, 1900, p. vii. 107 The Press, 4 April 1899. 108 ‘It is difficult to overestimate the value to the colony from the presence of tourists travelling throughout it, and yearly it is becoming a more valuable asset to us’ (Fraser, NZPD, 126, 22 October 1903, p. 708) with typical comments such as ‘I know a great number of very beautiful spots in New Zealand, and I know also that a great number of these spots are fast being destroyed as settlement progresses’ (Baldey, NZPD, 127, 6 November 1903, p. 399). It was also commonly lamented that the Bill was too little too late, and that had such measures been introduced twenty years before ‘we should have been able to preserve scenery that has in the meantime gone to destruction’. Reeves, NZPD, 127, 6 November 1903, p. 400. There were, of course, detractors, who cautioned that the question of scenery preservation in a new and picturesque country like New Zealand required careful treatment. 109 NZPD, 126, 22 October 1903, pp. 704–13. 110 Seddon, ibid., pp. 704–5.

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E ntangled ob j ects 111 AJHR, C-6, 1906. 112 Sites recommended for both scenic and historic interest are listed in both categories. Scenic: 317; Thermal: 10; Historic (Maori): 75; Historic (European): 12. AJHR, C-6, 1906, pp. 5–16. 113 Percy Smith to Stevenson, 15 June 1904, LS70/20 and LS70/21, ANZ. 114 AJHR, C-6, 1906, pp. 5–16, and LS70/5, ANZ. 115 Percy Smith, ‘Tracing Taranaki Pa’, n.d., LS70/22, ANZ. 116 13 January 1905, LS70/10, ANZ. 117 Resolution 289, LS70/10, ANZ. 118 NZPD, 153, 22 November 1910, pp. 890–1; Percy Smith to Ward, 21 March 1906, TO1, 1904/191/32, ANZ. 119 Donne to Percy Smith, 30 March 1906, TO1, 1904/191/32, ANZ. 120 ‘New Zealand’s Great Tourist Resorts and Health-Giving Spas’, New Zealand Freelance, 7:337, 15 December 1906. 121 Nor was this an isolated instance, with a similar approach being taken to the Mokau River in 1909. See ‘Report on the Mokau River’, AJHR, C-6, 1909, pp. 10–16. 122 Geoff Park, ‘Going between Goddesses’, in Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas, and Hilary Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney 1999), p. 178. 123 Skinner, AJHR, C-6, 1911, pp. 7–9. 124 For a list of those sites reserved, see Helen Leach, ‘Early Attempts at Historic Heritage Site Protection in New Zealand’, Archaeology in New Zealand, 34:2 (June 1991), pp. 88–90. 125 AJHR, C-1, 1897, p. vii. 126 ‘Address by the Hon. W. B. Mantell, F.G.S., on the “Moa”’, TPNZI, 1 (1868) pp. 18–20. 127 See Julius von Haast, ‘Address’, TPNZI, 10 (1877), pp. 47–54; Julius von Haast, ‘On the Rock Paintings in the Weka Pass’, TPNZI, 11 (1878), pp. 154–6. 128 Augustus Hamilton, ‘On Rock Pictographs in South Canterbury’, TPNZI, 30 (1897), pp. 24–9, and ‘Notes from Murihiku’, TPNZI, 29 (1896), pp. 169–78. 129 Otago Witness, 26 March 1902. 130 Thomson to Russell, 28 September 1916, MU00002, box 58, file 11/0/18, TPA. 131 Benham to Thomson, 26 September 1916, 29010–001, vol. 1, HPTA. 132 Thomson to Hislop, 10 July 1917, MU00002, box 58, file 11/0/18, TPA, and J. Allan-Thomson to Russell, 28 September 1916, 29010–001, vol. 1, HPTA. 133 Speight to Canterbury Museum Board of Governors, n.d., 29010–001, vol. 1, HPTA. 134 Memorandum, ‘Protection of Maori Burial Caves’, 11 July 1927, MU000014, box 6, item 13/27/184, TPA. Also see Michael Trotter and Beverley McCulloch, Prehistoric Rock Art of New Zealand (Auckland 1981), pp. 6–19. 135 For an outline of early archaeology in New Zealand see Henry Skinner, ‘Archaeology in NZ’, JPS, 42 (1933), p. 103. 136 Matthew Schmidt, Pa Excavations in New Zealand Archaeology: A History and Review (Wellington 1996), pp. 1–14. 137 For an example of this in middens found at Porirua, see Evening Post, 23  August 1919. 138 Heke, NZPD, 126, 22 October 1903, p. 710. 139 Cathy Marr, Robin Hodge, and Ben White, Crown Laws, Policies and Practices in Relation to Flora and Fauna, 1840–1912 (Wellington 2001), pp. 287–8. 140 NZPD, 15 August 1904. 141 ‘Letters from natives to Mr Percy Smith objection to proposed reservations around Rotorua’, December 1905, LS70/12, ANZ. Kaupa is the underlying concepts or philosophies on which tikanga is based. 142 Ngata, NZPD, 138, 24 October 1906, p. 596. 143 Ibid. 144 NZPD, 153, 18 November 1910, p. 837. 145 Findley, NZPD, 153, 22 November 1910, pp. 890–1. 146 Robieson to unknown, 13 September 1904, TO1, 1904/191/12, ANZ.

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CHA P T E R T WO

Throwing stones at Napoleon: Pakeha identity and the preservation and neglect of Maori material culture Considering the question of Maori art at a meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society in early 1915, the historian James Cowan and ethnographer Elsdon Best lamented the apparent failure of Maori culture to influence Pakeha New Zealand. Was this not due to New Zealand’s youth as a country? questioned one amateur artist. ‘We are supposed to be too busy to attend to such expensive luxuries as art and literature. We are also supposed to be a rough, primitive race of pioneers, engaged in a struggle with the wilderness. Perhaps in about fifty years’ time there will be a revival in Maori art and an increase in study of other arts in New Zealand.’1 Fifteen years later Cowan believed that things had changed – that Maori art and craft were now one of New Zealand’s ‘national characteristics’; it was native to the soil, a part of the country’s national background. ‘We fall back on the Maori now for many of the artistic features that go to distinguish these islands from the outside world, just as we call on the Maori whenever it is desired to give the great ones who visit us a true New Zealand welcome.’2 Elaborating on this soon after in the introduction to his The Maori Yesterday and Today, he noted: to-day the Maori is an element of the New Zealand population that exercises a marked influence on the life of our country. Not only is the native race an honoured and respected section of the population, living on terms of political and social equality with those of European blood, but the Pakeha pays it the compliment of borrowing largely from its literature and art and its traditions and folk-lore.3

Smitten as Cowan was with the myth of New Zealand’s bi-cultural partnership, his change of tune also reflected the scale of tikanga Maori’s absorption into Pakeha notions of New Zealandness in the early decades of the twentieth-century. New Zealand, of course, was far from unique in its ‘indigenous turn’, yet while in most settler socie[ 58 ]

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ties this was more closely aligned to the landscape and flora and fauna than indigenous peoples – Australia had the Outback, South Africa the Boers’ Great Trek, and the United States Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic frontier thesis – in New Zealand it was both. The image of Maori adopted by Pakeha society, however, was inseparable from the representations already discussed under colonisation and tourism. Each reinforced the others. In this sense, Pakeha efforts to ‘save’ Maori culture were for the most part self-serving – driven by the ways Maori culture was seen to support Pakeha identity.

‘The dear old Maoriland’ Indigenous flora and fauna and motifs from Maori carving had been employed as distinctly New Zealand symbols long before the end of the nineteenth century. The New Zealand Natives rugby team had adopted the silver fern as a national emblem by at least 1888, and both the silver fern and the kiwi appeared on some regimental badges during the South African War.4 The burgeoning manufacturing sector similarly used hei-tiki and other distinctly New Zealand symbols and designs as trademarks.5 In the home, kowhaiwhai and other Maori designs were incorporated into banisters, mantelpieces, doorframes, chairs, beds, and bookcases. Maori artefacts were also often used as ornaments.6 The popularity of Maori design also grew under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, with both William Morris and Owen Jones being particularly interested in Maori art.7 Outside the home the adoption of Maori symbols was even more common, and by the early 1890s tikanga Maori was commonly being drawn into national ritual and ceremony. Official visitors were greeted with ‘kia ora’ and Maori performances, and their departure was often marked by gifts of carvings and other smaller curios as mementoes of their time in New Zealand.8 Some were bigger than mere knickknacks. When Governor Lord Onslow returned to England at the end of his term in 1892, for example, he did so with the carved house Hinemihi, which he had sought out in the final year of his posting, and which was then reconstructed in the garden of his family seat, Clandon Park, as an exotic folly-cum-summerhouse souvenir.9 Maori and Maori designs also featured heavily in entries for the design of a New Zealand coat-of-arms at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pakeha adoption and adaption of tikanga Maori during this period is complex, but was ultimately the result of conscious efforts of ‘native-born’ colonists to create an indigenous identity for themselves. Where earlier perceptions of the New Zealand landscape centred on the romanticisation of English pastoralism, as settlers and especially native-born colonists saw themselves less as displaced Britons and [ 59 ]

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more as self-conscious New Zealanders, the local increasingly came to be seen not as alien but as normal and familiar.10 As the Canterbury novelist Edith Searle Grossman later reflected on the period, for many of her generation: The imaginative dependence on the Old World lingers still, but it is dwindling away. We still keep ‘the vision splendid’ of Europe, but it no longer occupies the foreground in our minds. A strong patriotic feeling has grown up for the land of our birth. We recognise it as our Motherland and our Fatherland. The sentiment for England has receded into the background. It is not unlike the veneration felt for the late Queen by her grandchildren. England is our ancestress, and we venerate it not only for that reason, but because it is a sovereign amongst the nations, and we are proud to belong to its family. But the most close and intimate love is kept as it should be for our own country.

No longer an empty and lifeless waste, the New Zealand landscape was now ‘haunted by the memories of our own childhood’.11 Positive emotional responses to indigenous flora and fauna were further justified as scientific solutions to the ills of land settlement emerged from the late 1880s, with the new philosophical framework fuelling nationalism by stressing the uniqueness and worth of the indigenous. Returning to New Zealand in 1890 after four years away in England attempting to establish his credentials as a gentleman – and during which he had visited and admired many of England’s great landscaped estates – Walter Buller set about creating his own ‘landscape’, but with a distinctly local bent, setting the pataka Te Takinga as a picturesque ruin among the remnants of the native bush in the garden of his ‘country estate’ in the Horowhenua.12 Such nationalistic twists of culture were not uncommon. As Edward Kaufman notes of the celebration of national traditions and common experience in the development of Americana rooms in nineteenth-century American art collections and museums, curators sought to expound not only a uniquely American tradition but one that was specifically independent of European values.13 In addition to symbolising a growing identification with indigenous New Zealand, the appropriation of tikanga Maori as national symbols warrants consideration within the broader context of colonisation. While this new affinity with the indigenous was in part made possible by a fading perception of the indigenous as alien, it also reflected the Pakeha sense that both the landscape and Maori were ostensibly submissive to settler authority, as had essentially been the case since the early 1880s. Pakeha dominance over the landscape increased rapidly from the late 1880s, producing a transformation that by 1910 had [ 60 ]

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seen New Zealand ‘evolve’ from a frontier society to a predominantly urban, centralised society, with all the appropriate social, cultural, administrative, and infrastructural trappings. No longer threatened by the indigenous, colonists could now view it favourably. Accordingly, when during the country’s Jubilee in 1890 a vice-royal child was born in the colony, the Governor Lord Onslow embraced Buller’s suggestion of naming the boy ‘Huia’. Although it was the last of the child’s names, he was known throughout his life as ‘Huia’.14 Despite such illustrations of enthusiasm for indigenous New Zealand, however, many nationalists felt that the Jubilee only highlighted how little New Zealand had in the way of its ‘own’ culture and history. Five years earlier the architect Benjamin Mountfort had argued that this lack of history was reason enough for the country to remain an extension of Britain.15 With no history, there was no content, no association with the land. Others, such as the poet and composer Arthur Adams, thought otherwise, with Adams lyrically complaining in the poem Myself – My Song of New Zealanders’ lack of historical p ­ erspective.16 The statesman and historian William Pember Reeves went further, setting out to provide his countrymen with the history they felt they lacked, and which was published in 1898 under the title The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa. While written principally for a British market, the book none the less provided New Zealanders with a usable past – the bones of which provided the basis for traditional histories of New Zealand well into the twentieth century. This was especially the case when it came to Maori history, which was typically presented as a warm-up to the main event of European arrival, both enlivening and lengthening New Zealand’s history and adding to it a dash of myth and romance. Edward Tregear had taken a similar line in his Fairy Tales and Folk-lore of New Zealand and the South Seas (1891), which – motivated by what he saw as colonial children’s lamentable ignorance of Maori lore – ­presented Maori mythology as quintessentially New Zealand as opposed to Maori stories.17 Others saw the same value in the Maori landscape, with one correspondent in the Southland Times in 1898 responding to laments on the country’s lack of vernacular ruins and castles with the argument that there were ‘romantic and poetic legends connected with many stretches of the country, and with lonely lake and mountain sides … Wherever the Maori built his pah [sic], his superstition soon clothed his surroundings with mystery and awe, and the conservation of such remnants of native folklore as remain would be one of the tasks of the historians.’18 The adaptation of Maori history and legend had in fact been one of the earliest themes of New Zealand writing, notably George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology, first published in 1855, and poetic stories such [ 61 ]

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as Joseph Ollivant’s Hinemoa: The Maori Maiden (1879) and Alfred Domett’s 487-page poem Ranolf and Amohia, which when published in Britain in 1872 was hailed as ‘the New Zealand epic’.19 Such writing expanded rapidly in the closing decades of the century under the banner of ‘Maoriland’, one historian recently suggesting that there was hardly a New Zealand poet in the 1890s who did not attempt a poem in the ‘Maori’ genre, while other research has highlighted how widespread and varied the motif was in fiction during the period.20 While initially used to refer to the mythic country of the Maori periphery, and later to regions of the colony still predominantly under Maori control, by the 1880s ‘Maoriland’ largely referred to the central North Island region famed for its indigenous tourist attractions. By the time the term peaked in usage in the mid-1890s, it was popularly used in place of ‘New Zealand’ with New Zealanders often called ‘Maorilanders’. Indeed, the extent of its popularity was illustrated in mid-1895 when Patrick O’Regan, the local Member for Inangahua, asked the premier if the government favoured changing the ‘inappropriate’ name of the colony to the more suitable one of ‘Maoriland’. Seddon’s somewhat delicate response was that ‘for weal or woe, we had better stick to the name of New Zealand’.21 Overly eager as O’Regan may have been, in late 1901 Grossman wrote in the Otago Witness about how much traction the Maoriland myth had gained to Pakeha notions of the country’s past: Young as New Zealand is already it has a past. Within the memory of some living men it has gone through two stages of existence which are utterly distinct from each other and utterly cut off from the present. The earliest period of all, when first the pakeha came in small numbers to the coasts, brings us face to face with a condition that is like nothing else so much as what the Romans found in ancient Britain. Indeed, a Maorilander who reads the story of Old England is often irresistibly carried back to the thought of the first settlement in this colony, and to the days before the settlement. These were the times when the kaingas, or villages, with their palisades and ditches and ramparts and their carved gods, were visible all over this northern isthmus; when hundreds of rowers sped their fantastic war canoes over the harbour waters; when there were great battles and fierce raids, funeral feasts and sacrifices, and wailings in the wild forest; when the great rangatiras, the chieftains, traced back their descent to gods and demigods; when the tohungas, the magicians of their race, cowed men’s minds and wrought death by their spells; when Maori traditions and legends were chanted by young and old: wild times, that at this distance fascinate us with their romance.22

Writing in the self-consciously nationalistic New Zealand Illustrated Magazine two months later, James Cowan took the idea further. ‘Here [ 62 ]

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in New Zealand’, he began, ‘we have infinite advantages over Australia in the way of material for literature, a national literature. Our country has a history; Australia has none – at any rate none that can equal our own in all those stirring elements which invest the past with a halo of romance, and make food for the poet, the painter, and the novelist.’23 Six years later the historian and ethnologist Johannes Anderson affirmed Cowan’s ideas, dedicating his Maori Life in Ao-tea ‘to the older Maori People of Ao-Tea-Roa and to the Younger Poets and Artists of New Zealand, with hopes for the immortality of the one at the hands of the other’.24 Far from being lone voices, efforts to fashion a New Zealand heritage around the rich store of Maori mythology were made by many of the leading authors of the period, including Edward Tregear, Elsdon Best, and William Pember Reeves. Gottfried Lindauer, Wilhelm Dittmer, Charles Goldie, and Louis Steele did the same in the art world, their interests ranging from ‘historical’ portraits of ‘Maori of old’ to the exploitation of Maori tradition, myth, and history that showed little concern for ethnological accuracy.25 As earlier noted, the construction and use of such images of Maori were also not restricted to the popular tradition, with the efforts of Pakeha scholars and ethnologists similarly creating new intellectual mythologies that supported and fed populist myths of Maori past and present. While the formation of the Polynesian Society in 1892, for example, grew out of concern for the ‘imminent demise’ of Maori, it was hardly a coincidence that Stevenson Percy Smith, Edward Tregear, and Elsdon Best – who had already spent most of their lives in New Zealand, often in government service associated with Maori affairs – founded the Society soon after New Zealand had celebrated its first fifty years as a British colony. While many of the Society’s founding members had published papers in the New Zealand Institute’s Transactions, by 1891 Percy Smith also believed that it was time to give a proper focus to Polynesian studies rather than rely on passing favours of an Institute that was concerned with natural rather than human sciences.26 With the colonial era passing, and many believing that Maori were dying out, they found it their ‘manifest duty’ to rescue some portion of the disappearing ‘Maori as he was’ in order to facilitate ameliorations in the present.27 In what James Belich terms the ‘Smithing’ of Maori history, they ‘tidied up’ Maori culture and tradition, in turn reinforcing prevailing anthropological theories of the day by ‘producing’ stereotypes of Maori culture that did not actually exist, but that enabled contemporary Pakeha society to be furnished with a history that reflected its own nationalistic aspirations.28 Such ‘science’ was the binding link between colonisation and nationalism. Smith’s ‘Great Fleet’ theory, for example, presented [ 63 ]

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Maori, like the British, as settlers who had come from distant lands, while also painting the Maori past in heroic Eurocentric terms with which European audiences could easily identify. Similarly, Tregear’s ‘Aryan Maori’ was seen to ­legitimise European colonisation by essentially presenting it as ­something akin to a family reunion. Indeed, as M. P. K. Sorrenson ­questions, ‘What better myth could there be for a young country s­truggling for nationhood and for the amalgamation of its races than this reunification of the Aryans?’29 This image would also be central to the exhibition of Maori, where, as much as fashionable forms of a­dvertising to encourage trade, tourism, and immigration, the ­exhibiting of Maori was a mandatory exercise in nationalism, ­projecting the image not so much of what was but of how the country wanted to be seen. One of the most profound instances of such display was the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch. In late 1904 Premier Richard Seddon made the case for an exhibition in Christchurch as a way of proclaiming New Zealand’s distinctiveness and imminent greatness. The timing was significant, coming after a decade and a half of Liberal government – much of it under Seddon’s premiership – that had witnessed the country’s economic recovery from the depression of the 1890s, and the passing of progressive legislation strengthening the reputation of the nation as a social laboratory of the world. It was also the first major exhibition since the establishment of the Department of Tourism five years earlier, and the promotion of the country’s scenic wonders was a significant element of the event.30 The exhibition accordingly offered the government the perfect opportunity to present a romanticised image of Maori – an image that also sat well with Seddon’s portrayal of the young country’s progress. Indeed, this representation was a necessary yardstick of Pakeha progress, with Cowan’s Official Record noting, for example, how only three generations earlier the country lay in the hands of the ‘cannibal savage’.31 As the romanticised Maori past was increasingly drawn into Pakeha perceptions of their own history, this in turn influenced the desire to preserve aspects of the Maori landscape, especially where it did not interfere with the process of settlement. While, in 1849, Edward Gibbon Wakefield had advised in his Art of Colonization that the colony should be inscribed with British place names because they made the young country seem more familiar to migrants, forty years later things were not so clear-cut.32 Commenting on the apparent appropriateness of Maori place names to the New Zealand landscape, in 1894 the author of Bond’s Almanac exalted that Ngaruawahia’s change of name to Newcastle by ‘some Goth of a government official’ had been [ 64 ]

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only temporary. Thankfully, he concluded, ‘the melodious and appropriate name given by the Maoris is the only one now recognised’.33 The desirability of preserving Maori place names had been raised in Parliament soon after the Jubilee, when in September 1892 it was suggested that a clause be inserted into the Land Bill – then before the House – ensuring that wherever possible new townships should take the Maori names of the area. The Minister of Lands supported the idea. While the ‘romance of their sound’ appealed greatly, the preservation of Maori names was also recognised as a way of furnishing the Pakeha cultural landscape with a sense of history. As Robert Bruce (MHR Rangitikei) noted, ‘Americans now regretted not having preserved the Indian names, and in our own country we should preserve the musical and appropriate names, which threw a halo of romance over a country without a history’.34 Many of the ideas raised in this discussion came together under the 1894 Designation of Districts Act, which authorised the governor to name and alter existing place names, with the provision that ‘in all such alterations and future naming, preference shall be given to the original Maori names’.35 The timing was important, the change of attitude taking place at the very time that nostalgic perspectives on the frontier were beginning to emerge. In the case of Ngaruawahia, however, Cowan later reluctantly acknowledged that the accepted translation of ‘Meeting of the waters’ was wrong, its actual meaning being ‘the food-stores broken open’. Lacking the desired romance, he concluded, this was ‘rather a pity, because a Maori translation of such a term would fit it exactly’.36 By 1900 Maori names and words had also grown in popularity among ‘native-born’ Pakeha, with everything from sports teams, to children, to houses being given them.37 As Cowan noted in June 1900, ‘a genuine delight [is found] when [the individual] discovers a smooth-sounding and appropriate combination of liquid Maori words; or for want of an original, they resort to William’s Dictionary and manufacture one for themselves. Queer blunders are made in this way sometimes, but the spirit is there, the craving for a home-name which shall be redolent of the soil.’38 Rumblings were periodically made in Parliament about the question of incorrectly spelled Maori place names, and Cowan himself urged greater effort be made to pronounce Maori words correctly. Ultimately, however, for most Pakeha, whether or not the word was spelt correctly, or even existed for that matter, was less important than its euphonious sound and accompanying air of romance.39 After all, as Tony Birch has commented in regard to the Australian experience, ‘For the colonisers to attach a “native” name to a place does not represent or recognise an indigenous history, and therefore possible indigenous ownership’.40 [ 65 ]

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Saving the ‘national patrimony’ Parallel to the growing importance of tikanga Maori to New Zealand’s tourism industry and colonial identity, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, visitor, museum, and collector demand for Maori artefacts expanded rapidly.41 As the trickle grew to a flood, in late 1898 the issue was raised in Parliament by the historian and politician Robert McNab, who questioned whether the government should introduce legislation to prevent the removal of such items from the colony.42 ‘No sooner was anything discovered in this colony of more than passing interest’, he argued, ‘than it was secured by some wealthy visitor to the colony. The result was that year after year instead of the colony having its discoveries gathered together in a central place – either under the control of the legislature or held by private persons – these rare and valuable specimens were taken away to enrich the collections of private collectors in other parts of the world.’ While he was sympathetic, as Seddon noted in his response, preventing Maori from disposing of what rightly belonged to them was a slippery slope – the application of such restrictions to Pakeha would be seen as scandalous.43 A year and a half later the naturalist William Walter Smith pressed the issue: When the old pioneer settlers of the plains have all passed away, leaving those treasures behind them which they found when they ploughed the virgin soil; when the original features of the plains shall have wholly changed, and perhaps the aboriginal inhabitants – the noble Maori – all have vanished, they will then be cherished as being among the most valuable possessions of the New Zealand museums. It is very regrettable that the numerous specimens of ancient stone implements and other valuable articles now in the possession of the settlers cannot be brought together to form a South Island collection, ‘for the good,’ as Captain Hutton expressed it to me, ‘of those who are to come after us.’44 

At the root of the problem was that, like most other young colonies, New Zealand lacked the wealth to hold on to relics in the face of the prices international museums and collectors were prepared to pay. It would take the intersection of two events the following year to bring about action – the establishment of the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, and the completion of Hamilton’s Maori Art. Undertaken in response to the New Zealand Institute’s call for the need to preserve a record of early Maori ‘before it was too late’, Maori Art had been printed in parts between 1896 and 1900 as The Art and Workmanship of the Maori Race in New Zealand.45 By the time the final section was published in 1901, the beauty of its illustrations had converted many to the importance of holding on to remaining [ 66 ]

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‘­authentic’ Maori artefacts.46 Making the case for greater powers to halt the loss of antiquities, two years later a Wanganui Herald editorial argued that legislative protection was ‘not only logical and patriotic, but sound business, if only as a means of attracting visitors to the colony’.47 Hamilton himself had been pushing for such action since the late 1890s, going so far as to produce a pamphlet in early 1901 calling on the government to establish an ethnological museum of Maori ‘art’.48 The significance of the problem was further highlighted months later when Maori welcomed visiting British royalty at Rotorua with ‘rare and costly’ gifts. ‘Before long’, one newspaper quipped, ‘it will be as difficult to obtain a piece of greenstone or a kiwi mat as it would be to find a cave bear or a mammoth in the countries of Europe’.49 Soon after, the issue was raised in the House, where the Scottish-born explorer and conservationist Thomas Mackenzie ran with the Wanganui Herald’s distinctly nationalistic line that the preservation of Maori material culture ‘must be the desire of patriotic New Zealanders’.50 The Native Minister James Carroll agreed, valuing artefacts as ‘characteristic of the country and its nativity’, while another Member concluded that nothing short of a national collection of art and artefacts would suffice.51 The idea of legislative protection for artefacts was nothing new, with nations such as Greece and Egypt having had measures in place since the late eighteenth century.52 Now, with the trade in Maori antiquities booming, it seemed it was New Zealand’s turn to lose out to the cultural appetites of Europe. ‘A century ago’, warned one Member during debate on the topic a few months later, ‘the continent of Europe was overrun by the Emperor Napoleon, who at the point of the bayonet, took out of each country whatever he thought was most attractive to building up a quasi-European metropolis at the cost of the country which produced these works of art, and to add a false and adventitious value to his supremacy in Paris’.53 Yet this was a practice of which the British were equally guilty, retorted the Legislative Councillor Thomas Kelly, ‘Did they not take away priceless specimens of statuary from Greece, and from Assyria, and India, and from Egypt? … I’m afraid we cannot afford to cast stones even at Napoleon.’54 Introduced under the title of ‘Maori Relics’, the Bill proposed to stem the loss of antiquities by making it illegal to export them without the consent of the colonial secretary, and gave the government the ­pre-emptive right of purchase, as well as proposing the establishment of a national ethnological collection and museum, and the publication of historical records relating to Maori.55 The Bill met with resounding support, the only common complaint being that more drastic measures were necessary, such as were in place in Italy where it was absolutely prohibited to export articles of archaeological or historical value. Of [ 67 ]

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particular importance as far its supporters were concerned were those things associated with the chief historic events and features of the social life of the Maori, including carved houses and stories of Maori history and lineage.56 Discussions also highlighted the tensions within the growing importance of Maori culture to Pakeha notions of New Zealand identity, with clear support also being shown for the government approaching the New South Wales and British Museums to get back artefacts long since lost. It was unacceptable, argued the Member for Auckland, that ‘Our children have to go beyond their own country in order to get an adequate knowledge of the ancient Maori carvings and the artistic treasures of the noble race with which we are now living in peace in New Zealand’.57 On the flip-side of this, however, were concerns that the Act not interfere with the tourist trade – a handful of Members arguing that the distribution of artefacts was in fact a good advertisement for New Zealand. Partly in response to this, but also reflecting the narrow scholarly interest in ‘authentic’ Maori material culture, the name and focus of the Bill was changed from ‘relics’ to ‘antiquities’.58

4  The pataka Puawai-O-Te-Aroha at the Auckland Museum, 1905

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More than simply an act of Pakeha salvaging the remnants of Maori culture, the Bill sought to capitalise on Maori desires to protect their customary culture, with the Maori version of the Bill translating ‘antiquities’ as ‘taonga Maori o namata’ – ‘treasures of ancient times’.59 It received a mixed reception from Maori. As a gesture of support for what he saw as government efforts to preserve taonga, during the early stages of the debate the Ngati Kahungunu leader Tamahau Mahupuku had gifted the carved house Takitumu to the nation, the hope being that it would be erected in the vicinity of the Colonial Museum as a storehouse for Maori treasures.60 Carroll was sure that Maori would deposit their taonga if such facilities were provided, as were many Pakeha Members of the House. Yet as Tame Parata, the Member for Southern Maori rebutted, ‘no doubt the House will understand my feelings when I say that nothing would ever induce me to part with them to any stranger, and that it would hurt me more than I can say to think that under any circumstances such heirlooms should pass out of the possession of my immediate family, much less leave the colony’.61 His support lay not in government efforts to collect Maori material culture, but in efforts to halt the separation of taonga from the people. Parata’s comments here also highlighted a basic misunderstanding on the part of Pakeha about the place of taonga in Maori society. In Pukaki: A Comet Returns Paul Tapsell gives the example of the famous carving of the eighteenth-century Te Arawa chief Pukaki, under whose leadership Ngati Whakaue had defeated Tuhourangi, allowing them to establish themselves in the Rotorua area. Carved in 1836 during the strengthening of Pukeroa Pa, Pukaki originally stood as a gateway guarding the pa’s southern entrance against attack by Te Waharoa and Ngati Haua warriors. In 1877 Ngati Whakaue presented Pukaki to the Native Land Court judge Francis Dart Fenton – who had expressed an interest in the carving – as a symbol of trust regarding the Crown’s promise to develop the Rotorua township. With the plan being to create a native lease township, this would have been a profound benefit to Ngati Whakaue.62 The tribe, however, were unaware that Fenton had taken Pukaki to Auckland, where it was passed on first to the Supreme Court Judge Thomas Gillies, and eventually to the Auckland Museum. Displayed alongside the museum’s other ethnological objects, it was, as John MacKenzie eloquently concludes, ‘reduced to the status of a “curiosity” shorn of its context, with its provenance confused, and glorifying the reputation of Judge Gillies who was constantly cited on its label as the donor’.63 Yet Fenton and Gillies’s treatment of Pukaki was also symptomatic of the limitations of Pakeha understanding of taonga in Maori society. As Tapsell notes, in transactions of importance such as that Ngati Whakaue understood of its agreement with Fenton, only [ 69 ]

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the most valuable taonga were considered worthy of release to another kin group, with the more valuable the taonga, ‘the greater the prestige bestowed upon the receiver’, and the heavier the obligation for future utu (reciprocity).64 The ‘gifting’ of taonga then, was intended to extend or revitalise relations between the giver and the receiver, or in the case of Pukaki, was a seal of trust between Ngati Whakaue and the Crown. As Amiria Henare further suggests, within Maoridom, concern about the future well-being of taonga was never an issue ‘because the recipients understood their obligations as custodians’, yet when gifted to Pakeha it was often a different question.65 Nor did Pakeha understand the spiritual connection between cultural objects and Maori society. When tapu carvings were buried to prevent desecration by Pakeha, this was typically viewed by Pakeha as wanton neglect – as was the charge laid in 1917 by a ‘concerned citizen’ at the apparent state of an ‘abandoned’ meeting house at Parawai. Failing to understand the place of tapu and atua (which saw people, places, and things dedicated to ancestors and deities made tapu or ‘untouchable’), the complainants’ naive response was simply that it was to be regretted ‘that a building with such fine examples of carving, and flax wall patterns, should be … allowed to deteriorate … cannot something be done to induce the Native owners to take better care of this building’.66 Similar ignorance lay behind efforts to ‘rescue’ a number of Maori burial chests in caves in the Waimamaku valley in 1902. When efforts to remove the chests to the Auckland Museum were commenced, the proposal caused great excitement among local Maori, who strongly objected to their removal. ‘They were unable to understand why these sacred articles should be taken from them, especially as they were actually the receptacles of the bones of their ancestors’, noted the museum’s curator, Thomas Cheeseman, somewhat incredulously. ‘They regarded the matter as an attempt to trample on their most sacred rites and traditions.’67 Discussing such illustrations of Maori ‘neglect’ during debate on the Antiquities Act the previous year, Legislative Councillor Thomas Kelly similarly told of how in his home town of New Plymouth experts had tried to get relics, but that Maori ‘would not part with them for any consideration’, even in the case of what to Kelly were broken remains of an ornately carved waka on the banks of a local river. Rather than viewing Maori responses in terms of tapu, many Pakeha instead saw such ‘neglect’ and ‘wanton destruction’ as yet further evidence of how the ‘domestication’ of Maori had caused the apparent breakdown of Maori culture. Kelly went even further, arguing during the debate that responsibility for this breakdown and the neglect of antiquities lay not with Pakeha but with Maori themselves: [ 70 ]

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I know that in many instances Maori curiosities and antiquities have been destroyed by fire; and from my own experience, I know that the Maoris very often refuse to sell works of Maori art because of the historical associations connected with them, or because they were tapu. That being the case, I consider that the neglect of preserving Maori antiquities in the past lies largely on the Maoris themselves, or rather, to their religious ceremonies, their tribal wars, and migratory character.68

The issue was further complicated by the reality that, as Maori increasingly adopted and adapted European ways, they did discard some ­cultural traditions, while others were lost more forcibly through European actions such as the Tohunga Suppression Act and its predecessors, which effectively outlawed the traditional keepers of cultural knowledge in Maori society, and the Native Schools Amendment Act of 1871, which prohibited the speaking of Maori in schools.69 Soon after the Antiquities Act was passed, Hamilton and Percy Smith drew up plans for the proposed Maori museum. Conceived of as an institution that would be both scientific and a popular bureau of information for students and travellers, the proposal included some surprisingly progressive ideas for the time, including bilingual labels and strong Maori representation on the Museum’s board.70 Envisaged as a ‘meeting ground’ for Maori and Pakeha, they also believed that as a monument to the Maori race, such a museum would partially compensate Maori for the effects of colonisation. In addition to the assistance this would provide to the building of racial harmony, it would also provide a focus for future cultural development – being a source of pride for Maori in their descent and evidence ‘that there is no desire to destroy or to lose any of the ancestral glories’ of Maori.71 At the heart of the museum was to be a collection of Maori buildings, including ‘a good carved house, a storehouse, a common house, a rua, a memorial canoe, and if possible, part of a pa-fence’, with the marae in front of the carved house set up in such a way as to ‘be available for photographic groups of natives with a suitable background’.72 The DTHR was understandably enthusiastic, Donne noting in the department’s first annual report that, with the country’s only significant ethnological collection existing at the Auckland Museum, a dedicated ethnology museum in Wellington would be a significant boost to tourism.73 While it was keen on the idea conceptually, the cost of establishing a new instruction, however, was too rich for the government’s blood, and the scheme was watered down to a refocusing of the Colonial Museum.74 When Hector retired in 1903 the museum’s old links with the Geological Survey were accordingly severed with the appointment of Hamilton as the new director, and, beginning with the deposit of his own collection in the museum, he urgently set about developing [ 71 ]

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a representative collection of Maori art and w ­ orkmanship. By 1905, by which time the collections of the Reverend. T. G. Hammond, J. Handley, and E. Hill had also been added, the ethnology collection comprised more than 2500 objects. A start had also been made to establishing a historical collection of paintings, engravings, and photographs representing Maori art and culture, while the Nga Puhi genealogist Henry Stowell was engaged to collect Maori folklore, history, and tradition.75 Hamilton also updated the display techniques used in the museum, employing photographs, paintings, models, and dioramas in the new layout in an attempt to pull in the punters. To this end in 1905 the artist and photographer James McDonald was employed to construct a romanticised model of a Maori village and fortified pa for the museum’s main hall, placing Maori carving at the physical and intellectual centre of the museum’s work while natural history and geology were relegated to the north and south wings. McDonald’s pa would remain one of the most popular exhibits for decades to come. Under Hamilton’s directorship, the museum’s ethnological profile was also significantly enhanced owing to the Antiquities Act, with the

5  The Maori Hall at the new Dominion Museum in Buckle Street, Wellington, ca. 1936

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museum’s in-house expertise quickly making it the de facto assessor of export applications, while the confiscation of materials under the Act would be a boon for the development of the museum’s collection on the cheap. The same, however, could not be said for the ‘first option’ on artefacts that the Act gave the government, the shortness of its purse strings rarely allowing the museum to purchase artefacts or collections presented for export. As the Ebbett Collection – recognised as one of the most valuable private collections of Maori artefacts, and priced out of the museum’s range at £3250 – illustrated decades later, however, permits could not be refused if the government did not wish to purchase such articles.76 Yet problems with the Act were also evident as early as 1904. Without adequate penalties for illegal exportation of artefacts, many sellers, it was believed, were simply smuggling them out of the country. Its most fundamental shortcoming, however, was its scope; in essence a reflection of the reactionary nature of the legislation in the first place. For the Minister of Tourism Joseph Ward, the defining loss was Hamilton and Birk’s Whakarewarewa carved house to a German museum owing to the building not technically falling under the Act as the bulk of it was of modern construction.77 What was needed, it was suggested, was the stricter approach to antiquities taken by many European countries, such as Ottoman and Greek legislation from 1884 and 1899, which required all citizens possessing antiquities to declare them to the authorities, and made all antiquities found on private land the automatic property of the state. It was also illegal for the owners of land holding relics to disturb them. In other countries, the state had the right to expropriate private or corporate property on artistic and historical grounds, while violation could be met by fines or imprisonment.78 Many of these issues would be broadly incorporated into the 1908 Antiquities Act amendment, which made any artefacts found automatically the property of the Crown, and made it illegal for them to be removed by unauthorised persons. The issue of scope and finances, however, remained a problem, and when in 1910 the leading colonial artist Charles Goldie offered a number of his much admired portraits of ‘the Maori of old’ to the museum at below market price the offer had to be refused owing to lack of funds, and Goldie eventually sold them on the more lucrative European market.79 The status of the Dominion (formerly Colonial) Museum as the national protector of antiquities was formalised and extended in 1913 by the Science and Art Act. In addition to seeing the official establishment of a National Art Gallery within the museum, the Act saw the museum officially assume administrative responsibility for the Antiquities Act, and move increasingly towards the collection of a­ rchival and historical [ 73 ]

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documents.80 Ethnology was also a big winner, and, as interest in the museum’s ethnological collection grew, the cost of the previous focus on tribal history and mythology at the expense of ‘technical’ knowledge of Maori culture was better appreciated.81 In response to this, after intense lobbying by Percy Smith, Tregear, and Peter Buck, a position specialising in the collection of Maori lore, customs, and rites was created, and in late 1910 the ethnographer Elsdon Best was appointed to the Museum as a ‘temporary clerical assistant’ – a ‘temporary’ position he would retain until his death in 1931.82 Best had become New Zealand’s first professional ethnographer, when in 1895 he was sent to the Urewera as a mediator to smooth the way for the government surveyors, and to gather information about preEuropean Maori society in the region before European settlement obliterated it.83 Following this, between 1904 and 1910 he was employed as a Maori Council sanitary inspector in the Bay of Plenty, during which time he collected the material that would later be published as Tuhoe: The Children of the Mist (1925). The knowledge of Maori language that he brought to the museum thus greatly aided Hamilton’s contact with elders, which in turn raised the profile of the Museum in Maori circles.84 Best flourished at the museum, and, following James Allan Thomson’s appointment as director in 1914, he embarked on an extensive schedule of publications, centred on a series of ‘technical’ ethnographic bulletins.85 Here both Best and Thomson were influenced by the recent visit of the noted English anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, and in particular accounts of Rivers’s 1898 Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition. In 1918 an expedition to Gisborne was proposed to obtain illustrations and Dictaphone recordings of Maori songs and games:86 this would be the first of a number of ethnographic surveys sponsored by the museum between 1919 and 1923. As Amiria Henare notes, through the extensive interaction with Maori in ‘technical’ areas of Maori society that occurred on these expeditions, Best, along with McDonald and Buck, gained a complex understanding of the importance of Maori social life in general, approaching their informants not just as objects of scientific study but as people who possessed knowledge and skills that were in many ways superior to their own.87 Further research was conducted in the later 1920s with the support of the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, which had been formed in 1923 after almost two decades of lobbying by Ngata for government support for the research and publication of ethnological material about Maori.88 Material and built culture featured heavily in Best’s research during this period, and, in addition to dozens of articles on various related topics, books were published on canoes, store houses, stone implements, middens, fish hooks, and most importantly his The Pa Maori [ 74 ]

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(1927), which served as a study of Maori fortified villages in pre-­ European and modern times.89 Research of this scale on Maori pa would not take place again until the late 1950s, following the establishment of the Historic Places Trust and the growth of professional archaeology in New Zealand. As an analysis of pa design, construction, and use, preservation was not altogether important to Best. However, in the course of his research he visited hundreds of sites, taking measurements, photographs, and notes, and by the early 1920s he had built up an impressive body of information. Even in the early stages of his research this work aroused considerable interest, and in 1914 the Minister of Internal Affairs requested that Best select a number of pa ‘of special interest’ for preservation.90 Following this, as questions relating to Maori historic sites arose, it became increasingly common for them to be forwarded not to the Scenery Preservation Board but to Best at the Dominion Museum.91 While Best’s significance and contribution to raising the profile of ethnology in New Zealand should not be under-estimated, as a ‘man of his times’ his work was also dominated by his own idealised view of ‘the Maori as he was’.92 Viewing tikanga Maori principally in functional terms, for example, in his eyes carving, dancing, music, and games had previously possessed important traditional roles, but once the context changed following contact with Pakeha, the whole society began to collapse.93 This enabled him to embrace the facts he had collected without having to evaluate them critically, and allowed him to record elements of art without taking their interpretation beyond empirical limits. This also reinforced his view of the Maori past by allowing him to distrust and oppose the Maori society of his own day.94 Nor was this approach out of step with that of the Dominion Museum, where, despite Thomson’s belief in the importance of the continued development of the Maori collection, his concern remained firmly bound up with Best’s notion of the ‘old time Maori’. Like Best, he had little interest in adding modern carvings to the collection, no matter how impressive they might have been.95 While the museum’s collection policy acknowledged the growing importance of Maori material culture to the New Zealand psyche, the museum also continued to view Maori objects in fundamentally collection-based terms. Forever seeking the ‘missing’ pieces that would complete the ‘set’, the curators had little interest in ‘duplicate’ items beyond their value in exchange with other museums.96 When objects could not be found to fill ‘gaps’, casts were instead sought from other institutions.97 Such tactics, however, were typical of museums and collectors, whose key pursuit was typology. In 1927, for example, the British Museum, which felt it had the finest collection of Maori artefacts in the world, approached [ 75 ]

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Johannes Anderson to help it obtain a burial chest, in part because it was the one piece still missing from its collection. As the deputy keeper of the British Museum simply noted, ‘Our collection is otherwise so thoroughly representative, that the gap is all the more noticeable’.98 Such attitudes were equally evident when it came to carved houses, as illustrated by the Otago Museum’s ‘restoration’ of Mataatua when it was returned to new Zealand in the mid-1920s (see below). Under the guidance of the ethnologist Henry Skinner, who had returned to New Zealand after completing his studies at Cambridge where he had been involved in the study of Maori and Moriori material culture in British museums, Mataatua was reconstructed according to museum orthodoxy. It was shortened, and missing or damaged carvings were replaced by pieces from other houses, thereby further breaking any connection with the house’s original meaning.99 Yet highlighting just how dislocated from this the Pakeha view of the house was, for many its return to New Zealand was viewed as an important event. As one Evening Post editorial framed the house’s unveiling: ‘It might be copied, but workmen in all the tribes represented could not be found today to reproduce from their own inspiration anything similar. For this reason, then, it probably ranks as the last of the great artistic works carried out by the Natives according to the correct traditions of their race.’100 Such ‘restorations’, of course, were far from uncommon, the Dominion Museum itself having taken a similar approach to its reconstruction of the pataka Te Takinga following its presentation to the museum by Buller’s sons in 1911, seeking to make it a fine example of a type – a completely carved storehouse on the model of Te Puawai o te Arawa housed in the Auckland Museum.101 The fact that this meant turning it into something that it had never been was irrelevant to the Museum. It remained, above all, a piece of art.

Maori iconography and New Zealand identity By the beginning of the First World War Maori culture was commonly drawn on in international representations of New Zealand – even if simply to ‘frame’ the scene. While during the famed 1905 first tour of Britain it is uncertain whether the All Blacks performed the  haka before many matches, by the time the New Zealand Army team played Wales in 1916 the tradition was firmly established, with the words to ‘Ka Mate’ being included on the printed programme.102 The First World War also had a profound impact on perceptions of Maori culture as an inseparable part of broader New Zealand identity. Maori – who were praised for their warlike ­qualities – could easily be fitted into Pakeha ideas of the nation, and their heroism on [ 76 ]

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the battlefield was a source of pride for wider New Zealand as much as Maori. The First World War also had another, perhaps unexpected impact on Pakeha valuing of Maori material culture, with the extensive collections of Maori objects in British museums being received as a welcome reminder of home by many soldiers on leave in England. Similar reminders were to be found outside of the museum, such as at Onslow’s Clandon Park, which from 1914 was used as a respite home for wounded soldiers. No doubt surprised to find the carved house Hinemihi down the bottom of the garden, in 1917 a number of Maori soldiers suggested that they dismantle the house and re-erect it away from the lake, with the resultant reconstruction more attuned to a traditional Maori meeting house.103 While on leave in England recovering from wounds received at Gallipoli, the ethnologist Henry Skinner similarly pursued ways of repatriating Mataatua to New Zealand, the house by then in storage in the cellar of the Victoria & Albert museum.104 Ngati Awa also sought its repatriation in 1920, but like Skinner to no avail, and Mataatua remained in storage until 1924 when it was displayed at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The following year it finally returned to New Zealand for the South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, after which it was removed to the Otago Museum. By the beginning of the 1920s tikanga Maori was synonymous with Pakeha perceptions of New Zealand identity, being heavily drawn upon at both official and everyday levels. When the Prince of Wales visited Wellington in 1920, for example, Maori curios were used to decorate the vestibule of the Town Hall for the citizens’ Ball, the idea being to fit out the hall as a Maori pa.105 By the mid-1920s, Maori symbols and images were also commonly used in the design of bank notes – the £1 note including an image of the Maori King Tawhiao together with a kiwi, while on the 10 shilling note a kiwi kept a watchful eye on the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Governor General Lord Bledisloe was one of the greatest champions of such adaptation, motivated in part by his subscription to the myth of New Zealand’s harmonious bi-cultural relations, in part by his belief that Maori culture was not adequately appreciated by Pakeha, and in part by his recognition of the value of Maori culture to tourism.106 In the early 1930s he similarly worked to secure the repatriation of a number of Maori objects from the British Museum, along with replicas of other objects that would not be released.107 Pakeha were also employing Maori culture on a much larger scale than just for special occasions. When in 1922 the Auckland-based magazine The Mirror began publication, for example, it increasingly drew on Maori culture as a way of competing with magazines from [ 77 ]

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Britain, America, and Australia. A few years later The Mirror’s lead was followed by the New Zealand Railways Magazine. Beginning life as something of an intra-departmental publication focusing on technical articles and accounts of New Zealand Rail social functions, by the mid1920s it had expanded into a magazine that treated New Zealand as a scenic destination, drawing heavily on scenery and Maori – ­typically in unison.108 Like many interwar publications, The Mirror and New Zealand Railways Magazine published circumscribed representations of Maori by displaying them exclusively as iconographic symbols of the past. In the process, this contributed to the effective erasure of the complex reality of Maori New Zealand from the consciousness of mainstream middle-class Pakeha – reflecting and reinforcing existing Pakeha attitudes to Maori culture. It was a valuable part of New Zealand’s cultural identity, but within clearly defined limits. When, for example, in the late 1920s, Peter Buck suggested that Maori decorative arts might be used as a ‘national characteristic’ of the country’s architecture (both public and private), the response was mixed, and highlighted the range of modern Pakeha views of Maori culture.109 Representatives of the architectural community certainly felt that the preservation of Maori art and design was a worthy idea, but, as one prominent architect argued, Maori art ‘is a barbaric art and after all we are civilized people and I think it would be disastrous if people, without proper thought, attempted to introduce Maori art generally into architecture’.110 Another architect, on the other hand, felt that Maori design was extremely attractive as embellishment, especially when used on buildings closely associated with New Zealand as a nation. In viewing Maori design principally as an ‘embellishment’, however, the point was that it in no way threatened to ‘degrade’ the country’s western architectural traditions. Yet it is telling that a similar view was held by Harold Hamilton, the first director of the Rotorua School of Maori Arts and Crafts. While lamenting the fact that no attempt had been made by Pakeha to adapt the ‘root patterns’ of Maori decorative art to the needs and requirements of everyday colonial life, he saw this as the principal cause of the loss of this ‘unique and highly developed form of ornament, “the special product of our beautiful country”’.111 Not only was Maori ‘art’ ‘ornament’, but its ‘rescue’ could come only at the hands of Pakeha, not Maori. The use of Maori carving and design had in fact become more common in public and private buildings in the 1920s and early 1930s, although, as one of the architects mentioned above had recommended, this was in particular contexts only. Perhaps the best-known examples were the offices of the new Parliament building, many of which were [ 78 ]

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6  Interior view of the premises of Thomson & Co., aerated water and cordial manufacturers in Dunedin, ca. 1920. Note the heavy use of Maori carving in the door frames, and the rafter patterns used in the ceiling

richly ornamented with Maori design in wood and plaster. Of particular note was the Maori Affairs Committee Room, which when opened in 1922 exhibited intricate carvings from floor to ceiling. In the wave of memorial building that took place at the end of the First World War, Maori designs also made frequent appearances. The memorial church at Tikitiki in the Poverty Bay was decorated with Maori designs, as were many spaces in the Auckland War Memorial Museum, then under construction.112 Private buildings joined the ranks as well, where in addition to the piercing of fascias in the style of maihi, or tekotekostyle finials, Maori designs were in some instances heavily employed in interior design. In the building of new premises in Dunedin in 1924, for example, the auction house of George Thomas & Co negotiated with the Dominion museum for casts of a number of Maori carvings, to be integrated into the ceiling and door design of the new offices.113 Maori design also featured as a common motif in the reconstruction of Napier after the 1931 earthquake. In other instances, full-scale Maori carvings were on permanent display in the interior of buildings such as the Geyser Hotel in Rotorua, and the Grand Hotel in Auckland.114 [ 79 ]

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Ultimately, however, the idea that Maori art could form the basis of a distinctive New Zealand style of domestic design gained only limited popularity.

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Maori agency and the counter-colonial response In recent years a number of scholars have sought to highlight the complexity of colonial encounters in the Pacific, pointing out the oft-oversimplification of European – indigenous interaction.115 Much of this literature has emerged in response to earlier postmodern and postcolonial literature which has tended to present museums principally as ‘blunt instruments of empire’ – to borrow Conal McCarthy’s phrase – in which the dominant narrative is one structured around the use and abuse of cultural technologies as weapons of empire as much as more obvious and boorish modes of conquest.116 As has been argued in this and the previous chapter, it is not that such a narrative is inaccurate, as the museum, the exhibition, and ethnology were certainly employed in this way, but that it was also more than just this. Yes Maori received the short end of the stick through the cultural encounter of colonialism; however, as Belich has argued in his re-evaluation of New Zealand’s colonial history, far from their being passive victims of European power, the Maori response ‘clearly owes even more to Maori resilience – a resilience that consisted partly of staunch resistance, but also to eager, adaptive and innovative engagement with the things and thoughts of Europe’.117 When it came to tourism, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century Maori responses varied. Many actively participated in processes of ethno-tourism – illustrating tours with Maori stories, demonstrating craft, showing tourists the Maori life and home, demonstrating Maori dance and song, and producing objects for the tourist market. Maori also took active roles in the trade of curios – such as Kai Tahu, who offered curios for sale at the 1882 exhibition in Christchurch – while others worked as curio dealers within the retail trade.118 While many Maori changed their situations economically by playing to the desires of the tourist market, however, care must be taken not to assume that this was necessarily the desired action on the part of Maori. While Makereti Papakura, for example, had a keen entrepreneurial sense, she was primarily concerned with how the promotion of Maori culture through tourism could benefit her people. In taking a concert party to Melbourne and Sydney in 1909 and 1910, a key motivation was to ‘show the work of the Maori … in front of the people of the world’.119 Makereti herself later told the New Zealand press that the tour had changed Australian assumptions about native peoples, noting [ 80 ]

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‘I imagine from the demeanour of those who visited our village that they expected to find people resembling the Australian Aboriginals, and they were agreeably surprised’.120 Other Maori were not so enthusiastic about tourism – Makereti’s daughter-in-law and arguably the most famous of all Maori guides, Rangitiaria Dennan, for example, was scathing about the damage to the thermal area that had been caused by Pakeha interference, and in particular tourism. ‘It is a good thing for the tourists that we Maoris have still retained some of our tribal ownership of the lands at Whakarewarewa. I am sure that if we had sold it all to the Pakeha there would be nothing left worth seeing by now. He’d have ruined the lot with progress!’121 In the same way that heritage tourism revalues the obsolete and outmoded, ethnotourism re-endows a given ethnicity with value.122 In the

7  Makereti Papakura seated in the carved wooden doorway of Te Rauru meeting house in Whakarewarewa, ca. 1905–10

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New Zealand instance, the implication of this is that tourism offered Maori a greater sense of agency and control over their culture, and became an important vehicle of Maori economic recovery. When, for example, in 1909 the government planned to abandon its ­underwriting of Maori performance labour at Whakarewarewa, Maori recognition of the centrality of their role in the venture put them in a strong position.123 Noting that the loss of stable income would in essence see the removal of the major pull for most Maori to the pa, Birks quickly backtracked and set a standard fee of 6d. Extortionate as he found the situation, Mackenzie – the Minister of Tourist and Health Resorts – also soon conceded, acknowledging that the attraction was dependent upon Maori presence.124 While politically Pakeha may have viewed Maori cultural expression as outmoded, tourism had assigned it new value through commodification, and, in doing so, acted to heighten Maori cultural self-consciousness. Aware of the political and economic importance of ‘traditional’ culture, Maori also became self-conscious preservers of elements viewed as useful, and with the support of the Native Department also made efforts to document their history and culture.125 Such preservation efforts were reinforced by the constant approval of European residents and visitors. One of the best illustrations of Maori use of cultural form as part of the counter-colonial response was the whare runanga.126 Meeting houses had long been central to Maori opposition to the colonial government, with many built between 1850 and 1890 constructed as symbols of military and religious resistance. For this very reason, during the New Zealand Wars many houses were burned to the ground by government troops. Others, such as Mataatua – the large carved house built by Ngati Awa in 1874 to strengthen alliances between themselves, Tuhoe, and Te Whakatohea – became a focus for opposition to government land confiscation and purchase.127 Following the New Zealand Wars, in the mid-1880 the construction of the Tanewhirinaki house was similarly undertaken as an assertion of Maori cultural identity.128 While the design of its carvings differed from the ‘traditional’, the workmanship and its impressive scale were greatly revered, with even the romantically minded James Cowan later describing the house as ‘superior, for true ancient artistry and primitive consistency of construction’.129 Cowan’s remarks here are in some respects the mark of a successful counter-­colonial intention on the part of its builders Hira Te Popo and Te Kooti, in that they intentionally exploited and adapted an ancient tradition that was known to appeal to Pakeha interests in order to gain the respect of the colonists and to conserve what remained of their land.130 Where, for example, earlier houses featured the ancestors of the chief or hapu who commissioned [ 82 ]

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them, the carvings on many houses during this period were of founding deities of pan-Maori significance, such as Maui, whose exploits were both well known and of interest to Pakeha.131 The establishment of a School of Maori Arts and Crafts in the mid1920s played a similar role. The idea had first been raised during debate on the Maori Antiquities Act in 1901 when the Member for Southern Maori, Tame Parata, suggested the need for a space in which Maori elders skilled in craft and carving could pass on their knowledge.132 Taking up the proposal, the following year Donne put forward a plan that would see Whakarewarewa become a focus for the living arts of the Maori: My proposals provide for the erection of a runanga (meeting house), pataka (food store) – these to be carved in the old Maori style – and several comfortable whares; a shed to be built near the schoolhouse, in which the young Native boys should be taught carving and the girls mat-making; the whole to be fenced in Maori manner. Later on a model fighting-pa could be added. Selected Native families to be given residence at this pa, and sanitation to be a salient feature of it. The villagers could make carvings and mats for sale, thereby earning sustenance. Thus two important object-lessons would be provided for the Maoris generally, and visitors would have an opportunity of seeing a replica of the old Maori life.133

When it was raised again two years later, the motivation was the production of objects for the tourist market, with inspiration coming from an institute in England that produced broken swords, cannonballs, muskets, and other such ‘Waterloo’ memorabilia.134 The first call for the actual ‘preservation’ of the art of carving came in 1907, when MacKenzie asked Carroll whether ‘in view of the small number of talented Maori wood-carvers now remaining, and also because of the unique designs and historic interest associated with that gradually disappearing art, he will cause to be established a school of Native carving for the purpose of preserving the art’.135 As tourist-driven as the idea’s origins may have been, its culmination in the establishment of the Rotorua School of Maori Arts and Crafts in 1926 needs to be understood within the context of the revival of Maori culture that took place from the 1920s, stimulated largely by the Young Maori Party members Apirana Ngata (then Minister of Maori Affairs), the writings and lectures of Peter Buck and Maui Pomare, the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, and also by Princess Te Puea in the Waikato.136 In establishing the School, the intention was to train carvers and other artists in traditional skills. These individuals would then be sent out in groups to build meeting-houses all over the [ 83 ]

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country. Both the school and the carvers were financed by the Board of Maori Arts and Crafts, which was later merged into the Maori Purposes Fund Board under the Maori Purposes Fund Act in 1935 – the general object of which was the promotion of the health, education, and social and economic welfare of Maori.137 Despite postcolonial critiques of such Maori who worked within the system, as McCarthy has recently suggested, individuals such as Ngata, Buck, Pomare, and Makereti ‘were not dupes who merely facilitated assimilation into mainstream society but facilitators who successfully preserved a degree of Maori independence in “a kind of benign segregation”’.138 For Ngata, Buck, and Pomare, this position was also influenced by their belief that Maori society was beset with antiquities and desperately in need of reconstructing. Yet far from suggesting the discarding of traditional ways, Ngata in particular was convinced of the power of Maoritanga in encouraging national Maori unity, particularly when centred on the carved house and the marae.139 These views were supported by educationalists, economists, and ­anthropologists – Buck, for example, arguing in 1940 that the ‘renaissance in building carved tribal houses and the creation of sustained interest in their social importance will help perpetuate loyalty to tribal organisation for years to come’.140 In centring their ideas on the marae and the carved house, the Young Maori Party also sought to promote a somewhat romanticised image of Maori that was acceptable to Europeans, believing that the renewal of the value of Maori culture to Pakeha would in turn augment the status of Maori in the Pakeha mind, thereby giving Maori greater leverage over their future. In this capacity Maori participation in tourism can be understood as part of a wider strategy to weave Maori into the modern New Zealand nation and the empire. This, of course, would have an impact on how different aspects of Maori culture would be employed within Pakeha society, one example being the Party’s focus on carving over figurative painting – despite the latter being the most common Maori visual art. Behind this lay a deliberate political motivation, with the political neutrality of the Rotorua style of carving being more acceptable to Europeans who would not have allowed figurative painting to become a national symbol because of its close association with Te Kooti and the ‘Hauhau rebels’.141 Such ideas had also seen the Party become a key contributor to the Aryan Maori myth, channelling Maori history into forms that could be useful to pantribalism. As Francis Reid has recently pointed out, they also employed such myths – and especially the ‘dying race’ narrative – as tools for securing funding for research and collecting activities in museums.142 Indeed, Ngata, Pomare, and Buck all played significant roles in the establishment of Crown policies of recording and preservation of Maori [ 84 ]

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knowledge, often arranging opportunities for Best, McDonald, and Anderson (among others) to collect and preserve the arts, crafts, lore, and songs of Maori.143 Yet such ideas were also not too far from the government’s own position, with its support of these various projects in part intended to advance political agendas such as an increase in Maori cultural pride and social integration, both locally and nationally, in order that Maori might better adapt to modern Pakeha New Zealand.144 And, for its part, the Young Maori Party’s reading of Pakeha perceptions of the Maori was acute. Conforming to his narrow view of ‘true’ Maori carving, Harold Hamilton – the son of Augustus Hamilton – praised the school for moving beyond the modern conception of so much Maori ‘art’ to produce work more typical of the early nineteenth century.145 Twenty years later the Secretary of Maori Affairs, Jock McEwan, could not have heaped more praise upon the revival. Noting that European settlement had resulted in the introduction of new patterns and techniques, and a mixing of regional styles that had only enriched Maori carving, the core of his praise was for what he understood as the resurfacing of older styles and techniques.146 Modern carving was still being judged on a past standard, of which the pre-European Maori ‘art’ was supreme. Writing in the same volume, Cowan took a similar position, praising the modern whare whakairo for its embracing of the best features of a carved house in accordance with old designs.147 While tokens of Pakeha influence remained ‘incongruities’ to Cowan, he also believed that the pinnacle of modern carving was (perhaps ironically) the work of Neke Kapua and Tene Waitere, owing to their use of ornate carving and apparent conformity to ‘olden designs’.148 Yet such responses had been anticipated, with Ngata originally seeing more traditional forms of carving as a stepping stone, revived out of necessity owing to the sad state of Maori arts in the late 1920s. Once the basic skills had been relearned, he believed that Maori art would once again become innovative.149 Maori involvement within the museum was similarly complex – the outcome of personal relationships between professional staff and Maori individuals negotiated through specific collections, displays, and events. As recent scholarship has highlighted, there was also a strong Maori interest in the western culture of museums, history, and heritage, with Maori well aware of the complexities of their roles as donors, informants, and collaborators. Many were also effusive visitors of displays of Maori taonga and portraiture.150 Similarly, while some Maori were fiercely against Pakeha possession and display of taonga, others concluded that, through its exhibition in museums, Maori were looking both to the past and the future, and this would facilitate [ 85 ]

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engagement with Europe and the world. While, as suggested above, Maori were not always in control of these transfers, in many instances they were, with objects often handed over not just as acts of utu but in recognition that through display the skill of Maori craft and aspects of Maori society were a mechanism to such engagement. As Neke Kapua declared during the 1907 Exhibition, for example, ‘Our works of ancient times have been brought here, so that the peoples of the earth may know that the Maori is still living’.151

Conclusion The introduction of legislation aimed at protecting Maori m ­ aterial culture is complex, but can ultimately be explained as a latent ­nationalistic response to the ongoing loss of an iconic aspect of the New Zealand cultural landscape and the economic importance of Maori material culture to the New Zealand tourism industry. There had been active trading in Maori artefacts since the earliest European contact with Maori, yet, as the timing of early efforts to stem, or at least manage, this highlighted, for many, tikanga Maori had become far more than a mere commodity – it had become a key part of what made New Zealand unique. Viewing this argument alongside those explored in the previous chapter, what emerges is something of a synergetic relationship between identity and tourism, in which the commodification of Maori culture through tourism saw tikanga Maori established as a fundamental dimension of New Zealand’s unique identity, which in turn reinforced its presentation to tourists as being emblematic of New Zealand. The crucial point here is that the initial impetus to preservation was not domestic but predominantly international and transnational. Later, as Pakeha increasingly came to view themselves less as displaced Britons and more as self-conscious New Zealanders, to these motivations could be added the belief that a ‘laundered and embalmed’ Maori history and culture also provided New Zealand as a nation with a rich past.152 Paradoxically, however, in the process of reconstruction of a usable Maori past, ‘real’ Maori culture was pushed to the periphery. Michael King rightly notes that the focus on Maori carving, costume, and action songs within broader notions of national identity ‘conveyed little of the strength of Maori values for those committed to them’.153 This superficial appropriation of the indigenous, however, ultimately reflected the fundamental role that it played in ‘flavouring’ New Zealanders’ view of their own European heritage. It also explained the predominantly national as opposed to local Pakeha interest in the preservation of Maori material culture. [ 86 ]

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As taonga Maori became enmeshed within Pakeha concepts of identity, however, Pakeha also increasingly came to view taonga Maori as a ‘national asset’ that belonged to them as much as to Maori. In this respect the idea of a national Maori museum, and for that matter the change in collection policy that was made as an alternative to the new museum, represented a new and distinctly colonial approach to ­ethnological collecting and display. Whereas in Britain, Europe, and the Mediterranean antiquities were regarded as ancestral treasures, connecting citizens to the land of their forebears, in New Zealand there were no such treasures to legitimise colonists’ claims to the land. As a result of westerners appropriating, collecting, and ultimately controlling Maori artefacts, however, the antiquities of Maori provided a cultural tie to the land that could be co-opted, like the land itself. Where in earlier times they had been seen as embodying the spirit of the people who made them, as Augustus Hamilton asserted, they had become ‘the very soul of the nation’.154

Notes 1 Evening Post, 5 May 1915. 2 Cowan, ‘The Art Craftsmanship of the Maori’, p. 121. 3 James Cowan, The Maori, Yesterday and Today (Christchurch 1930), p. v. 4 Sinclair, A Destiny Apart, p. 188. 5 Richard Wolfe, ‘Souvenirs of Maoriland: The Art of the Early Tourist Trade’, Art New Zealand, 61 (1991–92), pp. 68–72. 6 Nicholas Thomas, ‘Kiss the Baby Goodbye: “Kowhaiwhai” and Aesthetics in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Critical Inquiry, 22:1 (Autumn 1995), pp. 90–121; Anna Peterson, New Zealanders at Home: A Cultural History of Domestic Interiors, 1814–1914 (Dunedin 2001), p. 77. 7 For Morris’s interest in ‘primitive’ art, see ‘The Aims of Art’, in Signs of Change (London 1888), and ‘The Lesser Arts’ in Hopes and Fears (London 1877); Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London 1856), p. 14. 8 Two early examples of the use of decorative use of Maori design were the 1901 Royal Tour, and the 1908 visit of the US Fleet to New Zealand. ‘Kia ora’ is an informal Maori greeting literally translating to ‘be well/healthy’. 9 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Perspectives on Hinemihi: A Maori Meeting House’, in Tin Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object. Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London 1998), pp. 129–43. For details on Maori carved houses in the European garden more generally, see Neich, ‘The Maori House down in the Garden’, pp. 331–68. 10 See Miles Fairburn, ‘The Rural Myth and the New Urban Frontier’, NZJH, 9:1 (April 1975), pp. 3–21; Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land – English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington 1981), pp. 238–327. 11 Empire Review, May 1905, pp. 350–3. 12 Neich, ‘The Maori House down in the Garden’, p. 339. 13 Edward Kaufman, ‘The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village’, Assemblage, 9 (1989), pp. 33–4. 14 His full name being Victor Alexander Herbert Huia Onslow. 15 Benjamin Mountfort, Other Times (Christchurch 1885), p. 3. 16 Arthur Adams, Maoriland and Other Verses (Sydney 1899), p. 89.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 17 K. Howe, Singer in a Songless Land: A Life of Edward Tregear, 1846–1931 (Auckland 1991), p. 66. 18 Southland Times, 4 February 1898. 19 Daily Southern Cross, 21 October 1872 and 2 November 1874. 20 Phillips, ‘Musings in Maoriland’, p. 529; W. H. Pearson, ‘Alttitudes to the Maori in Some Pakeha Fiction’, JPS, 67 (1958), pp. 21l–38; Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914 (Wellington 2006). 21 O’Regan, NZPD, 87, 26 June 1895, p. 109. 22 Otago Witness, 9 October 1901. 23 James Cowan, ‘Ranolf and Amohia’, NZIM, December 1901, p. 216. 24 Johannes Anderson, Maori Life in Ao-tea (Christchurch 1907), p. v. 25 Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton 1992); Francis Pound, Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (Auckland 1983). 26 For a background to the formation and early activities of the Polynesian Society see M. P. K. Sorrenson, Manifest Duty: The Polynesian Society over 100 Years (Auckland 1992), pp. 24–59. 27 This process of amelioration is that outlined by Edward Said, Orientalism (London 1978), p. 79. 28 Belich, Making Peoples, pp. 24–5, 58–9. 29 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Maori Origins and Migrations (Auckland 1979), p. 30. 30 The Press, 12 November 1904. 31 Cowan, Official Record of the New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries Held at Christchurch, p. 2. 32 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, with Present References to the British Empire; in Letters Between a Statesmen and a Colonist (London 1849), p. 118. Also see Giselle Byrnes, ‘Inventing New Zealand: Surveying, Science, and the Construction of Cultural Space, 1840s–1890s’, PhD, of University Auckland, 1995. 33 Bond’s Almanac, Diary and Directory for the Districts of Waikato, Rotorua, Te Aroha and Adjacent Settlements (Cambridge 1894), p. 94. Geographically Ngaruawahia lies at the confluence of the Waikato and Waipa rivers. 34 Evening Post, 3 September 1892. 35 Cited in Byrnes, ‘Inventing New Zealand’, p. 376. 36 James Cowan, ‘The Romance of the Rail – a Descriptive and Historical Story of the North Island Main Trunk Railway’, NZRM, 3:3 (2 July 1928), p. 40. 37 New Zealand was not alone in its appropriation of indigenous names; however, here it seemed to take place earlier, and more commonly than in any other situation. For the Australian experience, see Sam Furphy, ‘Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity’, Journal of Australian Studies, 26:72 (2002), pp. 59–68, 267–8. For Canada, see Alan Rayburn, Naming Canada: Stories about Place Names from Canadian Geographic (Toronto 1994). For the United States, see Deborah Root, “White Indians”: Appropriation and the Politics of display’, in Bruce Ziff and P. Rao, Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (New Brunswick 1997), pp. 225–33. 38 James Cowan, ‘Maori Place Names’, NZIM, June 1900, p. 647. 39 Auckland Star, 24 May 1933. 40 Tony Birch, ‘Nothing Has Changed: The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture’, Meanjin, 51:2 (1992), p. 234. 41 For a background to international interest in the collection of colonial objects, see Tim Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project’, in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London 1998), pp. 11–27. 42 McNab and Seddon, NZPD, 103, 1 September 1898, p. 450. 43 Ibid. 44 William Smith, ‘On Ancient Maori Relics from Canterbury, New Zealand’, TPNZI, 33 (1900), p. 427. 45 ‘New Zealand Institute: Twenty-ninth Annual Report’, AJHR, H-27, 1897, p. 1.

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Throwing stones at N apoleon 46 James Hector, ‘Remarks on the Preservation of Ancient Maori Records’, TPNZI, 29 (1896), p. 612. 47 Wanganui Herald, 22 June 1901. 48 Otago Witness, 15 September 1898; Augustus Hamilton, National Collection of the Ethnology of the Maori People Established on a Permanent Basis in Wellington (Wellington 1901). 49 Cited in Wanganui Herald, 22 June 1901. 50 MacKenzie, NZPD, 116, 9 July 1901, p. 195. 51 Carroll, ibid.; Captain Russell, NZPD, 117, 6 August 1901, p. 247. 52 For an overview of the evolution of heritage legislation in Greece and Egypt see Catherine Bracken, Antiquities Acquired: The Spoliation of Greece (London 1975); Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt (Cambridge, Mt 2005); John Henry Merryman (ed.), Imperialism, Art and Restitution (Cambridge 2006). 53 Walker, NZPD, 119, 10 October 1901, p. 347. 54 Kelly, NZPD, 119, 11 October 1901, p. 349. 55 Carroll, NZPD, 119, 4 October 1901, p. 217. 56 Monk, ibid., p. 230. 57 Walker, NZPD, 119, 10 October 1901, pp. 347–351; Napier, ibid., p. 221. 58 Carroll, NZPD, 119, 9 October 1901, p. 278. 59 McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 54. 60 Evening Post, 11 September 1902; Otago Witness, 10 June 1903; Ballie, NZPD, 122, 2 October 1902, p. 918. 61 Parata, NZPD, 119, 4 October 1901, p. 233. 62 While things began promisingly, Fenton’s plans collapsed in the wake of the 1886 Tarawera eruption. Tourism plummeted, and in the early 1890s tribal leaseholdtownship lands were compulsorily purchased by the Crown. 63 MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, p. 197 64 Paul Tapsell, Pukaki: A Comet Returns (Auckland 2000), p. 15. 65 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, p. 94. 66 Godber to McDonald, 26 March 1917, MU1 box 16, file 10/1/100, TPA. 67 Cheeseman, ‘Notes on Certain Maori Carved Burial-chests in the Auckland Museum’, TPNZI, 39 (1906), p. 453, cited in MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, p. 198. 68 Kelly, NZPD, 119, 11 October 1901, p. 349. 69 For an extensive discussion of the topic see ‘Cultural Practices’, in David Williams, Crown Policy Affecting Maori Knowledge Systems and Cultural Practices (Wellington 2001), pp. 177–240. 70 Augustus Hamilton and S. Percy Smith, ‘Suggestions for the Establishment of a Maori Museum’, AJHR, G8, 1902, pp. 1–3. 71 See S. Percy Smith and Augustus Hamilton, Notes on the Proposed Maori Museum Addressed to Members of the Legislative Council and of the House of Representatives (Dunedin 1902). 72 AJHR, G-8, 1902, pp. 1–2. 73 AJHR, H-2, 1902, p. 22. 74 Carroll, NZPD, 120, 9 July 1902, p. 168; MacKenzie, NZPD, 119, 4 October 1901, p. 219; Pitt, NZPD, 119, 6 October 1904, p. 713. 75 Dell, ‘The First Hundred Years of the Dominion Museum’, pp. 105–14. 76 Oliver to Newton, 6 January 1931, MU1, box 18, file 11/6/35, TPA. 77 Ward, NZPD, 131, 28 September 1904, p. 548. 78 MU000014, box 6, item 13/27/184, TPA. 79 See MU152, box 5, folder 5, TPA for details. 80 Fish, NZPD, 163, 20 August 1913, p. 834, and Bell, NZPD, 166, 5 November 1913, pp. 534–5. 81 AJHR, H-33, 1915, pp. 4–5. 82 Dell, ‘The First Hundred years of the Dominion Museum’, p. 190. 83 For a biography of Best, see Jeffrey Holman, Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Auckland 2010).

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 84 Clark Wissler, ‘Anthropology in New Zealand, Australia and Japan’, American Anthropologist, 23:3 (July–September 1921), pp. 382–3. 85 AJHR, H-33, 1915, p. 13; Thomson to Minister of Internal Affairs, 27 February 1924, MU1, box 17, item 11/1/15, TPA. 86 AJHR, H-33, 1915, p. 13, p. 29 87 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, p. 231. 88 The publication of material Best had compiled since 1910 was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind Ngata’s desire to establish the Board of Maori Ethnological research. Ngata and Anderson, NZPD, 186, 28 July 1920, p. 760. Calls for the establishment of the Board had begun in 1906, when Ngata asked the Native Affairs minister James Carroll to fund the phonographic recording of Maori songs. Action would not come about, however, until 1920, when, despite being in opposition, Ngata persuaded the government to pass legislation establishing the Board. Ngata, NZPD, 137, 12 September 1906, pp 491–2; Ngata and Hine, NZPD, 185, 4 November 1919, p. 1349. 89 The key works here were The Stone Implements of the Maori (1912); Maori Storehouses and Kindred Structures: Houses (1916); Shell-middens of the Wellington District, (1918); Shell-middens of the Porirua District (1918); Stone-shanked Maori Fish-hooks (1921); The Maori Canoe (1925); The Pa Maori: An Account of the Fortified Villages of the Maori in Pre-European and Modern Times (1927). 90 Bell to Thomson, 3 June 1914, and Thomson to Minister of Internal Affairs, 8 June 1914, MU1, box 17, file 11/1/1, TPA. 91 A. P. Godber to McDonald, 26 March 1917, MU1, box 16, file 10/1/100, TPA. 92 See Elsdon Best, The Maori as He Was: A Brief Account of Maori Life as It Was in Pre-European Days (Wellington 1924). 93 ibid., p. 286. Also see a discussion by Cowan, Best, and Newman on the matter at the Wellington Philosophical Society, Evening Post, 29 April 1915. 94 Peter Gathercole, ‘Changing Attitudes to the Study of Maori Carving’, in Sidney Mead (ed.), Exploring the Visual Art of Oceania (Honolulu 1979), p. 217. 95 Thomson to Simmons, 18 June 1915, and Hamilton to Thomson, 25 June 1915, MU1, box 4, file 2/4/36, TPA. 96 See, for example, MU1, box 7, file 2/8/5, TPA. 97 Hamilton to Minister of Internal Affairs, 7 April 1913, MU95, box 15, TPA. 98 Joyce to Anderson, 7 January 1927, MU1, box 7, file 2/8/42, TPA. 99 Allen, ‘Maori Vision and the Imperial Gaze’, in Barringer and Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object, p. 151. 100 Evening Post, 31 March 1923. 101 Neich, ‘The Maori House down in the Garden’, p. 341. 102 ‘Ka Mate’ is the haka composed by Te Rauparaha that is commonly associated with the All Blacks. 103 Neich, ‘The Maori House down in the Garden’, p. 343. 104 MU14, box 5, file 13/27/127, TPA. 105 Daniel to Thomson, 15 April 1920, and Shallnass to Thomson, 30 April 1920, MU1, box 18, file 11/3/17, TPA. 106 Cowan, ‘Pictures of New Zealand Life’, NZRM, 6:8 (1 April 1932), pp. 60–1. 107 T. Lindsay Buick, Waitangi: Ninety-four Years After (New Plymouth 1934), p. 93; Dominion, 28 August 1933. 108 Kirstie Ross, ‘Signs of Landing: Pakeha Outdoor Recreation and the Cultural Colonisation of New Zealand’, Auckland, MA, 1999, p. 40. 109 Dominion, 24 January 1927, New Zealand Herald, 22 January 1927. 110 New Zealand Herald, 14 January 1927. 111 Harold Hamilton, ‘The Maori as an Artist’, Art in New Zealand, 2 (December 1929), p. 87. 112 New Zealand Herald, 14 January 1927. 113 Almost exactly the same was done for new offices of the Wairongoa Mineral Springs built in the same year. See Thomson to Thomson, 3 October 1924, MU1, box 7, file 2/8/34, TPA.

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Throwing stones at N apoleon 114 Anna Petersen, ‘Signs of Higher Life: A Cultural History of Domestic Interiors in New Zealand c.1814–1914’, PhD, University of Otago, 1998. Also see Christine McCarthy, “The Maori House”, “Te Pa” and “Captain Hankey’s House”: Bicultural Architecture in New Zealand at the Turn of the Century’, Fabrications, 11:1 (July 2000), pp. 62–78. 115 See Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange; Conal McCarthy, ‘Carving out a Place in the Better Britain of the South Pacific: Maori in New Zealand Museums and Exhibitions’, in McAleer and Longair (eds), Curating Empire, pp. 56–81; Hana O’Regan, ‘If It’s Good Enough for You It’s Good Enough for Me: The Hypocrisy of Assimilation and Cultural Colonisation’, in James Brown and Patricia Sant (eds), Indigeneity: Construction and Representation (New York 1999); Jeffrey Sissons, First peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures (London 2005); Thomas, Entangled Objects. 116 McCarthy, ‘Carving out a Place in the Better Britain of the South Pacific’, in McAleer and Longair (eds), Curating Empire p. 57. 117 Belich, Making Peoples, p. 271. Also see Jurg Wassmann (ed.), Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony: Cultural Practices of Identity Construction (Oxford 1998). 118 McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 30. 119 Hone Morehu Nuku, ‘Te Arawa Turupa Maori’, Te Pipiwharauroa, 151 (November 1910), p. 8, cited in McCarthy, ‘Carving out a Place in the Better Britain of the South Pacific’, in McAleer and Longair (eds), Curating Empire, p. 70. 120 Paul Diamond, Makereti: Taking Maori to the World (Auckland 2007), p. 96. 121 Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua, p. 84. 122 Michel Picard and Robert Wood (eds), Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies (Honolulu 1997); Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, pp. 149–51. 123 Birks to Robieson, 22 November 1909, BAEO, A259/44a/244, ANZ. 124 MacKenzie to Tarawera, 18 February 1910, TO1, 1904/288 part 3, ANZ. 125 Hawera & Normanby Star, 29 August 1910. 126 Deidre Brown, ‘Buildings of the Morehu: a Lineage of Counter-colonisation’, MA, University of Auckland, 1992, and Deidre Brown, ‘Moorehu Architecture’, PhD, University of Auckland, 1997; Deidre Brown, ‘The Architecture of the School of Maori Arts and Crafts’, JPS, 108:3 (1999), pp. 241–76; Ngarino Ellis, ‘Sir Apirana Ngata and the School of Maori Arts and Crafts’, Art New Zealand, 89 (1998), pp. 58–61 and 86–7. 127 Jeffrey Sissons, ‘The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House’, Oceania, 69:1 (September 1998); Jeffrey Sissons, Te Waimana: Tuhoe History and the Colonial Encounter (Dunedin 1991), pp. 37–8. 128 Michael Linzey and Richard Morris, ‘Tanne Whirinaki: The Design of a Facility for the Restoration and Display of Taonga Whakairo at Waikoeka Marae’, unpublished essay, University of Auckland, n.d., p. 1. 129 Cowan, The Maori, Yesterday and Today, p. 122. 130 See John Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori-Protest and Co-operation, 1891–1909 (Auckland 1969). 131 Thomas, Possessions, pp. 46–7. 132 Parata, NZPD, 117, 4 October 1901, p. 233. 133 AJHR, H-2, 1902, p. 15. 134 Reeves, NZPD, 130, 6 October 1904, pp. 712–13. 135 MacKenzie, NZPD, 139, 31 July 1907, p. 781. 136 The Young Maori Party was formed in 1897 by missionary-educated Maori who believed that the old ways had passed and who wanted to see the fulfilment of promised equality of treatment of Maori citizens. It emerged as part of the postland-war shift towards pan-tribalism engagement with Pakeha in order to secure a foothold in Pakeha political and ideological systems, through which Maori status and material conditions could be upheld. For discussion of the idea of introducing legislation to establish the school see Ngata to Bollard, 14 September 1926, MU000014, box 7 file 13/38/24, TPA.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 137 New Zealand Statutes, Maori Purposes Fund Act 1934­–35, p. 2. 138 McCarthy, ‘Carving out a Place in the Better Britain of the South Pacific’, in McAleer and Langair (eds), Curating Empire, p. 60. 139 Writing to Buck on the issue, Ngata also believed more broadly that nurturing Maori performance through public display and competitions would foster Maori identity, provide it a means of expression, and turn tribal difference into a positive political force. Ngata to Buck, 30 January 1899, 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 (Auckland 1986–88), p. 15. Also see Sissons, ‘The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House’, p. 37. 140 Peter Buck, ‘Foreword’, in I. Sutherland (ed.) The Maori People Today: A General Survey (Christchurch 1940), p. 9. 141 Roger Neich, Painted Histories (Auckland 1993), p. 4 and p. 241. Neich notes that figurative painting was generally viewed by tourists and ethnologists alike as being so tainted with European ideas and therefore so degenerate that it was not ­considered worth recording. 142 See Francis Reid, ‘The Province of Science: James Hector and the New Zealand Institute, 1867–1903’, PhD, University of Cambridge, 2007, especially chapter six. 143 AJHR, H-22, 1923, p. 12. 144 Sissons, ‘The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House’, p. 37. 145 Hamilton, ‘The Maori as an Artist’, p. 79. 146 J. M. McEwan, ‘The Development of Maori Culture since the Advent of the Pakeha’, JPS, 56:2 (1947), pp. 175–82. 147 Cowan, ‘The Art Craftsmanship of the Maori’, p. 127. 148 Cowan, The Maori, Yesterday and Today, pp. 116–22. 149 Neich, Painted Histories, p. 118. 150 The most valuable work on this is McCarthy’s ‘Carving out a Place in the Better Britain of the South Pacific’ chapter in McAleer and Longair (eds), Curating Empire, in which his analysis is based upon the visitors’ books of the Colonial Museum, the private Partridge Gallery in Auckland where portraits of Maori by Gottfried Lindauer were displayed, and letters dairies and Maori newspapers. Also see McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori; Roger Blackley, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Plaster Casts in a Colonial Museum’, in Anna Smith and Lydia Wevers (eds), On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies (Wellington 2004), pp. 41–64. 151 Dominion Museum Bulletin No. 3, p. 13. 152 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders, from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Albany 2001), p. 124. 153 Michael King, Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century (Auckland 1992), p. 304. 154 Percy Smith and Hamilton, Notes on the Proposed Maori Museum Addressed to Members of the Legislative Council and of the House of Representatives.

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The art of forgetting: history, myth, and the New Zealand Wars

As dawn approached on 11 March 1845, a force of around five hundred Maori warriors, led by the Nga Puhi chief Hone Heke Pokai, moved on the northern centre of Kororareka in three groups. One, under Te Ruki Kawiti, launched an attack on the gun battery at the southern end of the town. A second group pinned down the British defenders by firing on the main blockhouse at the northern end of the settlement. The third group, led by Heke, attacked the guard post, killing the defenders, and cut down the flagstaff – seen by Heke as a symbol of British authority and Maori despair – for the fourth and final time. After several hours of random exchanges of fire, at 1 pm the powder magazine at Polack’s Stockade exploded, and as Maori pressed home their attack the British evacuated the town and Lieutenant Philpotts of the HMS Hazard ordered the bombardment of Kororareka. By most accounts, this attack marks the beginning of the New Zealand Wars.1 Often described as being similar to the Plains Indian Wars that took place in America between the 1840s and the 1880s, the New Zealand Wars were in effect a series of conflicts fought between some Maori tribes and government forces – made up of British and colonial troops and their Maori allies – and which took place between the sacking of Kororareka in 1845, and the conclusion of ‘Te Kooti’s War’ in 1872. While the causes of the wars were varied and complex, at their heart lay a volatile combination – contested issues of sovereignty following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; the purchase of dubious titles to land by the New Zealand Company; and decreasing Maori willingness to sell land to the government coupled with increasing pressure for land for settlement as the European population grew rapidly. Despite the significance of the wars in New Zealand at the time, and their aftermath (notably land confiscations), in recent years a number of historians have described them as ‘forgotten’ wars.2 The Maori historian Danny Keenan similarly describes the former battlefields as [ 93 ]

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‘largely a forgotten landscape. There are few signs and few memorials or monuments ... the fields and paddocks are empty ... New Zealanders have not memorialized their own battlefields at home – unlike the Americans and the American Civil War.’3 While they make a valid point, the term ‘forgotten’ is overly simplistic, as, rather than being the result of a lapse of free-floating national memory, political and cultural variables rendered the New Zealand Wars not ‘forgotten’ but ‘ignored’. James Belich has gone even further, describing Titokowaru’s War – one of the key Taranaki conflicts of the late 1860s – as a buried memory, a ‘dark secret of New Zealand history, forgotten by the Pakeha as a child forgets a nightmare’.4 Keenan’s comparison between New Zealand and the United States, however, is valuable. In America – and for that matter Canada (as is explored in Chapter 6) – strenuous efforts were made to preserve aspects of the domestic landscape of war landscape from the late nineteenth century.5 In New Zealand, by contrast, few battle sites were preserved until well into the twentieth century, and even today they hold relatively little sway in the consciousness of the average New Zealander. Yet as is argued in this chapter, while they were by no means undertaken on the scale seen in the United States or Canada, New Zealanders did make efforts to preserve and protect the heritage and historic landscape of the New Zealand Wars – the first efforts even beginning before the end of the wars themselves. By the beginning of the twentieth century, interest in this landscape had also grown as a natural corollary of the growing importance of the wars to the myth of New Zealand’s race relations and colonists’ quest to identify a history for themselves in their new home. Where the New Zealand Wars stood apart from the earlier borrowing of the Maori past was that here, finally, was a history that the country’s European population could identify as its own. Consequently, if associations make identities, then here all of the right boxes were ticked for the stuff of a national myth of origin.

Memorialising the New Zealand Wars Apart from wooden grave markers, only a handful of memorials to the fallen were constructed during the New Zealand Wars, two of which were simply plaques in churches. Together, however, these few memorials illustrate some interesting attitudes towards the memory of the wars themselves. The first to be unveiled was to Colonel Marmaduke Nixon, a settler from Mangere near Auckland, who had been responsible for raising the colony’s Mounted Defence Force in 1860 to defend the nearby settlements of Otahuhu, Panmure, and Howick. When Nixon, wounded at Rangaiowhia in February 1864, died from his inju[ 94 ]

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8  Moutoa Gardens memorial ‘to the heroes of the Battle of Moutoa’ in 1868. The Rutland stockade crowns the hill behind

ries three months later, his comrades moved quickly to honour his memory, unveiling an obelisk on 13 May 1868 with full Masonic ritual. His death, the Southern Cross noted, ‘was more deeply felt, and more sincerely mourned, than that of any man who fell during the war. The whole country was in mourning’.6 This was the only memorial to a Pakeha military leader built during the wars – local or British – being constructed because of Nixon’s popularity at the time, and because he was the first well-known local leader to fall. Two other monuments erected by Pakeha at the time of the wars honoured Maori. The Te Awamutu obelisk sought to memorialise Maori of the Orakau battle as a ‘noble and courageous enemy’, introducing the theme that would become such a fundamental part of the wars’ mythology – that they gave rise to a mutual respect that enabled Pakeha and Maori to live in harmony. As Maclean and Phillips note, the ‘noble sentiments of this memorial covered a host of hypocrisies, not the least of which was the fact that the regiment which erected it, the 65th, slaughtered Maori women and wounded in the days after the “heroic” defence of Orakau’.7 The other memorial, at Moutoa Gardens, Whanganui, encapsulated a very different sentiment, reading ‘To the memory of those brave men who fell at Moutoa 14 May 1864 in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism’. The ‘fanatic [ 95 ]

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­barbarians’ were Pai Marire – a religious movement that emerged out of Maori bitterness at land confiscation, and which sought to regain lost land by driving out the Pakeha invader. The memorial itself essentially emerged from relief that the European inhabitants of Whanganui felt at having been saved from slaughter. When Mark Twain visited New Zealand thirty years later he was horrified by the text of the memorial. Patriotism, he argued, was patriotism: Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it. Even though it be a political mistake, and a thousand times a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is honorable always honorable, always noble ... But the men were worthy. It was no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell.

Such a monument, he felt, could only be rectified with dynamite as ‘it is an object-lesson to the rising generation. It invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism.’8 Two further memorials constructed during the wars were intended as collective monuments. The first was an obelisk erected by the 43rd Regiment to their twenty-six comrades who had fallen in the battles of Gate Pa and Te Ranga in 1864, and was standing within a year of the battles’ conclusion. The second monument was to the thirty-three victims of the Rongowhakaata leader and prophet Te Kooti’s raid on Gisborne in November 1868. Allegedly paid for by subscriptions from throughout New Zealand, it was unveiled in 1872.9 Two final memorials were raised in the closing years of the wars, but were undertaken by a different generation, and commemorated events that had happened over twenty years earlier. The first – erected in March 1869 – commemorated Pakeha who died in the Wairau incident of 1843, and was undertaken on the initiative of a relative of one of the fallen. It was designed to inspire reverence for the pioneering generation. The second took the form of a church, erected on the site of the pa at Ohaeawai in Northland, where in 1845 some forty-seven British had lost their lives in an ill-conceived attack on the pa. The prime movers behind this memorial, consecrated in 1871, were the Maori people of Ohaeawai, who conceived the church as a symbol of peace and a tribute to the courage of the Pakeha enemy. As Maclean and Phillips note, ‘Maori, like the 65th at Orakau, also had their myths about the defeated opponent’.10 There are several possible explanations for the small number of memorials erected during the wars. Firstly, the period covered by the wars (1843–72) coincided with the formative period of the British war memorial, and it would take another generation for such monumental [ 96 ]

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forms to gain significant cultural traction in the colonies. There were also those in the community who felt that utilitarian or civic memorials were more appropriate than monumental memorials – two suggestions during early planning for Nixon’s memorial, for example, being the establishment of a school and scholarships to English universities.11 Such memorials, the correspondent suggested, were appropriate as they would help to mould boys into leaders of the calibre of Nixon.12 As Belich suggests, it was also possible that the wars were too recent and ‘close’ for many New Zealanders to want to keep their memory alive. They had, after all, been not a confirming experience of triumph and heroism for Pakeha but long drawn-out conflicts, often initiated for reasons of dubious legitimacy, and characterised by an unexpected failure to win a clear-cut victory over a ‘savage’ adversary.13 Extending this, Phillips and Maclean suggest that it is possible that Pakeha may have also preferred to leave many sites unmarked owing to their being Maori pa, and characterise the period between the end of the wars and the beginning of the twentieth century was one of ‘national amnesia’.14 Yet to judge the period on the apparent failure to erect memorials alone is flawed. Firstly, far from consciously choosing to neglect the historic sites associated with the wars, few individuals during the period perceived any of the country’s past in historical terms, let alone the New Zealand Wars. With the settlement ethos continuing to dominate perceptions of landscape, there was simply no case to answer as people returned to the all-important task of breaking in the land, levelling earthworks, and filling in trenches. The government was also complicit in this, rewarding a group of local farmers, for example, who in 1877 had ‘thrown down’ Gate Pa owing to its dilapidated remnants being seen as a danger to people and livestock.15 Soon after, a road was built right through the centre of the site. Yet even here, there were those few prophetic individuals who, according to Cowan, demonstrated the vision and respect to mark the sites of unmarked burial mounds and fenced off the remnants of pa when taking up the land.16 While they were not significant in number, the decades following the wars did see the unveiling of a handful of new memorials, such as the elaborate monument unveiled at the centre of the Manaia township in 1886; a memorial cross unveiled in 1890 to those who were killed in the attack on Titokowaru’s pa, Te Ngutu o te Manu; and the memorial church at Gate Pa, built in 1900.17 In most such instances, the planning of these memorials had been in gestation for some time, with the idea for the Gate Pa memorial having received serious consideration on numerous occasions since the mid-1860s.18 As the Manaia m ­ emorial also illustrates, the sentiment behind many of these memorials was fundamentally patriotic. It was unveiled on Easter Monday 1886, [ 97 ]

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during a full day of commemoration, the underlying themes focusing on reverence for the example that the fallen had set for the current generation, and the responsibility of the present to honour the past.19 There was also a hint of nationalistic myth making, with the Reverend Wilks’s suggestion that Major von Tempsky and Captains Hunter and Ross – all of whom were killed in the attack on Te Ngutu o te Manu – were ‘heroes who must [for]ever be to New Zealand what the heroes of England are to the Old Country’.20 The period also saw the emergence of a growing interest in the wars within many of the communities associated with the more famous battles. Beginning in the late 1880s, and continuing until at least the mid-1930s, for example, the Waikato township of Te Awamutu commemorated the Battle of Orakau (1864) with a wreath-laying ceremony.21 As the legend of Orakau grew, by the early 1890s the focus of the anniversary had shifted from the commemoration of the battle as the end of the Waikato Wars, to celebrating the courageous Maori defence of the pa. The thirtieth anniversary at the battle even resulted in the decision to present a handsome testimonial to Rewi Maniapoto – the pa’s aged defender – conveying ‘the respect and admiration that his erstwhile Pakeha foes entertain of his qualities as a warrior’.22 In Taranaki a similarly legendary status was assigned to the ‘massacre at Pukearuhe’ and the murder of the Reverend John Whiteley in February 1869, culminating in the unveiling of an obelisk on the site in 1923. Far from emerging in isolation, the growth of local interest in sites was typically the result of pride in local links to emergent national myths around particular incidents from the wars. The most significant questions that emerged during this period, however, revolved around the care of historic war graves. The government first became involved in the issue following complaints in the late 1870s about the neglected state of many graves. The standard response at the time was to undertake a brief survey of the site in question, after which a small sum of money would be allocated for repair and maintenance. Where such costs were prohibitive or it was impractical to repair or replace headstones, a central stone was often erected in the form of a collective memorial. Government support for repairs, however, was by no means a fait accompli. While for years a number of communities had sought to maintain local war graves and cemeteries, for example, by the 1880s, as many of the original wooden headstones were deteriorating beyond recognition, requests for government assistance were typically met with the response that the maintenance of graves was a local responsibility.23 Similarly, when the condition of the Rangiriri and Mission Cemeteries at Tauranga – in which British soldiers lay – was raised in the British House of Commons in 1893, [ 98 ]

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the New Zealand government again pointed the finger at local government. Yet, wary of the financial commitments this might entail, the Tauranga Borough Council quickly returned the favour.24 When, three years later, a monument was eventually unveiled at the site, it was paid for by members of the regiments whose soldiers were buried there – Britain’s St James’s Gazette noting: it ought to be, I am sure you will agree with me, the duty of a prosperous colony like [New Zealand] to perpetuate the memory of men who lost their lives in its service and for its direct benefit; but as I am assured, both the Government and the public have been appealed to by old soldiers on this subject without success. The few surviving officers of the regiments then engaged and their successors are about to erect a lasting memorial over the neglected resting place of these brave fellows, and it might be wished that allusion should be made in the inscription to the stinginess of the Government and people of New Zealand.25

There were of course instances when community contributions towards restorative work were met by pound-for-pound subsidies from the Defence Department, and in a handful of instances – such as the replacement of rotted headstones at Okaihau and Pokeno in 1891 and 1902 – the state bore the brunt of the cost. In the late 1890s the government also began to compile a photographic record of war graves, although it seems this was abandoned after only Auckland and the Waikato had been surveyed.26 The turn of the century brought a new era of monument building, with statues marking Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee and then death, Edward VII’s coronation, and the death of Premier Richard Seddon, as well as memorials to the country’s fallen in the South African ‘Boer’ War. Riding this wave, between 1907 and 1918, more than twenty monuments to the New Zealand Wars were erected. There were several reasons for this renewed interest. First, the South African War fully domesticated the idea of war memorials, and, as more than forty memorials to the South African War were unveiled between 1902 and 1908, this naturally gave rise to an interest in memorialising the fallen from earlier wars. As Maclean and Phillips suggest, it is also possible that, as the South African War monuments were completed, sculpture and organising committees began to look around for other projects.27 More important, however, was the jingoistic spirit of imperialism that arose out of the South African War experience, and as day-by-day newspapers detailed the latest developments from the Transvaal, this was paralleled by a rapid growth in stories and reminiscences of the New Zealand Wars. Similarly, when the New Zealand contingents returned from the Veldt with a reputation as guerrilla fighters, people [ 99 ]

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looked for an explanation in the earlier conflicts and the country’s pioneering heritage. As New Zealand’s military commitment to Empire expanded in the years leading up to the First World War, such explanations and demonstrations of imperial commitment also served as powerful examples to the younger generation. Speaking in 1914 at a memorial service for those killed during the 1868 attack on Te Ngutu o te Manu pa, for example, the historian and Minister of Defence Robert McNab reflected on the potential of such commemorations to simplify the defence problem, as ‘sentiment would be built up, round which a rallying-point could be formed’.28 Such ideas only became more entrenched during and immediately following the Great War as the ‘Spirit of 1914’ and the myth of war experience actively employed the gravestone and the war memorial as examples of national regeneration. Lastly, as anniversaries of key battles and the deaths of veterans increasingly resulted in an outpouring of reminiscences of the New Zealand Wars, they also gave rise to a growing interest in recording and memorialising them. Encouraged by a constant stream of ‘letters to the editor’ such as the ‘Lest we Forget’ series which did the rounds in the early 1900s, the period also witnessed a growing enthusiasm for the maintenance of the country’s war graves.29 ‘Even our Navy have taken up the hint’, noted one correspondence sarcastically in 1907, referring to the sailors from HMS Encounter having tidied up the old churchyard at Russell and erected a new monument over the graves of the sailors buried there.30 Others, such as Captain C. A. Young, felt that more needed to be done. Referring to Macaulay’s famous warning about the apparent dangers of neglecting the memory of one’s ancestors, Young argued that nothing short of a royal commission on the neglect of war graves would suffice: Those of the present generation do not know at what cost their forefathers won this country for them, or surely they would not neglect an obvious duty. The graves of the dead, lying unhonoured where they fought and fell, call mutely from the past. Nor is the present generation to be altogether blamed for this ignorance. In a country where neither the Bible nor history is taught in the public schools how can patriotism be inculcated? What is the use of the Government calling upon the ablebodied youth of the Dominion to join the defence forces when these have not been taught what patriotism means?31

The tipping point finally came in 1910 when – despite a growing sentiment that the care of war graves was a national ­responsibility – the government rebuffed calls to assist with the maintenance of the Symonds Street Cemetery in Auckland. Faced with government [ 100 ]

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intransigence, the Auckland chapter of the Victoria League stepped in, stating that it would maintain and repair the graves of British soldiers buried therein.32 Founded in London soon after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, the Victoria League had taken ‘the conservation in memory of Queen Victoria, of the deeds of British soldiers and sailors, and other patriotic men and women in the Empire’ as its guiding principle.33 To foster the bonds of Empire, the League established branches in the colonies and dominions, with the Auckland branch being formed in November 1909. While it had little interest in the New Zealand Wars per se, as the League’s secretary Edith Statham explained to the Prime Minister Joseph Ward, graves work could be made ‘the means of inculcating the spirit of patriotism among our young people’.34 Ward eventually agreed that the government would bear the cost of grave identification and restoration; however, the fall of the Liberal government soon after cast doubts over whether the League would get any money.35 The reform leader Bill Massey promised to honour Ward’s pledge, but first wanted to resolve the question of who actually had responsibility for war graves.36 The net result was that the Department of Internal Affairs soon took over the administration and funding of war graves maintenance, appointing Statham to the part-time position of Inspector of Old Soldiers’ Graves.37 Driven as she was by ‘imperial sentiment’, Statham was well aware of the role that graves and memorials could play as part of the ‘correct’ education of the young. Writing to the Minister of Education George Fowlds on the matter in May 1911, she noted ‘it was also my idea that the [care of] graves should be made a peg on which to hang imperialism so far as the children of the schools and others are concerned, for we hope to hold little meetings during the winter and get old soldiers and other to speak about the Maori war of which I am sorry to say few of us know anything at all’.38 Three years later she similarly told the mayor of the Bay of Plenty town of Opotiki that the unveiling of their monument was ‘the way to impress it on the young people and others who sought to know the history of their own country’.39 In support of this the League built up extensive files on graves from the New Zealand Wars, including details on the manner of each individual’s death, photos of the graves and particulars of the engagements for deposit in public libraries throughout the country – an addition to the prizes it already offered in schools for knowledge of history, language, and geography of the empire. A scheme was also developed whereby Scouts and Guides would aid in the care of the veterans’ grave sites, and in the process learn about the heroes of the Empire.40 Throughout her efforts to identify and preserve graves associated with the wars, Statham focused exclusively on the ‘imperial’ side of [ 101 ]

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9  A depiction of an incident at the Battle of Gate Pa, 1864, where Wiremu Taratoa ran a calabash of water to his mortally wounded enemy Lieutenant Colonel Booth

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the conflict. So-called ‘Friendly Maori’ were included within this, as by ‘siding’ with the British they had apparently demonstrated the correct ideals and values.41 Inevitably, however, Statham had to confront the issue of the ‘Maori enemy’. On one of her first trips out of Auckland in her official capacity, she inspected the burial site at St John’s Church in Te Awamutu. Noting an unmarked mound where it was believed ‘friendly Maori’ were buried, she ordered a monument for the site and wrote to the local Anglican priest requesting he do the relevant research and provide the inscription. His reply was that the Maori had not in fact been ‘friendly’, but had fought against the colonists at Hairini and Orakau. ‘I think you will agree with me, however,’ he continued, ‘that it would be a grateful act on the part of the Government to show a kindly appreciation of the conspicuous bravery of the Maoris even though they fought against us’. He also suggested that the approved inscription reading ‘Erected by the New Zealand Government in memory of the Maori warriors who fell in the battles of Hairini and Orakau 1864’ have the word ‘warriors’ replaced with ‘heroes’.42 In April 1914 Statham was similarly surprised to find that a large monument to the Ngati Rangi chief Rawiri Puhirake was being made. The idea behind this had arisen five years earlier at the opening of a monument to colonial forces killed at Gate Pa when a veteran of the campaign, Captain Turner, had suggested honouring Rawiri – the ‘chivalrous victor of Gate Pa’.43 Taken up in an appeal entitled ‘The Hero of Gate Pa’, local Maori approached the trustees of the cemetery and European sympathisers for help. Unveiled on the fiftieth anniversary of Puhirake’s death, the monument was effectively an attempt at national reconciliation through commemoration – his ‘chivalrous’ conduct on the battlefield sitting tidily with the broader sentiment that many Pakeha wished to champion. The inscription read: This monument was erected on the fiftieth anniversary of his [Rawiri’s] death by people of the British and Maori races to commemorate his chivalrous and humane orders for the protection of unarmed or wounded men who fell into the hands of the Maoris, and for the respectful treatment of the bodies of any of their enemies slain in battle. This order framed by Rawiri with the assistance and approval of Henare Taratoa and other chiefs, was loyally observed by his followers, and after the repulse of the assault on the Pa, the British wounded, who lay all night in and around the Pa, were given water and treated with kindness. This chivalrous conduct of the Maori leader and his people so impressed their contemporaries that Rawiri’s body was exhumed in 1870 from the trenches at Te Ranga and reentered at this spot with befitting ceremonies. The seeds of better feelings between the two races thus sown on

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the battlefield, have since borne ample fruit, disaffection has given place to loyalty, and hostility to friendship. British and Maori lived together as one united people.44

Statham was not entirely immune to this shift. Following the unveiling of a monument at the site of Orakau later that same year, the New Zealand Herald and Dominion published letters proposing the erection of a second memorial to Maori at the site. Supporting the idea, Statham simply stressed the importance of the inscription telling of Maori chivalry and heroism. When Te Heu Heu – the paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa – finally supplied an inscription in Maori, however, it read ‘Rewi Maniapoto was one of the highest of the chiefs of Ngati-Maniapoto and Ngati-Raukawa. He was an upholder of the Kingdom of Potatua Te Wherowhero and Tawhiao, and at the time of the war waged by the Pakeha race against the Maori King, he fought in the war on the side of the Maori King, with the result that he was defeated at Orakau, his tribe subdued, and his lands taken by conquest.’45 The tone of this was unacceptable to Statham, who also objected to the fact that the inscription failed to mention the manner in which Rewi’s troops had made such a ‘gallant defence against our men’.46 The matter was referred to Elsdon Best, who, replying that Rewi had never been keen on fighting at Orakau and had spent most of the battle underground preparing cartridges, suggested that a neutral inscription might best serve. Caught between Maori honesty and Pakeha scholarship, however, Statham persisted, raising the idea of a new inscription again in 1919 and 1920, and later of an entirely new monument in 1925.47 There was another short burst of memorial building to the New Zealand Wars in the second half of the 1920s, and which resulted in at least a dozen new memorials. This was partly stimulated by the War Graves Commission looking around for work after completing its Great War obligations; partly by a renewed interest in the wars stemming from the experiences of the First World War; and partly from local initiatives, such as the erection of the monument to the Boulcotts’ Farm incident in Lower Hutt, the erection of the gun turrets from the steamer Pioneer at Mercer and Ngaruawahia, and a monument at the Turuturmokai redoubt near Hawera.48 It is highly likely that this new-found interest was also in part a natural consequence of the recent publication of Cowan’s The New Zealand Wars, and the release of Rudall Hayward’s epic films Rewi’s Last Stand in 1925 and The Te Kooti Trail in 1927.

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The use and abuse of the New Zealand Wars As James Belich suggests, a major explanation for the general neglect of the historiographical neglect of the New Zealand Wars can be found in their not having been a very positive experience for Pakeha, who initially ignored them in the hope that the memories and wider implications of the wars would simply ‘go away’. The enormously powerful British expectation of victory pervaded early interpretations of the wars, even distorting the battles Pakeha had lost. Maori victories could be explained without giving much credit to Maori talent, good shooting, or battle discipline, and it was common to put defeats down to British disadvantages.49 Writing in the Cambridge History of the British Empire in 1933, James Hight, the Professor of History at Canterbury College, virtually dismissed the wars as having any importance whatsoever, arguing that ‘They were small in scale, taught few, if any, striking lessons in the art of war, and are scarcely entitled to be classed in the category of “war” as recognised by international law’. Yet as Hight acknowledged, in the sixty years since they had ended, the wars, rich in incidents of human interest, had also significantly influenced the national psyche: ‘they are a part of the more romantic field of New Zealand history, and will continue to influence her literature as they have done her economic and political life’.50 The legend of the New Zealand Wars essentially argued that the conflicts were an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of competition for land. While, according to the myth, Pakeha victory was inevitable, the demonstrations of courage and chivalry by both Maori and Pakeha gave rise to mutual respect. This subsequently moved the settler government to an enlightened, humanitarian native policy, the end result being harmonious race relations. This was also the basis for the wider myth of New Zealand race relations – sustained opposition to which emerged only in the early 1960s in works such as David Ausubel’s Fern and the Tiki and from educated urban political activists.51 Maori also bought into such myths, with the Maori Affairs Department’s Te Ao Hou periodical noting the significant currency the myth had within the Maori community as late as 1964.52 During and immediately after their conclusion, the wars were represented in a number of ways. Published at their height, Frederick Maning’s 1863 Old New Zealand was written to arouse settler society to the violence of Maori society in preparation for war. The defeat of Maori became a similarly important aspect of colonising propaganda, with literature for prospective settlers taking care to note the wars’ successful conclusion. This was all the more crucial in areas that marked the edge of the frontier, such as the King Country, and similarly [ 105 ]

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c­ ontributed to the historiographical neglect of Maori after 1870 in early general histories of New Zealand. Yet as Belich notes, the emphasis on Maori courage and chivalry that began during the wars was important for a number of reasons, chief among which was its obscuring of British defeats and their causes, not to mention British war crimes.53 As early as 1873, for example, the Battle of Orakau was being touted as evidence of racial harmony in New Zealand – James Alexander writing that it had shown ‘the native character in new and unexpected light, and [excited] a great desire of every true aboriginal protectionist that manly races should be preserved, improved, and settled in God’s wide earth’.54 This was highly significant for the country’s racial policy. As Edward Tregear himself later concluded, white New Zealanders ‘need not blush to his brotherhood with the beauties of Hawaii or the heroes of Orakau’.55 Such myths proved remarkably resilient. Unveiling the monument at the Rangiriri Cemetery in April 1927, the Minister of Internal Affairs Richard Bollard, for example, commented: in the days when the country was in its infancy, the redoubtable Maori was an antagonist of the British Sovereign, but to-day he was with us in all the traditions for which the British Empire stood. That was a testimony to British justice and all that it meant ... we treat the Maoris ... as we would ourselves, and in doing so we do not want applause, for our native race is on par with us. We make it so because of the patriotism, the steadfastness, and honesty in battle and in peace of this country’s first inhabitants.56

Others, such as Thomas Gudgeon and George Hamilton-Browne, saw the wars as a potentially rich source of romantic and patriotic stories, and indeed, this would be the primary motivation behind the bulk of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on the wars, not to mention numerous campaigns for memorials. The famed adventurer, artist, and soldier Gustavus Von Tempsky had himself contributed to this highly romantic representation, exhibiting his images of the wars in Auckland in 1867 in an apparent attempt to remain solvent.57 Stressing action and adventure for the local art market, according to art historian Leonard Bell, such works were also propaganda pieces that promoted colonisation, thereby demonstrating ‘the merits and demerits of European and Maori respectively’.58 From the 1890s the revision of Maori stereotypes through the popular rewriting of the New Zealand Wars was also defined by the belief that the wars offered a striking juxtaposition to the recent ‘evolution’ of both the country and the place that Maori had within it. The novelist Edith Grossman commented on this in 1901, when she concluded that much of the current Pakeha fascination with the Maori [ 106 ]

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past related not so much to Maori themselves but to the romantic representation of them as a reference point to earlier European activity in New Zealand.59 The historian T. Lindsay Buick made a similar observation a decade later in the introduction to his An Old New Zealander; or Te Rauparaha, the Napoleon of the South, where he commented that, while he had undertaken to write the book largely to satisfy frequent requests for a more comprehensive sketch of Te Rauparaha, he also felt such a project was important for its attempt to break away from earlier representations of Maori and champion the success of the civilising mission.60 Indeed, the story of Te Rauparaha fitted so neatly within Pakeha mythologies of the country finding its feet through the New Zealand Wars that by the 1920s Te Rauparaha was the subject of more biographies that any other New Zealander.61 A key trigger in the growth of popularity of this view was no doubt the publication in 1893, of Frederick Jackson Turner’s highly influential The Significance of the Frontier in American History which argued that the essence of American identity was created at the juncture between the civilisation of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. The drawing of such parallels between New Zealand and America were by no means new, with similarities having been noted during the wars themselves. As one Daily Southern Cross article asserted in 1863: The settlers in America had … every obstacle to contend with that we have, and a vast number that we know nothing of; they too had a country to conquer, covered with vast forests and impassable swamps and rivers; they had a native race to contend with, a race of courage certainly not inferior to that of the Maoris, and of cunning and strategy inferior to no nation under the sun. Most of us know how they fought; all of us are aware that they conquered in the end … We do not imagine for an instant that the men of British race are in any respect composed of softer material in New Zealand than they were in America; we have much the same work before us; all that is wanted is that it should be performed in the same spirit, and with the same energy.62

This comparison, in fact, had been made a decade earlier by Thomas Cholmondeley, who believed that the experience of colonising a new country had encouraged certain traits in Americans, and that the same would happen in New Zealand.63 Just as the frontier was seen to be a defining influence on the New Zealand character, from the early 1860s, the alleged superiority of colonial troops was a constant theme of settler writings about the New Zealand Wars, in which bold settler frontiersmen were thought to be a better match for the Maori than the imperial soldier.64 Such attitudes only grew in the face of antagonism towards London during the [ 107 ]

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w­ithdrawal of the imperial regiments between 1867 and 1870. Far from suggesting anti-Britishness, they implied that the self-reliance of the settler manifested a ‘better Britishness’ than regular imperial troops in the circumstances. Within decades this would be a fundamental thread of the broader myth of settler New Zealand – Westby Perceval noting in his preface to Pictorial New Zealand in 1895 that, while the wars had now come to an end, they ‘have left their stamp on the character of the colonists, and taught them lessons of courage and self-reliance, characteristics which are specially marked in the New Zealander’ – ­characteristics such as physical and mental strength, courage, resourcefulness, and practicality in rough tough conditions.65 Jock Phillips has similarly shown the transference of such ideas to the arena of sport, where the British Daily Telegraph put the sweeping victory of the All Blacks’ 1905 tour of Britain down to the ‘ethnological fact’ that the demands of settlement had resulted in a colonial physique and health that were vastly superior to the typical Britisher.66 Twenty years later the official historian of New Zealand in the First World War, Henry Drew, fell back on the same explanation in accounting for New Zealand’s impressive performance at Gallipoli and on the Western Front.67 Such ideas also contributed to the reinforcing of dominant stereo­ types of Maori – George Bell in 1904 describing the Maori warrior as having ‘all the cunning and duplicity of the Greek, the stubborn courage of the ancient Briton, and the stoical disdain for death of the North American Indian’.68 As the Evening Post similarly responded to reports of the Maori performance during the First World War: Why, indeed, should not the Maori fight well – the descendants of those proud and warlike people ... Ask the 18th Royal Irish who met the swarthy warriors at Omaranui, or the survivors of the Taranaki rangers, mostly old Devon men, who were badly beaten back by the Ngatimanipotos and Waikatos at the little village of Puketekanere whether the Maori can fight? Appeal to the British sailors and marines who stormed the Gate Pa, or the men of the 40th and the Naval Brigade who fought at Meremere and Rangiriri – all engagements which showed that the natives had a skill in constructing earthworks which no other race has ever surpassed – and which they were prepared to defend with desperate courage.69

In his official history The Maoris in the Great War (1926), Cowan took a similar line, his introduction proudly making a case for the inevitability of Maori glory on the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front.70 Pakeha pride in their ‘Maori brothers’ also lay behind the Auckland Civic League’s erection of a plaque on the remaining wall of the Auckland Barracks in 1915. Others saw the importance of the New Zealand Wars to the country’s identity in even grander terms – one [ 108 ]

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correspondent on the fortieth anniversary of von Tempsky’s death suggesting that the stories of Orakau, of Ruapekapeka, of Rangiriri, of the Gate Pa, and of the great Taranaki fights were New Zealand’s equivalent of the classic Greek legends.71 The veteran Gilbert Mair took up this theme at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Orakau six years later, arguing that that Orakau had borne ‘the same relation to the Maori Race as did classic Thermopylae to the ancient Greeks’ – a reference, the historian Keith Sinclair later noted, that would soon become a standard association of editorial writers with the Gallipoli landing.72 No one, however, seems to have been more convinced of the nationalistic importance of the New Zealand Wars than James Cowan, whose writing was dominated by the geographical and racial frontiers of the nineteenth century. Driving Cowan was his belief in the importance of a rich and usable past in a new society, and he set out to convince the New Zealand public – prone instead ‘to look over the seas to the lands of his forefathers for leadership’ – that New Zealand had its own ‘true epic of conquest and colonisation’ and rich store of boys’ own tales.73 Cowan came to this view early in his journalistic career, passionately arguing in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1899 that New Zealand’s history was rich fodder for the country’s literary community.74 Two years later he elaborated on this, suggesting that from the perspective of identity and patriotism New Zealand was lucky to have suffered the turbulent past that it had – it, unlike Australia, had a history.75 A major impetus to his writing of Hero Stories of New Zealand (1935) was equally his irritation at the publication of Oliver Gillespie’s New Zealand Short Stories (1930), in the introduction of which Gillespie apologised for what he believed was a lack of national outlook or distinctive atmosphere of New Zealand stories.76 Initially responding to Gillespie’s comment in the pages of the country’s newspapers, Cowan later issued a more formal response in the introduction to Hero Stories, concluded that an ‘elementary knowledge of this country’s history and its settlement conditions should have prevented such a palpably inaccurate summing up of our past’.77 Cowan’s first opportunities to write about the New Zealand Wars in detail were The Maoris of New Zealand (1910) and The Adventures of Kimble Bent (1911) – the former of which included a foreword by James Hight, the newly appointed Professor of History and Economics at Canterbury College. ‘Even if we accept one of the narrowest of definitions of History,’ wrote Hight, ‘we must acknowledge that the presence of the Maori bestows on New Zealand, as contrasted with Australia, great historical interest. The early trading adventures, and the wars … have given us much picturesque material and a military record, at times creditable to both Pakeha and Maori.’78 Far from emerging as a [ 109 ]

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dig at New Zealand’s colonial cousins across the Tasman, the apparent lack of war – a commonly held prerequisite for worthwhile history – had long been seen as an unfortunate shortcoming in Australia’s quest for the colonial romance.79 Cowan saw the most striking parallels to the New Zealand experience in America. As he noted in the opening pages of his two-volume The New Zealand Wars, which was commissioned in 1918 as an official history: The student of New Zealand history seeking for foreign parallels and analogies must turn to the story of the white conquest in America for the record of human endeavour that most closely approaches the early annals of these Islands. There certainly is a remarkable similarity, in all but landscape, between the old frontier life in British North America and the United States and the broad features of the violent contact between European and Maori in our country. The New England backwoodsman and the far-out plainsman were faced with many of the life-and-death problems which confronted our New Zealand settlers on the Taranaki and Waikato and East Coast borders.80

Cowan similarly demonstrated an affinity with the work of the nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman, with three of Parkman’s books – The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), and Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) – being recommended in the first few pages of The New Zealand Wars as illustrative of the likeness of experience. Cowan’s championing of such similarities, it should be noted, took place parallel to the nostalgic reinvention of the American West during which the theme of white – Indian relations – both friendship and conflict – became especially popular themes in art and literature, and with collectors.81 This frontier was equally fundamental to Cowan’s view of New Zealand’s race relations, with his writings essentially presenting the view that, through the process of interaction that took place on the frontier, Maori and Pakeha had become one people. In Cowan’s narrative, the wars had thus been the result of misunderstandings and bureaucratic blunder rather than Maori savagery or settler greed. Just as Maori had been forced into war, so too, it seemed, had settlers. The ultimate outcome of them, he concluded, was ‘a strong mutual respect, tinged with a real affection, which would never have existed but for this ordeal by battle’.82 His history of the wars accordingly overplayed Maori agency, sentimentalising their efforts as valiant and inspirational examples in an effort to raise interest in and respect for New Zealand’s Maori heritage. So plotted was this vision that, as Peter Gibbons notes, conflict between Maori and settlers becomes a formative rather than [ 110 ]

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destructive force.83 As a symbol of nationhood, this narrative would be echoed by Our Nation’s Story – a 1920s school history reader – and A. H. Reed’s Story of New Zealand (1945). At the conclusion of the second volume of The New Zealand Wars Cowan was similarly quick to point out that Maori fighting alongside their ‘Pakeha fellow-New Zealanders’ in the First World War had acted to cement the brotherhood that had been found on the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars; ‘descendants of Hone Heke’s warriors, of Te Kooti’s fierce followers, of the gallant Arawa, and the fighting Ngati-Porou suffered and achieved with their white compatriots on the shell-swept slopes of Gallipoli and in the trenches and red fields of France’.84 His concern to present what he saw as the ‘right’ image, however, obscured the reality that Waikato and Tuhao – two of the tribes most represented at Orakau – refused to serve in the First World War. Nor did the combat of the First World War bear much relation to the supposed traditionalism of Maori fighting during the New Zealand Wars. As Belich wryly notes, ‘it is impossible to imagine Kawiti, Rewi Maniapoto, or Titokowaru permitting their people to participate in the hopeless bayonet charges of Gallipoli’.85 Ultimately Cowan also failed in his bid to establish the wars as the basis of patriotism. The reason for this was simply that Maori success in the New Zealand Wars did not seem to lend itself so naturally to Pakeha romanticism. Belich concludes his own assessment of the wars in the Victorian Pakeha imagination: ‘The children played oldworld soldiers at Waterloo, not Rangiriri, and new-world soldiers at the Wagon Box, not Ngatapa’.86 By the time The New Zealand Wars was published, the ANZAC legend had also already shown itself to be far more adaptable to the myth of war experience, not to mention less controversial.87 The New Zealand Wars had even arguably been surpassed in nationalistic value by 1902, with the government and public alike happily contributing vast sums towards the memorialisation of the fallen of the South African War, while at the same time remaining close-fisted on the New Zealand Wars graves issue.88 Cowan, however, was not the last to tout the wars’ nationalistic value, and soon after completing his history he helped his friend Rudall Hayward portray the heroism of Maori at Orakau in Hayward’s silent film Rewi’s Last Stand. Hayward had established his production company Maori War Films Ltd in the early 1920s with the aim of exploiting the romantic vision of the country’s pioneering days while also educating New Zealanders about the richness of their country’s past.89 The key theme of Rewi’s Last Stand was the amalgamation of the races, and in typical Cowan fashion the story embodied the myth of racial harmony and amalgamation after the hard-won fight and gallant Maori resistance. [ 111 ]

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The heritage of the New Zealand Wars The government’s commissioning of an official history of the New Zealand Wars was the result of a number of factors, not least of which was recognition that veterans were dying with their ­experiences unrecorded.90 Indeed, this had been a recurrent theme at unveilings and reunions for many years, with a number of interest group having lobbied the government to record veterans’ memories and ‘rescue from oblivion’ the historical incidents and associations before it was too late.91 Such concern about the need to preserve the country’s ‘rapidly disappearing history’ recurred throughout Cowan’s writing. Believing that personal memories rather than official documents were the ‘real’ voice of history, for Cowan, the death of the participants e­ ffectively meant the loss of the ‘real’ history. In writing The New Zealand Wars he accordingly spent months in the field interviewing veterans from both sides, listening to personal accounts and seeking out diaries.92 Sites and places were equally important as tangible connections to the past. Believing that ‘an index to a country’s amor patriae is the degree of loving care bestowed upon the places where its ancestral fighters suffered and bled’, Cowan thus saw the care of sites as an important thread in the development of patriotism, and urged children to seek out and explore historical sites.93 As he later elaborated in Hero Stories of New Zealand, ‘They are a perpetual incentive to a spirit of duty, bravery and comradeship’.94 Such was the perceived power of place that he similarly believed that native-born individuals unconsciously developed patriotism with the soil, and – similarly to Statham – that the care of graves was a local responsibility.95 Cowan’s belief in the value of sites had grown out of his own association with them. Much of his childhood had been spent on the family farm on the old site of the Orakau Battle, upon which he reflected in The Maoris of New Zealand, published in 1910: Nothing now remains to mark the site of that unforgettable fight. The peach-trees that grew so abundantly there in the old days had ­disappeared – cut up for fire wood – when I last visited that place. That sacred spot, my father’s old farm of Orakau, with its fine groves of Maori planted peaches and cherries, and its relics of vanishing Maoridom, is my earliest memory of childhood. Some of the peach-trees alongside the road were riddled with bullets; the holes made by projectiles of those days of big-bores were easily to be found; and Enfield bullets were sometimes to be picked out from the tree-trunks. A few years after the battle, when my father settled in that then remote and disturbed district, one of the furthest-out pioneers, relics of the fight were often ploughed up.96

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Cowan’s fascination with the landscape of the New Zealand Wars remained throughout his life, and he placed much store in visiting the sites of battles and engagements, especially when accompanied by those who had fought there and could describe in detail the actions in situ. As a part of his research for his history of the wars, for example, he visited most of the battlefields, sites, and buildings associated with the campaigns, often in the company of veterans.97 The most famous of these was undoubtedly the guerrilla soldier Gilbert Mair, who, well into his seventies, accompanied Cowan on a number of extended trips into the Uraweras.98 Helping Cowan to develop a mental picture of events ‘on the ground’, volumes of notes were taken down for comparison with documentary evidence, helping, Cowan claimed, to clear up many disputed and obscure historical points.99 Perhaps not surprisingly, in the published volumes, battlefields were given an almost mythic quality, with events often introduced through vivid geographical description. The richness of such descriptions not only enabled readers to access an historical New Zealand landscape but, as Michael King noted, allowed the book to be used as a travel guide to the wars.100 In conducting his research on sites associated with the wars, Cowan also sought to document the condition of important sites, which he presented – along with recommendations for action – to the Under Secretary of Internal Affairs as something of a preservation plan. All too aware of the impact of settlement’s advance on such sites, he believed that, unless measures were soon taken, future generations would search in vain for the location of famous events in New Zealand’s history.101 The resultant forty-page commentary offers an interesting insight into both Cowan’s perspective on the wars and his views of the value of historic sites.102 Of the forty-five sites listed, there is little evidence of bias towards sites of Maori origin as was generally the case with the work of Percy Smith and Best, but rather an attempt to balance them with sites of European origin. That said, Cowan also shared many of the Eurocentric views of his colleagues when it came to sites of importance to Maori, disregarding the tapu status of Porere Pa (Te Kooti’s last redoubt), which he rationalised by claiming that its historical significance warranted its preservation. Other aspects of his approach to sites were more progressive. In addition to seeking the preservation of New Zealand War sites, he also sought to highlight the importance of the sites and buildings already reserved through the addition of interpretative tablets.103 Similarly, while the handful of historic sites already protected under the Scenery Preservation Act or as a result of local effort had generally been protected because of either historical association or scenic value, Cowan took a more progressive approach, pushing for the preservation of the Pontoko redoubt, for example, for [ 113 ]

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both its historical significance and because it was ‘still a good specimen of the substantial earthworks used by the troops’.104 While perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of the preservation of historic places associated with the wars, Cowan was not the first to recognise their historical value or to argue for their preservation. In the immediate aftermath of the wars, there were a few unsuccessful efforts to have sites preserved. The earliest seems to have been the 1868 campaign of Gate Pa and Te Papa residents to halt the Auckland Provincial Council’s sale of the site of the Gate Pa redoubt. Fearing that private ownership would result in the removal of all traces of the pa and redoubt, they argued that as the locus of such bravery and gallantry ‘we should protect to our children’s interest and affection the remembrance of a place undying in the page of history’.105 While the sale was stayed, nine years later another attack was launched on the pa, this time by the Tauranga District Highway Board, which moved to level the earthworks owing to the dangers posed by the dilapidated remnants of the pa, eventually cutting a road through the centre of the site. The outcry was widespread, with the site having grown to become one of the most popular tourist spots in the district – a development that expanded rapidly after the Earl of Pembroke’s visit to the site during his 1868 tour, and Alfred Duke of Edinburgh taking a particular interest in the pa on the first royal tour of the colony in 1870.106 By the late 1870s, it had accordingly become a significant recreational site with Tauranga locals, many of whom made the three-mile journey to picnic and see the remains of the defences. As a result of such popularity the site was finally created a public reserve in late 1880.107 Many other famous battle sites held a similar fascination for visitors, with newspapers and travel guides of the 1870s and 1880s littered with travellers’ accounts of visiting battlefields and exploring the ‘rifle pits, ditches and embankments still testifying to the struggle with the Maori’.108 Tourists’ interest in sites centred on them as locations of ‘historical incidents’ – spots where ‘bloody battles’ had been fought, and where unmarked mounds of earth inevitably indicated the place where some fallen hero or Maori rebel now lay ‘mouldering in the dust’.109 Such was their romantic aura, noted the Hawera & Normandy Star, that in the future ‘the interest attaching to the sites of the old battles, and the graves of the Maoris who fought there, will be as of absorbing a kind as that which in England brings visitors from all parts of the country to view an Anglo Saxon harrow [sic] or a buried Roman city’.110 Similar suggestions were made by Donne soon after the establishment of the Department of Tourism – Donne arguing that New Zealand should heed the example of older countries where battlegrounds and other such sites were jealously cared for as the property of the nation. [ 114 ]

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In addition to proving valuable in the formation of patriotism and national spirit, he argued ‘Overseas visitors to a country are often far more deeply interested in historic associations of the land than are its inhabitants. Local history and romance have a value which very closely approached that of scenery and in this colony we have all the elements which should make it one of the most interesting countries on the traveller’s world-route.’111 Tied up with this was his hope that some of the more interesting New Zealand Wars sites might be brought under the protection of the Scenery Preservation Act – something the Minister of Tourist and Health Resorts, Joseph Ward was in agreement with, having forwarded at least two very detailed recommendations to the Commission on blockhouses and redoubts throughout the North Island.112 Yet in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, those who sought to preserve the landscape of the New Zealand Wars were still a small minority. Keen to leave the wars and the instability of the frontier in the past, most New Zealanders wanted to see sites cleared for settlement, agriculture, and development. Following the departure of the army from Auckland’s Albert Barracks in 1871, for example, the site came under the jurisdiction of the city improvement commissioners, who set part of the area aside as a public reserve and laid out the remaining land as streets and sections. Following a competition to find a suitable layout for the park, in the early 1880s most of the old barracks were removed to make way for paths and gardens.113 The conversion of battle sites into parks was, in fact, a common response to the landscape of war, where the conversion to sites of recreation was seen as both the ultimate demonstration that the wars were over, and as something of an unofficial memorial to the sacrifice made during them.114 The Defence Department, which had jurisdiction over most of the remaining blockhouses, was similarly uninterested in any notion of preservation, fearing that, if it preserved one site, it would have to accept demands for the preservation of others.115 The Department of Lands and Survey likewise restricted its preservation action to photographing sites that its officers encountered in the course of their everyday duties.116 Yet while standard, such acts of transformation were not universally embraced, and when, for example, in 1887 the Whanganui Borough Council pulled down the Rutland Stockade, public protests decried the move as an ‘act of civic vandalism’.117 As such expressions of sentiment grew, by 1920 a sizeable number of New Zealand Wars sites had been preserved as a result of local and community action. There were a number of motivations behind this. While they were contextualised within the growing importance of the myth of the New Zealand Wars, the most widespread factor was mounting concern at the [ 115 ]

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10  The reconstructed (in concrete) look-out tower of the Manaia Redoubt, ca. 1930

loss of historical associations – the general perception being that the loss of material associations with the past threatened the preservation of memory itself. This was an important influence behind the renewed interest in constructing memorials to the wars early in the twentieth century, which was also influenced by growing recognition that effort to collect veterans’ memories needed to be undertaken before it was too late. Veterans themselves would be one of the loudest-voiced for such action – one former combatant concluding that the failure to preserve the memory of the wars was the result of two simple factors, ‘utter ­callousness and £ s d’.118 [ 116 ]

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By the early 1910s the remnants of the New Zealand Wars landscape were also increasingly being viewed by a broad cross-section of society as markers of progress and change. One of the most clear-cut examples of this was the marking of the opening of the railway to Tauranga in June 1924 with a special issue of the Bay of Plenty Times devoted to the story of Gate Pa – the savagery of the battle serving as a poignant juxtaposition to the progress signified by the coming of the railway. For other communities sites were important as mnemonic devices or were closely tied to perceptions of place. In Taranaki town of Waverley, for example, the Wairoa redoubt – which in the early 1900s stood in the main street of the town – was preserved because of its valuable associations with both the ‘the troublous times of the sixties’ and the progress of the community since.119 The Armed Constabulary redoubt in Manaia was viewed in a similar way. Though it had been built in peacetime, the redoubt’s location in the centre of the Manaia town park saw it become an iconic site, and by the early 1900s the interior of the redoubt had been laid out in lawn and flowerbeds, and was flanked by two well-preserved blockhouses.120 In addition to this the community was also immensely proud of the redoubt’s reputation as one of the best examples of an Armed Constabulary post – a view endorsed by Cowan.121 Accordingly, when in 1910 the original redoubt was severely damaged by a storm, it was replaced by a concrete replica ‘for the sake of old remembrances of the war time’.122 As the celebration of local jubilees and key battles grew in frequency from the mid-1910s, so too did local interest in sites associated with them – especially as connections to the myth of the New Zealand Wars. Auckland, Taranaki, and Tauranga each staked their claims to having the most famous and important associations. Local pride also played a part in many individual efforts to preserve sites, and, as interest in the wars grew, many sympathetic farmers sought to stem the damage to buildings or earthworks on their land. The Omata and Bell block stockades, for example, were fenced off by the early 1910s, while in other instances farmers sought to mark earthworks and possible graves by planting trees along their edges. Cowan’s father had made such efforts at Orakau in the late 1860s – erecting a picket fence around unmarked graves on the family farm – while Gilbert Mair noted that other farmers would courteously permit visitors to wander their fields and endeavour to discover traces of the trenches and other earthworks.123 When, in 1909, the government disposed of a plot on which rested a small dilapidated cemetery containing soldiers who had fallen during the capture of Otapawa Pa north of Whanganui in 1866, the farmer who purchased the land similarly took it upon himself to tidy up the plot and erect a small triangular obelisk on the site.124 [ 117 ]

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All in all, however, preservation remained a rarity, and well into the 1910s sites were still commonly being cleared with little or no consideration of their possible historic value. Most farmers simply did not understand sites on their land as historic. In other instances sites had been reclaimed by nature so quickly following the wars that farmers were totally unaware why they kept ploughing up bullets and bones.125 The state, for its part, remained unconvinced of the strength of local interest in historic sites – the Under Secretary of Internal Affairs James Hislop suggesting that the default response to calls for preservation of New Zealand War sites be limited to the taking of a photographic record alone.126 While Hislop misjudged local interest here, many sites did have a precarious existence, and in 1919 the Waverley redoubt – long valued for its rich historical associations – finally met its end when the Waverley local council proposed levelling the site to erect a new post office. Cowan pleaded against ‘an undesirable interference with the only historic spot Waveley possesses’; however, for a small country town like Waverley, progress it seems, could not come soon enough.127 Indeed, despite Cowan’s insistence that historic preservation should be a local responsibility, by this stage it was becoming clear that even under the best conditions there were limits to what individuals and communities could achieve. Calls for government assistance to preserve New Zealand Wars sites had grown rapidly following the establishment of the War Graves Department in 1912, and before the end of the decade even Statham was beginning to understand the appeal of historic sites and buildings. Visiting the Pukekohe East Church on ‘grave business’ in early 1919, she was surprised at the amount of evidence that remained of the battle, including trenches and a riddle of bullet holes throughout the church. Writing to Hislop on the matter soon after, she suggested that, as an ‘historical relic of the past ... a record for all who passed by to see’, something should be done to preserve or mark the spot.128 Having earlier come to this realisation themselves, Pukekohe locals had already unsuccessfully sought government assistance with the church’s renovation, and Statham’s recommendation met with a similar result – Hislop refused the request on the grounds that the department was not in the business of erecting battle site monuments. A few months earlier, during the course of research for his history, Cowan had put forward a similar idea, suggesting that the government-owned site of the Alexandra redoubt could form an evocative monument to the war days. At the time the site was for sale and the idea was ignored. When, however, the farmer who purchased the site then pulled down the blockhouse to build pig pens, the government’s standoffish position was looking increasingly untenable, and [ 118 ]

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the Minister of Internal Affairs had little choice but to publicly agree on the desirability of introducing legislation along the lines of the Britain’s Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act.129 The voices of support for such an idea only increased soon after when the French government announced the selection of 140 sites to be preserved as monuments to the First World War. Referring to this in a letter to Hislop soon after, Cowan simply concluded that historic sites in New Zealand were ‘in no degree less worthy of patriotic pride and care than those in France’.130

Conclusion The collection and preservation of the heritage of the New Zealand Wars was a watershed in the history of heritage preservation in New Zealand. While small in scale, and often finding only limited success, such efforts highlighted the fundamental power that place in particular could have on both the local and national psyche. Like memorial construction, preservation of the historic landscape was not an automatic, unthinking reaction, but a deliberate and often hotly debated response to the perceived importance of maintaining memory. The particular political and intellectual contexts within which this occurred are fundamental to understanding this response, while interest in the preservation and visiting of New Zealand War sites was both a reflection of, and reflected in, beliefs about the importance of the wars to New Zealand’s present. Most colonists remained unconvinced by assertions that New Zealand had a rich and fascinating past, and instead conformed to the view that history was something that happened in Britain, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Yet the fact remains that between the end of the 1890s and the mid-1920s, interest in the landscape of the New Zealand Wars grew, and it grew rapidly. Within this emergent interest three themes stand out. The first is the growth of local identification with sites far outshone any perceived value of the wars as being nationally important. Sometimes, such as in the case of the Manaia redoubt or Gate Pa, this was driven by broader community pride in their apparent ‘national’ status or importance, while in others, such as the broad-ranging efforts of James Cowan, the motivations were more personal and individual. While the early twentieth century did see the growth of state interest in the preservation of the memory of the New Zealand Wars, this interest manifested almost exclusively in the expansion of traditional forms of memorialisation, which were seen to convey more effectively the intended sentiment. Battlefield ruins and crude colonial buildings were simply not as evocative as classical architecture and a carefully worded inscription. The [ 119 ]

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second is that while the quest for preservation was initially dominated by veterans, as the country progressed and the myth of the wars grew, they were increasingly viewed as sites of recreation and tourism. The final point is to acknowledge the crucial influence of anniversaries as nostalgic points of reference for the preservation cause. This was not unique to the New Zealand Wars, or for that matter to New Zealand. Rather, as George Mosse has noted, Europe-wide it took a decade after the end of the First World War before the mass of reflections and memories began to make their appearance.131

Notes 1 For background see James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland 1986). 2 For example, Ian Hernon, Massacre and Retribution: Forgotten Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Stroud 1998), p. 48; Nigel Prickett, ‘Forgotten Conflict that Made Us Who We are Today’, www.nzherald.co.nz/anzac-day/news/article. cfm?c_id=773&objectid=10378632, accessed 12 July 2012. 3 www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/_2001/news_releases/02_05_01a.html, accessed 6 February 2009. 4 James Belich, ‘Titokowaru, Riwha’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t101/1, accessed 25 April 2011. 5 For an overview of the preservation of Civil War battlefields and sites, see Richard Sellars, ‘Pilgrim Places: Civil War Battlefields, Historic Preservation, and America’s First National Military Parks, 1863–1900’, CRM Journal, 2:1 (Winter 2005), pp. 23–52; Richard Sellars, ‘A Very Large Array: Early Federal Historic Preservation – the Antiquities Act, Mesa Verde, and the National Park Service Act’, Natural Resources Journal, 47 (Spring 2007), pp. 267–328; Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton 2003), especially pp. 57–114. For Canadian preservation of 1812 War sites, see Carl Benn, Historic Fort York: 1793–1993 (Toronto 1993); Christopher Taylor, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Canada’s National Historic Parks and Sites (Montréal 1990). 6 Thomas Gudgeon, The Defenders of New Zealand (Auckland 1887), p. 158. 7 Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride: New Zealand War Memorials (Wellington 1990), p. 22. 8 Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World (Hartford 1897), P. 321–2. 9 Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, p. 19. 10 Ibid., p. 24. 11 Daily Southern Cross, 13 June 1864. 12 Ibid. 13 See Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, pp. 240–2. This view is certainly supported by comments from a number of correspondents writing in the mid-1860s. See for example Daily Southern Cross, 24 June 1864 and 13 February 1865, both of which essentially argue that there is little but pain to be gained from remembering the disastrous campaign at Gate Pa. 14 Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, p. 21. 15 Bay of Plenty Times, 18 April 1877 and 25 July 1877. 16 Cowan, ‘National monuments – Waikato’, Cowan to Hislop, 18 June 1920, IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 17 Hawera & Normanby Star, 27 April 1886; Taranaki Herald, 20 March 1886; Wanganui Herald, 4 November 1884 and 28 April 1886.

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The art of forgetting 18 The call for a memorial ‘for the widows and orphans of those who have fallen’ was suggested by George Grey in 1865, but to no avail. It was raised again three years later when the government set out to sell the site (Daily Southern Cross, 26 February 1865 and 25 February 1868). The idea of the memorial church itself first arose in 1882 (Bay of Plenty Times, 7 March 1882 and 22 May 1882). 19 Taranaki Herald, 20 March 1886; Wanganui Herald, 28 April 1886. 20 Hawera & Normanby Star, 27 April 1886; Wanganui Herald, 4 November 1884. 21 Auckland Star, 2 April 1927 and 2 April 1935. 22 Taranaki Herald, 7 April 1894. 23 For example see Waikato Times, 2 September 1882; Taranaki Herald, 14 September 1886; Evening Post, 22 May 1895; Fitzpartrick to unknown, 22 July 1894, IA1, 7/4/21, ANZ. 24 Downing Street to Earl of Glasgow, 3 October 1893, IA1, 7/4/21, ANZ; Bay of Plenty Times, 13 September 1893. 25 The St James’s Gazette, 11 September 1893. 26 See IA1, 7/4/206, ANZ, for details. 27 For details of Boer War memorials see Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, pp. 46–67. 28 Wanganui Herald, 7 September 1908. 29 See, for example, Taranaki Herald, 17 November 1904; Hawera & Normanby Star, 15 August 1907; Evening Post, 21 January 1909. 30 Hawera & Normanby Star, 15 October 1907. 31 Otago Witness, 4 November 1908. 32 Carr to Ward, 21 February 1911, IA1, 7/4/206, ANZ; Bertram Stokes, A History of the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship in New Zealand (Auckland 1980), p. 6. 33 Alma Simmonds, Fifty Years of the Victoria League in Auckland, New Zealand (Auckland 1960), p. 3. 34 Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, p. 31. 35 For details of this, see Carr to Ward, 21 February 1911, IA1, 7/4/206, ANZ, and Statham to Hislop, 6 September 1915, IA1, 7/4/2, ANZ. 36 Hislop to Russell, 14 August 1912, IA1, 7/4/206, ANZ. 37 Statham to Hislop, 6 September 1915, IA1, 7/4/2, ANZ. 38 Statham to Foulds, 8 May 1911, ibid. 39 Statham to Short, February 1914, ibid. 40 ‘Summary Report to the League’s Head Office in England’, IA1, 7/4/206, ANZ. 41 Ibid. 42 IA1, 7/4/2, cited in Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, pp. 35–6. 43 Bay of Plenty Times, 12 July 1909. 44 Gilbert Mair, The Story of Gate Pa (Tauranga 1937), p. 79. Hori Ngatai’s monument in the same cemetery was erected for similarly imperial reasons, as he was seen as ‘a man who upheld the law and the sovereignty of England since the battles of Gate Pa and Te Ranga down to the time of his death’. 45 Cited in Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, p. 37. 46 Ibid. 47 Thomson to Hislop, 20 January 1917, IA1, 7/4/38, ANZ. 48 Statham, to Hislop, 18 November 1914, ibid.; unknown to Hislop, 29 January 1924, IA1, 7/4/128, ANZ; AJHR, H-22, 1919, p. 12. 49 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, pp. 240–2, 312. 50 James Hight, ‘The Maori Wars, 1843–1872’, in John Holland Rose, Arthur Percival Newton, and Ernest Alfred Benians (eds) The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. VII, part II, New Zealand (London 1933), p. 120. 51 Olssen, ‘Where to from Here?’, p. 63. 52 ‘Reflections on Battle Centenaries’, Te Ao Hou, 48 (September 1964), pp. 34–7. 53 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, pp. 319–20. 54 Alexander, Bush Fighting, p. 159. 55 Tregear, The Aryan Maori, p. 103.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 56 Dominion, 14 April 1927. 57 Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori, 1840–1914 (Melbourne 1992), p. 124. 58 Ibid., p. 137. For more on the representations of the New Zealand Wars in art, see pp. 94–146. 59 Otago Witness, 9 October 1901. 60 T. Lindsay Buick, An Old New Zealander, or, Te Rauparaha, the Napoleon of the South (London 1911), pp. vii–viii. 61 Olssen, ‘Where to from Here?’, p. 56. 62 Daily Southern Cross, 15 July 1863. 63 Cholmondeley, Ultima Thule, pp. 3–4 and 324–5. 64 For example William Fox, The War in New Zealand (London 1866), pp. 247–50. 65 Perceval, Pictorial New Zealand, 1895, p. ix. This image of heroic settler history featured heavily in works such as Gudgeon’s Defenders of New Zealand, and later Cowan’s Hero Stories of New Zealand. 66 Cited in Jock Phillips, ‘75 years since Gallipoli’, in A. Anderson, J. Binney et al., Towards 1990: Seven Leading Historians Examine Significant Aspects of New Zealand History (Wellington 1989), p. 93. Also see Jock Phillips, ‘Rugby, War and the Mythology of the New Zealand Male’, NZJH, 18:2 (1984), pp. 83–103. 67 H. T. B. Drew, The War Effort of New Zealand (Auckland 1923), p. 1. 68 Bell, Mr Oseba’s Last Discovery, p. 134. 69 Evening Post, 11 September 1915. 70 James Cowan, The Maoris in the Great War: A History of the New Zealand Native Contingent and Pioneer Battalion: Gallipoli 1915, France and Flanders 1916–1918 (Auckland 1926), pp. 1–8. 71 Hawera & Normanby Star, 26 September 1908. 72 Gilbert Mair, Jubilee Souvenir of Battle of Orakau: Fought March 31st, April 1st and 2nd, 1864 (Hamilton 1914), p. 4, Sinclair, A Destiny Apart, p. 171. Others described Orakau as New Zealand’s Gettysburg: Evening Post, 7 March 1914. 73 James Cowan, Hero Stories of New Zealand (Wellington 1935), pp. viii–ix. 74 James Cowan, ‘The Poetic Side of the Maori’, NZIM, 1:1 (1 October 1899), p. 37. 75 Cowan, ‘Ranolf and Amohia’, p. 216. 76 O. N. Gillespie, New Zealand Short Stories (London 1930), p. v. 77 Cowan, Hero Stories of New Zealand, p. viii. The significance of Cowan’s perspective on identity was illustrated by the journalist and writer Alan Mulgan, who in his The Making of a New Zealander (1958) noted that, as a child growing up in the 1890s, he – like most children – was taught that New Zealand had little history worth writing about. ‘We did not know that the deeds of American scouts and rangers had been paralleled in our own country, only a few years before our settlement was founded. I did not fully realize this my-self till, years afterwards, I read the history of the Maori wars by my friend James Cowan.’ Alan Mulgan, The Making of a New Zealander (Wellington 1958), p. 30. 78 Hight in James Cowan, The Maoris of New Zealand (Christchurch 1910), p. ix. Highlighting as it did the apparent exceptionality of the New Zealand colonial experience, Cowan once again employed the Australian comparison in the opening lines of his The New Zealand Wars (1922), where he begins ‘Australia’s pioneering work was of a different quality to ours, mainly because the nation-makers of our neighbour encountered no powerful military race of indigenes to dispute the right of way’. James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period (Wellington 1922–23), vol. 1, p. 1. 79 Graeme Davison, ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend’, 8 September 2009, www. anu.edu.au/discoveranu/content/podcasts/rethinking_the_australian_legend/, pod​ cast, accessed 15 June 2012. 80 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 1. 81 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American culture (New York 1991), pp. 400–1. 82 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 3.

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The art of forgetting 83 Gibbons, ‘Non-fiction’, in Strum (eds.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, p. 63. 84 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 2, p. 502. 85 James Belich, ‘War’, in Cohn Davis and Peter Lineham (eds), The Future of the Past: Themes in New Zealand History (Palmerston North 1991), p. 130. 86 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, p. 320. 87 See George Mosse, ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21:4 (October 1986), pp. 500–1. 88 Lang, NZPD, 120, 18 July 1902, p. 460. The issue was raised again on 15 September 1904. 89 New Zealand Herald, 30 July 1925. Two years after Rewi’s Last Stand, Hayward released a second film, The Te Kooti Trail. For information on both films, see Martin Blythe, Naming the Other: Images of the Maori in New Zealand Film and Television (Metuchen 1994), pp. 34–9. 90 The other reasons were the belief that existing histories of the Wars were fragmentary and consisted principally of personal narratives, and the belief that such a work would be a guide for future generations, who, it was argued, would ‘treasure every scrap of our early fighting history and pioneering adventure in settlement, surveying, gold mining, and coast trading’. AJHR, H-22, 1919, p. 12. 91 Hawera & Normandy Star, 7 June 1897 and 3 December 1907. 92 Cowan, Hero Stories of New Zealand, p. x; Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. v–vi. According to Chris Hilliard, who has analysed a number of Cowan’s drafts in some detail, on a number of occasions Cowan even rejected written accounts as inaccurate in the light of oral accounts. He also seems to have biased Maori over Pakeha oral accounts. Chris Hilliard, ‘Island Stories: The Writing of New Zealand History, 1920–1940’, MA, University of Auckland, 1997, p. 40. 93 Cowan to Hislop, June 1919, IA1, 13/27/50; Enzed Junior, 11 June 1938. 94 Cowan, Hero Stories of New Zealand, p. ix. 95 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 3; Auckland Star, 4 May 1937. 96 Cowan, The Maoris of New Zealand, p. 298. 97 AJHR, H-22, 1920, pp. 4–5. 98 Ron Crosby, Gilbert Mair: Te Kooti’s Nemesis (Auckland 2004), pp. 277–8. 99 AJHR, H-22, 1919, p. 11. 100 Michael King, ‘Introduction’, in James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (Wellington 1983), p. v. 101 Cowan to Hislop, June 1919, IA1, 13/27/50, ANZ. 102 Cowan’s report was passed on to Hislop who planned to take action to get the sites reserved in the next session of the house; but, owing to end of the First World War and the government becoming involved in soldier resettlements, no action was actually taken. 103 Cowan, ‘National monuments – Waikato’, Cowan to Hislop, 18 June 1920, IA1, 158/193, AZN. 104 Cowan, undated notes, IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 105 Daily Southern Cross, 25 February 1868. 106 Daily Southern Cross, 3 April 1868 and 20 December 1870. 107 Bay of Plenty Times, 23 December 1880. 108 G. T. Chapman, Chapman’s Traveller’s Guide Through New Zealand (Wellington 1872), p. 30. Also see, for example, Russell Duncan’s trip up the Ruakituri River in early 1901 hoping to identify the site of the infamous Ruakituri engagement. Russell Duncan, The Fight at Ruakituri (Dunedin 1939), pp. 7–8. 109 Bay of Plenty Times, 28 March 1877; Otago Witness, 6 April 1893. 110 Hawera & Normandy Star, 7 June 1897. 111 Donne, AJHR, H-2, 1903, p. iv. 112 Ward to Percy Smith, 2 May 1904. LS70/20/2, ANZ, and Ward to Percy Smith, 17 January 1906, LS70/20/21, ANZ. 113 Daily Southern Cross, 27 August 1872; Otago Witness, 1 April 1882.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 114 This, for example, was a common theme in discussion around the creation of Albert Park in Auckland, and the Marsland Hill memorial reserve in New Plymouth. Otago Witness, 1 April 1882; Taranaki Herald, 4 March 1895. 115 Seddon to Donne, 27 January 1905; Robison to Ward, 28 July 1905, LS70/9, ANZ. 116 Poverty Bay Herald, 10 March 1899; Otago Witness, 21 September 1899; Hawera & Normanby Star, 15 October 1907. 117 L. J. B. Chapple and H. C. Veitch, ‘Wanganui ’ (Hawera 1939), pp. 132–3. 118 Hawera & Normanby Star, 2 November 1907. 119 Percy Smith notes, 11 May 1905, LS70/20/21, ANZ; Wanganui Herald, 5 April 1909. 120 Cowan, n.d. IA1, 158/193, part 1a, ANZ. 121 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 2, pp. 516–17. 122 Hawera & Normanby Star, 1 April 1910 and 6 May 1910. 123 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, pp. 401–2, 406; Mair, The Story of Gate Pa, p. 67; Cowan also noted a similar effort by the farmer and veteran who owned the site of the imperial redoubt at Manawapou. 124 Hawera & Normanby Star, 30 October 1908. 125 See for example Hawera & Normanby Star, 15 October 1907. 126 For details of this discussion see IA1, 13/27/50, ANZ. 127 Cowan to Hislop, Untitled Report, 18 June 1918, IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 128 Statham to Hislop, August 1920, IA1, 7/4/21, ANZ. 129 AJHR, H-22, 1919, pp. 10–11. 130 Cowan to Hislop, June 1919, IA1, 13/27/50, ANZ. 131 Mosse, ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience’, p. 501.

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History from below, or, When did parochialism become a dirty word?

In mid-1913 a letter published in Wellington’s Dominion newspaper drew attention to a pair of elm trees that stood where construction of the new parliamentary buildings was about to begin. ‘It may not be known to the present generation’, remarked the writer, ‘that where these two trees are growing is the site of the home of the first white man to live in Wellington. Here, in a manuka whare, with a roof thatched with toitoi, lived one Richard Barrett, or “Dicky Barrett,” as he was familiarly known at the time.’ Barrett had been there in late 1839, continued the correspondent, when the explorer James Coutts Crawford arrived at the end of his exploration of the region’s western coast. Considering the significance of the site, it was concluded, the spot deserved to be commemorated by a marble slab or some suitable monument. A few days later a response was published under the name of ‘Ira Tahu’ – the pseudonym of Elsdon Best. Turning to Barrett’s notebooks and diaries, Best quickly picked apart the earlier correspondent’s claims. Barrett had not been living in Port Nicholson (Wellington Harbour) when Crawford arrived as, he had been away with Wakefield on a trip to the Taranaki. Nor was it known for certain when Crawford had arrived, as, since he was ‘a careless writer’, his notebook gave no dates. And as for the marble slab, Best concluded, ‘it is hard to see what Richard [Barrett] did for early Wellington. He was not the first white man to live here, for Robinson had been here two years at that date. David Scott claimed to have lived in a hut somewhere about Lambtonquay, as a trader, from 1831 to 1834, as agent for a Sydney firm, and George Young, a whaler, claimed to have lived at Thorndon in 1834 and 1835.’1 Trivial as the matter may have been, Best’s knowledge of the topic and associated sources illustrated the detail mastered by many working within the amateur historical tradition in early twentieth-century New Zealand – a time when little professional interest was being shown in [ 125 ]

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New Zealand history. Historiographically, however, ‘popular heritage’ such as that practised by the early historical societies has been viewed disparagingly. Jock Phillips, for example, has criticised the writers of early local histories for their lack of interest in the larger questions of Pakeha society and its values, while James Belich suggests that, with the exception of Otago, ‘the breadth of impact of the “Old Settler” movement does not seem to have been huge after the 1900s’.2 Certainly many of the accusations thrown at early local history stick; however, as is argued in this chapter, at a time when the ‘profession’ was more interested in so called ‘real’ history, the amateur historical tradition laboured to record, collect, and preserve the material remnants of the country’s past.

The rise and rise of local history Regional and local identities were a thorn in the side of New Zealand’s claims of national identity from the very beginning. During the ­country’s Jubilee celebrations in 1890, where the central theme of ­ celebration was European progress in the new land and the ­apparent attainment of a sense of maturity, journalists and academics alike struggled with the ongoing influence of the provinces. ‘There is no part of the world’, wrote the editor of the New Zealand Times, ‘where the individuation of places is so pronounced as in New Zealand … town rivals town, and hamlet, hamlet, each one fights to the bitter end for its own hand’. New Zealand ‘jubilating in sections was a sorry sight’, remarked another observer, who called for the establishment of a single national day – the ‘discordant mess’ of rival celebrations being seen as a symptom of the county’s obstinate provincialism.3 Indeed, perhaps the best demonstration of the pervasive power of the local was in the fevered response to the very suggestion of a single ‘national’ day. While Auckland claimed that the most appropriate date would be 29 January, the day on which Lieutenant William Hobson had arrived at the Bay of Islands in 1840, Wellingtonians argued that the landing of the first settlers from the Aurora at Petone on 22 January 1840 was a more appropriate date, as this was the beginning of organised European settlement in the colony.4 In desperation, Governor Onslow was brought in to resolve the matter, concluding that as 29 January had generally been known as the official date it would remain so, but that henceforth it would be a national holiday, and 22 January would be a Wellington holiday.5 This did little to halt the ­mudslinging – Auckland accusing Wellington of impudence, while Wellington countered that Auckland had a ‘parchment or sheepskin ceremonial birthday, a thing of red tape and sealing wax, with firing [ 126 ]

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and salutes and waving of cocked hats’, while Wellington celebrated the real ‘flesh and blood, human jubilee’.6 Despite such differences, Jubilee celebrations across the country all venerated the sacrifices of the pioneers. Gatherings of old colonists had been increasingly common from the early 1870s, following the establishment of early colonist societies in the main centres.7 Formed principally as platforms for social gatherings, and to assist early settlers in ‘distressed circumstances’, these societies also sought to claim pride of place in provincial and national narratives of s­ ettlement. In Wellington, for example, membership was initially open only to those who had arrived between Colonel Wakefield’s arrival in the Marlborough Sounds on 17 August 1839 and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s arrival on 3 February 1853.8 In Otago, after much debate the date was set to the eve of the discovery of gold in 1861 – the suggestion being that the later prosperity and achievement of the province was the result of the foundation laid by the pioneers, while also implying that those who had arrived after this date had been lured by the prospect of gold and quick riches.9 Within this context, the accepted definition of ‘pioneer’ in Otago was also jealously guarded. When, in the early 1930s, the centenary of the Otakou whaling station was celebrated with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque, the Otago Early Settler’s Association saw red. As the Otago historian K. C. McDonald later summarised, ‘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’.10 The following year the Otago Early Settlers’ Association responded with its own plaque commemorating the spot where the pioneer settlers from the John Wickliffe had landed in 1848 ‘to found this City and Province’. A similar parochialism had been demonstrated twenty-five years earlier when the doctor, historian, and bibliophile Thomas Hocken attempted to persuade the Association to expand its areas of interest to encompass the North Island and the Pacific explorations of Cook and Tasman. ‘If any notice whatever was taken of the existence of the North Island’, retorted the writer and soon-to-be city councillor William Downie Stewart, he ‘would retire from the Society and start another himself on a proper Otago basis’.11 Nor was Otago alone in such views, with a proposal by the Director of the Dominion Museum for the establishment of a new historical association greeted with fervent opposition by the Wellington Early Settlers’ and Historical Association.12 Such views were by no means unique to New Zealand, with exclusivity and the ‘politics of possession’ seemingly intrinsic to pioneering ­societies [ 127 ]

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across the empire and beyond. Australia’s Early Colonists’ and Natives’ Guild of Victoria, for example, was especially exclusive, with its membership criteria both narrow and hierarchical – only those who had arrived in the colony before 1855 could enrol as ‘pioneers’, while those who dated back to before 1870 were accepted as ‘members’.13 In the United States, organisation such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Society of the Colonial Dames of America, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas similarly used genealogy as a way of marginalising or excluding less desirable groups in the community. Organisationally historical and pioneer societies were also heavily gendered organisations. In those that were open to both sexes, prestigious positions were typically the reserve of men, with women more active at a committee level. Yet women were also particularly active within historical societies because of their interest and enthusiasm for cultural work, and indeed, a significant amount of early heritage preservation was either led by women or done through all-female organisations. In the second half of the nineteenth century the charge of being the guardians of society’s culture and morals was a role women took seriously, beginning their work with religious groups, and later adding temperance, moral reform, women’s rights, and community as they worked to eliminate some of the problems of rapidly changing society. In Britain and America the problems associated with industrialisation and rapid urbanisation were especially strong influences, while in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada the encouragement of ‘British values’ and empire citizenry were dominant. Heritage and historic preservation threaded through many of these themes. Where in Britain, for example, Octavia Hill was central to the establishment of the Commons Preservation Society and later the National Trust, in America Ann Pamela Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association was something of a model for women’s organisational efforts, while in New Zealand the lead was taken by the Victoria League, whose concerns centred on the intersection between memory, sacrifice, and empire citizenry.14 While the seeds of the pioneer myth were planted by the early settlers themselves, their children made it flourish. In what the Australian historian Graeme Davison calls ‘patriarchal history’, the children of the early European settlers nurtured an image of the pioneers as arrivals in a wild country inhabited by a wild people, but who in only fifty years had transformed it into a modern urban society, thus earning their title to the land.15 In this respect, as Peter Gibbons notes, local histories of the period were colonising texts in the sense that they justified European appropriation of the land by claiming that only Pakeha had made it fruitful.16 In such narratives Maori [ 128 ]

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were s­ ignificant only in so far as they assisted or impeded settlement, typically being assigned the role of ‘scene setter’ to the arrival of the colonists, who – through the vocabulary of origins – were promptly transformed into ‘pioneers’ who arrived on the ‘first ships’. As Tom Griffiths suggests of the Australian experience, however, rather than consciously being designed as colonising texts, the exclusion of Maori in most early local history texts was simply a means to an end. The goal was securing an inheritance and defending recently invented traditions from the continuing sweep of change in an effort to create a durable and stable sense of place and continuity.17 As the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Natives’ Association noted in its jubilee history of the settlement, for example, ‘One of [its] chief aims is to give its members and New Zealanders generally a better knowledge of their native land, and thus to encourage them to take a keener interest in its welfare and advancement’.18 While the origins of interest in local history in New Zealand can be found in the early colonist associations which sprang up across the country in the early 1870s, many of these early societies were shortlived, and focused attention on the history of early European settlement often had to wait for the formation of dedicated local history societies. The first of these seems to have been the Otago Early History Society, established in 1884.19 The major stimuli for the formation of many such societies was local jubilee celebrations, with the Otago Early Settlers’ Association, for example, founded in the lead-up to Otago’s jubilee celebrations in 1898. A year later the Auckland jubilee gave rise to the Old Colonists’ Society, while Canterbury’s jubilee the following year saw the establishment of an Old Colonists’ Committee within the Canterbury Museum – the Committee promptly setting about compiling an ‘official’ list of early settlers.20 The encouraging of interest in local history was bread-and-butter stuff for historical societies, many of whom were the main outlet for local history at the time. Some societies limited their focus to discussions and lectures on historical topics, while others, such as the Wellington Early Settlers’ and Historical Association, attempted to take a more scholarly approach, viewing the publication of local history as a primary task. The ‘marshalling of memory’ was equally central to societies’ work, with the ‘collecting, recording, and publishing of interesting historical incidents and data connected with the early ­settlement of the colony’, for example, being a constitutional clause of the Wellington’s Early Colonists’ Association from the early 1870s.21 The Otago Early Settlers’ Association similarly expressed one of its aims as being ‘to collect and preserve books, papers, and articles of historic interest illustrative of the manners, customs and events [ 129 ]

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of the early days’.22 By the turn of the century the Association was also ­expanding its collection policy to include everything from heirlooms and memorabilia to the Double Fairlie locomotive Josephine. Establishing a ‘display’ in its rooms to exhibit objects, by the end of the decade this had evolved into a fully fledged museum.23 The establishment of the Otago Association’s museum provides a good example of the key difference between the fundamentally selfcongratulatory earlier work of the early colonist societies and that of the societies formed by their children. Filial piety remained a central thread, but this was no longer simply characterised by the rambling reminiscing of the earlier societies. By the end of the First World War the scale and extent of activities undertaken by many historical societies had become quite complex, entailing the collection of documentary resources, objects, and artefacts, the sponsorship of lectures, and the compilation of rolls of early settlers. When it opened in 1916, for example, the Auckland Old Colonists’ Museum included everything from important documents and early photographs of the city, to flags and New Zealand War relics, and even what was claimed to have been the first phonogram used in New Zealand.24 Brosnahan suggests that at the time that the Auckland Old Colonists’ Museum opened, there was nothing comparable in the country.25 Just as ethnologists scrambled to collect information and artefacts before their keepers vanished forever, the efforts of historical societies to collect manuscripts and record reminiscences was motivated by the rapidly thinning ranks of pioneers.26 Much of this material was published in shapeless compendia-like collections of facts, lists, anecdotes, and diary excerpts – typical examples being W. H. S. Roberts’s History of Oamaru and North Otago (1890) and Louis Ward’s Early Wellington (1928). While such works are often viewed critically as congratulatory chronicles exhibiting only the haziest notions of historical method, most never intended or attempted to present a ‘usable past’. Instead, they were compiled in the belief that the publication of first-hand accounts and formative ‘facts’ and documents was an integral part of collection and preservation. Indeed, generally speaking historical societies took their primary duty to be institutions that saved knowledge ‘from oblivion’ rather than interpreting it. As Thomas Downes noted in the foreword to Old Whanganui in 1915, his motivation for writing the book was ‘the fear that the old memorised histories will be lost for ever if not placed on record now’.27 Such practices only increased after the 1907 fire at Parliament destroyed volumes of pre-1902 official records. Collection was also tied up with the perceived passing of an era. Changes to the landscape, and in particular the urban landscape, were often catalysts for floods of reminiscences about ‘how things had been’. [ 130 ]

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Such reflection is an intrinsic part of place identity, where the loss of local landmarks highlights the link between place or object and the past. The collection of memories and documents associated with the early settlers was also seen as a form of memorialisation, and many early local histories were even published as just that – John Barr’s The City of Auckland (1922), for example, dedicated as a memorial ‘To the pioneers, men and women, who by their industry and self-abnegation established the city of Auckland’.28 When the first instalment of Augustus Hamilton’s Maori Art was published in 1897, Hamilton’s example gave rise to pleas for similar ‘preservation’ of the early record of European history of New Zealand – one correspondent noting that the establishment of a local museum and the collection of historical documents would be a most appropriate way to mark the forthcoming Diamond Jubilee.29 Preservation and publication, the argument went, were analogous to memorialisation – a response to the belief that ‘too often the only monument to our pioneers is “a half effaced inscription in some neglected graveyard”’.30 Milestone anniversaries were particularly strong motivations, and by the beginning of the twentieth century it was common for such events to be marked by the publication of a memorial history. Evidence of this can be seen in the pages of Thomas Hocken’s A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand. Covering the period from 1880 through to 1909, it reveals few works of local history prior to the 1890s, after which time provincial and local jubilees became more common.31 Nor did the anniversary have to be a ‘milestone’ – Buick, for example, noting in the preface of his Old Manawatu (1903) that his motivation for writing the book was little more than the township’s twenty-fifth anniversary. As a milestone in itself, however, ‘it has appeared to me an opportune time to collect some of the fast-receding history connected with these rising towns and their rapidly extending districts … Old Manawatu will create a greater reverence for the romantic past that I fear at present prevails amongst the young New Zealanders.’32 Behind such elevation of minor anniversaries lay a degree of cultural politics – as there often was with the very establishment of historical societies themselves. While internally historical and pioneer societies were inseparably linked to the politics of the authoritative narrative, externally their establishment was often seen as a marker of a community’s culture and civilisation, and their concern with the present and the future. In Recording America’s Past David Van Tassel similarly suggests that in the American instance the establishment of historical societies was part of an unconscious effort to achieve cultural equality with older states – a notion that transposes well to the wider colonial experience.33 [ 131 ]

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Collection and memorialisation were often inseparable, and, in preparation for the writing of many memorial volumes, amateur historians spent hours searching out sources, tirelessly culling newspapers, and poring over school, court, and local authority records. Hidden away in newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, keepsakes, and heirlooms were the more personal evidence of the individual experience, while church and civic records, and farmers’ organisations, presented an insight into the workings of the community. As Graeme Davison notes of the Australian instance, such materials have often been ignored by historians who write about the nation as a whole.34 Nor was the volume of material amassed by historical societies necessarily small. In addition to the Otago Early Settlers’ Museum already mentioned, for example, the scale of Canterbury’s collection necessitated it being looked after by the Canterbury Museum authorities, while the scale of work being undertaken by the Auckland Old Colonists’ Museum resulted in the museum’s collection being housed within the city’s Public Library and Art Gallery.35

The state and the history of early settlement. The preservation of historical documents in New Zealand was first seriously considered by government in 1872 with the establishment of a commission of enquiry into the safe custody of records.36 Apart from a brief interim report, however, little seems to have happened until 1906, when the Director of the Colonial Museum, Augustus Hamilton, wrote to his minister urging the construction of ‘a proper Repository for the Archives of the Colony’.37 Records were taking up valuable room in the museum’s storage buildings, few of them fireproof. Cabinet accepted the suggestion in principle, but little eventuated, with even the loss of significant quantities of records in the 1907 fire at Parliament doing little to speed the process. Things finally began to change following a discussion in the House in 1910 on the topic of documents lost in the fire, out of which a Joint Library Committee was established to report on the collection and preservation of historical documents, and a sum was placed on the supplementary estimates for establishing a national collection of early historical documents in the Dominion Museum.38 Under Hamilton’s directorship of the museum a number of important objects and documents associated with the European history of New Zealand had been added to its collections; however, real progress had to wait until the arrival of Hamilton’s successor, J. Allan Thomson, in 1914. The collection of historical documents had been made an early priority for Thomson, with the 1913 Science and Art Act having broadened the scope of the museum’s activities by officially ­sanctioning the [ 132 ]

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establishment of art and historical collections. This included the development of its library and historical record collections, which under the Act were to consist of both historical papers of state and ‘any specimens, manuscripts, log books, old newspapers, photographs, prints, or pictures which illustrate early New Zealand history’.39 Things began promisingly, and by the end of 1916 Thomson had reorganised the New Zealand Institute library collection (recently gifted to the Dominion Museum), and a number of early objects and documents had been added. Percy Smith, however, believed that more could be done. Taking inspiration from work being done by the country’s early settler societies, in early 1917 he suggested compiling a register of all pioneering families and recording their reminiscences. The time would arrive in New Zealand, he argued, ‘as it has in America, Canada and other places where it will be of great interest to descendants to have these particulars recorded, and very naturally it will become a matter of pride to trace descent from those pioneers’.40 The Board of Science and Art agreed, and by the end of the year appeals had been made to almost a thousand families in New Zealand, while in London the New Zealand High Commission set about contacting descendants in the United Kingdom.41 Appeals were also made to New Zealand’s newspapers for biographies of pioneers that had been published in their pages, and several local councils also offered material from their collections. The overall response, however, was disappointing, and, while by the end of 1918 almost a thousand items had been donated, relatively little material of historical interest had been captured, and the collection languished in a safe in the basement of the General Assembly Library until being transferred to the Turnbull Library.42 Plans were also made to follow up Percy Smith’s idea of composing an early settlers’ register, but, as with many initiatives, this was stifled by the need for economic restraint during the First World War. In the later years of the war the energies of museum staff were also redirected towards collecting details of ‘men of distinguished service’.43 In 1920 a solution to a number of the museum’s problems was presented with the opening of the Alexander Turnbull library. A merchant whose wealth had allowed him to indulge his passion for books and collecting, Turnbull had bequeathed his collection to the nation ‘as the nucleus of a New Zealand National Collection’ in 1918, and following his death later that year the government purchased Turnbull’s specially designed house in Bowen Street in Wellington to house the collection.44 Taking steps to fireproof the building and begin cataloguing, the library opened its doors to researchers on the second anniversary of Turnbull’s death. In the lead-up to its opening Thomson had suggested that the logical move was to transfer responsibility for the [ 133 ]

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National Historical Collection to the Turnbull – a move that would partly solve the Dominion Museum’s storage problems; would make the collection accessible to scholars; and would allow interesting parts of the National Historical Collection to be exhibited, further stimulating interest in New Zealand history.45 Familiar with the collection through his research for his New Zealand Wars history, in late 1920 Cowan was engaged to sort through the accumulated records with the view of transferring the more important material to the Turnbull. Yet as Rachel Barrowman suggests, the government also underestimated the value of its windfall. In addition to being the largest private library in the country – consisting of 55,000 volumes of books, pamphlets, periodicals and newspapers, and thousands of maps, paintings, drawings, prints, and manuscripts – the collection’s focus on New Zealand and the Pacific was without comparison.46 Turnbull was not the first to leave his collection to the nation, Auckland having received much of George Grey’s Polynesian material in 1887. Thomas Hocken similarly gifted his Maori artefacts to the Otago University Museum, followed in 1908 by the presentation of 4300 printed volumes and copious manuscript materials. In 1913 the politician and historian Robert McNab also gave his collection of some 4200 volumes to the Dunedin Public Library.47 In addition to donating their collections, Hocken, Turnbull, and McNab also made significant contributions through their efforts to rescue and preserve the records of the colony. While in Britain, for example, in 1903 Hocken had gathered material on the early European settlement of New Zealand from former colonists and their families. Pursuing enquiries he had begun twenty years earlier, he also spent months at the Public Records Office organising the papers of the New Zealand Company which he unsuccessfully tried to acquire for New Zealand. He did nevertheless secure some important documents, including duplicates of dispatches from the company’s agents in New Zealand and many drafts of other documents. He had better luck in his dealings with the Church Missionary Society (CMS), which, helped by the presentation of a sizeable cheque, parted with the letters and journals of Samuel Marsden and of other early CMS missionaries in New Zealand.48 In the absence of a suitable repository in New Zealand these went into storage in the basement of the General Assembly Library, where, Hocken worried, they would inevitably suffer the same fate as the rat-chewed Treaty of Waitangi he had found a decade earlier ‘buried in a heap of old papers and rubbish in a dungeon’ of Parliament Buildings.49 Turnbull negotiated with the Cape Town Public Library for the exchange of New Zealand materials that had earlier been deposited in Grey’s South African collection.50 While this was not as grand in scale or perceived as important as that [ 134 ]

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of Hocken, the thirteen years of diplomatic posturing needed to secure the transfer required Turnbull to dig deep into both his skill as a businessman and his political contacts.51 McNab’s contribution to preservation took the form of his mammoth two-volume Historical Records of New Zealand. Strikingly similar in form and conception to many of the books then being produced by local history societies, it was a compendium ‘of the Author’s research, not the fruits of his thought’.52 It was the result of almost two decades of McNab’s excavation of historical sources in New Zealand, the United States, Great Britain, Europe, and in particular Australia. The idea of publishing the work seems to have first been raised in 1900 by the Australian historian Edward Morris in a paper to the New Zealand Institute. Arguing that ‘a nation should, at national cost, publish its origins’, he suggested that the New Zealand government should produce a work along the lines of the recently-published Historical Records of New South Wales, and McNab used this as a model for his own work.53 According to Chris Hilliard, in the 1920s William Downie Stewart attempted to get the Department of Internal Affairs to continue McNab’s work; however, little seems to have come of the suggestion.54 The transfer of the historical document component of the National Historical Collection to the Turnbull also meant that for a brief moment the library became the home of the ‘Office of Public Records’. This plan, however, was diverted in 1926 when the new Parliamentary Librarian, Dr Guy Scholefield, was also appointed as the country’s first Dominion Archivist. Conscious of the value of archives for research, Scholefield had previously reported on New Zealand archives in London’s Public Record Office and at the British Museum Library, and, in addition to running the General Assembly Library, he spent much of the late 1920s unearthing provincial and central government records, newspapers, and private collections.55 With much of the responsibility for the collection of historical documents now off its shoulders, by the early 1920s the Dominion Museum could focus more attention on collecting artefacts and other objects relating to the country’s early European history.56 Inevitably this would see Thomson come face-to-face with the issue of historic places, particularly as the museum began to compile photographic records of what were seen to be the more important historic sites and buildings throughout the country.57 Commenting on the apparent failure of the Scenery Preservation Act, in July 1917 he suggested to Minister of Internal Affairs George Russell that historic sites and monuments should be considered under legislation separate from scenic reserves. Failing that, changes needed to be made to the Scenery Preservation Act to give groups interested in historic places direct representation on the Scenery [ 135 ]

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Preservation Board, and to give the government the power to apply protection orders to privately owned sites under threat. He also recommended empowering local bodies to purchase or to become guardians of historic sites and monuments. Whichever approach was taken, the first step would be to establish a royal commission on historic monuments to prepare a list of sites worthy of permanent preservation. Such a list ‘would be most educative to local public opinion’, and would create a programme of reservation towards which the government and local authorities could work as funds become available or as private owners and local bodies recognised the desirability of reservation.58 Despite Russell’s enthusiasm for Thomson’s recommendations, the fact that the Scenery Preservation Act was administered by the Department of Lands made the decision one for the Minister of Lands William Massey to take. While agreeing that amendment of the Act was desirable but would have to wait until after the war, Massey doggedly resisted the idea of a royal commission. Instead, he insisted, lists could be compiled through existing channels whereby commissioners of Crown lands would be instructed to forward the details of sites for consideration.59 The failure of the status quo, however, had been the primary motivation behind Thomson’s report in the first place. As he noted in his reply to Russell, the proposed approach relied on the favours of the commissioners of lands, none of whom had any expertise in matters of historical importance.60 Thomson’s fears were borne out, as following Massey’s circular to the commissioners only a handful of reports were submitted. Viewing them the following year Thomson concluded that, with the department’s understanding of ‘historic places’ barely stretching beyond rock paintings, little progress would be made until new legislation was introduced, yet, with the Lands Department increasingly absorbed in soldier resettlement schemes after the war, the chances of this quickly evaporated.61 Even as Massey closed the door on Thomson’s proposal, however, in Parliament the member for Nelson – Thomas Field – asked Russell for government assistance in the protection and restoration of buildings associated with early settlement, and for the introduction of legislation along the lines of Great Britain’s Ancient Monuments Act.62 In addition to being yet another black mark against the Scenery Preservation Act, the direction of Field’s request highlighted a profound change in perceptions of the very nature of historic places – not everyone saw their significance as either purely aesthetic or tourism-based. Nor did Thomson give up. Sceptical as he was of the value of the Lands Department reports on historic sites, he proposed that Internal Affairs undertake its own report by employing James Cowan to compile lists of historic sites in the course of his travels researching his New Zealand Wars history.63 Russell was fascinated by Cowan’s reports. Convinced [ 136 ]

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11  The memorial statue of Robert Burns, uncle of Dunedin’s co-founder, the Reverend Thomas Burns, in The Octagon, Dunedin, ca. 1910

of the need for separate legislation to deal with historic places, he suggested that, as ‘an excellent method of rousing public interest in historic sites and monuments’, Cowan’s reports should be published as Parliamentary Papers.64 While this never happened, the reports are valuable for the breadth of consideration Cowan put into their compilation.65 In the late 1920s attempts were made by the New Zealand Tourist League and the Auckland Science Congress to resuscitate the idea – however, to little effect.66 [ 137 ]

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People, sites, and monuments Interest in historic sites of European origin in New Zealand initially manifested in the construction of monuments to mark key events and individuals associated with the earliest phase of European contact and settlement. An extension of the late nineteent-century British boom in monument building, this was also a conscious attempt on the part of colonists to make their own claims to having a history in the new land. Far from simply a ‘smoke and mirrors’ illusion of identity, this reflected an emerging recognition on the part of Pakeha of their own history in New Zealand, while also being intended to memorialise what was seen as the passing of the early phase of settlement. While in a handful of instances monuments to people or events were pursued at a truly national level, in most cases memorialisation was a reflection of fundamentally local historical horizons or local claims to national significance. Nor could memorials be separated from the politics of identity; even at a local level their construction was often part of an assertion of power by one section of a community. Well into the twentieth century New Zealand’s southern settlements led the way in constructing memorials to the country’s European past. In 1864, barely fifteen years after the settlement had been established, a magnificent Gothic monument was unveiled in the centre of Dunedin to the settlement’s co-founder Captain William Cargill.67 While Cargill’s monument was unveiled with little public ceremony, by the 1880s the mood had changed. In a bid to assert the settlement’s Scottish origins, in 1887 a statue of Robert Burns – uncle of the other co-founder, the Reverend Thomas Burns – was unveiled in the Octagon. Five years later, Robert Chapman, a former registrar to the Supreme Court, gave £1000 to construct a somewhat controversial twenty-metre-high Gothic revival column to Thomas Burns. A monument to the province’s last superintendent, James Macandrew, had also been unveiled the year before.68 Pride was equally held in the province’s national achievements, with a memorial cairn being unveiled in 1907 on Oamaru’s Sebastopol Hill overlooking the site of the Totara Estate slaughter yards to ‘the father of the New Zealand meat industry’ Thomas Brydone.69 Reflective of the economic and infrastructural contributions Brydone had made, early debate on the memorial had centred on a utilitarian form, and in the end a memorial hall was also constructed in his honour.70 A few years later a similarly inspired memorial was unveiled to Gabriel Read, who had discovered the first major goldfield in Central Otago in 1861.71 Canterbury’s memorial construction followed a similar path. When the settlement was less than twenty years old, in August 1867 a [ 138 ]

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statue of the settlement’s founder, John Robert Godley, was unveiled in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square.72 Eighteen years later a statue of the second superintendent of the province, William Moorhouse, was unveiled, followed in 1906 by a statue of the province’s final superintendent, William Rolleston. The only other major statue unveiled in Christchurch up until this time was that of Queen Victoria. Yet even here the settlement made a showing, as, in addition to commemorating the royal jubilee, the reliefs on the lower level of the pedestal observed the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the pioneers in Lyttleton in 1850.73 National campaigns of memorialisation, by comparison, did not fare as well. This began to change in the wake of the memorial building campaign associated with Queen Victoria’s jubilee, after which Premier Richard Seddon took greater interest in preserving the colony’s heritage. Seddon’s death in June 1906 ironically resulted in an impressive memorial itself, with its unveiling in the Bolton Street Cemetery in Wellington in March 1910 being the grandest memorialisation event in the country’s history.74 Seddon’s death, in fact, gave rise to a minimemorial movement in itself, with initial plans for memorials to be erected in every district.75 By the beginning of the First World War, three statues and at least three memorial tablets had been erected in his honour.76 Parliamentary subsidies, however, were still rare (all the regional Seddon memorials were locally funded), and financial assistance for the construction of memorials or monuments depended on the whim of departmental favour. While in part a reflection of turn-ofthe-century Pakeha lack of interest in the Treaty of Waitangi, government penny-pinching even saw the 1904 suggestion that a monument be erected to William Hobson – New Zealand’s first governor and cowriter of the Treaty – scaled back instead to a simple repair job of the damaged grave.77 Edward Gibbon Wakefield fared little better – even after his biographer, the British scholar and librarian Richard Garnett, chastised the colony in 1898 for having ‘done nothing for his memory – absolutely nothing whatever’. No memorial was forthcoming.78 Appalled to find Wakefield’s grave in the Bolton Street Cemetery ‘hidden among a small forest of shrubs and vegetable growth’, in 1908 the former parliamentarian Samuel Hodgkinson took the issue to the newspapers. ‘Is this the way New-Zealanders should treat the memory of the greatest colonial empire-builder and the greatest colonial statesman of the nineteenth century, the man to whom in God’s providence they owe the good land they live in and all its blessings?’ he questioned, asking whether simple maintenance of the grave was enough.79 The British imperial publicist Sir Frederick Young had raised this very question with Prime Minister [ 139 ]

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Joseph Ward the previous year, suggesting that efforts should be made to have Wakefield’s name ‘imperishably perpetuated in [New Zealand’s] history for all future generations of Britons both at Home and beyond the seas’.80 Taking up the cause, Thomas Hocken gathered support from Lords Onslow, Ranfurly, Glasgow, and Tennyson, and in mid1910 the Canterbury Early Colonists’ Association launched a scheme for the erection of a national memorial to Wakefield.81 In Wellington the Historical and Early Settlers’ Association similarly cajoled both the government and the city corporation on the matter, aiming, of course, to have the memorial erected in the capital.82 Despite these and other suggestions, the outbreak of war in 1914 put a dampener on the scheme. Other attempts at memorial building evolved in a similar way. In 1898 a memorial was unveiled at Akaroa marking the spot where Captain Stanley of HMS Britomart had forestalled French claims to territory in August 1840. An unenthusiastic government had eventually made a small contribution to the project, but locals stumped up the site and most of the money. The Marsden Cross unveiled in 1907 on the spot at Oihi, Bay of Islands, on which the Reverend Samuel Marsden had landed on Christmas Day 1814 was funded by Archdeacon Philip Walsh’s ‘appeal to the Church people of New Zealand’.83 Taking inspiration from ‘Prayer Book Cross’ unveiled in San Francisco in 1894, the memorial had been planned to celebrate both the event and the bringing of Christianity to the Maori people.84 Four years later it was another ‘first’ that was being memorialised in the form of an obelisk in New Plymouth marking the landing of the first white settlers in March 1841.85 At a time when pioneer and ‘contact’ history dominated efforts to preserve historic sites, it was inevitable that places associated with Captain James Cook would predominate. The first known visit by a European to one of Cook’s landing places in New Zealand for the sake of historical associations was that of the English trader Joel Samuel Polack in 1835. Having been forced to bring his ship into Tolaga Bay to repair damage sustained in storms off East Cape, while in port Polack was taken on a tour of the sites Cook had visited in and around Tolaga Bay by the Ngati Porou chief Te Kani-a-Takirau.86 Among these was a cave in Cook’s Cove, where it was reputed Cook’s Tahitian interpreter Tupaea had slept. In the decades that followed, this and other Cookassociated sites witnessed a flurry of visitors, and by the early 1880s the sites had been ‘explored’ in numerous newspaper articles, journals, and books. As Archdeacon Williams wrote in an 1888 paper tracing his own tour of Cook’s landing places at Poverty and Tolaga Bays, the appeal of exploring the sites was that they enabled the individual ‘to present to his mind a more vivid picture of all the circumstances’ of Cook’s visits.87 [ 140 ]

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As interest in Cook’s sites grow, so too did interest in their reservation. In 1864 the Marlborough provincial government had set aside part of Ship Cove – the most famous of the sites – as a scenic reserve, and in 1896 it was scheduled as a permanent historic reserve, ‘in memory of its occupation by Cook’.88 By the early 1900s interest in Cook’s landing places was at an all-time high. While in newspapers and journals popular writers and historians explored every conceivable aspect of the famous explorer’s interactions with the local landscape, enthusiasts such as Alexander Turnbull and the photographer Russell Duncan retraced Cook’s routes on both land and water.89 Carrying with him John Hawkesworth’s edition of Cook’s Voyages, over the Christmas of 1901 Turnbull had made a cruise to the Sounds in his yacht Iorangi in search of the spot at Grass Cove where Captain Furneaux and two of his crew had reputedly been massacred by local Maori during Cook’s second voyage. Armed with a packet of photographs from Turnbull, the following year Duncan visited the same spot. Arriving in Queen Charlotte Sound, the party opened the packet of photographs to find they were actually at Grass Cove, and sitting but metres from where the men had reputedly been killed. The feeling at discovering this, Duncan noted, ‘was rather awesome, notwithstanding the 128 years that had elapsed, the occurrence and details being vividly before our minds’.90 As Duncan’s comments suggest, the historical associations between place and event were deemed to be immensely potent. This quest to identify the precise spots where Cook stood had, in fact, been the motivation behind all of the trips made by Williams, Hocken, Duncan, Morris, and Haszard. The experience of literally ‘following in Cook’s footsteps’, together with the environmental experience of place that Cook himself had encountered, were seen to present an opportunity for understanding that no journal or diary alone could approximate. Creating an immensely detailed photographic record of the sites he visited, Duncan was especially fascinated by the famed ‘Cook’s Well’ at Tolaga Bay – a supposed basin cut into the rock by Cook’s men. The site had become something of a popular shrine to Cook, with someone having cut the name ‘COOK’ and the figures ‘1778’ into the rock around the hole, and an even more enterprising visitor having cut letters at the bottom of the basin. Duncan, none the less, believed that the basin was not the real one created by Cook’s crew as mentioned by Polack in 1835.91 Maori, he suggested, had lost the true locality of the site, leading to the creation of another to satisfy the demands of tourists and Cook devotees. Publishing an account of his investigations into the sites he had visited later in the year, he recommended that the government should acquire title to other Cook sites, as it had done in Ship Cove.92 The most important of these, he believed, was Motuara Island, [ 141 ]

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abreast of Ship Cove, as it was here that Cook had taken possession of the South Island in the name of King George III. Following the passing of the Scenery Preservation Act, in June 1904 the recently formed Gisborne Captain Cook Memorial Committee suggested that a portion of Kaiti Hill, which faced Cook’s first landing place in New Zealand, should be secured ‘for the public of New Zealand’.93 The Scenery Preservation Commission agreed, though an existing lease on the site caused the Tourism Department to drop the idea, even though the Land Act permitted compulsory purchase. Yet the department’s position here was probably driven by its emphasis on ‘scenery’, and when soon after the site was ravaged by fire the department quickly lost interest in its reservation – an act that only further highlighted the divergent interests of settlement and the preservation movements.94 Indeed, as Morris had noted five years earlier in regard to the ‘lamentable destruction’ of trees flanking Ship Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound, the response of one settler was simply ‘You want scenery, we want grass’.95 The Captain Cook Memorial Committee had been formed in early 1902 out of disillusionment with government inaction in preserving Cook’s memory after the 1896 reservation of Ship Cove. Its immediate goal was the construction of a national monument to Cook in Poverty Bay. With a support base ranging from local history buffs and Cook devotees to politicians and prominent New Zealand businessmen, a nationwide fundraising campaign was begun. Since they believed that it was important to capture the interest of young New Zealanders, every school child also reputedly contributed a penny to the project.96 Within a year the committee’s supporters in the House had also secured a pound-for-pound government subsidy, with the monument being formally unveiled in 1906 on the anniversary of Cook’s landing amidst speeches, street parades, and a Maori haka party.97 Encouraged by the result in Poverty Bay, in early 1906 Cook enthusiasts in Blenheim decided to initiate a similar project in the Marlborough Sounds.98 With interest in the region’s history further awakened by the contemporaneous publication of the first volume of McNab’s Historical Records of New Zealand, by April 1908 the collection of funds was proceeding well and an eighteenth-century cannon had been secured from the Admiralty to form the heart of the monument.99 McNab was particularly pleased at the level of public enthusiasm, even offering to run lectures in the major cities to raise additional funds.100 The monument was unveiled by Governor Liverpool in February 1913.101 Eight years later a second monument was unveiled on Motuara Island, its original unveiling having been delayed by the outbreak of war. Indeed, as government energies were increasingly taken up with [ 142 ]

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soldier resettlement schemes and First World War commemoration projects after 1917, a number of earlier memorialisation projects fell by the wayside. Writing to the Evening Post soon after the Motuara Island monument was unveiled, the Cook Memorial Committee sounded a tone that was strikingly reminiscent of Cowan’s and Statham’s earlier claims of the value of New Zealand War sites: Sir, – have historic associations with the past – I was almost about to write ‘sacred’ associations – such small claim upon us that they are to be treated as having little or no value? In recent sad years we have had performed for us deeds of valour in the cause of justice and right – deeds that are being commemorated in various ways that should be a reminder to succeeding generations of all time great sacrifices made … New Zealand history dating back nearly 200 years. What more inspiring and stirring story of the kind could appeal so strongly to the imagination of the boy – aye, to the girl too – of any spirit as the narrative of the travels and exploration of the great Captain Cook … Is there no belief in inspiration coming from adequate recognition of or veneration for the great men who helped build our vast empire?102

While visitor interest in Cook’s sites continued to grow, serious government interest in them did not stir until the lead up to the 1940 New Zealand Centennial. In the meantime, the various local Cook memorial committees remained the primary carers of Cook’s sites, the

12  The Canterbury Provincial Buildings, ca. 1880

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Blenheim chapter itself even funding the renovation of the Motuara memorial in 1933.103 Yet the strength of local leadership often came with local claims to national pre-eminence. In wanting a national monument to Cook in Poverty Bay, Gisborne based its claims on its being the site where Cook first landing in New Zealand. A similar local claim of national pre-eminence had earlier been staked by the member for Northern Maori, Hone Heke, in late 1894 when he forwarded a request to the government to mark places of historical importance in the Bay of Islands. Suggested candidates included those of the first missionary landings, first sermons preached, and first seat of government, as well as the site of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.104 Yet although Bay of Islands residents asserted that their history was of national significance, the government was not so keen, and the issue went no further.105 Arguably the most profound example of the local focus on historic preservation, however, was the grand Canterbury Provincial Chambers, the foundation stone of which had been laid on 6 January 1858. With money pouring into the provincial coffers through strong land sales and a buoyant wool trade, by the time the building work was completed the following year, tenders had already been called for a more elaborate extension. When in 1861 the membership of the Provincial Council was increased from twenty-six to thirty-five, yet further plans were made – this time for a magnificent stone Gothic Revival addition to the earlier wooden buildings.106 As the Lyttelton Times noted a mere three years after the original buildings were first occupied, the extension told ‘of a time when provincial prosperity demanded increased accommodation’.107 When in 1876 the provincial system was abolished, the buildings passed to the central government.108 The first effort to protect the Chambers emerged in 1906 in protest at the Department of Lands and Survey’s plans to replace the original wooden building. It had never been liked by the government departments who had over the years occupied it, and the plan was to replace it with a Gothic Revival stone extension. As the Member of Parliament for Christchurch, T. E. Taylor, noted, however, in his opinion the buildings were ‘one of the most precious architectural possessions in Australasia’ – a sentiment echoed by the Christchurch Beautifying Association which vociferously protested against their modification or removal.109 Arguing that as the buildings had been constructed with provincial moneys they belonged to the citizens of Christchurch, it instead proposed that they should remain as a memorial to Canterbury’s heritage.110 The planned alterations were [ 144 ]

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shelved. While this was the first effort to protect the Chambers from destruction, it was not the first time the question of their ownership had been linked to provincial pride. This honour went to the radical Christchurch Member for Parliament William Collins, who six years earlier had unsuccessfully lobbied the government to hand the buildings over to mark Canterbury’s fiftieth anniversary.111 This idea was raised again following the 1906 protest; however it too failed, and it would not be until 1928 that the government would finally relinquish ownership with the passing of the Canterbury Provincial Buildings Vesting Act. The immediate path to the Act was the Beautifying Association learning of new government plans to make major alterations to the wooden section of the buildings. Arguing that this would ruin the character of the original building, in late 1925 the Association lobbied the government on the issue, while the architect Samuel Hurst Seager published an article in the popular New Zealand Life magazine suggesting that the complex should be gifted to the city as a museum of pioneering life. Acknowledging that it had no legal right to the building, but claiming a strong moral right, the Beautifying Association formally asked the government to donate the buildings to the province.112 The following month Sir Francis Bell, the leader of the Legislative Council, put the matter to government, arguing that, ‘considering the historic association of the original province with those buildings, the purpose of their erection, and their architectural quality, it seemed fitting that the buildings ... should be set apart as a special property of the people of the district constituting their original province’.113 The government finally conceded. While the Canterbury Provincial Buildings Vesting Act was simply a mechanism of transfer, it was a landmark in the evolution of heritage protection in New Zealand, prohibiting any further building on the area by government or the trust into whose care the buildings were to be transferred.114 Unlike earlier legislative consideration of historic buildings, it also recognised the need for ongoing management, providing funds for the buildings’ upkeep. The Bill’s passage through the House was equally enlightening. Where one member applauded the ‘generous act’ by the government in handing over the buildings, Bell replied that they hardly deserved the designation – it was simply ‘an act of ordinary justice’.115 Others regretted that the Bill did not hand over the entire buildings, the member for Lyttelton noting the importance of the various parts of the buildings to one another.116 Considering that the old wooden buildings were due for demolition, it was continued, an opportunity should be given to the community to remove them to another site. That way, ‘at least a portion may be preserved as a [ 145 ]

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memento of the past’.117 Tellingly, however, Bell, showed little interest in the wooden part of the buildings. For Canterbury the buildings were essentially important for three reasons. The first was architectural – the original building having long been viewed as an example of the finest English architecture New Zealand possessed.118 As Bell had exuberantly described them during the Bill’s debate, they were ‘an illustration of the fact that in the early days men were able to make real sermons in stone. In fact, it is not only illustrative of a sermon, but of a piece of poetry taken from the Mother-land and planted in this new country in the southern seas.’119 The importance of this comment lay in Canterbury’s having been founded on the idea of transplanting a cross-section of English provincial life with a hierarchical social structure and a full Church of England diocesan establishment. While the reality fell far short of this, remnants of this vision persisted in the settlement’s architecture which was unmistakably Gothic in character – a view reinforced in two early research dissertations on the Canterbury settlement’s ‘character’.120 Second, the buildings were a powerful symbol of pioneering sacrifice, a persistent theme since at least the beginning of the twentieth century and revived during discussion of the Bill itself.121 As the Christchurch Sun noted a few years later: It is not, however, the architectural beauty which makes the greatest claim for the reverent care of the building. It is rather that deep sentiment for the past and our forebears who lived there and planned the future we know, and ‘building better than they knew’. To walk through the buildings to-day, to pace the flagged corridor with the wooden arches overhead, gives one the sense of moving in historic scenes, getting glimpses now and then of the Fathers who moved there long ago.122

Such was the perceived strength of this association that when Lands and Survey vacated the wooden section of the buildings in 1934, the Canterbury Pilgrims’ and Early Settlers Association tried to have it turned into an early settlers’ hall and museum.123 Third, and most importantly, the buildings also symbolised ­provincial pride at its height. In doing so they underpinned provincial identity. Presenting a very John Ruskin-inspired vision in his 1932 Master’s dissertation on Canterbury architecture, Charles Sayer argued that the history of Canterbury could be read through its buildings. Suggesting that the move from wood to stone and brick structures marked the end of the pioneering stage, the Christchurch Provincial buildings in their entirety captured both the province’s origins and its future: [ 146 ]

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13  Tableau, re-enacting the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, at the East and West Missionary Exhibition, Wellington Town Hall, in 1923

This is an English building, reflecting the Homeland in almost every stone, but it reflects more than the Homeland. The lavishness of beauty is evidence of the rapidly increasing wealth of the Council, the result, largely, of their insistence on the ‘sufficient price’ of the Wakefield system … its erection at so early a date, and the money so readily expended on it are indicative of the enthusiasm with which the Canterbury settlers welcomed the proclamation of local government for which they had fought so doggedly from the very outset.124

Such was the extent of local pride in the buildings that when, at the end of the 1940s, Johannes Anderson’s Old Christchurch in Picture and Story was published, much of his book was structured around them – one chapter emphasising their architectural wonders, while a second borrowed from Sayer by placing them as a central stage on which the history of the community and province had unfolded.125 The buildings, as much as the early settlers, were viewed as pioneers.

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The cradle of the nation? Interest in Waitangi for its historical significance stems back at least to the last quarter of the nineteenth century.126 Visiting the Bay of Islands in April 1868, Governor George Bowen took particular interest in it, even being given a personal tour by James Busby, the first British Resident, on whose grounds the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed on 6 February 1840.127 Sixteen years later the newly appointed Governor similarly Jervois – in Northland investigating colonial defences – ­ indulged his interest in history and early colonisation with a visit to Archdeacon Henry Williams’s monument in Paihia, followed by a walk along the beach to Waitangi. For Jervois, the significance of the site came from it being the place where the Treaty was signed – the site where, as he said, ‘the Maoris accepted the rule of the Queen of England’.128 The near-derelict former British Residency was of lesser significance. Long interested in the Treaty, and convinced of the historical significance of the Waitangi area, in 1908 the local lawyer and newly elected MP Vernon Reed moved to have the government purchase and preserve the Waitangi estate as a national memorial.129 Within educated circles – where since the 1890s increasing importance had been placed on the Treaty as the foundation of New Zealand nationhood – Reed’s proposal rode a wave of interest.130 At a popular level, however, the Treaty had long been derided and denounced, and the idea was shelved.131 Spurred by the apparent lack of public interest in the Treaty, T. Lindsay Buick set to writing The Treaty of Waitangi (1914), although like many amateur historians of his time he was equally motivated by what he saw as the need to put the story of the Treaty’s formulation and signing in print before further details were lost.132 The earliest known efforts to preserve or memorialise Waitangi were undertaken by Maori, who in March 1881 unveiled a monument and memorial hall to the Treaty and the earlier 1835 Declaration of Independence on the riverbank opposite the Waitangi estate.133 A petition to the Queen that year described Maori motivation behind the memorial: in this year, 1881, we, O the Queen, built a House of Assembly at the Bay of Islands, and the great symbol therein is a stone memorial, on which has been engraved the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi, so that eyes may look thereon from year to year. Two invitations were sent to the Governor, requesting him to unveil the Stone Treaty Memorial. He did not accede to the request. Perhaps his disinclination arose from the fact that the Europeans had disregarded the principles embodied in the treaty.134

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Following the hall’s destruction during a storm in 1917 its replacement, Te Tii Marae wharenui, was officially opened in March 1922.135 The first concerted effort by the state to preserve Waitangi began the following year, when the Under Secretary of Lands and Survey enquired into making Busby’s old house and the nearby site where the Treaty had been signed a historic reserve.136 The local Field Inspector approached the task with gusto; however, his enthusiasm was not shared by the North Auckland Commissioner for Crown Lands, who stripped back the recommendation of creating a generous reserve to merely reserving the house and garden and placing a tablet on the spot where the Treaty had been signed.137 It was, none the less, a moot point, with the owner not keen to sell, despite being presented with the prospect of compulsory acquisition. A few months later, however, the property was on the market, the owner no doubt wishing to capitalise on growing interest in the site. With an asking price well outside of what the government was willing to pay, the estate failed to sell and ended up in the hands of the bank as it appears that the mortgage was called in.138 During the late 1920s the house began to deteriorate again as further attempts to sell it were unsuccessfully. When fresh efforts by Reed to persuade the government to purchase the property also failed to pan out, in 1931 he approached the Governor General, Lord Bledisloe, who was holidaying in Paihia.139 Hoping that if Bledisloe became interested in the significance of Waitangi his support might induce the government to buy the property, Reed emphasised its attractions as an historic site to visitors. Both keen walkers, the Bledisloes spent a day thoroughly exploring the area, enough to persuade them to purchase the property as a gift to the nation. In early May 1932 Bledisloe wrote to Prime Minister George Forbes formally offering the property as a place of historic interest, recreation, enjoyment, and benefit for the people of New Zealand. Forbes replied the same day, gratefully accepting the gift.140 The estate was handed over under a declaration of trust, with the governing authority to consist of representatives of the government, descendants of notable Maori concerned with the Treaty, and those of certain pioneer families whose members had played a distinguished part in the history of the country.141 In deciding to gift to the state the former residency  – which at his request was renamed the Treaty House – Bledisloe had clear ideas about the site’s significance to New Zealand’s past and future. History had long fascinated Bledisloe, and as he travelled around New Zealand in his official capacity he looked out for places with historical associations.142 In one of his first engagements after becoming Governor General, in March 1930 he visited Hobson’s grave, and the following year during his first visit to Te Awamutu he specifically requested to [ 149 ]

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14  Treaty House, Waitangi, photographed in the early 1930s prior to its ‘restoration’ and reinvention

see the historic St John’s church and the site of the old mission station established by the Reverend John Morgan at Otawhao in 1841.143 He was equally interested in Maori history. In the Waikato in late 1931 he visited the battlefield of Orakau, being met by a group of local Maori who gave him a gift of a stone axe obtained from the battlefield.144 Two months later a visit to Taranaki included a tour of the famed Turuturu Mokai pa, Bledisloe even knowing the history of the redoubt’s defence by the 18th Royal Irish Constabulary.145 He was also a firm believer in the importance of nationalism in a young New Zealand. Admiring the country’s natural and cultural heritage, in the 1920s and early 1930s he had pushed for the preservation of remaining native bush, and donated the ‘Bledisloe Challenge Trophy’ for the best use of native plants in domestic gardening.146 The importance of history in all of this, he believed was that sentimental associations with the past were the building blocks of national traditions and restrained the tendencies of an age in which the spirit of materialism threatened to become dominant.147 Elaborating on this at the unveiling of Christchurch’s Captain Cook statue in 1932 he noted: ‘If this sense of nationhood among New Zealanders – a vital condition of the effectiveness of Empire partnership – is to be promoted, a knowledge of their country’s history should form a fundamental part [ 150 ]

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of the i­ntellectual equipment of all classes. It should be inculcated not merely in the days of youth, but it should be cherished proudly and patriotically throughout life.’148 Nationhood and national identity were thus complementary to imperialism. The stumbling block to New Zealanders’ love of history, he believed, was their perception that the country had emerged too recently from the pioneering stage of settlement to have given much thought to memorialising the events that had shaped this period. As ‘the cradle of New Zealand history as a civilised state’, Bledisloe accordingly believed that a nationalised Waitangi might be instrumental in developing a greater sense of national solidarity and a deeper spirit of nationhood, while also healing long-standing differences or suspicions which might have existed between Maori and Pakeha.149 As Gavin McLean eloquently notes, ‘Almost 100 years after Hobson had said “now we are one people”, Bledisloe had articulated the replacement myth “two peoples, one land”’.150 In doing so, he was sustaining the widespread conceit that New Zealanders had created a harmonious society. A true imperialist, Bledisloe in fact saw the Treaty of Waitangi as having greatly benefited Maori, drawing them in as members of the British Empire and ultimately seeing them become ‘white on the inside’.151 In doing this, colonisation had actually ‘saved’ Maori. As he argued at the Waitangi ceremony in 1934, prior to systematic British colonisation, Maori seemed to be advancing towards self-extinction. ‘Then came the Treaty of Waitangi, bringing with it British sovereignty, the majesty of the law, together with the Pakeha system of adjusting disputes, and from that day no tribal wars had taken place.’152 The fact that the official opening of the restored Treaty House in February 1934 brought together representatives of different tribes and sub-tribes from all over the dominion was, for Bledisloe, further proof of the unifying affect that the Treaty had wrought on Maori. As he noted in his speech at the event, ‘let Waitangi be to us all a Tatau Pounamu – a happy and precious closing of the door for ever upon all war and strife between races and tribes in this country – the place where all erstwhile antagonists have clasped hands of eternal friendship’.153 Accordingly, when, a few weeks after the announcement of Bledisloe’s gifting of the Waitangi estate, Sir Apirana Ngata called for a matching whare runanga to commemorate both the Governor General’s gift to the nation and the Treaty itself, Bledisloe was naturally enthusiastic.154 At a number of levels it fitted perfectly with his interpretation of the significance of both the Treaty and the newly renamed Treaty House. First, the two buildings – Maori and Pakeha – standing side by side symbolised dominant myths of the country’s race relations. As a Weekly News editorial later reflected, ‘no two [ 151 ]

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buildings could be less alike than these, no two cultures as disparate as those they represent’, and yet, the author concludes, the Treaty of Waitangi ‘brought the blessing of unity’.155 Second, as a building of essentially Maori design, Te Whare Runanga was recognised by Pakeha as a tangible monument to Maori art and craft, or, as Buick argued in 1934, a classic example of their craft, and a testimony of the restored culture.156 Third, the fact that Te Whare Runanga was a building for all Maori reiterated Bledisloe’s claim that the Treaty had united Maori. Finally, the gesture was, for Bledisloe, testimony on the part of Maori to the sincerity of British honour and integrity.157 In reality, however, Te Whare Runanga was conceived more as a reminder to Pakeha of the agreement they had entered into.158 Bledisloe’s perceptions of the importance of Waitangi similarly informed the conservation and interpretation of Busby’s old residence. As the centrepiece of a national shrine, the dilapidated ­ former British Residency had by the end of 1933 been transformed into the Treaty House and made physically grander than the Sydney ­architect John Verge’s original design.159 At the same time, Bledisloe also hoped that a history of the European settlement of New Zealand centred on the Treaty of Waitangi could help unite opposing pioneering views of New Zealand’s settlement, namely those of the missionaries of the North, and the New Zealand Company.160 As ­ an extension of this idea, in October 1933, while attending the Christchurch suburb of Fendalton’s jubilee celebrations, he suggested Waitangi as the centre of New Zealand’s pioneer history, where a roll of the first settlers from the ­different parts of the country could be compiled and preserved.161 As an advocate of the value of historic places and national landmarks Bledisloe had also hoped that donating Waitangi would help to stimulate wider interest in the preservation of historic sites and landmarks, undervalued, he believed, by the common perception that New Zealand was too young to have sites of real historical significance. The idea, it seems, bore immediate fruit, and within weeks of the public announcement of the gift, the New Zealand Forestry League Council – which had the preservation of historic spots as one of its objectives – reiterated Bledisloe’s call, suggesting that Elsdon Best’s records in the Dominion Museum could be used to compile a list of historic places for preservation or the erection of plaques.162 The New Zealand Institute of Town Planners similarly praised Bledisloe’s foresight, noting that because of him a ‘historic link with the past history of New Zealand [would] now be preserved like the home of George Washington in America’.163 Bledisloe’s hopes, however, were perhaps most concisely expressed in an editorial in the Dominion: [ 152 ]

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We have reached a stage in our existence as a young nation when the amenities of life are beginning to influence our thoughts. The pioneer stage has been passed. Fire and sword have left their scars upon the landscape. We are not in a state of civilisation which, for want of a better description, is ‘half-baked’. In building for the future we have also to rescue from oblivion the relics of the past, for these relics are our history. Some have gone beyond recall, but it is still possible in various ways to preserve those that remain and which are now a prey to the ravages of time and decay … The danger in a new country such as ours is that in our haste to make material progress we may destroy the traces of our history. Their Excellencies’ generous gifts are therefore a timely reminder of the value of these. It is for the public to show that they have grasped this real significance.164

Conclusion Perhaps the most important action on the part of the state with respect to the preservation of New Zealand’s European heritage was the appointment of J. Allan Thomson as the Dominion Museum’s director in 1914. In part the argument behind this relates to the broadening of the museum’s activates after 1913 both to give greater consideration to Pakeha heritage and to establish various ‘national collections’. More importantly, however, was Thomson’s recognition of the significance of individual and local effort in heritage preservation and collection, and indeed one of his recommendations to Minister of Internal Affairs George Russell in 1917 had been that local bodies be given the power to purchase or become guardians of historic sites and monuments. In making this suggestion, Thomson was clearly aware of the unique relationship that communities and regions had with the history and heritage in their backyards, be that historic places and buildings, historical documents and objects, or even historical narrative itself. The significance of local efforts to the collection and preservation of historical documents cannot be overestimated – either in motivation or in scale – not only with the local leading the preservation cause well into the twentieth century but research institutions and professionals themselves being somewhat dependent upon the work of amateurs. While the same can be said for the preservation of historic sites and buildings, they were also a little more complex, with ‘local’ having significance not just as a reflection of pride, in pride, but in a possessive sense, in which perceptions of local and national significance were often conflicting. The pride Canterbury had for its Provincial Buildings or Gisborne for its ‘first’ links to Cook, for example, had their national dimensions, but were principally motivated by local pride in the past or in claims to national pre-eminence. Or they were simply seen as anchors to the [ 153 ]

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past. The Treaty House, by comparison, was fundamentally symbolic and of overwhelmingly national significance. The site and building were part of the Bay of Islands community, but as a ‘national shrine’ there was little space given to local connections.

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Notes 1 Dominion, 5 August 1913 and 8 August 1913. 2 Phillips, Jock, ‘Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips and Footie on Saturday Afternoon: Reflections on 100 Years of New Zealand Historiography’, NZJH, 24:2 (1990), pp. 122–3; Belich, Paradise Reforged, p. 544. 3 New Zealand Times, 25 January 1890; New Zealand Mail, 31 January 1890. 4 The importance of Hobson’s arrival related to his landing the following day to read his proclamation of appointment as Lieutenant Governor. 5 Onslow to Lord Knutsford, 1 February 1890, G/25/16, ANZ. 6 Evening Post, 23 January 1890. 7 The first seems to have been the Wellington Early Colonists’ Association, established in late 1872. By the end of 1873 similar groups existed in Christchurch, Dunedin, and Auckland. 8 Evening Post, 7 January 1873. 9 K. C. McDonald, City of Dunedin: A Century of Civic Enterprise (Dunedin 1965), p. 258; Sean Brosnahan, To Fame Undying: The Otago Settlers Association and Its Museum, 1898–1998 (Dunedin 1998), pp. 6–7. 10 McDonald, City of Dunedin, pp. 346–7. 11 Cited in Brosnahan, To Fame Undying, p. 24. 12 Edwards, Secretary of the Wellington Historical and Early Settlers’ Association, to Russell, 16 August 1918, IA1,13/27/45, ANZ. 13 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Melbourne 1996), pp. 210–11. 14 Barbara Howe, ‘Women in Historic Preservation: The Legacy of Ann Pamela Cunningham’, The Public Historian, 12:1 (Winter 1990), pp. 31–61. 15 Graeme Davison, ‘The Parochial Past: Changing Uses of Australian Local History’, in Paul Ashton (ed.), The Future of the Past?:  Australian History After the Bicentenary (Sydney 1990), p. 9. 16 Gibbons, ‘Non-fiction’, in Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, p. 66. 17 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 200. 18 Canterbury, Old and New, 1850–1900: A Souvenir of the Jubilee (Christchurch 1900), preface. 19 Otago Witness, 26 April 1884. 20 Brosnahan, To Fame Undying, pp. 6–7, 14, 33–4; Taranaki Herald, 1 October 1900. 21 Evening Post, 7 January 1873. 22 Otago Witness, 29 May 1907. 23 McDonald, City of Dunedin, pp. 286–7. 24 Grey River Argus, 20 January 1916; John Barr, The City of Auckland, New Zealand, 1840–1920 (Auckland 1922), p. 150. 25 Brosnahan, To Fame Undying, p. 33. 26 See for example, ‘Objects of the Association’, Journal of the Early Settlers’ and Historical Association of Wellington, 2:2 (September 1922), p. 28. 27 T. W. Downes, Old Whanganaui (Hawera 1915), p. vii. Other examples include New Zealand Natives’ Association, Canterbury Old and New (1910), which was ­essentially a collection of pioneer reminiscences as well as accounts of Maori life, and Bishop W. L. Williams’s East Coast Historical Records (Gisborne 1932), which was motivated by the need to compile information ‘before it was lost’. 28 Barr, The City of Auckland, preface.

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H istory from below 29 Hawera & Normandy Star, 7 June 1897. 30 Canterbury Old and New, p. 11. 31 T. M. Hocken, A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand (Wellington 1909). 32 T. Lindsay Buick, Old Manawatu, or, The Wild Days of the West (Palmerston North 1903), preface. 33 David Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago 1960), p. 97. 34 Davison, ‘The Parochial Past’, in Paul Ashton (ed.), The Future of the Past? Australian History after the Bicentenary (Nowra 1989), pp. 5–19. 35 Auckland Star, 22 March 1916. 36 E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr. Hocken and His Fellow Collectors (Dunedin 1961), pp. 7–8. 37 Michael Bassett, The Mother of All Departments: The History of the Department of Internal Affairs (Auckland 1997), pp. 61–2. 38 Greenslade and Field, NZPD, 151, 25 August 1910, pp. 22–3; Russell, NZPD, 156, 24 October 1911, p. 940. 39 AJHR, H-33, 1915, p. 13; H-22, 1927, p. 12;. MU1, box 17, file 11/1/15, TPA. 40 Percy Smith to Ewen, 5 May 1917, IA1, 13/27/45, ANZ. 41 Hislop to Massey, 31 December 1917, and Memorandum for the High Commissioner, London, August 1917, IA1, 13/27/45, ANZ; AJHR, H-22, 1917, p. 16. 42 AJHR, H-22, 1918, p. 19. 43 Anderson to Hislop, 3 March 1922; Hislop to Downie Stewart, 2 October 1922; and Anderson to Hislop, 3 October 1922, IA1, 113/6, ANZ. 44 Rachel Barrowman, The Turnbull: A Library and Its World (Auckland 1995), p. 25. 45 Evening Post, 23 June 1920. 46 Barrowman, The Turnbull, pp. 4–25; 32–3. 47 J. E. Traue, ‘McNab, Robert 1864–1917’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.dnzb.govt.nz, accessed 20 April 2009. 48 S. R. Strachan, ‘Hocken, Thomas Morland 1836–1910’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.dnzb.govt.nz, accessed 20 April 2009. 49 Otago Witness, 11 August 1909. 50 Grey’s collections were originally split between Auckland, Cape Town, and London. The government had itself unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate for their return in 1904. NZPD, 131, 19 October 1904, p. 228. 51 McCormick, The Fascinating Folly, p. 29. 52 Robert McNab, The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840 (Christchurch 1913), p. vii. 53 Edward Morris, ‘On the Tracks of Captain Cook’, TPNZI, 33 (1900), p. 514; Robert McNab, Historical Records of New Zealand, Vol. 1 (Wellington 1908), pp. iii–iv. 54 Hilliard, ‘A Prehistory of Public History: Monuments, Explanations and Promotions, 1900–1970’, in Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips, Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History (Auckland 2001), p. 32. 55 In addition to facilitating Scholefield’s work on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, much of this research was presented in his 1929 bulletin Historical Sources and Archives in New Zealand (Wellington 1929). 56 AJHR, H-22, 1930, p. 34. 57 Russell to Rev. T. Fisher, Vicar of St Stephen, 15 July 1918, IA1, 13/27/45, ANZ. 58 Thomson to Hislop, 10 July 1917, IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 59 Broderick to Hislop, 30 July 1917, ibid. 60 Thomson to Hislop, 11 August 1917, ibid. 61 Ibid., 25 March 1918; AJHR, C-6, 1919. The government did however make a small grant to the Department of Lands in order to protect those buildings most exposed to possible damage. 62 Field, NZPD, 180, 17 September 1917, p. 189, and 1 October 1917, p. 545. 63 Thomson to Hislop, 18 April 1918, IA1, 158/193, ANZ.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 64 Note from Russell to Hislop, 16 July 1918, in Cowan to Hislop, 6 July 1918, IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 65 The reports themselves exist in IA1, 158/193, ANZ. 66 Auckland Star, 18 May 1927; C. A. Fleming, Science, Settlers and Scholars: The Centennial History of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Wellington 1987), pp. 60, 245. 67 Edward Goodwillie, The World’s Memorials of Robert Burns (Detroit 1911), pp. 72–5. 68 Otago Witness, 5 May 1892; Otago Daily Times, 6 July 1891. 69 K. C. McDonald, History of North Otago (Oamaru 1940), pp. 191–2. 70 The other leading idea had been for it to take the form of a series of educational scholarships. Otago Witness, 5 July 1905 and 14 March 1906. 71 Robert Gilkinson, Early Days in Central Otago, 3rd ed. (Christchurch 1958), pp. 145, 197–202. 72 J. Cattell, Historic Buildings of Canterbury and South Canterbury (Wellington 1985), p. 9. 73 Simone Stephens, Public Art in Central Christchurch: A Study by the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (Christchurch 1998), p. 12. 74 Evening Post, 22 March 1910. 75 Hawera & Normanby Star, 16 February 1907. 76 Evening Post, 12 January 1914 and 26 June 1915; Tuapeka Times, 10 July 1909; Hawera & Normanby Star, 2 September 1907; Wanganui Herald, 17 February 1909. 77 New Zealand Herald, 11 August 1904. Calls for Hobson’s grave to be better cared for had, in fact, periodically arisen since at least the early 1880s. 78 Richard Garnett, Edward Gibbon Wakefield: The Colonization of South Australia and New Zealand (London 1898), p. 375. 79 Stewart, NZPD, 145, 7 October 1908, p. 982; New Zealand Tablet, 24 September 1908. 80 Otago Witness, 21 October 1908. 81 Evening Post, 8 July 1910. 82 The Journal of the Early Settlers and Historical Association of Wellington, 1:3 (September 1913), p. 99. 83 J. B. Marsden, Life and Work of Samuel Marsden, Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1913, p. v. 84 Ibid., pp. v–vi; Donne to Ward, 1 April 1904, TO 1/64 1906/315, ANZ. 85 Grey River Argus, 1 April 1911. 86 Joel Samuel Polack, New Zealand: Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures During a Residence in That Country Between the Years 1831 and 1837, vol. 2 (London 1838), pp. 127–36. 87 Most notably Archdeacon W. L. Williams, ‘On the Visit of Captain Cook to Poverty Bay and Tolaga Bay’, TPNZI, 21 (1888), pp. 389–97. 88 Frances Porter, A Sense of History: A Commemorative Publication for John Cawte Beaglehole, O.M., about James Cook’s Landing Sites in New Zealand (Wellington 1978), p. 17. 89 See, for example, Morris, ‘On the Tracks of Captain Cook’; H. D. M Haszard, ‘Foottracks of Captain Cook’, TPNZI, 35 (1902), pp. 24–32; Russell Duncan, ‘Following the Tracks of Captain Cook’, TPNZI, 35 (1902), pp. 32–44. 90 Duncan, ‘Following the Tracks of Captain Cook’, pp. 43–4. 91 Haszard, ‘Foot-tracks of Captain Cook’, p. 37. 92 Duncan, ‘Following the Tracks of Captain Cook’, p. 40. 93 Gaudin, Secretary of the Cook Memorial Council to Percy Smith, 1 June 1904, LS70/22, ANZ. 94 ‘Schedule of proposed reserves for scenic purposes’, n.d. LS70/22, ANZ. Also see Donne to Ward, 21 December 1905; Coleman to Acting Superintendent of Tourist Department, 31 May 1905, LS70/8, ANZ. 95 Morris, ‘On the Tracks of Captain Cook’, p. 502. 96 Otago Witness, 6 May 1903; Evening Post, 28 September 1906. 97 Evening Post, 28 September 1906.

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H istory from below 98 Porter, A Sense of History, pp. 16–17. 99 Evening Post, 3 April 1908 and 9 April 1908. 100 Wanganui Herald, 20 July 1909; Otago Witness, 5 August 1908. 101 ‘The Captain Cook Memorial at Ship Cove: its financing’, n.d., n.a., IA1, 60/70/4, ANZ. 102 Evening Post, 8 September 1921. 103 IA63, Micro-3580, n.d., ANZ 104 Heke, NZPD, 86, 10 October 1894, p. 607. 105 Seddon, ibid. 106 John Wilson, The Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings (Christchurch 1991), pp. 28–9. 107 Lyttleton Times, cited in ibid., p. 24. 108 Wilson, The Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings, p. 35. 109 Lyttelton Times, 4 October 1910. 110 Strongman, City Beautiful, p. 24. 111 Ibid., p. 33. 112 Lyttleton Times, 18 April 1928. 113 Sir Francis Bell to unknown, 28 May 1928, IA1, 60/12, ANZ. 114 Bell, NZPD, 219, 3 October 1928, pp. 771–2. 115 Ibid., p. 771; Howard, NZPD, 218, 4 September 1928, p. 750. 116 Combs, NZPD, 218, 4 September 1928, p. 752. 117 Isitt, NZPD, 219, 3 October 1928, p. 773. 118 Lyttelton Times, 4 October 1910. 119 Bell, NZPD, 219, 3 October 1928, p. 772. 120 Both of these theses argue that architecture in the first three decades of the Canterbury settlement was decidedly English in style. After this date, they argue that a colonial influence began to grow, but that until at least the end of the century a strong English influence remained. See Charles Sayer, ‘The History of Canterbury as Expressed in Its Buildings’, MA, Canterbury University, 1932, and Paul Pascoe, ‘The Study of the Early Buildings in the Canterbury Settlement of New Zealand Erected by the Canterbury Pilgrims, in Their Effort to Found a New England’, MA, Canterbury University, 1935. 121 See, for example, Holland, Bell, and Howard, in NZPD, 219, 3 October 1928; Lyttelton Times, 29 May 1928, 122 Christchurch Sun, 7 August 1934. 123 Christchurch Press, 16 January 1934; Christchurch Star-Sun, 18 August 1937. 124 Sayer, ‘The History of Canterbury as Expressed in Its Buildings’, pp. 33 and 105. 125 Johannes Andersen, Old Christchurch in Picture and Story (Christchurch 1949), pp. 165–227. 126 The location had also long been on tourist schedules as an interesting place for tourists to visit; however, the historical significance of the spot was rarely given much emphasis here. See, for example, Ernest Bilbrough (ed.), Brett’s Handy Guide to New Zealand (Auckland 1890), p. 52. 127 Daily Southern Cross, 2 May 1868. 128 Auckland Weekly News, 22 March 1884. 129 Evening Post, 10 December 1909. 130 T. Lindsay Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi: or, How New Zealand Became a British Colony (Wellington 1914), p. vii. 131 Taranaki Herald, 13 December 1909; Evening Post, 14 May 1910. 132 Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi, pp. vii–ix. 133 New Zealand Herald, 25 March 1881. 134 AJHR, A-6, 1883, p. 2. 135 www.historic.org.nz/magazinefeatures/2007Spring/2007_spring_maori-halls.htm, accessed 5 January 2008. 136 Melanie Lovell-Smith, ‘History and Historic Places: Some Thoughts on History and Historic Places in New Zealand during the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, MA, University of Auckland, 2000, pp. 60–3.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 137 Clarke to Commissioner of Crown Lands, North Auckland, 7 November 1923; Commissioner of Crown Lands, North Auckland to Thomson, 19 December 1924, BAAZ, 1109/528a, ANZ. 138 Commissioner of Crown Lands, North Auckland to Whitelaw, 26 May 1926; Thomson to Commissioner of Crown Lands, North Auckland, 28 October 1927, ibid.; Vernon Reed, The Gift of Waitangi: A History of the Bledisloe Gift (Wellington 1957), p. 13. 139 Peter Shaw, Waitangi (Napier 1992), p. 74. 140 Buick, Waitangi: Ninety-four years After, pp. 11–12. 141 New Zealand Herald, 23 May 1959. 142 For further information on Bledisloe’s approach to history see Gavin McLean, The Governors: New Zealand ’s Governors and Governors-General (Dunedin 2006), pp. 218–20. 143 New Zealand Herald, 31 March 1930; Waipa Post, 29 September 1931. 144 Waipa Post, 31 October 1931. 145 Hawera Star, 11 December 1931. 146 Evening Post, 21 March 1930; Marlborough Press, 4 November 1930; Dominion, 26 March 1931. 147 See, for example, his speech ‘Captain James Cook, R.N.’ from the unveiling of the Captain Cook statue in Christchurch in August 1932, and ‘A Hall of Memories’, which was delivered at the dedication of the Auckland Memorial Museum in April 1932, in Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood: A Selection of Addresses Delivered in New Zealand (New Plymouth 1935), pp. 119–24 and 229–34. 148 Ibid., p. 119. 149 New Zealand Herald, 11 May 1932; Unidentified newspaper article, 6 February 1934 in MA, 97/12, ANZ. 150 McLean, The Governors, p. 224. 151 Wairarapa Age, 10 December 1930. 152 Unidentified newspaper article, 6 February 1934 in MA, 97/12, ANZ. 153 Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood, pp. 146–7. Tatau Pounamu refers in a figurative sense to how, in times of trouble, peace could be secured and warfare ended through a political marriage and the exchange of greenstone. 154 Evening Post, 1 June 1932; Ngata to Bledisloe, 13 July 1932, MA51/148, ANZ. 155 Weekly News, 11 February 1959. 156 Buick, Waitangi: Ninety-four Years After, pp. 12–13. 157 Unidentified newspaper article, 6 February 1934 in MA, 97/12, ANZ. 158 Claudia Orange, Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington 1987), p. 235. 159 Shaw, Waitangi, p. 76. 160 New Zealand Herald, 11 May 1932. 161 Christchurch Press, 2 October 1933. 162 Evening Post, 27 May 1932. 163 Dominion, 21 October 1932. 164 Dominion, 9 December 1932.

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CHA P T E R FIVE

In pursuit of a national past: ‘New Zealand is putting her historical house in order’1 The past in the present Anniversaries are a natural time to take stock, all the more so in colonial societies, who – all too aware of the apparent weakness of their pasts and lack of tradition – have historically seen major anniversaries as moments of validation. In colonial societies such concerns developed rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with history and tradition earlier assuming little importance as commemorations tended to focus on the past not as a marker of cultural tradition or public remembrance but as a yardstick of progress and change. While 26 January had been observed as Foundation Day or Anniversary Day in Australia since 1791, for example, and the first ‘official’ commemoration of the day was gazetted in 1818, celebrations typically consisted of elegant dinners, military salutes, entertainments, and the occasional public holiday, with most preparations remaining the preserve of private individuals. No allowance was made in government estimates for the New South Wales (NSW) colony’s jubilee in 1838, and the event failed even to garner a mention in the Governor’s despatches. A few individuals were prompted to contemplate higher things such as the national past and future, but for most it was a day of enjoyment rather than commemoration.2 While New Zealand’s Jubilee in 1890 was similarly dominated by sports competitions and jubilee processions, history did have a more substantive role. Around the country newspapers ran a ‘Then and Now’ series of historical reflections, while ‘Head Lines of New Zealand History’ traced key dates and events in the country’s history to the abolition of the provinces in 1876.3 In Wellington and Auckland the provincial anniversaries of 22 and 29 of January were commemorated with handsome souvenir edition newspapers, brimming with early settler reminiscences, and tracing all manner of early colonial history and progress. The publisher and history buff Henry Brett also [ 159 ]

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got in on the game, publishing the eight-hundred-page Early History of New Zealand as an unofficial jubilee history of the colony, replete with muster roll of pioneers.4 Yet the significance of history in New Zealand’s jubilee relative to Australia’s was as much a reflection of the times as it was a belief in the significance of the colony’s history per se, and indeed in devising its celebrations New Zealand had borrowed heavily from the Australian centenary two years earlier. More than just a NSW anniversary, 1888 was the first year in which 26 January was celebrated as a national holiday in each of the Australian colonies. While tensions remained – the South Australian Advertiser at pains to remind NSW that, though ‘senior’, it was not ‘the parent colony’ of all the others, which had their own ‘local memories and historic dates’ – the day was widely celebrated as the centenary of the beginning of Australian colonisation.5 History was central to the celebrations at a number of levels, even at the International Exhibition held in Melbourne, where the most popular attraction in the NSW court was a lifelike diorama of James Cook’s landing at Botany Bay. Arthur Phillip and the first fleet (of convicts), however, were nowhere to be seen, with the centenary more generally seen as an opportunity to move beyond the colony’s embarrassing origins and promote a narrative more acceptable to the idea of modern Australia.6 Government was especially active in the promotion of history, with NSW Premier Sir Henry Parkes providing a prize for the best work on ‘the first hundred years of Australia’ written by a native-born Australian, while his government advanced funds for the research and publication of the first volumes of the Historical Records of New South Wales and the completion of Ernest Favenc’s The History of Australian Exploration.7 In Victoria the schoolmaster and historian Alexander Sutherland was engaged to produce the two-volume Victoria and its Metropolis. Reflecting the dominance of European perceptions of history that remained in the Australian consciousness, Sutherland anticipated criticism for devoting eight hundred pages to the history of such a young colony – one which had no ‘battles, sieges or rebellions; the deaths of kings and the changing of dynasties: the dungeon, the axe, and the martyr’s stake – all those incidents which form the picturesque in history are absent from our story’.8 As with Favenc’s history, Sutherland’s great Australian hero was instead the explorer and the pioneer, with both books tracing the path of Australian greatness not through military conquest but through the winning of victory over a harsh uncharted landscape. Indeed, as with the New Zealand Jubilee publications two years later, many of the commemorative histories that appeared in Australia around 1888 featured roll-calls of pioneers and those who had shown the ‘moral courage’ required to open up the [ 160 ]

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continent – ­collectively telling a story of courage, perseverance, and energy overcoming disadvantages and obstacles, and eventually leading to independence. Similar themes lay at the heart of the Voortrekker centenary in South Africa in 1938. Organised by the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisations (FAK) established by the Broederbond in 1929 to combat what it saw as ‘cultural chaos’, the FAK sought to control and politicise the cultural debates of the 1930’s through the nurturing of a sense of a classless, unified, white Afrikaner yoke.9 With an antiimperialist narrative at the heart of this identity, the Voortrek was important as a symbol of both of the Afrikaners’ struggle against British colonial domination and the broader triumph over the Africans.10 The re-enactment of the ‘Great Trek’ that lay at the heart of the 1938 celebrations thus became a vehicle to create local and national identities, and as the wagon-train traversed the route from the Cape Colony to Pretoria it drew together the white Afrikaans-speaking population in a massive cultural orgy.11 Spectators were often dressed in Voortrekker clothing and held solemn ceremonies where wreaths were laid on the graves of Afrikaner heroes and streets were renamed in their honour.12 Further encouraging this narrative, the government sponsored a host of historical undertakings, including official histories, the publication of historical documents, and the writing of a play, not to mention Joseph Albrecht’s epic and costly film Bou van ‘n Nasie (They Built a Nation), which retold Afrikaner history between 1652 and 1910 as a powerful and successful struggle against hostile forces. Revisionism and social inclusion played an equally central role in Australia’s sesquicentennial – also celebrated in 1938 – which was the country’s first major post-federation anniversary.13 With the state having taken increasing control of directing Australian nationalism after 1901, the sesquicentennial represented an official attempt to re-orient the habits of Australian commemoration, and ideologically aimed to show a united and strong Australia; to bind the wounds of regional, class, and racial conflict; and to instil a sense of Australian community.14 History was again central to this. In Victoria, for example, the state’s ‘History and Heritage Committee’ set about erecting almost fifty plaques – its aim being to redress existing historical bias and imbalance by directing attention to neglected aspects of Victoria’s past, including Aborigines and inter-racial conflict.15 New South Wales similarly sought to redress past bias by drawing Arthur Phillip back into the fold, with the ­re-enactment of his landing at Farm Cove in 1788 featuring as one of a major events of the state’s centennial calendar. The seven hundred convicts that had arrived with Phillip, however, remained absent – a decision reflecting the general concerns with nationalism and [ 161 ]

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the ­promotion of a palatable past which sought to present Australia’s history as a story of peaceful development and progress. Celebrated in 1940 – two short years after the Australian sesqui – New Zealand’s Centennial drew upon elements of a number of earlier colonial anniversaries. Five years in the planning, and with considerable public investment, at its heart lay the celebration of a hundred years of government, progress, and the attainment of a national maturity. It was, at a number of levels, a deliberate act of national self-definition. ‘It is high time’, stated the Minister of Internal Affairs William Parry, ‘we ceased to labour the point of view of our being a young country… and look to 1940 as the year of our national comingof-age … not only as the end of a chapter, but as the beginning of a new one’.16 The Auckland mayor Ernest Davies put it in simpler terms – the Centennial ‘comes to us as a prayer to the past and an inspiration to the future’.17 Yet this idea of the young nation reaching adulthood has been a repeated theme in New Zealand history, with the same claim having been made in 1890, 1901, 1915, and the 1930s. As its resurgence in 1940 illustrated, the country never arrived at a fixed sense of national identity, each generation making its own discovery and forging its own identity. Detailed planning of the Centennial began in March 1936, with Parry and his Under Secretary Joe Heenan soon having a proposal before Parliament. The main celebrations were to include the completion of the new Parliament buildings; the erection of monuments and local memorials; the writing of historical surveys; and the running of celebratory events across the country, as well as an international exhibition in Wellington. The state would chip in £250,000 towards the cause.18 In line with the traditional role of the international exhibition, it was to focus squarely on progress – its aim, Governor General Lord Galway stating, being to ‘present a clear, unified and comprehensive picture of a century of modern progress and civilisation’ in New Zealand.19 The strong modernist lines of the exhibition buildings were similarly seen as evidence of the young country’s ambition – this statement of modernity coming on the back of 1930s expansion which had seen the stamp of progress leave an indelible mark on the country’s urban centres. Nowhere was this more evident than in Wellington, which had experienced an unprecedented building boom following the Liberals’ expansion of the public sector. Shedding its colonial skin, the city was becoming ‘more and more dignified as the capital city of the Dominion’ with buildings such as the Mutual Life and Citizen Assurance building (1938) and the State Insurance Building (1939) with their ‘striking modern architecture’ and high-speed elevators lauded as the future of modern urban New Zealand.20 [ 162 ]

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The Centennial’s emphasis on progress was as political as it was historical, with the event employed by the Labour Party as an opportunity to announce its success in pulling New Zealand out of the Depression as much as to illustrate the country’s political and social progress. Accordingly, while not initially conceived as Centennial memorials, a number of infrastructural developments such as Wellington’s Ngauranga Gorge highway and the Coastal highway were adopted as symbols of regional progress. Drawing the past into the present, as Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage queried during his opening of the new highway, ‘How few will realise or ever know as they speed in comfort along the new road of the difficult journeys made by our early mailmen and travellers on foot along this same path and difficulties they encountered?’21 The earlier coastal road alongside which the new highway sat thus acted as a marker of evolutionary distance travelled as much as it paid tribute to past endeavours and pioneering values. Indeed, of the 257 approved Centennial memorial projects, more than seventy-five per cent were of a utilitarian nature – as had been the government’s preference.22 Top of the list were the creation of parks, tree plantings, and Plunket rooms,23 with halls and swimming pools close behind. Historical memorials – the majority of which took the form of publications – made up the bulk of the remainder.24 For others who felt that it was their responsibility to ensure that the country lived up to the ideals upon which it had been founded, the urban landscape was itself a memorial to the pioneers. In the early stages of Wellington’s planning of the exhibition, for example, there was strong support for it being located in the Te Aro district, as amongst other things this would have involved bulldozing the most squalid of the city’s slums. ‘The greatest opportunity to make amend for our previous shortcomings in civic pride is now at hand’, commented one concerned citizen, concluding that ‘nothing short of demolition of the area is worthy of a moment’s consideration’.25 In a similar vein, at the first Centennial Conference in 1936, the mayor of Napier suggested that, as New Zealand’s newest city, post-earthquake Napier should perhaps be paraded as the future of the modern New Zealand city.26 Pioneers were equally synonymous with progress, and pioneering rhetoric and mythology would be central to the Centennial narrative. Indeed, as the Minister of Industries and Commerce Daniel Sullivan had argued during the first Centennial Conference, the dominant theme of the celebrations should be: the paying of an adequate tribute to the wonderful pioneers of this country who, at the risk of their lives in many instances, blazed the trail and made possible all that has flowed in creating a great civilization in a

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very short period of time … Today the foundations of a great civilisation have been laid, and in the short period of one hundred years – a little more than the span of one man’s life – all things have been done.27

Embodied in this stereotype of the pioneer were all the attributes considered essential for the economic and cultural development of any country, young or old. With these in pocket, there was a feeling that the challenges and uncertainties of the future could be approached with a sense of inevitable success. Yet in addition to the Centennial’s proclamation of one hundred years of progress, many also believed that the achievement presented the close of the pioneering era.28 Though many ‘old colonists’ remained to assist the next generation with ‘their wisdom and experience’, it was clear that the fortunes of the country must increasingly depend on their sons and daughters. Indeed, some people found looking back discomforting, seeing the opening decades of the twentieth century as being characterised by the demise of the pioneering values on which New Zealand had flourished, and the rise of a complacency. Evidence of this, argued the Canterbury Pilgrims and Early Settlers Association, was the lack of interest the younger generations had in New Zealand’s past.29 Others believed that the period charted a decline from the ‘energetic but sometimes unbalanced selfassertion’ of Julius Vogel’s foreign policy to an overly imperial ‘mother complex’ towards Britain.30 Those mesmerised by the vitality of earlier periods also claimed that since the end of the Great War ‘little history has been made’ in New Zealand.31 The implications were striking: Eliminate struggle, discipline and creative effort from our personal and national life, and inevitably we sow the seeds of national decadence … We must at all costs keep alive the crusading spirit of those who settled and developed this country. We must ‘follow the example of our gallant pioneers’, and discover … the moral equivalent of the struggle and hardship which were the lot of our forefathers.32

The underlying narrative was that behind the celebrations lay a story of courage, industry, vision, and faith: a heritage into which the current generation had entered, and which it would neglect at its peril. The revival of these ideals, it was believed, would be the truest memorial the present could make to the past, and few opportunities would be missed to highlight such values. Indeed, even the construction of the twenty-two hectares of exhibition buildings and grounds in only twenty-two months was portrayed as encapsulating the determination and ingenuity of the ‘national spirit’.33 The country’s support of the Exhibition following the outbreak of war only strengthened this view, with suggestions of postponing the exhibition labelled as contrary to the very national characteristics that were being celebrated.34 [ 164 ]

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In attempting to reinvigorate the pioneer legend, the archetype was dramatically revised and updated to better serve the needs of the present. Where the earlier ‘pioneering spirit’ celebrated the simple ‘Britishness’ of predominantly English-born settlers, it was now transferred to the New Zealand-born colonist, and updates to obscure regional, class, gender, and racial differences – the suggestion being that the strengths and ideals of the pioneers had entered the blood of every New Zealander.35 Organisers went to great lengths to ensure that surviving pioneers were central to celebrations, providing them with free train travel to events, where it was hoped they would wear ‘badge of honour’ Centennial ribbons – the different colours signifying their different lengths of residency in New Zealand. The death of early settlers was equally newsworthy material, often accompanied by reflections on the colony’s development over the period of the individual’s life.36 Orations lauding the patriarchal virtues of the pioneers were succeeded by the dedication of public monuments immortalising their memory – the ‘simplicity and reality’ of these monuments extolled in comparison to what was considered the ‘mere pageantry’ that accompanied many of the earlier forms of colonial monument building.

Making New Zealand Heenan pushed for an ambitious programme of historical publications, monuments, and historical re-enactments. These he saw as culturally constituting the heart of the celebrations. More than simply aiming to fill gaps in the existing scholarship, however, he believed the celebrations presented an opportunity to destroy old fallacies and present a ‘well-proportioned view of the facts revealed by new and unbiased research’.37 After considering everything from the publication of historical records and competitions for a historical novel to the restoration of buildings and the creation of a chair in New Zealand history, the wideranging historical programme was finalised around a flagship series of eleven scholarly ‘Centennial Surveys’.38 Complementing them would be thirty pictorial surveys targeting the popular audience and based loosely on the Building America series which was first published in 1935 for the United States Society for Curriculum Study, a historical atlas, a dictionary of New Zealand biography and a literary competition. In addition to this an endorsement fund was suggested to finance the publication of the best Master’s theses in New Zealand history. Finally, the National Centennial Committee (NCC) also approved a series of national events to celebrate the beginnings of British settlement in New Zealand. In the preceding decades, efforts had been made to give New Zealand [ 165 ]

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history greater prominence in the school curriculum, but to little effect. The absence of a single lectureship in New Zealand history at any university college was said only to aggravate the problem.39 The suggestion of creating a chair in New Zealand history as a Centennial memorial had been made with this in mind – its proposer, the president of the New Zealand Education Institute, arguing that a chair would become a centre of New Zealand studies, encouraging research in everything from national and regional history to local history and biography.40 The idea gained immediate support, including that of the rector of Canterbury University College Dr James Hight, Sir Apirana Ngata, and the Bishop of Waiapu William Herbert Williams.41 University men, however, were far from positive. To make such an appointment, responded John Elder, Professor of History at Otago University, ‘would be to emphasise a narrow and parochial view of history, which New Zealand, in its essential isolation, should strive to avoid’.42 Elder was a complex fellow. Like Hight’s, his books were not altogether different from those of Cowan or Buick – written on topics such as missionaries, pioneering, and goldmining – and like nonacademic historians’ his writing played up ‘the romantic’ and included large blocks of undigested quotation. Yet prior to his arrival in New Zealand he had also published a number of more scholarly works on British history, including books on Scottish history, British economic history, and the history of foreign policy.43 And it was within this frame that he broadly saw the teaching of New Zealand history. It was part of British colonial history, and needed to be considered within this wider theme. Original research was, however, being undertaken on New Zealand history within the universities through Master’s theses, with students making extensive use of historical collections of the Hocken and Turnbull libraries, which had grown steadily through the 1920s and 1930s. So too did the number of theses themselves, which climbed from a single work in 1920 exploring Te Kooti and the Hauhau movement, to twelve in 1927, and thirty in 1934, by which time there was an almost exclusive focus on the early European history of New Zealand or early Maori – Pakeha relations. Indeed, of the 363 history theses completed in New Zealand universities prior to 1940, only eighteen were not on New Zealand subjects.44 Yet, as this breakdown suggests, the emphasis remained clearly on colonial policy and empire. Indeed, as Olssen notes, for most of the first generation of professionally trained New Zealand historians who came of age in the 1920s, Britain and the Empire remained of central historical interest: ‘J. C. Beaglehole devoted much of his life to Cook; A. J. Harrop to Wakefield, the New Zealand Company, and the relationship between England and New Zealand; [ 166 ]

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W. P. Morrell to the annexation and development of New Zealand within the context of charging imperial policy’.45 Morrell was also particularly attached to the ‘more English than England’ narrative of New Zealand, while Beaglehole had initially been reluctant to focus on New Zealand history. Influenced in part by his London School of Economics supervisor’s view that historians should study ‘general movements in the Empire as a whole’ rather than write histories of individual colonies, he also initially mocked the country’s failure to be sufficiently English.46 Indeed, as Giselle Byrnes has recently suggested, it was not until the 1950s and the new wave of professional revisionist historians such as Michael Turnbull, W. H. Oliver, Keith Sinclair, and Andrew Sharp that ‘professional’ history moved from studying New Zealand history in the context of an imperial framework to New Zealand as a nation with its own identity.47 Not surprisingly then, the first response of many of this first group of professional historians to the Centennial’s emphasis on identity and national maturity was one of scepticism. As Beaglehole – concluding his New Zealand: A Short History (1936) with an inquiry into whether a sense of nationhood had yet emerged in New Zealand – found, the country was not with any deep feeling, a nation: The tenderness of place, the genius loci, in no large sense it appears, is part of the life of the European born in our country – for the Maori, the ancient conqueror, it is different – the sense of intimacy, quietude, profound and rich comfort is not yet indestructibly mingled with the thought of a native soil, an habitual and inseparable surrounding. There is glad recognition, there is love even; but there is not identity. Not enough men have died in this land. Not in letters nor in art has life crystallized and ennobled itself.48

The Centennial was to be regarded as an ‘indulgence in a series of fatuities, all of them depraved, from which a sensible person ought to be exempt’.49 By the end of the decade, however, Beaglehole had been somewhat won over to the ideas of his fellow ‘Centennial branch’ historians Wood, McCormick, and Webb, who saw the 1930s as finishing with genuine, but modest, signs of ‘adult nationhood’.50 Yet this difference of opinion was also telling, highlighting underlying tensions that existed in New Zealand historiography at the time. Historians such as Beaglehole, Wood, McCormick, and Webb had been raised within the historiographical paradigm first elaborated by William Pember Reeves in The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa in 1898. Absorbing certain elements from the ‘more English than the English’ idea, the paradigm made a case for the decisive influence of the settler experience on the New Zealand ‘habitus’, stressing the importance of the Maori, the frontier, the New Zealand Wars, and the gold rushes in [ 167 ]

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freeing the country’s British colonists from old-world traditions and creating an adventuresome and democratic society that would become the ‘social laboratory of the world’. The influence of Turner’s frontier was undeniable. Other writers, such as Cowan and Buick, assigned more weight to the influence of Maori and the idea that New Zealand had become a harmonious bi-cultural society, but the undercurrents of the Reevesian paradigm remained. Many historians who came of age before the Second World War managed to hold the two paradigms together, usually by seeing the evolution of the social laboratory and harmonious race relations as evidence of New Zealand’s racial energy and intelligence, its success in perfecting British traditions, and even of an imperial destiny in the Pacific. As a consequence of this, the generation which came of age in the 1920s conceptualised New Zealand’s emergent nationality in evolutionary terms, but, whereas some stressed the importance of the British heritage, others placed emphasis on the environment and the process of natural selection. The pioneer, as a metaphor, held these two paradigms together.51 Yet with the Centennial apparently marking the end of the pioneering phase, the old paradigm was about to become the proverbial square peg. For Parry and Heenan it was thus an invaluable opportunity to address some of the shortcomings of the national character through the creation and guiding of the national spirit.52 Others, including leading National Historical Committee (NHC) members such as McCormick, Beaglehole, and D. O. W. Hall, saw the surveys as an opportunity to bring academic standards to New Zealand history, and rescue history writing from the so-called ‘amateur tradition’. In recent years this aspect of the Centennial has been the focus of intensive study, scholars seeing the involvement of a number of key first-generation academic historians interested in New Zealand as being akin to the passing of the torch from the ‘amateur’ to the ‘professional’.53 In addition to the simple conceit here that there was practically no ‘real’ New Zealand historiography until there were academic historians to write it, however, this is somewhat overplaying things. The scale of ‘professional’ historical involvement was certainly unprecedented, but, far from being dominated by academically trained ‘professional’ historians, the surveys in reality constituted a ‘meeting of the historical traditions’. While McCormick, Hall, and Beaglehole saw the occasion as a platform for scholarship, others such as Heenan, and McCormick’s predecessor Oliver Duff, were more at home in ­middlebrow traditions. Other writers, such as Cowan and Jenkinson, were firmly within the so called ‘amateur’ tradition that McCormick and his cronies hoped to supersede. Furthermore, even though historians such as Morrell and Beaglehole had written New Zealand history, [ 168 ]

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their use of British academic publishers meant that comparatively few of their books sat on bookshelves of the general public in New Zealand. Indeed Erik Olssen has suggested that Morrell’s ‘professionalism’ isolated him from ­literate colonials ‘who needed a good dose of romance to make history palatable’ – a charge that could equally be laid on Beaglehole.54 Additionally, as argued in the previous chapter, ‘amateur’ historiography in the 1920s and 1930s cannot be viewed as a single tradition, with the swashbuckling of Cowan’s style constituting one point; the compendia style of Louis Ward at another; and the solemn heroworship of the pioneer biography completing the triangle. The same could be said for academically trained historians, with a number of the ‘professional’ contributors to the surveys incorporating elements of the ‘amateur’ tradition within their writing. Indeed, as Duff advised authors in mid-1938, the common thread holding the surveys together would be the wider story of progress – the narrative ‘that New Zealand today is the result of a century’s struggle by a British community to adapt itself to a new environment’ which had long dominated amateur historiography.55 Following Duff’s departure as editor McCormick sought at least to modify the ruling myths; however, he too ultimately viewed the country’s first hundred years as ending on a note of progress, mainly owing to the promise he saw in post-1935 Labour policies of encouraging a break with traditional dependence on British models.56 Not everyone was convinced by the government’s attempts to repackage New Zealand’s past, with many artists and intellectuals taking a cynical view of the idealistic representation being sold of the country.57 The issue of a historical survey on war, for example, had been raised by Duff early on, only to be emphatically rejected by Heenan, who recognised that a comprehensive history would have to discuss racial conflict in New Zealand. Cowan’s provocative comparison of the settler government’s treatment of Maori in the Waikato Wars to Italy’s treatment of the Abyssinians during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, and William Sutch’s Marxist take on the history of social welfare policy were similarly too much for the Centennial’s gatekeepers.58 Maori similarly complained that the celebrations failed to recognise New Zealand’s sordid race relations history, instead essentially seeking to enrol them as participants in the Centennial around Bledisloe’s old ideas about bi-cultural harmony and colonisation having saved Maori. Indeed, as Ngata joked in mid-1939 of the role assigned to Maori, it seemed that ‘the only way to show the progress of the Maori in the century was to provide a place at the exhibition where the influence of civilisation could be shown by the spectacle of gentlemen in plus fours with a bag of iron sticks’.59 Even at events as singularly important as the [ 169 ]

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anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi or the exercising of sovereignty over Akaroa, Maori were given only a supporting role. The anniversary of the Treaty’s signing was to be a highlight of the Centennial calendar, with the celebrations built around two main events – the re-enactment of the meetings of 5 and 6 February 1840 culminating in the first signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the opening of Te Whare Runanga. Adding an air of majesty to the event, the Treaty itself was restored, mounted, and displayed at Waitangi – the first time it had been on display and treated as significant.60 Or at least its fabric was. More accurately, the Treaty was significant as an object and symbolic relic of the country’s founding myth, but the obligations and politics behind the document were decidedly absent from the celebrations. Still, with a crowd of over ten thousand attending, the country’s newspapers had a field day, with full-page articles lauding Waitangi as the ‘cradle of the nation’ and the Treaty as the ‘Dominion’s Magna Carta’. Behind the façade, however, things were not so happy. Despite government attempts to present the event as evidence of the country’s good race relations, many Maori took it as an opportunity to embarrass the government. With their Treaty claims not settled, Waikato refused to attend, while Taranaki tribes were divided on the issue. South Island Maori made a good showing but were also careful to press home that they had waited almost a hundred years for settlement of claims that had been officially recognised since the 1850s. Although the government liked historical re-enactments of early settler landings, in Canterbury the suggestion that the celebrations should include a re-enactment of the Battle of Onawe was similarly vetoed by Parry, who stated that ‘One of the main purposes of the Centennial celebrations was to show that the Maori and Pakeha had left behind them the few old disputes which occasionally led to bloodshed and were linked now in friendliness ... Anything which tended to give reminders of old ­troubles should have no place in the pageantry.’61 Nor did Maori fare much better when it came to memorials, with the Centennial’s grand themes of national unity and progress leaving little space for specifically Maori memorials. Indeed, when the Auckland Provincial Centennial Committee suggested that a national hui (Maori assembly) be held as part of the celebrations, the NCC responded with an emphatic ‘No!’ – its reasoning being that the Centennial was for all, not Maori alone.62 Ngata’s suggestion in late 1936 that a whare runanga be constructed in Wellington as a national Maori memorial initially met the same response, with the main benefit Heenan seeing in the idea being as ‘a place where tourists could go and see Maoris as they really are and not under “show” conditions’.63 The idea, however, was greeted with more interest the following year when Ivor Arthur Te Puni [ 170 ]

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presented it in terms more amenable to the government’s vision for the Centennial – the suggestion being that the whare be constructed as a memorial to the Maori founders. ‘This remarkable letter from Te Puni’s descendent [sic]’, Heenan noted in a memo to Parry, ‘has re-oriented my ideas in regard to the participation of the Maori in the Centennial ... As the writer says, the modern greeting between Maori and Pakeha is “Tatou, Tatou” which being literally interpreted as “us, us”, or in the liberal sense “working together”.’64

Local uprisings Until recently the focus of the historiography on national celebrations in New Zealand has been just that – national.65 Where comment is made on dissension in the ranks, it has usually been considered in respect of differing views of the various historical traditions on New Zealand in the greater sense, with the underlying assumption being that, as it set out to be, the Centennial was a major step towards the creation of nation and the breaking down of regional parochialisms. To date only two scholars have seriously argued against this grain: the literary historian Lawrence Jones, who has explored efforts to create a pioneer antimyth both within and without the official Centennial publications, and Hilliard, who astutely notes that the scholarly focus on the evolution of a truly national history assumes that settler culture was ‘centrally concerned with “national identity”, and that New Zealand cultural history should be too’.66 This was certainly true for the government, which saw the intersection between the national and the local as the cutting edge of the Centennial. As a celebration of national progress and unity, the bulk of celebrations were conceived as regional, provincial, and local events – the idea being that this would employ the wealth of local sentiment within a nationalistic framework. The figures speak for themselves, with three-quarters of the £250,000 the government stumped up for the Centennial going towards local celebrations and memorials in the form of subsidy.67 Similarly, despite the attention lavished on the eleven Centennial surveys, in all there were 180 state-funded Centennial publications, including twenty-six regional and provincial histories that were completed as official memorials. The government’s flagship publications were the proverbial tip of the iceberg.68 Indeed, those that had the greatest impact on readers were the pictorial Making New Zealand series, and newspaper series such as ‘One Hundred Years Ago’ and James Berry’s ‘New Zealand in Review’.69 Inevitably, such articles were written for a popular readership, but the fact that a high proportion of New Zealand’s 130-odd newspapers picked up the series went a long way towards popularising New Zealand history. [ 171 ]

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In its organising of regional and local historical publications, the NHC was constantly looking over the shoulder of the provincial committees who were expected to toe the party line – particularly in relation to the Centennial’s emphasis on the European history of New Zealand. With government subsidisation at stake, the shortness of provincial purse strings meant that for most this simply had to be factored into the mix. Viewed together, however, the provincial histories have little in common beyond the fact that most sought to reinforce regional views of self or claims to national pre-eminence. Henry Wily’s South Auckland and Melville Harcourt’s Bay of Islands history The Day Before Yesterday, for example, both laid claims to their respective districts being the cradle of the nation – with Wily’s history focusing on the earliest stage of settlement up to the end of the 1860s, while Harcourt barely looked beyond the end of the 1840s, the early missionaries, and the Treaty. With Gate Pa similarly fundamental to the identity of Tauranga, the New Zealand Wars featured very heavily in the province’s history, closing as it did with the formation of the borough in 1882.70 Tempting the wrath of the NHC was avoided by looking at the topic from the perspective of the missionaries and playing up Cowan’s old race relations myth. A similar approach were taken in local celebration of important dates and historic events: qualification for government support of events required that they be undertaken within the ‘official’ Centennial period between 1 January and 16 November 1940.71 This quickly proved problematic, and for local communities inevitably meant either changing the dates of celebrations to fit the government’s narrative or forgoing government support. Yet as interest in local history grew it often brought with it a growth of local pride, which – contrary to the intentions of the NHC – often occurred at the expense of national identity. Gisborne was a particularly interesting case. Fuelled by decades of celebrating its historical associations with James Cook, by the mid-1930s there existed in the district a popular view of the region’s importance to the country’s wider history.72 It was, the popular slogan went, ‘the birth place of New Zealand’ – a claim grounded on Poverty Bay being the site where Cook first landed in New Zealand. Gisborne consequently wanted a national monument to Cook in Poverty Bay, while also hoping that local plans for a re-enactment of Cook’s first landed in October 1769 would mark the launch to the national celebrations.73 As the local newspaper stoked the fire of enthusiasm, it was not long before the Gisborne 30,000 Club was knocking on the Minister of Internal Affairs’s door in the hope of getting Gisborne’s local celebrations promoted as national events.74 Cautious as Parry was, he eventually decided that ‘with its rich and individual historical [ 172 ]

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associations’, the East Coast would be given special attention, and for the period of the Centennial separated out from the Auckland province, within whose boundaries it had fallen since 1853.75 Swept along on a wave of local pride, the mayor of Cook County was soon back in Parry’s office pitching the idea of making the change permanent. While he was supportive in theory, as Parry delicately noted, with the provincial system having been abolished in 1876 the term ‘province’ was now meaningless in law and fact. Perhaps, he concluded, the area should simply call itself ‘East Land’ to differentiate it from Auckland, as did Northland from Auckland.76 Bolstered by what it read as a tacit support for its claims, by late 1938 Gisborne had begun drafting a chapter for an anticipated history of New Zealand, literally writing its position into the national story, despite no state plans for such a work.77 Then again, for Poverty Bay the idea wasn’t so much about national identity as it was about local pride and identity. Such local perspectives on the nation were common, and, as the Centennial gave rise to local enthusiasm and passion, community and local celebrations soon came to form the hub of people’s identification with the larger event. In Wellington, for example, local pride and belief in its own historical importance resulted in the nature of the city and provincial memorials being hotly contested. In part this stemmed from the fact that the national celebrations coincided with Wellington’s own; however, much as in Gisborne it was also grounded in the belief that it was the well-spring of the colony. In the hearts and minds of Wellingtonians it was thus anticipated that the celebration of New Zealand’s Centennial would finally redress the balance and recognise Wellington, over Auckland and Gisborne, as the heart and true foundation of the country. For locals, the city’s winning of the right to hold the Centennial Exhibition was seen as further evidence of this. In a similar capacity, while within scholarly circles the interwar period had witnessed a growing scepticism about the legacy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield – Beaglehole even considering writing a debunking essay – his importance to the self-images of Wellington and Canterbury saw him undergo a renaissance during the Centennial.78 Amidst growing calls for a memorial to Wakefield, ‘whose life has resulted in more being done for the real foundation of this country than by anybody else’, as the Wellington Mayor Thomas Hislop argued, in mid-1938 Wakefield fever, culminated in the suggestion that the new St Paul’s Cathedral – then being completed – should have a chapel consecrated  within it in memory of the pioneers, and in which the remains of E. G. Wakefield be entombed – an adaptation of the notion that the closer to God or Godliness one was in life, so too should one be in death. Making reference to the prospect of death by duel that awaited [ 173 ]

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anyone who slighted the character of an eighteenth-century gentleman, as Hall later joked, ‘it is such a fate which would overtake anyone in New Zealand to-day who was so rash as to disparage the character and attainments of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’.79 The relative importance of local anniversaries over national also meant that not everyone was keen to throw their all into the Centennial, with Nelson, Canterbury, and Otago in particular viewing the Centennial as little more than an entrée to the main course of its own impending provincial centennials. During the First Centennial Conference in 1936 the mayor of Nelson even expressed the region’s concern at placing too much emphasis on the Centennial for fear of detracting from its own centenary thirteen months later.80 Otago – with major plans in development for its centenary in 1948 – took a similar stance, reserving what were seen as the most important commemorative events for later. Indeed, the Otago Provincial Committee met only three times between 1937 and 1940, at the end of its second meeting concluding that ‘as 1940 was the year of the national centennial, the publication of a History of Otago should be left till 1948 the year of the provincial centennial’ – a suggestion that met with general acceptance and brought the discussion to a close.81 With Heenan deeply disappointed by the gaping hole left by Otago’s absence, McCormick made one final plea, asking the Otago University Professor of History and secretary of the Otago Provincial Committee Angus Ross to consider publishing one of the historical manuscripts held in the Hocken or the Early Settlers libraries.82 Nothing happened. Ultimately all three regions did have a presence in Centennial, but it was on their own terms, resulting principally in Centennial memorials of a utilitarian nature, which took advantage of the government subsidy in order to provide things of value to the local community, but that would not detract from the later centenaries.

Preserving the past Despite the existence of important collections in a number of public libraries and Parliament’s General Assembly Library, prior to the late 1930s little consideration had been made by the New Zealand government to the collection and preservation of historical documents and records. The question of the state taking on the responsibility for such matters had first been raised in 1926 when the suggestion was made that the government should continue the work of the historian and politician Robert McNab, whose assiduous gathering of primary sources on New Zealand’s early history had resulted in the publication of the landmark Historical Records of New Zealand in 1908. Little [ 174 ]

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seems to have come of the idea until 1934 when Buick was appointed to Elsdon Best’s old position of ‘clerk’ in the Dominion Museum. Whereas Best’s concern was ethnology, Buick was directed to focus on both the collection of historical documents and the writing of New Zealand’s European history. His passion for writing, however, soon saw the collection of documents fall by the wayside.83 As plans for a suite of historical Centennial publications emerged in 1936, Heenan saw the need for more concerted effort in the area, handing the job over to McCormick and a young graduate, John Pascoe, who quickly began tracing historical sources in private hands.84 By year’s end newspaper articles were prompting members of the public to come forward with old diaries and other documents, while provincial centennial committees were charged with seeking out resources at a local level.85 Material was also sought from outside of New Zealand, with an appeal in England identifying a wealth of pioneer correspondence with English relatives and the letters and journals of early settlers who in their old age had retired to England.86 The greatest success, however, came from the provincial historical committees – an eventuality that had been suspected by the government at the time of the early Centennial conferences in 1936.87 In part this stemmed from the fact that many descendants of pioneers were involved in local historical and early settler societies, and from the knowledge of community that provincial historical committees had. In the minds of many people, diaries and letters from pioneer relatives were also akin to relics, and, much as Maori had earlier been reluctant to give up their taonga to government institutions, so too were many Pakeha. The significance of local and amateur effort here cannot be overestimated, and, for all their assumed superiority, professional historians such as Beaglehole, Hall, and McCormick were dependent on the public research libraries and historical societies. Indeed, historical societies helped shape the status of professional history in so far as they allowed themselves to become the scholars’ handmaiden, while professional history also owed much to the conceptual forms of antiquarian study. Similar observations have been made of the amateur – professional dichotomy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the United States, where Philippa Levine has noted the frequent insistence of professional historians on a physical acquaintance of ‘place’ reminiscent of the topographer and local historian; John Burrows has made the crucial observation of how British Whig historians attached considerable significance to the popular attachments to ancient buildings; and Amanda Laugesen has noted how in turn-of-the-century America the professional and amateur historical worlds were never far apart nor disentangled.88 [ 175 ]

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Local newspapers – many of which had long encouraged local history – were a particular goldmine of information, with reminiscences and historical titbits being published by ‘practically every newspaper and periodical in the dominion’, as the Centennial News put it in 1939.89 Across the country newspapers also ran historical retrospectives such as the ‘Fifty Years Ago’ series which invited readers to contribute their own reminiscences of the early days. Mirroring projects in other regions, in Wellington articles such as ‘The City Founders: Their Names Endure’ and ‘Wellington History in Names’ looked more literally at the ‘places’ many of the pioneers held in the landscape in the form of street names, buildings, and monuments.90 Busily gathering in such material as it was published was the Centennial Branch’s newspaper clipping bureau.91 As local history societies got busy, across the country the discovery of rare historical documents threw new light on historical debates. In Wellington, for example, the discovery of an old letter written by a Wesleyan minister in 1893 suggested that the first church had been established in the region almost a year earlier than previously thought.92 The story of Te Rauparaha having converted to Christianity was also quickly dispensed with via the platform of the local newspaper, as was the story of Wakefield’s dash to Plymouth on the eve of the departure of the immigrant ship Cuba from England in August 1839, following a logistical analysis of the story in the pages of the Dominion.93 Historical documents were only the beginning, and, as the Centennial focused the spotlight on the apparent value of New Zealand’s past, it also saw a growing interest in the material culture associated with the country’s history. ‘Relics’ played the most public and perhaps clichéd role, with their perceived didactic value as direct links to the pioneers seeing the NHC heartily recommend the building of displays around them.94 For Wellingtonians, the highlights included a hat worn by George Hunter, the first mayor of Wellington, and one of the axes paid as the purchase price for Wellington – such objects being ‘full of historic and sentimental interest’.95 Relics associated with the first settlers or the founding of districts had near-religious significance, with the flying of one of the original 1840 New Zealand Company flags at the opening of the Wellington provincial memorial in January 1940 arousing such patriotic fervour that the history of the flag received almost as much media attention as the memorial opening and historical pageant together.96 As the perceived importance of artefacts grew, so too did concern for their preservation. Early settler museums soon found their collections outgrowing the available storage, and in a handful of instances the scale of collection even gave rise to the establishment of new regional [ 176 ]

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and community museums.97 House museums were also seen to have a particular appeal in the display of such collections, with their primary value being their evocative nature – especially in comparison to the dry-as-dust academic display practices of the professional museum.98 Other historical interest groups such as the New Zealand Founders’ Association and the Te Awamutu Historical Society viewed the preservation of historic buildings and monuments as a primary concern in itself, and did what they could to pressure both central and local government to consider the matter more seriously.99 Historic buildings, of course, were also seen as relics, and the Centennial was a landmark in the history of historic preservation in New Zealand because of its impact on both public and government attitudes to the historic landscape. The NHC had first considered the question of preserving historic buildings in late 1936 as part of its preliminary investigations into possible Centennial projects. At the root of this lay the simple recognition that the historical thread proposed to run through the celebrations was likely to lead to a deeper appreciation of sites of historic interest scattered throughout New Zealand. McCormick also felt that the restoration and endowment of historic buildings could form an admirable means of commemoration.100 The following year Heenan jumped on the bandwagon when the amateur historian Allan Sutherland forwarded him the manuscript for a book exploring New Zealand’s historic landmarks and monuments.101 Far from emerging as a bolt out of the blue, government interest in historic places had slowly begun to grow from the early 1930s as it took a cautious yet watchful interest in ‘historic Russell’ in the Bay of Islands, around which a healthy tourist trade had grown. Visiting the area in late 1936, for example, the manager of the Tourist Department, L. J. Schmidt, returned full of praise, recommending that Kemp House (1821, the country’s oldest building), Bishop Pompallier’s old home (1841, originally the headquarters to the French Catholic mission to the Western Pacific), and the Stone Store (1833, the oldest surviving stone building), should be carefully preserved by the government, and that the Stone Store be used as a ‘treasure house’ for relics of the early days of European settlement in New Zealand. Yet as he concluded in his report to Heenan, it was the perceived tourist value of the sites above all else that prompted this call for action.102 And by the early 1930s ‘heritage’ had become an ingrained part of Bay of Islands identity. Making a home in Pompallier in the early 1900s, the Stephenson family promptly made the house and garden a showpiece of Russell, such was their pride in the historical associations of their new family home.103 Following the end of the Great War, tourism to the region took off as people recovering from the stress of war years made Russell a popular [ 177 ]

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summer holiday destination. The region’s growing fame with big-game fishing enthusiasts was also a drawcard, especially following the visit in 1926 of the famous American writer and fisherman Zane Grey.104 The biggest influence, however, was the completion of the long-awaited Whangarei – Russell Road, which connected Russell to the new main highways network. Just as access had been a primary consideration for the preservation of sites under the Scenery Preservation Act, highway developments, and the growing popularity of the motor car in the 1920s and 1930s had a profound impact on interest in historic places. The recreational aspect of the motor car was an important selling point, and, when in the mid-1920s the New Zealand Automobile Association began producing maps and guidebooks, historical snippets and sites of interest ‘along the way’ were quickly integrated.105 By the beginning of the 1930s historic places were also featuring more frequently in the popular media as waning interest in the image of Maoriland was met by a growing interest in the country’s scenery and European history. The most popular platform was arguably the New Zealand Railways Magazine, the circulation of which had reached 26,000 by the mid-1930s. Recreation was the magazine’s bread-and-butter, and, as history found its way into its pages and ease of travel increased, ‘interesting places’ with their ‘historical associations’ featured more and more. Cowan was the magazine’s most prolific contributor, writing more than 120 historical and travel features.106 The presentation of romanticised stories of the country’s European past alongside that of Maori was a significant evolution in the development of colonial nostalgia, with historical stories exploring every conceivable aspect of the landscape and the historical connections that could be experienced: the ‘Quaint character of Early Otago’ with its memorial to the goldminers of the Southern district; the ‘Colour at Waitangi’ and the history of the residency; Russell with its ‘old bullet-riddled church, which has seen so much bloodshed and strife’, and ‘Blinkinsopp’s Gun – the purchase price for the Wairau Plain’.107 The Bay of Islands, with its rich historical associations and scenic splendours, featured heavily.108 While the idea of preserving historic sites as part of the Centennial was ultimately shelved owing to the perceived cost, following continued prodding on the matter, in early 1939 the NHC took the first step of compiling a national list of historically significant sites and buildings. As had been the case with the quest for historical documents, Beaglehole, Wood, and McCormick turned to local and provincial historical committees. Articles were also published in the local papers, prompting the public to forward suggestions of ‘old landmarks’ and ‘historical buildings’.109 The response offers a fascinating insight into [ 178 ]

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the uniqueness of local attitudes to heritage, with the intense pride in which some provinces held their heritage resulting in the submission of exhaustive catalogues of sites, while others did not respond at all.110 The nature of the individual reports also commonly reflected local claims to national pre-eminence. Auckland, for example, offered a broad sweep of sites, summarily covering both the region’s preEuropean and early European past, with a focus on religious sites, early infrastructure, and the city’s early capital status.111 In Taranaki, however, the focus was almost exclusively on its rich New Zealand War history – with most of the sites listed already being under the care of the region’s local councils.112 In an effort to reinforce its claims to the earliest phase of European contact with New Zealand, all but one of Gisborne’s sites was pre-settlement, with a strong emphasis on Cook, early Maori-European interaction, and early trade.113

The power of place Public perceptions of historic sites and buildings at the time of the Centennial were both varied and complex; however, a number of observations are worth making. Firstly, the majority of sites were seen as being significant either for their historical associations with events and people or because they were seen as historical totems and markers. In some instances, direct significance was even overshadowed by their broader historic ‘aura’. Te Awaiti in the Marlborough Sounds, for example, was recognised as being ‘historic’ more for the romantic imagery of its ramshackle old pier and abandoned try pots than for its apparent status as the first whaling station in the South Island.114 In Wellington, the ruins of old Fort Paremata were ‘a reminder of years when Wellington trembled under the threat of the grim Te Rauparaha, conqueror of all New Zealand from Kawhia to Akaroa, to drive the Pakeha into the sea’.115 The Pukekohe church, with its bullet-scarred walls, was seen in much the same light, remaining as ‘a link to the stout-hearted pioneers who went out into the wilderness to make a home for themselves’.116 Historical significance was there, but it lay buried under layers of romance and historical invention. Perhaps the most striking example of this, however, was reflected in the public fascination with historic trees.117 Recognised by many as ‘memorials of another age’, they were also often viewed as witnesses to history. As one editorial in the Auckland Star described: If, on the other hand, it is a spreading oak, elm, gum, or straight poplar, against the background of an old home, the wonder is the many changes it must have seen since first it was planted. The generations that

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have come and gone make it a perpetual calendar, recording the passing years in the growth of its height and girth. It is inspiring to stand in their shade and reconstruct what happened there perhaps more than a century ago.118

Trees that had associations with the earliest missionary activity were seen as particularly important, as were the stumps of trees supposedly cut down by Cook’s men at Dusky Sound and a grove of puriri at the entrance to Ruapekapeka Pa where ‘There [was] no doubt that bullets whistled through the leaves … 110 years ago’.119 The loss of historic trees was recognised as being equally significant, with the ‘death’ of one tree in Nelson during a storm being presented in the pages of the Nelson Mail in the form of an obituary of a veteran – the time of death posted as 5.22 pm on 1 July 1940.120 The felling of ‘the old pine tree on Garden Place Hill’ in Hamilton the previous year was presented in a similar light, the event playing out ‘like some great civic occasion of pioneer days which beckoned the populace to the town square’.121 As the country became increasingly historically minded during preparations for the Centennial, in 1938 the Canterbury District Council sought government assistance to preserve historic trees, and especially those planted by pioneers. Already sponsoring a scheme of the Forest and Bird Protection Society, the government put out a public call for information, and, while protective measures were not forthcoming, a preliminary list of ‘nationally significant trees’ was published in 1940.122 While rarely seen as ‘witnesses’ to the past, buildings were important as perceived links between place and past. When, for example, in 1939 Wellington’s ‘ye ancient smithy’ and the old Colonial Museum building were removed in the name of the progress, the greatest loss was seen to be that of historical association. One of Wellington’s oldest landmarks – noted one article about the old museum, the building was ‘a link between the present and very early days, and is inseparably associated [with the history of the city]’.123 Publicly its removal was seen as history’s loss, with the ‘ruthless hand of the wrecker’ removing the ‘interesting link to Wellington’s early history ... it will proudly face again, for a day or two at least, the city whose growth it has watched for three quarters of a century’.124 The value of such buildings, suggested one editorial writer a year later in reference to the crumbling Wallaceville Blockhouse, ‘is never appreciated till they have been destroyed, and then it is too late’.125 Other ‘associations’ were not deserving of appreciation, as was the case of Auckland’s first tavern – the Old Stone Jug – which was demolished in 1938. Various schemes had been put forward for its restoration and maintenance as a ‘link with Old Auckland’ since the mid-1920s; however, for critics the tavern was [ 180 ]

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a relic of the lighter side of history, with memories of Sunday drinking excursions and the occasional brawl the sort of associations should not be cherished.126 Other sites, such as St John’s College in Auckland, were valued by some for the historical depth and validity they apparently brought to the landscape. ‘Many of [Bishop] Selwyn’s original buildings’, noted McCormick in 1938, ‘notably the refectory, the chapel and the old printing home, still remain intact, lending an air of mellow charm to the institution’.127 The nearby ruin of St Thomas’s Church was similarly valued for the air of historical romance the ivy-clad remains exuded. Indeed, in the face first of efforts to build afresh on the site, and later efforts to restore the church as a memorial, in 1924 the Auckland Civic League launched a campaign to preserve the church’s ruined state – their aim being to strengthen the weakening ruin’s walls and improve the appearance of the grounds and the old cemetery.128 In a similar vein, other sites were of value for their iconic status as much as historical associations: the hulk of the Edwin Fox at Picton significant as much for its historical associations as because it was a local icon – in this case ‘an object of never-failing interest to visitors of that port’.129 Outside the bounds of the purely historical, for a small number of sites architectural merit also played a role in defining their value. Pushed primarily by Auckland University’s Professor of Architecture Cyril Knight, this argument was taken up in more detail in the Housing and Public Buildings pictorial surveys, both of which argued that New Zealand architecture was derivative yet uniquely local in form and style. Earlier derided, interest in New Zealand’s architectural history had grown rapidly under Knight’s influence following his appointment as the country’s first professor of architecture in 1925. By the time of the Centennial his core argument was that the most perfect forms of New Zealand architecture lay in the first few decades of the colonial period before the influence of the vulgar Victorian taste emerged with its ‘amazing contrasts of dignity and ostentation’.130 Heavily influenced by parallel movements in America and Australia that had emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the focus on early architecture was grounded in the argument that the unique climate and environment had profoundly shaped domestic cultural forms, and that colonial architecture, moreover, reflected the ‘spirit of the times’ and provided material evidence of a national history and a developing national consciousness. Perhaps the most enlightening incident involving a historic place, however, followed the announcement from the Church of England authorities in early 1936 that they were going to add a large stone chancel to the old wooden Christ Church in Russell, demolishing much [ 181 ]

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of the existing structure in the process. Hitting the newspapers, the issue quickly developed into one of the more important early debates around heritage preservation in New Zealand. Consecrated in 1836, the church had been the location where Hobson had read aloud his proclamations on 30 January 1840, including those authorising him to establish British sovereignty over New Zealand. It was also the centre of the fiercest fighting in Heke’s sacking in 1845 of Kororareka, as the first Russell township was then called. As the debate played out in the correspondence columns of Auckland’s newspapers, responses spanned the country. If the Church authorities wanted a new and larger church, went one common argument against the proposed development, by all means let them build one, but let them do it on a new site so that the existing building could be restored.131 The Church principally viewed the building in terms of its utility, accused another correspondent, whereas its real value was historical and it should not be ‘improved’ by addition or alteration.132 Opening up the Pandora’s box surrounding history and proximity, others argued that, as a truly national monument, the building belonged not to the Church of England but to the people of New Zealand: ‘This century-old church was contributed to at various times by people of all sects and no sects; many famous visitors gave donations; it was a kind of cosmopolitan church in the early days of North Auckland. It is not merely a Church of England place of worship. It is a national monument, and the whole country is, or should be, interested.’133 The Church authorities responded with two arguments. Firstly, considering that the building had been altered twice before, and therefore was not an intact specimen of early missionary architecture, it had little architectural merit.134 ‘The fact that the building has been twice “restored” or “improved” from that which Fitzroy and Darwin saw’, countered Buick, did little to lessen the argument that further alteration should not be made.135 Recognising that many who objected to the proposed development were animated by sentimental interest, his comments here were an acknowledgement that public attitudes to historic places were changing. This was only reinforced by the Church’s second counter-argument that – much like the recently completed Williams Memorial Church at Paihia – the proposed new building was itself to be a memorial to the region’s pioneers and their ideals. The ‘ghosts of the old missionaries’ were memorialised not in the reconditioning of an old church but in the construction of grand memorials to their work that would still be standing in a thousand years.136 Appeals were made to the government to intervene, but, with no legislative precedent, the issue appeared to be in the hands of the gods. They, it seemed, were listening to the development’s critics, as in the end Church authorities [ 182 ]

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could not raise the necessary funds for the proposed development, and the project was abandoned in favour of the restoration.137

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Conclusion While historians have typically seen the 1940 Centennial as a key moment in the emergence of professional history in New Zealand – presenting the event as something of a passing of the torch from the ‘amateur’ to the ‘professional’ – this focus, together with that of Centennial’s emphasis on the nation, is profoundly misleading. The Centennial was a formative moment in the evolution of ‘professional’ history in New Zealand, with the significance of the historical undertaking at the heart of the occasion being the first time that much of the country’s past had been seriously examined and made accessible, but it was also much more than that. ‘Professional’ history was but a small part of the wider historical perspective that emerged during the Centennial’s lead-up, while the focus on Heenan’s conception of the Centennial as a demonstration of social concord and national unity assumes that the greater public saw, and celebrated the event, as such. It presumed a feeling of national pride among people whose loyalties were still largely parochial – and proudly so. Yet, far from suggesting that this was simply a case of New Zealand as a nation not yet having developed any real sense of collective identity, the primary reason for this was the nature of Heenan’s call to celebratory arms that called for the promotion of collective identity at the expense of local identity and sense of belonging. In doing this, he failed to recognise both the contingent nature of historical knowledge and that identity is ‘nested’ and – as Raphael Samuel notes – is made up of ‘little platoons’ rather than ‘greater society’.138 Accordingly, as communities looked back on the past, misty-eyed nostalgia tended to make them all the more chauvinistic about their regions and localities. It was, accordingly, here at the local and community level that the Centennial also had its greatest historiographical impact. As local pride was channelled into militant localism, armies of amateur historians began to investigate, collect, preserve, and reinterpret their city, town, and regional histories.139 This was grounded not in any sense of inferiority but in a sense of place which bore little relation to legal boundaries. The scale of local research that took place also brought with it a flood of renewed associations between community and place, consequently having a profound impact on local identification with the historic landscape. Indeed, as the MHR for Parnell, Duncan Rae, would later note in his introduction to the Historic Places Bill in 1954, it was only at the Centennial ‘and in the years just prior to and succeeding that, when we celebrated [ 183 ]

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provincial centennials, that many people in New Zealand for the first time became conscious of the fact that we really did have a history of our own, quite separate from the history of the mother country’.140

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Notes 1 Neville Lewers, ‘Highways and Byways: The Making of the Centennial Talkie’, NZRM, 1 May 1939, p. 35. 2 Edward Kinglake, The Australian at Home (London 1892), p. 6, cited in Maya Tucker, ‘Centennial Celebrations, 1888’, Bulletin, 7:7 (April 1981), pp. 11–25. 3 New Zealand Times, 22 January 1890. 4 Auckland Star, 19 June 1889; Evening Post, 9 June 1891. 5 The South Australian Advertiser, 26 January 1888. 6 See ‘Centennial Celebrations’ in Graeme Davison, J. W. McCarty, and Ailsa McLeary (eds), Australians 1888 (Broadway 1987), pp. 1–29. 7 Ibid., p. 4. 8 Alexander Sutherland, Victoria and Its Metropolis, Past and Present (Melbourne 1888), p. v. 9 Dan O’Meara, ‘The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927–1948: Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3:2 (April 1977), p. 166. 10 Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington 2003), pp. 49–50. 11 O’Meara, ‘The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927–1948’, p. 172. 12 Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga (eds), New History of South Africa (Cape Town 2007), pp. 290–1. 13 Australian federation took place on 1 January 1901. 14 Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–1975 (Harmondsworth 1978), p. 158; Martin Thomas, ‘Centennial Dreaming’, The Age Monthly Review (December 1987–January 1988), pp. 3–6. 15 Tom Griffiths, ‘Past Silences: Aborigines and Convicts in Our History-Making’, Australian Cultural History, 6 (1987), pp. 23–4. 16 Parry, in New Zealand Centenary 1940: Report of Conference Held in Parliament Buildings Wellington on Monday 2 March 1936, Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1936, p. 5. 17 ‘Message from Sir Ernest Davies’, New Zealand Centennial News, 15 September 1938, p. 14. 18 AJHR, H-22, 1937, p. 2. 19 Evening Post, 8 November 1939. 20 Dominion, 9 January 1936, cited in Schrader, ‘Modernising Wellington: The 1920s to the 1950s’, in John Wilson (ed.), Zeal and Crusade: The Modern Movement in Wellington (Christchurch 1996), p. 15. 21 Evening Post, 16 November 1939. 22 Parry to Provincial Centennial Committees, 1 April 1938, IA1, 62/10, ANZ. 23 The Plunket Society was founded in New Zealand in 1907 by the child health visionary Sir Frederick Truby King. His vision behind the Society was to help the mothers and save the babies who were dying from malnutrition and disease. 24 For a detailed breakdown of memorials, see New Zealand Centennial News, 15 (6 February 1941), pp. 19–27. 25 Dominion, 16 September 1936. By the end of 1936, however, time, the high cost of purchasing the properties, and the problem of accommodating the four hundred families left homeless, saw the plan reluctantly dropped. 26 Morse, ‘New Zealand Centennial Conference’, 20 August 1936, IA1, 62/5/1, ANZ. On 3 February 1931 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the region, the net impact being that nearly all of the buildings in Napier and the nearby city of Hastings were levelled.

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I n pursuit of a national past 27 Sullivan, in New Zealand Centenary 1940, p. 6. 28 Dominion, 14 November 1939. 29 Christchurch Star-Sun, 3 August 1937. 30 McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand, pp. 178–82; F. L. Wood, New Zealand in the World (Wellington 1940), pp. 100–6, 132. 31 Dominion, 14 November 1939. 32 J. L. Hay, ‘Youth and the Centennial’, New Zealand Centennial News, 20 January 1939, p. 14. 33 N. B. Palethorpe, Official History of the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, Wellington, 1939–1940 (Wellington 1940), p. 39. 34 Dominion, 8 September 1939 and 25 September 1939. 35 See Charlotte MacDonald, ‘Emily’s Dream: A Women’s Memorial Building and a History Without Walls: Citizenship and the Politics of Public Remembrance in 1930s–40s New Zealand’, in M. Lake, K. Holmes, and P. Grimshaw (eds), Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (London 2001), pp. 168–83. 36 See, for example, the Dominion, 24 January 1940. 37 McCormick to Heenan, 11 October 1937, McCormick to Heenan, 20 October 1937, and Duff to Heenan, 3 May 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1, ANZ; Hall, notes for Heenan, 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/8/1, part 2, ANZ. 38 New Zealand Centennial News, 3 (25 October 1938), p. 14. For details of the proposed projects see IA1, 62/7/1, ANZ. 39 New Zealand Herald, 24 August 1936. 40 Auckland Star, 24 August 1936. 41 Christchurch Press, 4 September 1936. 42 Auckland Star, 2 September 1936. 43 Prior to his appointed to the Chair of History at Otago in 1920 Elder was at the University of Aberdeen. 44 Compiled from D. L. Jenkins, Union List of Theses of The University of New Zealand 1910–1954 (Wellington 1956). 45 Olssen, ‘Where to from Here?’, p. 54. 46 Arthur Percival Newton, The Old Empire and the New (London 1917), p. 21. While completing his PhD in London, Beaglehole had also assumed that returning to New Zealand would mean the end of his career as a historian. T. H. Beaglehole, “Home”? J. C. Beaglehole in London, 1925–1929’, Turnbull Library Record, 14:2 (October 1981), p. 77. 47 Giselle Byrnes (ed.), The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Melbourne 2009), pp. 5–6. 48 J. C. Beaglehole, New Zealand: A Short History (London 1936), p. 159. 49 J. C. Beaglehole, ‘The New Zealand Scholar’, in Peter Munz (ed.), The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History / Presented to F. L. W. Wood and J. C. Beaglehole on the Occasion of Their Retirement (Wellington 1969), p. 245. 50 McCormick, Letters and Art, pp. 169–70; Wood, New Zealand in the World, p. 133; Leicester Webb, Government in New Zealand (Wellington 1940), p. 140. 51 Olssen, ‘Where to from Here?’, p. 57. 52 Address by Parry at the First Meeting of the NHC, 10 June 1937, IA1, 62/7/1, ANZ, p. 2. 53 See, for example, Rachel Barrowman, ‘History and Romance: The Making of the Centennial Historical Surveys’, in William Renwick (ed.), Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand’s Centennial (Wellington 2004), pp. 161–77; Dennis McEldowney, ‘Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines’, in Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, pp. 568–72. 54 Erik Olssen, A History of Otago (Dunedin 1984), p. 176. 55 Duff, ‘Memorandum to Authors’, 27 June 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, part 1, ANZ. 56 McCormick himself sought to present this argument in his own survey Letters and Art in New Zealand; however, it was perhaps most concisely elaborated in Monty Holcroft’s The Deepening Stream – the winning entry of the Centennial literary

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M competition. The basic tenet of Holcroft’s argument was that a truly New Zealand literature would spring from a genuine response to the land and history of New Zealand. 57 The most oft cited example is Denis Glover’s, ‘Centennial’ poem. 58 Cowan’s text was accordingly heavily edited, while the government simply refused to publish Sutch’s manuscript. 59 Evening Post, 26 July 1939. 60 Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 236. 61 Cited in John Wilson, ‘The “Useful” Memorials of a Centennial Year’, Historic Places, December 1990, p. 18. 62 Dominion, 10 December 1938. 63 ‘Notes of a representative Maori deputation which waited upon the Minister of Internal Affairs at Wellington on 1 October 1936’, IA1, 62/39, ANZ. 64 Heenan to Parry, 6 February 1939 IA1, 62/25/1, ANZ. 65 Indeed, this is the exclusive focus of Renwick’s Creating a National Spirit. 66 Lawrence Jones, ‘Myth and Anti-myth in Literary Responses to the Centennial’, in William Renwick (ed.), Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand’s Centennial (Wellington 2004), pp. 207–8; Chris Hilliard, ‘Colonial Culture and the Province of Cultural History’, NZJH, 36:1 (April 2002), pp. 82–97. 67 AJHR, H-22, 1937, p. 2. 68 See A. G. Bagnall, A Reference List of Books and Other Publications Associated with the New Zealand Centennial (Wellington 1942). 69 One Hundred Years Ago focused on the social, economic and religious steps to colonisation in Britain in the 1830s. New Zealand in Review was a graphical series of bite-sized facts and events in the history of the country’s first hundred years. 70 W. H. Gofford and H. B. Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga (Dunedin 1940), p. 11. 71 New Zealand Centennial News, 2 (15 September 1938), pp. 6–7. 72 Yearly celebrations commenced with the unveiling of the Gisborne Cook memorial in 1906. Such was the importance of Cook to the European population’s image of the region that, when the town celebrated its jubilee in 1927 with the publication of a history, it began with Cook’s landing and exploration of the region, only then stepping back to look at the earlier Maori history. Life in Early Poverty Bay: Trials and Triumphs of Its Brave Founders (Gisborne 1927). 73 ‘Report of the meeting of the Central Executive’, 7 August 1936, IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. 74 Parry to Coleman, 24 June 1936, IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. Minutes of meeting between Parry, Heenan, and Mathews (Chairman of Cook County Council), 25 August 1936, IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. 75 Parry to Coleman, 24 June 1936, IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. 76 Minutes of meeting between Parry, Heenan, and Mathews (Chairman of Cook County Council), 25 August 1936, IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. 77 See IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. The work was finally completed in 1949, published as Joseph Mackay’s Historic Poverty Bay and the East Coast (Gisborne 1949). 78 J. C. Beaglehole, ‘The Colonial Office, 1782–1854’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1 (April 1940), p. 170; Beaglehole to Williams, 17 April 1939, IA1, 62/110/13, ANZ. 79 D. O. W. Hall, ‘New Zealand Centennial History’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, 1 (April 1940), p. 21. 80 Page, in New Zealand Centenary 1940, p. 22. 81 Otago Provincial Committee minute book, 10 August 1938, Hocken Library. 82 E. H. McCormick to Angus Ross, 24 October 1938, IA1, 62/6/7, ANZ. 83 Stewart to R. F. Bollard, 6 April 1926, J. A. Young to T. Lindsay Buick, 9 August 1934, and Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128, ANZ. 84 ‘National Centennial Historical Committee Preliminary Suggestions on Scope and Activities’. McCormick to Heenan, 11 November 1936, IA1, 62/48, ANZ, pp. 8–9. 85 Minutes of the third meeting of the NHC, 2 December 1938, IA1, 62/7/1, ANZ.

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I n pursuit of a national past 86 It was fashionable for the more moneyed early settlers to retire to England in their old age. Hall, ‘New Zealand Centennial History’, p. 27. 87 Minutes of the Second Centennial Conference, 18 August 1936, IA1 62/5/1, ANZ. 88 John Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (London 1966), p. 179; Levine, The Amateur and Professional, p. 81; Amanda Laugesen, The Making of Public Historical Culture in the American West (Lewiston 2006), p. 84. 89 New Zealand Centennial News, 30 September 1939, p. 8. 90 Dominion, 14 November 1939. 91 New Zealand Centennial News, 30 September 1939, p. 8. This was essentially a successor to the collection of similar material in the Dominion Museums, which had in the early 1920s finally scraped together resources to devote a staff member to writing to the descendants of old settlers and collecting of obituaries from newspapers. Anderson to Heenan, 3 October 1922, IA1, 113/6, ANZ; AJHR, H-22, 1921, p. 24. 92 Evening Post, 1 March 1940. 93 Dominion, 22 November 1940. The Wakefield debate raged in the ‘Letters to the editor’ column of the Dominion between September 1939 and July 1940, with contributors from even Great Britain chipping in. 94 Minutes of NHC meeting, 31 August 1937, IA1, 62/9/8, ANZ. 95 Evening Post, 23 July 1940. 96 Ibid., 23 January 1940. 97 Thames Star, 11 February 1938 and Gisborne Times, undated article in IA1, 62/5/8, ANZ. 98 Dominion, 1 July 1939. 99 Dominion, 20 December 1939; Auckland Star, 2 April 1935; C. W. Vennell, Such Things Were: The Story of Cambridge, N.Z. (Dunedin 1939), p. x; Henry Wily, South Auckland (Pukekohe 1939), p. 215. 100 National Centennial Historical Committee Preliminary Suggestions on Scope and Activities, McCormick to Heenan, 11 November 1936, IA1, 62/48, ANZ. 101 Minutes of the NHC Standing Committee, 13 December 1937, IA1, 62/9/8, ANZ. 102 Schmidt to Heenan, 26 October 1937, IA1, 135/37, ANZ. 103 Fergus Clunie, ‘A Town’s Pride’, New Zealand Historic Places, November 1993, p. 24. 104 Marie King, Port in the North: A Short History of Russell, New Zealand (Russell 1949), pp. 126–9. 105 See, for example, Auckland Automobile Association, Motor Trips Around Auckland (Auckland 1923), which mentions sites such as Logan Campbell’s Cottage, early missionary sites, and the Old Stone Jug. 106 Neill Atkinson, Trainland: How Railways Made New Zealand (Auckland 2007), pp. 115–19. 107 NZRM, 2 May 1938, p. 31; 1 November 1938, p. 20; 1 December 1938, p. 17; 1 March 1939, p. 39; 2 October 1939, pp. 29, 41; 1 December 1939, pp. 20, 34. 108 See, for example, Jean Boswell, ‘The North: A Great Country’, NZRM, 1 May 1937, O. N. Gillespie, ‘A Private Paradise: New Zealand’s Northland, an Efficient Garden of Eden’, NZRM, 1 May 1935, E. Wilson, ‘Kawau: Island of Dreams’, NZRM, 2 December 1935, Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde), ‘On the Road to Anywhere’, NZRM, 1 May 1935. 109 Such as Hawera Star, 16 March 1939. 110 It is also worth noting that while Provincial Centennial Committees were effectively responsible for the compilation of these lists, they themselves were heavily reliant on the interests and expertise that existed in local interest groups – and in particular the country’s many early settler and historical associations – which sent numerous recommendations of sites to be preserved. 111 Barr to McCormick, 14 June 1939, IA1, 62/6/6, ANZ. 112 Houstan to Secretary of the NHC, 24 April 1939; Skinner to Secretary of the NHC, 5 May 1939, IA1, 60/70/1, ANZ. 113 MacKay to Heenan, 9 October 1939, IA1, 60/70/1, ANZ.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 114 Dominion, 29 July 1936. This belief was based on the claim of the whaler and ex-convict John Guard, who claimed that he began whaling (for bone, not oil) at Te Awaiti in 1827. The date is disputed and it now appears that Peter Williams established a whaling station at Preservation Inlet in 1828. 115 Dominion, 14 November 1939. 116 Dominion, 11 April 1938. 117 Numerous articles exist on this topic, but for some good examples see James Cowan, ‘Trees of History and Beauty’ part 1 and part 2, Enzed Junior, Auckland Star, 11 and 18 November 1939, and A. W. B. Powell, ‘Our History Grows in Trees’, Auckland Star, 27 July 1940. 118 Auckland Star, 1 May 1939. 119 Dominion, 23 July 1940; Isdale to McCormick, 7 July 1939, IA1, 60/70/1, ANZ. 120 Nelson Mail, 2 July 1940. 121 Waikato Times, 21 and 23 March 1939. 122 Harry Allan, Historic Trees in New Zealand (Wellington 1940). 123 Timaru Herald, 8 February 1939; Dominion, 7 July 1939. 124 Evening Post, 19 April 1939. 125 Dominion, 15 August 1940. 126 New Zealand Herald, 23 and 24 November 1938. 127 McCormick to Heenan, 7 March 1938, IA1, 62/6/6, ANZ. The ‘old printing home’ refers to the building that housed Selwyn’s printing press. 128 John Adams, ‘“Never to be Constructed”: The Nature of a Colonial Park’, unpublished conference paper, 2000; Evening Post, 17 April 1925; Auckland Star, 21 October 1936. For Australia see Paul Hogben, ‘Nationalism in Australian Architectural History, 1890–1920: A Discourse Analysis’, Architectural Theory Review, 5:2 (2000), pp. 94–111; Conrad Hamann, ‘Nationalism and Reform in Australian Architecture, 1880–1920’, Australian Historical Studies, 18:72 (April 1979), pp. 393–411; John Philips, ‘John Sulman and the Question of an “Australian Style of Architecture”’, Fabrications, 8:1 (1997), pp. 87–119. 129 Dominion, 12 July 1938. The Edwin Fox had been a Crimean War transport ship and immigrant ship. 130 Making New Zealand, Pictorial Surveys of a Century, no. 21, ‘Public Buildings’, p. 2, and no. 20, ‘Houses’, p. 13. A similar argument is presented by Knight in the Centennial Essay Collection 1840 and After, and also in G. L. Gabite’s pictorial survey on furniture (no. 22) and Doris McIntosh’s survey on dress (no. 23). Knight, ‘Architecture’, in Arthur Sewell (ed.), 1840 and After: Essays Written on the Occasion of the New Zealand Centenary (Auckland 1940), pp. 163–84. 131 New Zealand Herald, 20 March 1936. 132 Auckland Star, 7 February 1936. 133 Ibid., 25 February 1936. 134 Chairman of Russell Church Centennial Committee, New Zealand Herald, 19 February 1936. 135 Buick to Oliver, 22 February 1936, IA1, 86/10, ANZ. 136 New Zealand Herald, 4 March 1936. 137 Ibid., 20 March 1936. 138 Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1 (London 1989), p. xvii. 139 Furthermore, argued A. B. Chapell, state interest in historical documents would likely lead to the awakening of district and local history. IA1 62/25/8, ANZ; Minutes of the first meeting of the NHC, 10 June 1937, p. 2. 140 Rae, NZPD, 303, 20 July 1954, p. 553

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CHA P T E R SIX

New Zealand in context: history and heritage in late nineteenth-century Canada and Australia While many elements of New Zealand’s ‘use and abuse’ of history and heritage are representative of the wider colonial experience, one of this book’s core arguments has been that, in considering how societies use the past, ‘empire’, ‘nation’, and the ‘local’ cannot be considered outside of the context of one another. This final chapter accordingly offers a counterpoint to the New Zealand experience through an exploration of what were on the surface two vastly different colonial experience of history making – Canada and Australia. In doing so it highlights the broader continuity of the perceived place and role of history and heritage in shaping identity in the wider colonial and ‘new world’ contexts, while also demonstrating the uniqueness of the individual colonial experience. The Canadian experience is also particularly valuable for the insights it provides on the politics of cultural dominance and possession, with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian pursuit of heritage preservation centred on an Anglo-French more than Anglo-Indigenous dichotomy. In Australia, by comparison, the problem was how to create a usable past while avoiding the pitfalls – namely the treatment of Aborigines and the country’s sordid convict past.

Canada first Despite the hopes of Canadian nationalists for a truly national history, the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada remained largely sectional, with especially strong divisions between Anglo and French traditions. A duality had long existed between these two groups both at an ethnographic level (such as through language and religion) and on the level of behaviour and collective representations, where celebrations such as St Jean Baptiste Day and Orange Day only acted to aggravate sectionalism.1 Provincial [ 189 ]

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t­ensions were often equally strong, Michael Kammen giving the example of the Canadian Education Association, which in 1897 was unable to persuade the provinces to adopt a single standard text for the teaching of Canadian history owing to the significance of local bias and vested interest in different provincial narratives.2 Yet such division was perhaps not surprising, having its basis (at least at an official level) in Lord Durham’s 1839 report on the Lower Canada Rebellion which stressed the importance of the cultural division between French and English – of ‘two nations warring in the bosom of a single state’. Early histories of Canada exacerbated this, Gérard Bouchard suggesting that the anti-French perspective of Anglophone historians such as William Smith and Robert Christie only heightened provincial consciousness through the backlash they produced owing to New France’s attachment to its roots and the distinctive characteristics of the continent. While Durham’s recommendations sought to break down such divisions through the union of Upper and Lower Canada, on the ground this meant the cultural and political assimilation of French Canadians – his conception of the union essentially being an English civilising mission that would raise the inferior descendants of French ancestors to a nobler life. Indeed, his contention that French Canadians possessed neither a past nor a culture worthy of preservation triggered an unprecedented engagement with people’s history, literature, and culture, one of the results being François-Xavier Garneau’s four-­volume Histoire du Canada (1845–52) which was written with the express intention of demolishing Durham’s charge.3 In a significant early attempt to apply Durham’s principles to the writing of a unified history of Upper and Lower Canada, in his History of Canada (1855) John McMullen argued that it was the historian’s duty ‘to infuse a spirit of Canadian nationality into the people ­generally – to mould the native born citizen, the Scotch, the English, and the Irish emigrant into a compact whole’.4 His history accordingly turned not to the dominant tropes of biography and pioneer worship but to the ‘narrative of nation’ as a source of examples with which to implant in the minds of younger generations an established pattern of acceptable conduct. While this notion of Canada as ‘one nation housing one people inhabiting a common land’ was central to the emergent national school of Canadian historians and was used to justify Confederation long before it occurred in 1867, the vision ran up against particularly strong opposition in French Canada and the Maritime provinces. In the latter the issue was fundamentally one of incompatible foundational mythologies and a belief in provincial pre-eminence, while in Québec it was a combination of the AngloCanadian world being perceived as an existential cultural threat, and [ 190 ]

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New Z ealand in context

a reaction to rapid industrial and economy growth, and urbanisation. The net result was a Québec society pierced by a sense of its own fragility and battling for its very cultural survival.5 Indeed, the Québécois sociologist Fernand Dumont argues that French-Canadian society between 1840 and the Second World War was driven into a structural impasse which viewed culture as the only path to national salvation, and that this culture was heavily dependent upon a history of and nostalgia for the nation’s French origins.6 By the end of the century progress was being made in breaking down the singular perspective of Canadian history predominant amongst British Canadians, especially following the appointment of George Wrong to the Chair of History in the University of Toronto in 1894. While Wrong was clear in his commitment to the Canadian imperialist faith, and habitually spoke of Canadians as a British people, he wrote extensively on Québec within a tradition that endeavoured to reconcile differences and promote better understanding through sympathetic interpretations of its history and culture. His portrait of Québec focused on the traditional, retrogressive features of French Canada both as a counterpoise to the dull uniformity and materialism of British Canadian society and as a guarantee that Canada remained different from the United States.7 The perceived importance of this French ‘flavouring’ of British Canada would be central to both scholarly and popular resistance in Ontario to Regulation 17 (1912), which sought to restrict the use of French as a language of instruction to the first two years of schooling. As in New Zealand (and as would be the case in Australia) the emergence of historical societies in Canada typically followed the appearance of pioneer societies, was predominantly ‘local’ or provincial in perspective, and held the ‘rescue’ of reminiscences and historical documents especially close. One of the earliest local history ­associations – ­established in Upper Canada in 1861 – for example, emerged in part from a recognition that the sources of historical information were rapidly being lost, and in part out of the belief that the Literary and Historical Society of Québec gave too little attention to Upper Canada.8 Local and regional identities were similarly heightened by Confederation in 1867, with the years either side being a boom-time for new historical societies and the publication of local histories. Other groups, such as the United Canadian Association (UCA) – a federation of patriotic and historical groups formed in 1872 – were established with the express goal of breaking down such boundaries through the promotion of a common past. Yet, as an Anglo-Canadian association, the UCA also believed that Canada was and should remain fundamentally Anglo-Saxon, while the Canada First movement went even [ 191 ]

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further, implicitly rejecting any notion of French-Canadian influence within the new Canadian nationality.9 What did, ironically, bring Canadians together was the perceived threat from without that came with urbanisation, rampant materialism, and mass immigration in the 1890s. In addition to helping to create a climate conducive to the formation of historical societies, such threats were also a shot in the arm for those who – similarly to American nativists – argued that a great nation required a homogeneous people.10 The key difference, of course, was that, for Canada, America was itself one of the feared cultural influences. Indeed, such fears would be central to the Dominion-wide backlash in the years around the turn of the century when the Sons of the American Revolution sought to build a monument in Québec City in memory of General Richard Montgomery who had been killed during the Battle of Québec.11 A strong link between history, patriotism, and education was one consequence of these historiographical machinations, with historical societies by the 1880s typically advocating the introduction of Canadian history into all levels of education. Included within this was the introduction of more inspirational history texts – especially those written by Canadian authors – flag ceremonies, the hanging of portraits and historical murals, and the erection of monuments, all designed to nurture a better appreciation of the national heritage.12 In English-speaking provinces, texts that highlighted Canada’s British connections were seen to be especially important, and, even as demand for Canadian history increased after 1900, it was firmly viewed within the frame of empire.13 Indeed, as George Hay noted on the opening page of his official school text The History of Canada (1905), ‘Where are the boys and girls who are not proud of such a land, who are not eager to help make it their home, and to preserve it as a part of our great British Empire?’14 Yet even within this ‘the local’ had its place, with the president of the Ontario Historical Society, David Williams, arguing in 1912 that the best way to develop a child’s interest in general history was to teach the heritage of their home town or city as this tapped into what he believed was a natural curiosity to learn the story of their own past.15 The apparent educational value of the past was also central to the preservation work of historical societies, with even the dominion’s earliest learned society – the Literary and Historical Society of Québec (LHSQ) – motivated to collect and publish historical documents owing to the perceived value of cultural and educational development to ‘open new views, and new sentiments more suited to the present state of the civilised world’.16 Access to historical documents was similarly recognised as a prerequisite to the expansion of historical writing, and as the historical society movement grew after 1867 preservation lay at its [ 192 ]

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heart. While a number of societies developed sizable collections (many even resulting in the establishment of local museums and archives in which to house them), most were also well aware of the limitations of their own efforts. Accordingly, much of their energies – and where they had it political influence – were focused on lobbying provincial and federal government for state action to collect and preserve historical documents, reminiscences, and sites. One of the most important of these campaigns was for the establishment of a national archive, which came about in 1872 principally in response to the efforts of the LHSQ. Grounding its argument for an archive in the link between history and patriotism, the petition also made the case that it was access to historical documents, rather than their collection, which was of paramount importance. This idea would remain central to the Archive’s early work, with the first director, Douglas Brymner, focusing his energies on the surveying of documents held by Canadian provincial governments, and the institution of a vigorous copying programme in Britain and Europe.17 Under his successor, Arthur Doughty, the scheme was ratcheted up, and by the time the Archives Act was passed in 1912 the collection included over 40,000 volumes of manuscripts, 45,000 books relating to Canada, and 25,000 historical prints, engravings, and drawings.18 Indeed, such was Doughty’s belief in the nationalistic value of the archive that, despite his professional capacity as both Dominion Archivist and Keeper of the Records, he gave little consideration to the systematic preservation of the archives of state, instead focusing almost exclusively on the collection of materials relating to the period prior to Confederation, and other historical materials that could help reveal the truth about aspects of Canada’s past.19 His strategy was twofold – firstly involving the augmentation of the Archive’s holdings, and secondly publication of original documents which could serve as the ‘constitutional archaeology’ of a definitive political history.20 Doughty’s efforts here effectively saw the Archive become the nursemaid of the historical profession – something particularly characteristic of Canada. Indeed, such was the importance of his contribution to the national culture that following his death in 1936 a monument to him was unveiled in the Archive grounds – one historian quipping that ‘[Doughty] is probably the only archivist who will ever have a statue erected to him in his honour’.21 Similar perspectives existed at a provincial level, where institutions such as the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia (1857), Provincial Archives of British Columbia (1894), and the Provincial Archives of Ontario (1903) all mandated to become ‘arsenals of history’.22 In Nova Scotia, the government also took steps to preserve and reprint material on the early history of the colony – the provincial archivist Thomas [ 193 ]

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15  ‘Quebec Improvements’ – Lord Dufferin’s 1875 plan for the preservation of Québec fortifications and for construction of a new Château St Louis. Dufferin’s proposal had been motivated by his discovery that the town council of Québec had started to demolish the walls and fortifications which surrounded the seventeenth-century section of the town, and accordingly used his influence as Governor-General to stop what he saw as an act of ‘civic vandalism’, and managed to ensure that the walls were restored and repaired

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Aikins believing that ‘public documents of a country are its true history and nothing else’.23 In Ontario the Toronto Public Library had a similarly clear concern with the collection of primary sources and reminiscences. In addition to historical documents and oral histories, John Hallam, the library’s founder, also considered the collection of indigenous place names and tribal histories to be of importance, with such details valued for the colour and richness they gave to the province’s European history.24 Beyond the bounds of ‘the archive’, historical societies were especially enamoured of the perceived didactic value of historic sites and monuments. Indeed, as the Ontario Historical Society noted of monuments in 1901: There is nothing better calculated to promote patriotism than the honor paid by posterity to those who in the past have served the public. Monuments are not less honorable to those who erect them than those whom they seek to honor. They are at once an index to the character of a people and constant object lessons of the civic virtues, of heroism, and public and private gratitude. Their educational influence can hardly be overestimated.25

In Ontario the focus of early interest in monuments and historic sites was the War of 1812, where evidence of interest in preservation is visible from at least the 1850s, and largely inspired by the construction of the second Brock Monument on the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights (the first having been blown up by anti-British agitators). Completed in 1856, the new Brock monument unleashed a wave of patriotic enthusiasm, and by the early 1870s nationalists and pioneer societies were undertaking annual pilgrimages to Brock’s tomb at the base of the monument.26 Indeed, Cecelia Morgan has recently suggested that Brock and the ‘the coming of the Loyalists’ remained central to Anglophone historical societies’ work well into the first half of the twentieth century – grounding as they did the themes of persecution in the Thirteen Colonies, loss of home for the sake of high religious and moral values, and adherence to the institutions and philosophy of the British constitution and to imperial unity.27 The War of 1812 was portrayed in much the same light, essentially being a tale of romance and moral and patriotic devotion to Britain – narratives which would be heavily drawn upon in the writing of history textbooks and lay history.28 Popular interest in historic sites began to grow in the late 1880s when the Lundy’s Lane and Wentworth Historical Societies began campaigning for the construction of monuments on the battlefields of the war. These appeals were fundamentally patriotic in motivation, [ 195 ]

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with the campaign for a monument to the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, for example, driven by concern that seventy-three years after the battle ‘No worthy monument appears to attest respect and to give honour to the memory of those heroic defenders of our soil who fought and fell’.29 The impressive Stoney Creek monument was motivated by similarly patriotic ideals – its dedication plaque concluding that ‘More dearly than their lives, they held those principles and traditions of British liberty of which Canada is the inheritor’. Such patriotic notions were heavily loaded, and, as Canadians embraced Wilfrid Laurier’s famous declaration that the twentieth century would belong to Canada, Ontarians in particular became conscious of the fact that the mythologies associated with the Loyalist and militia traditions supported their province’s claim to the lion’s share of the national glory. Stimulated by this, the early twentieth century witnessed a stream of efforts to mark battlefields and preserve the remnants of key forts. Preservation could also break down provincial differences – as illustrated by the Dominion-wide campaign to preserve the Plains ­ of Abraham and chemin Sainte-Foy. While across the dominion old forts were revered as sacred symbols of the long struggle for imperial unity, the earliest moves to preserve the Plains were motivated not by historical consciousness but by their existence as a green space accessible to city dwellers. The historical value of the site was seen to support the cause, but was a secondary importance. When, at the turn of the century, the Plains’ Ursuline owners unveiled plans to develop the site, it resulted in a campaign for government purchase of the site as a public park. Consideration of the site for its historical value emerged in the lead-up to the tercentennial of Québec in 1908, which, despite being a provincial celebration, was touted as a platform for national commemoration and unity. Within this, the Governor General Lord Grey saw the preservation of the Plains as an opportunity to create a commemorative park in memory of both French and English combatants. As the scene of a climactic battle between the two forces that decided the fate of Canada, for him the site was thus part of a heroic epic in which the ancestors of all participants – French, English, and aboriginal – could take pride. In the tercentennial memorial volume The King’s Book of Quebec (1911), William Wood went even further, suggesting that stressing the dominion’s French and British pasts as two halves of one connected whole was vital if Canada was to remain a worthy member of the Empire.30 Other authors addressed this from a different perspective, with books such as Byron Nicholson’s The French-Canadian: A Sketch of His More Prominent Characteristics (1902), Frederick Wightman’s Our Canadian Heritage: Its Resources and Possibilities (1905), and Benjamin Sulte’s A History [ 196 ]

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of Quebec: Its Resources and People (1908), all written for AngloCanadian audiences, but seeking to dispel prejudices and misconception, and illustrating the valuable aspects of Québec society and history.31 In most cases, however, preservation was driven by local as opposed to national sentiment – Fort York in the city of Toronto being an especially interesting example, its preservation having resulted from a combination of factors. Firstly, in the 1880s as the fort’s defences became obsolete people began to see the dilapidated buildings as relics both of the city’s earliest history and the War of 1812. The perceived value of such historical associations saw the city apply to the federal government for possession of the fort in 1889, which finally occurred in 1903, and which bound the city to a course of preservation.32 Suggestions had also been made that the fort be restored and the blockhouse turned into a museum – an idea driven principally by the perceived tourist potential of the site, with the late nineteenth century seeing the rapid growth of visitor interest in such sites for their historical associations and as picturesque locations.33 In terms of historical significance, for Anglo-Canadians the site was most important for its connections with Loyalist and British traditions, the fostering of Canadian nationalism within the fold of Empire, and its serving as a warning against the perils posed to Canadian identity by America. Writing to Ontario Historical Society members in 1909 on his views on the site’s value, Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Mortimer Clark argued that, as newcomers to Canada visited such sites, they would learn that ‘their country has been fought for, and is worth fighting for again should occasion arise’. They would also ‘have it impressed on their hearts that we are part of that great British Empire of which we are so justly proud’. The chancellor of Victoria College, Nathanael Burwash, wholeheartedly agreed, arguing that, if immigrants were to be turned into patriotic Canadians, ‘[we] must make the most of our history and make its monuments as impressive as possible’.34 Interestingly, this was strikingly similar both in timing and use of historic landscapes to the United States, where the rising popularity of historic preservation was tied to middle-class anxieties about the waves of new immigrants pouring into the country.35 Other forts were preserved through the efforts of local communities, and in particular as an extension of local pride and historical association, with sites often being described as ‘sacred’ to local memory. Indeed, perceived threats to sites of local significance lay behind the establishment of at least four historical societies in the Niagara region around the turn of the century – the Lundy’s Lane Historical Society, established in 1887 with the aim of memorialising the Battle of Lundy’s [ 197 ]

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Lane; the Wentworth Historical Society, whose founders credited its establishment in 1889 to the region’s neglected landmarks; the Thorold and Beaverdams Historical Society, established in 1894 with a view to memorialising the site of the Battle of Beaver Dams; and the Niagara Historical Society, which was founded in 1896 with the aim of dedicating itself to ‘the preservation of all historical landmarks in [the] vicinity’.36 Seeing sites as mnemonic devices, preservationists were equally concerned with halting commercial interests or development that threatened them. In 1904, for example, the residents of Amherstburg petitioned the federal government to acquire Fort Malden as a national historical park in part from the threat of commercial encroachment, and in part owing to its perceived value in stimulating local interest in the region’s history.37 Efforts to preserve Fort Erie had similarly emerged in the late 1880s in response to developmental threats, with both historical interest groups and the Niagara municipalities calling for the site to be brought under the protection of the Niagara Parks Commission, which had been established in 1885 as part of an effort to preserve the natural scenery around Niagara Falls to take advantage of rapidly growing tourism interest. When the Commission took possession of the fort in 1901 it did so in an effort to prevent ‘further desecration’, and on the basis of there being few places more closely associated with the early struggles of Ontario.38 Indeed, as the centennial of the War of 1812 grew near, the Commission began to attain a number of historic sites – in some cases through purchase or donation, in others as Crown lands were turned over to them. Yet in many respects the Commission was simply a mechanism, and indeed, by the mid-1890s Niagara’s historical societies recognised that the best solution for the preservation of many of the district’s forts was to petition for them to be brought under the Commission’s control.39 In 1911 many of the concepts behind the Commission were integrated into the Dominion Parks Branch. Initially concerned principally with the management of parks, in 1915 the Branch’s commissioner, James Harkin, established a scheme for the setting apart of sites as historic parks. While inspired by the Royal Society’s Historic Landmarks Association, which since its establishment in 1907 had sought to gather information on historic sites across the Dominion, Harkin’s interest in historic sites was more complex, stemming from a belief that they had both educative and humanitarian value, and that historic parks served ‘to educate the people in the history of their country, [and] to stimulate patriotism and admiration for and emulation of noble actions’.40 With the Parks Branch’s attention limited to state-owned properties, however, four years later Harkin persuaded the federal government to establish the Historic Sites and Monuments Board (HSMB), [ 198 ]

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which assumed responsibility for government involvement in historic preservation.41 While directly emerging out of Parks Branch’s earlier efforts, the establishment of the HSMB also reflected the growing voice of the Canadian heritage movement, and its ability to influence government policy. Its establishment also served the priorities of government, which in Harkin’s idea of the didactic value of historic sites saw an opportunity to extend the national parks system eastwards through the creation of parks around significant historic structures. This served the interests both of local groups, which sought to preserve such sites as monuments to a heroic past, and of the Department of Militia and Defence, which were keen to dispose of obsolete properties such as old fortifications or fur trading posts. As a consequence, many of the Board’s early recommendations emphasised military history and exploration.42 While the regional diversity of Canada prevented the Board from developing any single, unified definition of ‘national significance’, Board members none the less focused their initial energies on sites in the regions they represented, often with little regard for significance. While this initially saw a focus on sites in Ontario and Québec, between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s Québécois influence on the board waned as Anglophone members banded together to thwart the efforts of the province’s well-developed heritage community.43 The dominance of the binationalism debate in Canada had profound implications for aboriginal Canadian history and heritage. Indeed, indigenous support for and against the Loyalists was one of the primary frames through which interest in the continent’s aboriginal past was seen. Beyond this, Anglo-French Canadian representations of indigenous peoples were typically dominated by the Eurocentric tropes that associated them squarely with Canada’s past (as opposed to present), or as romantic ‘wild men’ – William Lighthall, in his romance The Master of Life (1908), for example, writing of how natives possessed ‘a marvellous physique, a keen eye and quick reflexes, amazing stamina, a natural wisdom, a simplicity of manners, a poetic way of speech, and all the other attributes of a people totally in tune with nature’.44 Children’s books of the period tended to portray indigenous peoples across the stereotypes of the noble and barbaric savage, while school texts and history books often ignored or glossed over the existence of contemporaneous indigenous communities. More than simply writing them out of narratives charting colonial progress and growth, this supported the idea that indigenous peoples were extinct or at best ‘degraded natives’. In his History of the Dominion of Canada (1897) William Clement simply dismissed the Six Nations as ‘descendants of the once powerful and ferocious Iroquois’ who now lived ‘largely upon the bounty of the Canadian government’.45 [ 199 ]

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Such representations, or course, were favoured by ethnotourism, which, while not as significant in scale as in New Zealand, was an integral part of the nineteenth-century Canadian tourism industry – especially archaeological sites, which were a way for tourists to obtain memories and mementoes. Indeed, by the early 1800s travel guides were promoting archaeological sites as interesting places to visit, with the 1826 Northern Traveller, a guide to New England, Niagara, and Québec, for example, including a stop at an ancient tumulus near the Ontario town of Queenston, while George Munro Grant’s Picturesque Canada (1882) included an old village and burial ground near Streetsville and a tumulus mound outside of Hamilton.46 As domestic tourism began to grow in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, such promotion only increased, with ‘outdoors’ guides and magazines pointing out burial grounds and pictographs alongside paths.47 According to the influential archaeologist and ethno-historian Bruce Trigger this image of the idealised indigene was also supported by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American archaeology, which reflected and legitimated stereotypes of indigenous peoples and expressed the dominant political ideas and interests of colonial culture.48 Gerald Killan suggests that a number of nineteenth-century archaeologists such as David Boyle and Horatio Hale worked to promote a more selective image of indigenous Canadians that emphasised romantic Enlightenment ideas but downplayed the ideas of aboriginal peoples as warlike and uncivilised.49 More recently Michelle Hamilton has argued that only two archaeologists – Andrew Hunter and J. Hugh Hammond – believed that aboriginal history should be studied from the aboriginal viewpoint – Hunter describing the popular understanding of aboriginal peoples as being ‘at the mercy of their fancies and exaggeration’.50 Canada’s earliest measure offering protection to aboriginal sites was the 1797 Upper Canada proclamation criminalising the plundering of Mississauga fisheries and burial grounds. In bringing about the measure, the province’s administrator, Peter Russell, had been prompted by the ‘many heavy and grievous complaints’ from the Mississaugas, and by wider rumours of Native discontent, which prompted efforts to ensure the loyalty of Upper Canadian nations and tribes.51 Russell’s prescription, however, was neither precedent-setting nor a legal or moral deterrent. Subsequent protection fell under local jurisdictions. In 1859 the ‘Act respecting the municipal institutions of Upper Canada’ allowed municipalities to pass bylaws to deter destruction of graves and burial sites; however, it seems no municipalities used this legislation to protect aboriginal sites. More success was met with in British Columbia, where in 1865 the Indian Grave Ordinance was passed in response to aboriginal protests. The disturbance of aboriginal [ 200 ]

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sites – at least burial sites – was finally made a national crime in 1906 when the national Criminal Code was amended; however, in practice it too had limited effect. More widely the push for legislative protection of indigenous sites in Canada was grounded not so much in moral or ethical debate, but in professional ethnologists’ condemnation of non-scientific research.52 Following archaeology becoming the primary focus of the Canadian Institute Museum during the 1880s, Boyle, as its first paid full-time curator, worked tirelessly to professionalise the discipline, and frequently lobbied the government both for the establishment of a provincial archaeological museum and to enact protective legislation.53 Boyle’s appeal to the Department of Indian Affairs in 1889 for funds, however, was declined, with the Superintendent General Edgar Dewdney noting that, while he recognised the value of the Institute’s work, its goals would not help aboriginal peoples.54 The Department, of course, was much more interested in assimilating aboriginal peoples than helping them preserve their traditions and material culture, with the Indian Act, in fact, outlawing many aboriginal traditions to this end. ‘Preservation’ was itself a loaded notion, and, while the creation of the Anthropological Division of the Canadian Geological Survey in 1910 brought with it federal funding for the collection and research of aboriginal artefacts, the professionalisation of anthropology and archaeology only acted to further disempower aboriginal peoples by placing museum professionals in the position of stewards, and ultimately as interpreters, of material culture. Indeed, as the Hamilton Herald suggested in 1901, Boyle, as the curator of the Ontario Provincial Museum, ‘[knew] much about natives and not just the present mix-up of reservation “braves” but the real, sure-enough Indian of long, long ago. In fact it would please a resurrected Indian to find out what a really interesting being he was.’55 With this in mind a number of aboriginal leaders attacked the exclusivity of scholarly and scientific focus on so-called ‘traditional’ indigenous culture, such as Evelyn Johnson – sister of the famed Mohawk writer and performer Pauline – who in 1902 complained to the government about the distorted impression of indigenous society presented by scholars. Taking particular aim at Boyle, she noted that he ‘seldom was seen among the more educated Indians’, while his reports showed nothing of brick homes, churches, or ‘accomplished’ people, those who showed ‘advancement and civilization’.56 A few years later one Six Nations publication similarly challenged that, far from being evidence of aboriginal underdevelopment, indigenous artefacts demonstrated the ‘industry, patience, economy, endurance, originality and skill’ that were an inherent part of the aboriginal character.57 [ 201 ]

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Despite efforts to limit destructive diggings and careless treatment of artefacts, professional archaeologists were heavily dependent upon amateur efforts, both to locate archaeological sites and to build public museum collections. Indeed, members of the public – and especially farmers and surveyors – spearheaded contact with archaeological sites, discovered the remains of aboriginal villages, middens, and cemeteries during their daily work. Railway cuttings were seen to be such potentially valuable sources of artefacts that the Canadian Institute even urged railway workers to record any discoveries found.58 Amateur knowledge was also often crucial in guiding professionals to places on private property or known through local gossip and memory, and indeed, by the end of the century many local histories recorded the presence, location, and often amateur excavations of archaeological sites.59 Despite the protestations of professionals about the destruction of sites caused by amateurs, in the absence of legislative protection, owners of private property were key to controlling what happened to sites located on their own land, and some did attempt to protect sites. In the Simcoe town of Collingwood, townspeople tried to stop excavations, while other landowners refused to allow amateurs to excavate. The owner of the land on which the Southwold earthworks in Elgin County sat similarly sought to leave the site undisturbed by not ploughing or planting crops on this part of his property.60 Indeed, as Boyle noted in a number of reports for the Canadian Institute museum, ‘hope’ that private owners would continue to protect landmarks from destruction was a primary front in the face of no legislative protection.61 Amateur and local societies were also particularly active in pushing for legislative protection, such as the Ontario Historical Society, which in 1910 lobbied Indian Affairs for the protection of archaeological sites on reserve lands, while historical societies more generally confronted government inactivity by petitioning for legislation along the lines of Britain’s Ancient Monuments Protection Act.62 Typically, however, local societies took a piecemeal approach to lobbying local councils and later the HSMB for the protection of individual sites. There were also a handful of instances where wider public passions for the preservation of indigenous sites were roused – the most important examples perhaps being sites associated with the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, and the Shawnee Tecumseh, who were considered to be heroes in the broader scope of British and Upper Canadian history. Numerous attempts to locate and excavate the bones of Tecumseh – originating with US supporters of William Henry Harrison during his presidential campaign of 1840 – infuriated Ontario residents, many of whom saw Tecumseh as a local hero of 1812.63 Efforts to draw Brant more closely in to settler nationalism similarly resulted in a [ 202 ]

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widespread appeal for the construction of a tomb at Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks in Ontario into which Brant’s remains were reinterred.64 Yet it was no coincidence that two of the indigenous Canadians most important to Ontario settler identity were associated with the War of 1812, with the conflict in many ways shaping settler interest in aboriginal history as much as it did settler interest in colonial Canada. In addition to being fascinated by the role Native allies played during the war, some contemporary historians argued that Native alliances with Britain had been essential in repulsing American attacks – this itself being part of the myth of beneficent and morally palatable imperialism in which Native American support had been given because of Britain’s good treatment of Native peoples.65 The War of 1812 could also be seen as a romantic episode in the history of Anglo-native relations, the last time that aboriginal peoples in Upper Canada fought as allies of the Crown and not as subjects.

Avoiding Australia’s pitfalls Between the late 1860s and 1920 Australian ethnography had a central place in social evolutionary thinking and the production of anthropological theory. Central to this was ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ – Thomas Huxley – who regarded contemporary Aborigines as ‘probably as pure and homogenous in blood, customs, and language, as any race of savages in existence’.66 Such views were heavily promoted internationally, with the collection of Australian Aboriginal material displayed at the 1867 Paris Universelle Exposition highlighting their ‘stone age’ state and employed as a contrast to ‘man in the golden age of his present civilisation’.67 As the most primitive example of early man, the following half-century witnessed a remarkable surge of interest in the morphological investigation of the Australian Aborigine; so much so that through the 1880s and 1890s Australian museological interest in Aborigines was limited principally to the collection of Aboriginal remains as scientifically interesting specimens of natural history.68 There was little Australian institutional interest, however, in collecting of Aboriginal material culture. Soon after being Appointed honorary director of the National Museum of Victoria in 1899, for example, Baldwin Spencer assessed the state of the country’s ethnographic collections: Victoria had next to nothing, Western Australia had even less, and Sydney was ranked poor, with South Australia the best. In Europe, meanwhile, museums and collectors scrambled for both Aboriginal specimens and artefacts – Carol Cooper and Philip Jones suggesting that by the early 1930s up to forty thousand Aboriginal objects had been acquired by European museums.69 As Spencer thus set himself the task [ 203 ]

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of extending the Museum of Victoria’s collection, by the mid-1920s his efforts had resulted in its thirty-fold growth as he raced to obtain ‘authentic’ artefacts before the anticipated demise of the Aboriginal ‘race’.70 Indeed, capturing the spirit of the times, as one of his collectors, James Field, noted in a letter to Spencer in 1903, ‘I have not forgotten what you told me and am annexing all I can lay hands on’.71 In his work on the South Australian Museum, Philip Jones has suggested that a key reasons for this earlier lack of interest in Aboriginal material culture in Australia was that once colonisation saw Aboriginal people reduced to fringe dwelling there was not a great deal of interest in their way of life.72 In their wide-ranging exploration of indigenous collections in Australian museums, Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen, and Louise Hamby have similarly suggested that, even following the establishment of Aboriginal studies as an academic discipline, between the 1920s and the 1970s there was little public appetite for Australian archaeology and anthropology – a reality illustrated by the fact that even in the South Australian Museum the Aboriginal exhibition stood unchanged from 1914 to 1982, while the display in the Queensland Museum stood unchanged from 1911 to 1986, and that in Sydney’s Australian Museum from 1906 to 1956.73 Michael Davis’s exploration of late nineteenth-century writing about Aboriginal heritage offers further support, Davis noting the ‘dry scientific writing’ and exclusivity of comment in the journals of learned societies.74 Such lack of public interest in Aboriginal material culture, however, is perhaps less surprising when we consider the absence of Aborigines from popular narratives of Australia’s past from the late nineteenth century. In Sutherland’s The History of Australia and New Zealand from 1606 to 1901, which was widely used in Victorian schools, for example, Aboriginal people are barely mentioned. The Australian section of the book in fact begins with European discoveries, whereas the New Zealand section begins with an entire chapter devoted to ‘the times of the Maoris’. Nor were children ‘taught’ about Aboriginal people after white contact, and if Aboriginal people appeared at all in school texts it was as prehistory caricatures. More generally, by the turn of the century literary representations of Aborigines provided an aesthetic rationale for dispossession, with dominant narrative patterns symbolically marking the end of a period of Aboriginal Australian ownership of the country and their slipping out of the cultural landscape.75 Such narratives also formed a rationale for the construction of a rash of monuments commemorating the ‘last of tribe’. When Frank ‘King Billy’ Wilson – the supposed last Aborigine of the Wathaurung tribe in the Ballarat region – died in 1896, for example, Ballarat’s newspapers lamented ‘the extinction of another native tribe’, while the public [ 204 ]

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16  James Dawson’s memorial obelisk to the Aborigines, as illustrated in the Sydney Mail in December 1885

stumped up the cash to give Wilson a Christian burial in the local cemetery.76 The following year the Australian Natives Association (ANA) and the Australian Historical Records Society decided to mark Wilson’s grave, erecting a monument to this ‘last ruler of the bush’. A similar memorial was unveiled to the Aboriginal women ‘Queen Aggie’ in 1930, the local Victorian Member of Parliament explaining that the memorial would ‘impress the rest of the aboriginals of the district of the fact that their race was thought of, and had its place in honor and historically would be remembered’.77 Griffiths suggests that such memorials probably entered local white consciousness as ‘historic sites’, monuments to white philanthropy, and as milestones of progress.78 Yet there is also more to it, with the death of supposed ‘last aborigines’ providing a context for the expression of sadness at the ‘end of an era’. Perhaps more [ 205 ]

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importantly, such events played out dominant ideologies and cultural beliefs of the time concerning the demise of the Aborigine. For members of organisations such as the ANA who claimed status of ‘authentic native’ Australians, it was equally important that they be seen to ‘do the right thing’ by seeing off the last Aboriginal Australians.79 A small number of ‘last’ memorials were also raised in anger, such as that by the amateur ethnologist and ‘friend of the aborigines’ James Dawson, who in 1884 initiated the erection of an obelisk in memory of Aborigines of the Camperdown district in western Victoria, demanding local contributions to the fund. For many the idea was quite a rub – one local settler refusing to contribute on the basis that he could not assist ‘in erecting a monument to a race of men we have robbed of their country’.80 Coupled with increasing administrative and bureaucratic controls over Aboriginal people, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the apparent demise of the Aborigine had also given rise to a heightened sense of urgency to record and preserve the vestiges that remained.81 Such views about the importance of collecting Aboriginal culture ‘before it was too late’ had been voiced since at least the 1840s, with the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institution, for example, in 1846 seeking to develop an Aboriginal collection out of fear that with the ‘rapid decrease’ in the Aboriginal population it would soon no longer be possible to do so.82 As interest in Aboriginal culture grew, by the turn of the century the centrality of ‘visible’ culture to western scientific discourse gave rise to a clear preferencing of material culture over other forms of Aboriginal culture. Indeed, the relative absence of cultural clues in Australia that European geologists and palaeontologists typically recognised – shards of pottery, domestic structures, and ‘monuments’ – was itself one of the key planks to the scientific opinion that Australia’s Aborigines were probably without antiquity. The Aboriginal cultural landscape was similarly lacking, with the best offers seen to be ‘extensive “kitchen middens”’ and isolated rock art.83 While the first known European descriptions of Aboriginal cave art were recorded by William Westall during Mathew Flinders’s circumnavigation of the continent in 1802–3, descriptions of cave art by later explorers such as Phillip Parker King (1827), George Grey (1841), and Robert Brough Smyth (1878) caused considerable stir.84 Carved trees sparked similar reactions, with the Australian Museum alone possessing over fifty trees by the end of the 1930s, while others were preserved at pastoral station homesteads, in local country museums, by shire councils, and by historical societies.85 Despite this, however, the development of measures to protect and preserve Aboriginal material culture and historic sites in Australia was woefully slow, with the first legislation enacted in the Northern Territory in 1955, followed by Acts in [ 206 ]

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South Australia in 1965 and Queensland in 1967.86 Legislation protecting flora and fauna, by comparison, had been in place since as early as the mid-nineteenth century, such as Tasmania’s 1858 Land Act, which allowed for the establishment of scenic reserves for public and recreational purposes, and the 1861 Crown Lands Alienation Act in New South Wales (NSW), which was used to reserve natural attractions such as the Wombeyan Caves as ‘public assets’.87 While earlier legislation under the various lands and native affairs departments dealt with issues of land use and the creation of Aboriginal reserves, the only pieces of legislation that included provisions for the protection of Aboriginal sites were the NSW Crown Lands Consolidation Act of 1913, which provided for the dedication of relics in situ (however, only upon special request), and Tasmania’s Scenery Preservation Act enacted two years later, which allowed for the reservation of sites of scenic or historic value, but offered little protection for Aboriginal relics within reserves. These frameworks were, none the less, employed to limited effect, with a number of sites in NSW reserved following recommendations by the Australian Museum and the Anthropological Society of NSW or through the initiative of the surveyors who found them, while in Tasmania Aboriginal sites were reserved on Freycinet Peninsula, Tasman’s Peninsula, and Bruny Island. Yet, as the anthropologist and aboriginal scholar Fred McCarthy complained in 1938, municipal and shire councils were often unwilling to take steps to preserve sites unless they could make them attractions for tourists, and it was far more common for councils to freely permit quarrying and the development of sites, resulting in the destruction of untold graves, middens, and cave paintings. Carved trees had similarly been lost to the axes of firewood and fence-post cutters, or in the clearing of land for settlement. With funding available under the Acts was negligible, and at the mercy of departmental whim, the perceived cost of patrolling, fencing, and servicing reserves often thwarted even the creation of new reserves on Crown land.88 Outside of the legislative frame, there had since the late nineteenth century been instances of private effort to ensure the preservation of Aboriginal sites, and following the First World War efforts to affect preservation began to grow among European Australians at a number of levels.89 In the early 1920s the Royal Australian Historical Society began actively seeking protection of rock paintings with local councils, while the Anthropological Society of Victoria fenced rock paintings in the Grampians and at Langi Ghiran, and worked to encourage municipal councils to use Aboriginal names for streets and local features.90 Similar work was carried out by amateur groups such as the Barrier Field Naturalists’ Club, the Rangers’ League, and BushWalkers’ Clubs. There was, however, also a note of discord between [ 207 ]

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amateur and ‘professional’ efforts, culminating in early 1937 when the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science asked the governments of both countries to enact legislation for preserving archaeological sites as national monuments.91 While the Association cited the ongoing loss of sites to vandalism as its primary motivation, its request also sought to limit the examination of sites to approved societies and institutions – namely ‘experts’. The appeal was soon taken up by Joseph Shellshear, honorary archaeologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, who in his ‘Appeal for the Preservation of Prehistoric Remains in Australia’ both stressed the need for preservation and condemned collectors as the primary cause of destruction.92 Shellshear’s Australian Museum colleague Fred McCarthy was similarly scathing of the destruction wrought by amateur collectors, by the public at large, by industry, and by farming – believing that the restricting of access to sites to experts would be a necessary feature of any effective protective measure.93 Although McCarthy’s and Shellshear’s proposals were submitted to the NSW, South Australian, and Commonwealth governments in 1939 and again in 1945, their concerns would not be listened to until the 1960s when they began to coincide with wider public debate and expressions of concern over environmental issues in general. While the perceived costs of the proposal were certainly a major stumbling block in its implementation, as Griffiths suggests, another significant factor in delaying protective legislation was the influence of a distinguished group of ‘amateur’ ethnologists and collectors who feared that legislative protection would curtail the freedom of private collectors.94 For colonial Australians, Tom Griffiths notes, the Australian past was full of pitfalls.95 Even if the violent dispossession of the Aborigines was swept under the rug, most historians working in the second half of the nineteenth century at best viewed Aborigines as a scene-setter to the country’s ‘real’ history, and at worst as having no history at all. Many early themes in Australia’s European history were similarly isolated, Eric Rolls observing that until well into the twentieth century there were more attempts to hide than to record Australian history which had taken place outside of the law.96 It was not just the Aboriginal past that was the problem, with the origins of a number of Australia’s earliest settlements linked to something that many were not exactly proud of – convictism. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century even the Chief Justice of Tasmania was campaigning for the destruction of all convict relics because they were visible reminders of shame and of a tainted past.97 Visitors to Port Arthur a few years earlier similarly often found themselves greeted by one civically minded local determined to put ‘a limited quantity of dynamite or gunpowder’ under [ 208 ]

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the Penitentiary in the hope of removing every last trace of the physical stain from Tasmania’s landscape – much of the job being done in early 1898 by a suspicious fire.98 While attitudes to the country’s convict past changed with time, it was slow going, and when in the 1920s the historian Alexandra Hasluck protested against the West Australian Historical Society’s suppression of recently discovered letters to a convict, she was categorically told that the state ‘was founded as a free colony by gentlefolk: the convicts came later and unwanted, and should not be associated with it’.99 Similar embarrassment at its convict past existed in NSW – Graeme Davison suggesting that this was one of the reasons for the unveiling of memorials to James Cook as opposed to Governor Phillip during the 1888 Centennial celebrations.100 Efforts to brush Phillip aside because of his convict associations were nothing new in 1888, with greater emphasis being placed on Cook following the end of transportation in 1852, the introduction of responsible government in 1855, and the economic boom of the 1850s, which resulted (among other things) in a growing call for the emphasis of Anniversary Day to be on contemporary achievements. The Australian Patriotic Association (APA) similarly began to employ Cook as something of a marker in which colonial progress was judged in terms of change ‘since Captain Cook first set foot on the shore of Botany Bay’ as the Sydney Empire noted in January 1853.101 A decade later a further logic for the sidelining of Phillip was offered during discussions around the idea of making 28 April – the day Cook supposedly landed at Botany Bay – a national holiday, the argument being that Phillip simply ranked on a far lower stage than Cook: ‘The foundation of our present city is a less national event than the landing of the great navigator on the shores of this new world’.102 In the second half of the nineteenth century exploration narratives such as that Cook encapsulated became one of the most heavily drawn upon tropes in the story of Australia’s past. A number of factors lay behind this. Firstly, as heroic narratives they did not ooze shame – far from it. Such narratives also intersected naturally with the domestically nurtured themes of landscape and environment (which had unquestionably proved colonists’ greatest foes and defined the cultural obsession with the interior), and with the dominant pioneer legend which centred on the bush and honest rural toil, as encouraged by poets, writers, and painters such as Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, and the Heidelberg School.103 Yet for many the pioneer legend had its limits, and indeed well into the second half of the nineteenth century many historians believed that Australia effectively had no history. A few writers such as Price Warung, Thomas Browne, and Marcus Clarke embraced convict history and bushranging in the hope of showing that Australia had its own [ 209 ]

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exotic past, while others sought instead to focus on the future. David Blair was one of the few historians prepared to hint at an independent Australian history, with his Cyclopedia of Australasia (1881) published in the hope of fostering a spirit of patriotism. The lack of any major conflict in the settlement of Australia was also seen as an unfortunate shortcoming, with a number of historians lamenting that, compared with other reaches of empire, Australia’s Aborigines were insufficiently warlike.104 As Henry Turner, for example, noted wistfully in his History of the Colony of Victoria (1904): The wars which our American cousins waged for two hundred years against the brave and crafty redskins; the long struggles in Canada against the confederated six nations; the storming by British troops of native Pahs [sic] in New Zealand; the protracted wars, so costly in blood and treasure, involved in the subjugation of the Kaffirs and Zulus in South Africa ... had no counterpart in the settlement of the colony of Victoria.105

Perhaps because of such a troubling historical landscape, when in 1933 the Carnegie Foundation report on Australian museums was published, it highlighted the dearth of nationally oriented historical c­ ollections in Australia. It did, however, go on to note that ‘Most museums ... have historical collections referring to the town in which they are situated’, and indeed local museums – which were often attached to mechanics’ institutes – were key sites of early historical collecting.106 By the beginning of the 1870s, for example, the George Street mechanics’ institute in Sydney had in excess of two thousand volumes of historical and scientific work, while in Tasmania the Launceston Museum had by the early 1890s amassed one of the largest collections of historical documents and relics in the country.107 Early public collecting similarly clustered around Old Identities Associations, Pioneers’ Societies, and Old Residents’ Groups, whose preservation interests – as in New Zealand and Canada – were a mix of reminiscences, documents, and objects. The objectives of the Australasian Pioneers’ Club, for example, included the preservation of relics and documents, and to ‘­perpetuate the honoured names connected with the country’s history’.108 Establishing its historical collection in 1886, the South Australian Old Colonists’ Association similarly encouraged its members to scan their drawers and bookcases for relics from the old days.109 Historical societies began to emerge in Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the context of a fermenting nationalism and British patriotism. Formed in 1883, the Geographical Society of Australasia initially held ‘the patriotic desire of seeing the natural resources of this great country brought to light and developed, and the land become the home of happy and contented millions’ as its primary concern. A histor[ 210 ]

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ical dimension, however, was quickly added to its work, including the collection and publication of historical records of geographical interest and the memoirs of ‘notable men’ in the development of the colonies.110 Similarly imperial-centred themes lay behind the establishment of the short-lived Historical Society of Australasia, which was concerned with encouraging the study of the ‘authentic history of the British Empire in the South’.111 Priority was given to collection, the ‘recording of memory’, and a recognition that large collections of documents relating to the early days of the colony in the possession of old families and pioneers who were ‘fast passing away’.112 A similar objective was assumed by the Australian Historical Records Society, essentially a local organisation. The bulk of its members were old diggers who wanted to preserve the stories and historical record of ‘the gold years’ and, of course, of the Eureka Rebellion – an organised rebellion of Ballarat goldminers who in 1854 rose against taxation without representation. As one patriotic member noted, ‘the hour has arrived wherein we should begin to collect and preserve the absorbingly exciting stories of a vanishing past, stories that can be told by the heroic hearts who shared in the struggles and triumphs of this glorious country’.113 The established of the Australian Historical Society (AHS) in 1901 was prompted by subtly different motivations – notably a keen sense of the loss of Old Sydney, and the perceived importance of retaining an ‘authentic record’ of the city’s development.114 Behind this lay a dispute which arose in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1901 as to the correct date of the laying of the foundation stone of an old church, with correspondents suggesting that there should be an authority to provide an authentic record of such information since ‘the swift advance of civilization is continually … sweeping away historical monuments of the past’.115 Accordingly, in addition to the preservation of historical records, the compilation of a chronology of interesting and significant events was undertaken as one of its formative objectives. Principally a Sydney organisation, the AHS also sought to reclaim the NSW past as a source of pride rather than shame. Much like local historical and pioneer societies, state societies brought together pious members of the older pioneering families and the professional classes. Though some of their early investigations were based on painstaking research, the majority were ­undiscriminating and uncritical – one historian recently describing the early volumes of the Victorian Historical Magazine as ‘a mausoleum of minor preoccupations’. A cursory glance at papers read before the AHS in 1908 similarly suggests that research was dominated by self-congratulatory and antiquarian topics such as the landing of Governor Phillip at Port Jackson, ‘Old Sydney Illuminated’, and a history of Tank [ 211 ]

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Stream – the main water supply of the fledgling NSW colony.116 Much of the work of state societies was similarly motivated not by scholarly values but by Australian or imperial nationalism, while other bodies were ­concerned principally with the positioning of the state or region within the broader story of national progress. Local societies, by comparison, tended to focus greater attention on the nurturing of civic values. Yet the oft single-minded judgement of ‘amateur’ historical societies as naive organisations is short-sighted, with local societies in Australia – as in New Zealand and Canada – leading the push for the collection and preservation of historical documents, reminiscences, and relics. Indeed, the preservation ethic would itself be the motivation behind the establishment of a large proportion of local historical societies in Australia, such as the Western Australian Historical Society which saw its primary objective being ‘to collect, classify, and preserve records and articles concerning the history of Western Australia; to publish selected records from time to time, and to create a public opinion favouring the preservation of worthy historical relics and fit recognition of notable anniversaries in the State’s history’.117 Local society members were also often active in the wider historical and cultural communities outside the bounds of historical societies, and indeed in civic institutions and government departments many of the preservation ideals of historical societies would find a firm footing. Local and state libraries similarly saw both the collection and the promotion of Australia’s colonial history as being of central importance, with many libraries undertaking significant collection projects on their own initiative. While in England in 1882 and early 1883 in his official position as immigration agent for the Queensland government, for example, the amateur historian and teacher James Bonwick began searching London for early Australian source material. Discovering a wealth of material, he began exploring the possibility of a transcription programme similar to that recently begun by the Canadian government – in June 1883 beginning a three-year programme copying historical records for the Queensland and South Australian governments, and for the Melbourne Public Library. Following this he began a six-year transcription project for the Tasmanian state government and a fifteen-year stint for NSW – the latter of which resulted in some 125,000 sheets of manuscript which would form the basis of the eight-volume Historical Records of New South Wales (1892–1901).118 Building upon this, in 1904 the NSW Public Library sought to systematically extend the collection of material, making a call to ‘old residents’ for documents relating to the first fifty years of the settlement – with the resulting collection to be preserved and made available to students of history.119 [ 212 ]

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The importance of public libraries in the collection of official records was acknowledged early in the twentieth century when legislation was passed giving de facto control of public archives to state library boards, and enabling the establishment of archive sections within libraries. The earliest of these was the South Australian archives department, which had been established in October 1920 by the public library authority owing to their existing collection outgrowing the library’s facilities.120 This collection had originally been established when a leading Adelaide resident gifted a substantial body of documents to the Melbourne Museum owing to the lack of repositories in South Australia – the President of the Adelaide Public Library duly suggesting that the creation of the collection was ‘a matter of local patriotism and obvious good policy’.121 Yet at an official level such attitudes had only recently been embraced, with, for example, the creation of the Mitchell Library in 1906 – the most significant repository in Australia during the period – made possible only by the NSW government’s belated acceptance of conditions earlier imposed by the collection’s donor, David Mitchell. An obsessive bibliophile, Mitchell had first offered to bequeath his collection of roughly sixty thousand volumes of Australiana to the state, together with a £70,000 endowment, if a suitable building were provided to house it. At the time, however, many legislators dismissed the collection as a ‘lot of convict rubbish’ and the gift was not clinched until the year before Mitchell’s death.122 Nor was it historical documents and photographs alone that were seen to be of value to society, with the Sydney Public Librarian Charles Bertie writing Old Sydney (in collaboration with the artist Sydney Smith) in 1911 out of what he saw as the pedagogical value of historic sites and buildings. The hope, noted Bertie in the preface, was that ‘our endeavour with pen and pencil to portray the charm of an old city; a city as old as our Australian race’ would serve as an introduction to the romance of the streets and buildings of Sydney. The educational – not to mention cultural – benefits of such history, he suggested, were incalculable: ‘an ancient building or old street scene awakens a sense of pleasure through the eye, or a feeling of reverence for a thing that has endured the buffets of time, or brings to life again the men and women who once strutted on the scene.’123 Indeed, the link between education and local history was especially significant in Australia, where it was often schoolchildren who documented local history for the first time. While the introduction of history into Australian schools was initially resisted, by the end of the nineteenth century it occupied a central place in the curriculum, being viewed as the principal means of building and strengthening a sense of community and fostering love of home, country, and race. Pioneer and explorer narratives were [ 213 ]

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especially central to this, with texts such as George and Alexander Sutherland’s History of Australia and New Zealand – which passed through more than a dozen editions and sold 120,000 copies after its publication in 1877 – and Ebenezer Watts’s widely used Stories from Australian History (1908) both devoting the majority of their narratives to stories of pioneering virtues and values. As Watts concluded in his preface, ‘It is hoped that these pupils will learn to appreciate how much they owe to the pioneer explorers and settlers, and will retain their admiration for them long after they leave school’.124 It was also linked to a growing desire among a number of writers to advance the idea that – as the educationalist Charles Long later put it – Australians were ‘making a justifiable bid to be heirs no more of others glory, but the makers of our own’. Long was especially convinced of the pedagogical value of ‘the local’, explaining that ‘local history should be appealed to periodically to explain the reason for the erection of the monument, and the monument should be made the centre for commemoration services at regular intervals’.125 Similar ideas lay at the heart of the Victorian National Parks Committee’s (NPC) 1910 suggestion that a ‘Discovery Day’ be instigated in state schools – the idea being instituted the following year on 19 April, the day Lieutenant Hicks sighted Victoria from the Endeavour in 1770.126 Conceived as a day for schoolchildren to pay tribute to the founders and recognise the heritage which was won for them by the toil, privations, persistence, sacrifice, and even death, endured by the sturdy pioneers and explorers, for its proposer – the educational reformer James Barrett – the places associated with this early history were as important as the narrative.127 Sites such as these, he explained, remedied the pre-European Australian landscape’s emptiness – its lack of evidence of bygone civilisation or of vanished empires, of ‘storied urn or animated bust ... [of] column trophied for triumphal show’.128 Barrett’s enthusiasm soon bore fruit when in 1912 memorial tablets were unveiled to the explorer George Bass and cartographer Matthew Flinders on the You Yang mountains, and to the surveyor and explorer Thomas Mitchell atop Pyramid Hill in western Victoria.129 The following year the efforts of local schoolchildren saw memorial cairns unveiled at Westernport, and atop Mount Arapiles – the latter being pushed along by the assistance of Barrett and the Victorian Director of Education, Frank Tate.130 Few opportunities were missed to highlight schoolchildren’s enthusiasm for the scheme or the community provision of funds and labour as supposed illustrations of youthful patriotism and respect. Indeed, when the You Yang memorial – the result of small subscriptions and voluntary labour coupled with the deeper pockets of the National Parks Association – was unveiled, criticism [ 214 ]

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was even made of the size of the wording of the latter as it was seen to detract from the contribution of the local.131 Tapping into such demonstrations of patriotism and local pride, in the early 1920s – as the centenary of Hamilton Hume and William Hovell’s 1824 expedition neared – the Victorian Historical Memorials Committee was established. Led by the Education and Lands Departments, the Committee’s goal was to organise celebrations at points along the route taken by Hume and Hovell – an idea that drew inspiration from the ‘Eleanor Crosses’ in England erected by Edward I to mark the nightly resting-places on the path taken when the body of his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was transported from Lincoln Cathedral to Westminster Abbey in 1290.132 By the early 1930s the Committee had overseen the construction of over one hundred cairns and plaques to discovery and explorers in Victoria.133 Similar initiatives would soon by launched in Queensland, where the Education Department promoted local history in schools in the hope of fostering community and bringing to light previously unknown letters, diaries, and manuscripts, and in the 1930s in NSW and South Australia.134 Explaining the broader importance of memorialisation, Long drew together a number of threads. Channelling Macauley’s argument that a ‘people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered’, he believed that the present generation of Australians had a responsibility to preserve the memory of achievement and endeavour for its successors. He also believed that the erecting of monuments and the holding of commemorative services was the most potent means of doing this, as memorials gave pause to reflect, and in this reflection reminded society of much worthy of remembrance. The memorial to the explorer, for example, was a reminder of ‘his long-tried patience and stubborn endurance, the battle that he fought against great natural difficulties and obstacles, and the work that he accomplished for mankind by blazing a track into the unknown’.135 Memorials also had a ‘national value’, as, in fostering the feeling of close relationship to the past and the recognition of race kinship that they engendered, they aided in cementing together that race, and urging it onward to fresh efforts through the sentiment of great possibilities. The Department – as with the Historical Memorials Committee – thus wanted to create an instructive landscape, one that would offer places of association, refuges of reflection, and material evidence of Australian values. Interest in the mnemonic power and value of sites, however, was also a relatively recent development in early twentieth-century Australia, as illustrated by the reception of efforts to protect James Cook’s landing place at Kurnell on the southern side of Botany Bay in New South Wales. [ 215 ]

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While the first monument to Cook was unveiled in 1822 when the Australian Philosophical Society unveiled a brass plate commemorating Cook and Joseph Banks’s landing at Kurnell in April 1770, interest in the preservation and even marking of historic sites was rare in Australia before the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, despite the narrative of Cook’s landing at Kurnell as being the true foundation of the colony having continued to grow in popularity since the early 1850s, there was little correlation between the narrative and interest in the site itself. When, in 1881, the suggestion was made that the government reserve the site ‘as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers honour the spot where the men of the Mayflower landed’, for example, the motion was quashed as critic after critic dismissed the importance of the site itself – the Secretary of Lands James Hoskins arguing that Cook ‘was best honoured by the progress of the colony’, while the Premier and Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Parkes argued that the ‘physical and moral grandeur of the country was a sufficient memorial’.136 Articles about Cook’s connection with Kurnell frequently graced the pages of the local papers; however, little association was made between the maintenance of the narrative and the physical site, and indeed few saw a problem promoting the importance of the Cook narrative to Australia’s history while also pushing for the site as a l­ ocation for ‘noxious trades’ that was debated between 1884 and the early 1890s. Indeed, despite moves to place Kurnell at the heart of national celebrations of empire following the 1888 centenary celebrations, the site’s eventual preservation as a public reserve in 1899 ultimately came about not because of a groundswell of public support but because of the efforts of the Cook aficionado extraordinaire Joseph Carruthers’s own position as Minister of Lands, and the patriotic zeal of then Premier Sir George Reid. Yet much as Long would later suggest in his work with the Victorian Historical Memorials Committee, for Carruthers, Kurnell’s importance was not for its association with an historical event but for its associations with Cook the man as a symbol of imperial virtue. As Carruthers simply summed the situation up in 1905, Cook possessed ‘the characteristics we want’ – he was an example to Australia’s children that all had a part to play ‘in building up this great nation of Australia’ and that the ‘best mortar’ with which to achieve this was ‘absolute devotion to duty’.137 Interest in historic sites and places thus did not necessarily emerge in parallel to an interest in historical narrative. Indeed, at a popular level interest in the historic landscape began to emerge in Australia only during the 1890s, and typically in response to a growing awareness of the change that had taken place both in the landscape and in society. As the century came to a close a cascade of sentimental books, pamphlets, and essays appeared that venerated old [ 216 ]

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landmarks because of their apparent power to reproduce the moods of the past and increase the vividness of reminiscence. The mystique of preservation was evoked through nostalgic lamentations over the price of progress and the disappearance of familiar landmarks.138 In other contexts, such as in Tasmania, such mnemonic potency was reason for the destruction of landmarks as opposed to preservation. The ending of transportation to Tasmania in 1853 was widely greeted by locals with an enthusiasm for the removal of any and all vestiges of the colony’s sordid past. In 1856, for example, the colony’s name was changed from Van Dieman’s Land to Tasmania in part for this very reason, while even in the early twentieth century the destruction of the mouldering remains of the island’s convict prisons and probation stations – commonly referred to as ‘blots on the landscape’ – was greeted with general approval, with each building lost seen as one link less in the chain which shackled the modern, progressive State of Tasmania to the sordid Vandiemonian past. Yet while the desire to cut the past loose may have been strong locally, the situation was not necessarily this clear-cut. To begin with, the end of transportation brought not only the withdrawal of British subsidy amounting to some £350,000 annually but also the end of the plentiful supply of free labour which Tasmania had relied upon since 1804. Coupled with the stagnation and economic depression of the 1860s, this saw tourists become sufficiently important for the claim to be made that they kept Hobart alive during the summer months. With Tasmania soon promoting itself as ‘The Sanatorium of the South’ and ‘the tourist isle’, and actively seeking the patronage of wealthy visitors from the mainland of Australia, the major attractions were Tasmania’s temperate climate, its ‘Englishness’, and its much-vaunted scenery. While a growing fascination with Tasmanian history – especially amongst visitors – was also evident during the period, Tasmanian anxiety about the island’s penal past was somewhat endemic, with the Tasmanian government in 1857 symbolically ordering the demolition of the old Imperial Gaol in central Hobart. For at least the next half century denial of the convict past permeated all aspects of Tasmanian life, with ‘active disinformation’ peddled to the rising generation. In Walch’s Tasmanian Guide Book, published in 1871, for example, the author manages to avoid mention of the convict past almost entirely, though a few ‘bushranger stories’ are present, being the one aspect of Tasmania’s past with sufficient inherent romanticism to overcome the usual restraints.139 As the desire of Tasmanians to demonstrate a complete rift with the past became more pronounced during the economic boom of the 1880s, many places closely associated with the convict past were renamed, and guide books increasingly focused attention on scenic and recreation [ 217 ]

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attractions, or simply avoided mention of convict associations. While, for example, the 1886 Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company’s Guide for Visitors to Tasmania made mention of the ‘old Richmond Road’, it was described as ‘one of those grand public works carried out in the days of the Imperial regime, when the government had an unlimited supply of labour’.140 There was no mention that this ‘unlimited supply of labour’ was convicts. The section on the Tasman Peninsula in the 1884 edition of Thomas’s Guide for Excursionists did not even mention the peninsula’s convict past, while the 1889 New Tasmanian Guide Book claimed that ‘Transportation ceased in 1853, and the convicts, being mostly childless, have left little trace behind them’.141 Yet Tasmanians could not so easily obliterate the material traces of convictism which dotted most settled parts of the island, and, following the publication of Marcus Clarke’s enormously influential convict novel His Natural Life (in serialised form) in 1870, visitor interest in such sites began to grow rapidly, with the novel doing much to colour popular perceptions of Tasmania’s past. Indeed, as the journalist Beverly Coultman Smith argued in his crusading Shadow over Tasmania (1941) – a work which set out to shatter the foundations of Tasmanian convict mythology – His Natural Life had ‘probably done more damage to the reputation of the convict days than any other work’.142 While many Tasmanians did not wish the colony’s sordid past to be acknowledged, the success of His Natural Life showed there were thousands of others both within and outside of Tasmania for whom this newly revealed netherworld was fascinating. This was only exacerbated in the early years by the primary setting of Clarke’s novel – Port Arthur – remaining an active penal station, and with its eventual closure in 1877 it quickly became one of the colony’s most popular attractions.143 Despite continuing opposition to the promotion of the buildings amongst many levels of Tasmanian society, the question of their value came to the fore in early 1889 when the government announced its intention to sell the remaining Port Arthur buildings it owned, including the Model Prison and Penitentiary. No sooner had the ­ announcement been made, however, than protests, deputations, and ‘letters to the editor’ from visitors and residents began. The arguments posed for their retention were varied, but ultimately focused not on any intrinsic historical attachment but on their significance to the local economy. As one correspondent summed up the situation, ‘to do away with those buildings would be destroying one of the leading attractions to the island, and seeing that the colony depends to a great extent upon the visitors that go to it, I think it would be a very bad policy on the part of the Government to destroy one of its chief sights’.144 Taking the matter up soon after with the Minister of Lands, [ 218 ]

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Port Arthur residents focused almost exclusively on the buildings’ economic importance, while also seeking to head off critics of preservation with the argument that the buildings would help people see how much progress had been made in the colony since convict days. Concerned as it was with economics, the Hobart Chamber of Commerce had a foot in each camp – supporting the retention of the buildings because of their importance to tourism revenue, while disagreeing that the buildings were important as a reminiscence of the island’s earlier days. For most Tasmanians, however, the site’s sordid past remained a major stumbling block to preservation. Indeed, for the Minister of Lands, Alfred Pillinger – in whose hands the buildings’ fate ultimately lay – the idea of keeping them as a record of the old days of the colony was repugnant, with Pillinger ‘consider[ing] them monuments of disgrace to the British Government’.145 The editor of The Mercury newspaper wholly concurred, praising Pillinger’s refusal to halt the sale on the grounds that he kept the colony’s – more than just the Port Arthur community’s – ­interests at heart. Yet as another correspondent to The Mercury aptly noted, destroying the buildings would not alter the fact that convicts and Port Arthur once formed a leading part in the history of the colony.146 As the appetite for Tasmania’s ‘dark spots’ continued to grow, during the early 1880s tourists also began to frequent secondary sites such as the notorious Macquarie Harbour penal settlement, with the tourist trade to this area opening up much of Tasmania’s west coast for the first time. Within a few years a regular steamer service between Hobart and Macquarie Harbour was established, and by the early 1890s sections on the west coast convict sites were beginning to appear in travel guides.147 A number of significant museum-based convict attractions also began to appear from the late 1880s, such as William Williamson’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’, which opened in the 1880s at Brown’s River. Publishers were also fully aware of the money to be made from popular interest in tales of the convict days, while, according to Coultman Smith, as the convict industry grew a number of ex-convicts even made a small living manufacturing and selling ‘convict relics’ to tourists – one man reputedly selling ‘at least a dozen of “the last cat-o’-nine-tails of the convict days” which he had worked on through the winter’.148 The most significant attraction – outside of Port Arthur itself that is – was the photographer John Beattie’s Port Arthur Museum, which opened at his studio in Hobart during the 1890s. Migrating from Scotland with his parents in 1878, Beattie had become a full-time professional photographer in 1882 and soon developed an enthusiasm for Tasmania’s scenery and local history.149 Making [ 219 ]

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his first photographic excursion to Port Arthur in the mid-1880s, as interest in such sites grew he made it his business to visit and document them, and it was not long before he began returning from such expeditions with ‘some leg-irons, manacles, hand-cuffs, an original cat-o’-nine tails … a batch of ticket of leave documents, a “hue & cry” poster for an absconder, some magistrates’ orders for floggings, or a collection of pewter stamped with the brand of the broad arrow’.150 He also developed a series of illustrated lectures (which were sold with copies of his slides) on Tasmania’s convict past – his biographer suggesting that, while convictism held for him a romantic appeal, ‘he generally managed to avoid sensationalism in his lectures and writings which were always tempered by his scholarly concern for historical accuracy’.151 Beattie’s belief in the value of Tasmania’s convict past led to his repeated calls for action to preserve sites associated with this past. Yet for most Tasmanians any promotion – let alone active preservation – of this dimension of the island’s past was a bridge too far. This continued to be the case under the Tasmanian Tourist Association (TTA), which was established in 1893 by the colony’s newly elected Premier Henry Dobson out of recognition that tourism could be Tasmania’s ticket out of the economic depression Australia was then suffering.152 While the TTA retained the standard view that Tasmania’s primary attraction was its scenery and climate, its approach to Tasmanian history was coloured by the wave of patriotism that rose in Australia from the early 1890s, and which for many meant playing down or ignoring aspects of the colony’s past that did not reflect well on Britain.153 The TTA’s publications thus typically made little mention of the convict period. A Trip to Southern Tasmania (1901), for example, contains no mention whatsoever of the region’s penal history, despite its geographical focus on Hobart and the surrounding districts, while the 1904 Just the Thing guide simply describes Port Arthur as ‘the popular tourist resort of Port Arthur’.154 More space was devoted to Port Arthur in the pictorial Beautiful Tasmania (1912), although the book’s introductory ‘history’ managed to avoid all mention of convicts. Following the TTA’s absorption into the newly created Tasmanian Government Tourist and Information Bureau in 1914, little changed, with tourists typically directed to attractions described simply as ‘old’ or, better still, ‘the oldest’. The few references to the convict past in Tasmanian histories of the interwar period either played down its importance or highlighted the completeness of the rift between past and present, such as Mabel Hookey’s The Romance of Tasmania (1921), which, while presenting an unabashedly romantic depiction of the penal era, concluded with a section on ‘Tasmania today’ and the devotion of modern Tasmanians to [ 220 ]

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17  Historic Tasmania, Port Arthur, Tasmanian government Tourist Bureau, Hobart, ca. 1940

the British Empire. Others, such as Ronald Giblin’s The Early History of Tasmania (1928), avoided the penal era altogether, covering the period to the establishment of the first British settlement is Tasmania in 1804. The preservation of convict sites fared no better, despite the establishment of a Tasmania Scenery Preservation Board in 1915 with its charge of recommending sites of both scenic and historic interest for [ 221 ]

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reservation.155 Indeed, aside from the Port Arthur complex, which was reserved in 1916 owing principally to the lobbying of Tasman Peninsula tourism operators, there are no references to be found in the minutes of the Scenery Preservation Board which suggest that consideration was given to the preservation of a single convict building.156 Yet it is also worth reiterating that prior to the Second World War the protection of Port Arthur (and Tasmanian convict sites more generally) was grounded not in attachment to or recognition of innate historical significance but in their importance as tourist attractions. Indeed, this had been the principal reason behind Port Arthur’s survival through numerous efforts to raze it. Following the fire of 1898, for example, in 1902 the Tasmanian government’s desire to demolish the ruin was only stayed by the Carnarvon Town Board’s desire to retain it – presumably as a tourist draw-card.157 A decade later similar plans for demolition were halted only by the intervention of the Tasmanian government’s engineer-in-chief Thomas Fowler, who believed that the buildings were valuable assets in fostering tourism.158 Yet even as the Minister of Lands Edward Mulcahy contemplated Fowler’s recommendation, The Mercury had no compunction making its case for their removal: In Tasmania, in Australia generally, we need memorials and reminders that are cheerful and inspiring, not depressing, humiliating, ­saddening … we should encourage all that makes for power in human nature, not that which repels and weakens and degrades ... if there is aught in the relics of bye-gones that depresses and pains us to recall, we can make matters better for those that come after us by passing on to them a world from which as many as possible of these painful influences has been expunged.159

The question of cultural significance was never raised. Most significantly, it was not voiced by either opponents or supporters of the retention of the buildings. Indeed this would be a recurring theme around the material culture and cultural memory of Tasmania’s convict past for decades to come. Accordingly, as debate raged in 1926–27 over the question of the state purchasing Beattie’s Port Arthur Museum – Beattie offering it to his home state at a significantly lower price than the £3000 he had already been offered by a prospective interstate buyer – the issue of cultural significance hardly received a mention.160 Passed over by the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart owing to its shallow pockets, the eventual completion of the purchase by the Launceston City Council was fundamentally for reasons of economic pragmatism – one councillor, Alderman Hart, noting that the city council had seen the collection’s purchase as an opportunity to do ‘something to keep tourists in our city’.161 [ 222 ]

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Economics were equally central to debates around the UnionAustralian Company’s announcement that they planned to film His Natural Life on location in Tasmania – a move which polarised the community. Leading the objections were the Royal Society and The Mercury – the former arguing that the film would be ‘one of the worst advertisements that Tasmania could possibly have’, while the latter felt it was ‘biologically and politically and socially unjust … [to] rivet upon Tasmanians the stigma of degeneration from convictism’.162 Despite agreeing with such concerns, for the Tasmania government the impetus the film’s production might give to the local industry was ultimately enough for Cabinet not to impede production.163 Indeed, economics would constitute the basis of Tasmanians’ growing acceptance of Port Arthur from the late 1920s, and which by the late 1930s was being promoted by the Tasmanian government – inaccurately as it was – as ‘Australia’s only bona-fide ruin’.164 In 1927 the town of Carnarvon had its name officially changed back to Port Arthur (having been changed in 1883 – in part in the hope of breaking the association with its unsavoury past) principally owing to the value of the earlier name to tourism. That year also saw the establishment of the Port Arthur Tourist and Progress Association – its primary goal being the development of Port Arthur as a tourist attraction.165 The economic value of Port Arthur came to the fore in the 1930s, and especially under Albert Ogilvie’s premiership beginning in 1934. Devoting significant attention to the state’s financial problems, in 1934 Ogilvie estimated the cost-benefit of tourism to Tasmania at £750,000.166 Recognising – along with the Director of the Tourist Department, Evelyn Emmett – that Port Arthur and its historical associations were an integral part of this, in June 1938 the state took over control of Port Arthur with the intention of making it ‘a “show place” that will become world-famous’.167

Notes 1 Gérard Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World (Montréal 2008), pp. 58–9. 2 Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, p. 524. 3 Bouchard, The Making of the Nations, pp. 72–3, 108. 4 John McMullen, The History of Canada, from Its First Discovery to the Present Time (Brockville 1855), preface. 5 Bouchard, The Making of the Nations, p. 77. Also see Alan Gordon, Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930, which, in addition to exploring the efforts of Anglophone intellectuals to incorporate and idealised version of French Canadian society into a ‘bicultural interpretation of modern Canada’, also traces the parallel emergence of francophone commemorative movements in Québec. 6 Fernand Dumont, Genése de la société québécoise (Montréal 1993).

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 7 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900 (Toronto 1986), p. 18. 8 James Talman, ‘Some Precursors of the Ontario Historical Society’, Papers and Records of the Ontario Historical Society, 40 (1948), pp. 13–21. 9 Constitution of the United Canadian Association (Toronto 1872), unpaged. 10 See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New Brunswick 2002), pp. 68–105. 11 Gerald Killan, ‘Preserving Ontario’s Heritage: A History of the Ontario Historical Society’, PhD, McMaster University, 1973, p. 196. 12 Ibid., pp. 124, 154; Marylin McKay, ‘Canadian Historical Murals 1895–1939: Material Progress, Morality and the “Disappearance” of Native People’, The Journal of Canadian Art History, 15:1 (1992), p. 74. 13 Phillips, Britain’s Past in Canada, pp. 4–5, 10. 14 George Hay, The History of Canada (Toronto 1905), p. 1. 15 Ontario Historical Society Annual Report, 1912, pp. 23–4. 16 Peter Burroughs, ‘George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_ nbr=3625, accessed 8 February 2013. 17 Hugh Taylor, ‘Canadian Archives: Patterns from a Federal Perspective’, Archivaria, 1:2 (1976), pp. 4–5. 18 Report of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee (Ottawa 1982), p. 129. 19 Jay Atherton, ‘Origins of the Public Archives Records Centre’, Archivaria, 8 (1979), pp. 44–6. 20 Doughty, in Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada 1906, 40:7, pt 1, p. xiii. 21 Taylor, ‘Canadian Archives’, pp. 8–9. 22 Canadian Archives: Reports to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Ottawa 1980), pp. 19–20. 23 Brian Cuthbertson, ‘Thomas Beamish Akins’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?id_nbr=5924, accessed 8 February 2013. 24 Susan McGrath, ‘The Origins of the Canadiana Collection at the Metropolitan Toronto Central Library: The First Twenty-five Years’, BSC Papers, 13 (1974), pp. 89–90. 25 Ontario Historical Society, circular to prospective members, 16 February 1901. 26 Killan, ‘Preserving Ontario’s Heritage’, pp. 44–5. 27 See Cecilia Morgan,‘History, Nation, and Empire: Gender and Southern Ontario Historical Societies, 1890–1920s’, Canadian Historical Review, 82:3 (September 2001), pp. 491–528. 28 See Edwards and Saltman, Picturing Canada, pp. 17–50. 29 Lundy’s Land Historical Society appeal, 1887, cited in www.niagarafallsreview. ca/2008/07/26/battle-of-lundys-lane-near-conclusion-of-war-of-1812. The memorial was finally unveiled in 1895. 30 The King’s Book of Quebec (Ottawa 1911), p. 134. The Tercentenary, however, demonstrated the difficulties of joining the contentious pasts into a unified historical tradition – Henry Nelles’s wide-ranging examination of the Tercentenary showing how Anglophone visions of Canada’s bicultural history were altered significantly in response to French Canadians’ very different readings of historical events. H. V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec Tercentenary (Toronto 1999). 31 In the preface of The French-Canadian, for example, Nicholson notes that he hoped the work ‘may help to correct some misapprehensions and to soften, if not remove, some prejudices which, unhappily, prevail all too extensively amongst a certain class of English speaking people in various parts of Canada’. Sulte similarly talked about the prejudices English Canadians have of French Canadians as being grounded in misconceptions, and makes the argument that English Canadians should embrace Québec as part of their own shared past, in which Québec City

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New Z ealand in context should be seen as ‘the cradle of [Canadian] political liberty’. A History of Quebec (Montréal 1908), pp. iii–iv. 32 This was complicated in 1905 by transport department efforts to drive a tram line through the centre of the Fort – the eventual outcome being that the Garrison Common was granted in trust in exchange for the city’s promise to restore and maintain the Fort. Lawrence Burpee, ‘Historical Activities in Canada, 1916–1917’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 4:2 (September 1917), p. 223. 33 Albert Paul to the Minister of Militia and Defence, 18 July 1898, cited in Benn, Historic Fort York, p. 140. 34 Annual Report of the Ontario Historical Society 1909, p. 40. 35 Stipe and Lee (eds), The American Mosaic, p. 188. 36 Niagara Historical Society: Motto, ducit amor patriae: Constitution, 1897, p. 1. 37 Francis Cleary, ‘Fort Malden or Amherstburg’, Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, 9 (1910), p. 16. 38 Niagara Parks Commission Annual Report, 1900, p. 4, and 1901, p. 6. 39 Killan, ‘Preserving Ontario’s Heritage’, p. 121. 40 Burpee, ‘Historical Activities in Canada, 1914–1915’, pp. 256–7. 41 Taylor, Negotiating the Past, pp. 29–30. 42 Thomas Symons (ed.), The Place of History: Commemorating Canada’s Past (Ottawa 1997), p. 333. 43 Shannon Ricketts, ‘Cultural Selection and National Identity: Establishing Historic Sites in a National Framework, 1920–1939’, The Public Historian, 18:3 (Summer 1996), pp. 23–41. 44 Cited in Robert Lecker, Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of the Nation (Toronto 2013), p. 43. 45 William Clement, The History of the Dominion of Canada (Toronto 1897), p. 127. For children’s literature, see Galway, From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood, pp. 95–114. 46 Cited in Michelle Hamilton, Collections and Objections: Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario, 1791–1914 (Montréal 2010), p. 33 47 The 1888 guide Four Years on the Georgian Bay, for example, described the Georgian Bay village of Coldwater as a ‘Mecca of many an ardent sportsmen and amateur archaeologists’, and recommended visiting several nearby sites. (p. 36.) 48 Bruce Trigger, ‘Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian’, American Antiquity, 45:4 (October 1980), pp. 662–76. 49 Gerald Killan, David Boyle: From Artisan to Archaeologist (Toronto 1983), pp. 111, 148. 50 Hamilton, Collections and Objections, pp. 150–8. 51 E. A. Cruikshank (ed.), The Correspondence of the Honourable Peter Russell, vol. 2 (Toronto 1935), p. 41. 52 Hamilton, Collections and Objections, pp. 81–3. This obsession with the apparent break between the pre-professional and professional stages of Canadian archaeology and anthropology, Hamilton notes, has also resulted in a historiographical focus on the establishment of the Geological Survey’s Anthropological Division in 1911. 53 Douglas Cole, ‘The Origins of Canadian Anthropology, 1850–1910’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 8:1 (1973), pp. 33–45. 54 Hamilton, Collections and Objections, pp. 64–5. 55 Herald, 3 June 1901, cited in ibid., p. 169. 56 Cited in ibid., p. 115. 57 Nora Jamieson, ‘Indian Arts and Crafts’, in Six Nations Indians: Yesterday and Today, 1867–1942 (Ohsweken 1942), p. 11. For more on aboriginal agency and the museum see Stacey Anna-Marie Loyer, ‘Belonging and Belongings: Ethnographic Collecting and Indigenous Agency at the Six Nations of the Grand River’, PhD, University of Ottawa, 2013. 58 The Canadian Journal, 1:2 (September 1852), pp. 25–6.

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H I STO RY, H ERI TA G E, A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 59 Hamilton, Collections and Objections, pp. 31–2. 60 Ibid., p. 39. 61 For example, Royal Ontario Museum, Archaeological Report, 1895, p. 51; 1897, pp. 9, 26; 1901, p. 35; 1902, p. 69. 62 Ontario Historical Society, Annual Report, 1910, p. 61. 63 See Guy St-Denis, Tecumseh’s Bones (Québec 2005). 64 The Life of Capt. Joseph Brant: An Account of His Re-interment at Mohawk, 1850 and of the Corner Stone Ceremony in the Erection of the Brant Memorial, 1886 (Brantford 1886), pp. 29–35; Killan, Preserving Ontario’s Heritage, pp. 45–6. 65 In his 1932 history The United Empire Loyalists, Founders of British Canada (London 1932), for example, A. G. Bradley concluded that ‘Canada has from the first kept faith consistently with her Indians, while every well-informed American is conscious that their Indian policy in the past has many dark pages’. p. 234. 66 Charles Lyell, The Antiquity of Man (London 1863), p. 87. 67 T. A. Murray, ‘A Description of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales as Forwarded to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867’, in Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, Melbourne 1866–67 (Melbourne 1867), p. 356. For more on Australian representation of Aborigines in international exhibitions see Louise Douglas, ‘Representing Colonial Australia at British, American and European International Exhibitions’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 3:1 (2008), pp. 13–32, and Kate Darian-Smith, et al. (eds), Seize the Day, especially chapters 2–4. 68 Paul Tumbull, ‘“Ramsay”s Regime”: The Australian Museum and the Procurement of Aboriginal Bodies, c. 1874–1900’, Aboriginal History, 15 (1991), pp. 108–21; Mulvaney, ‘The Australian Aborigines 1606–1929’, p. 301. 69 Carol Cooper, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections in Overseas Museums (Canberra 1989); Philip Jones, ‘Report to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust of South Australia’, Adelaide: Churchill Memorial Trust of South Australia, 2001, http://churchilltrust.com.au/site_media/fellows/Jones_Philip_2001.pdf. Also see Elizabeth Willis, ‘Gentlemen Collectors: The Port Phillip District, 1835–1855’, in Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen, and Louise Hamby (eds), The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Melbourne 2008). 70 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, p. 141. 71 Field to Spencer, 29 March 1903, Pitt Rivers Museum, Spencer Collection, cited in ibid., p. 147. 72 Philip Jones, ‘Words to Objects: Origins of Ethnography in Colonial South Australia’, Records of the South Australian Museum, 33 (2000), pp. 33–47. 73 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, pp. 3–4, 61–75, 315–54. 74 Michael Davis, Writing Heritage: The Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European-Australian Writings (Kew 2007), p. 13. 75 Thomas, Possessions, p. 109; Christopher Lee (ed.), Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s (Brisbane 1999), p. xxii. 76 Bendigo Advertiser, 25 September 1896. 77 Swan Hill Guardian, 22 September 1930. 78 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 112. 79 Janice Newton, ‘Remembering King Billy’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 3:2 (2001), p. 77 80 Town and Country Journal, 7 August 1886, cited in Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 113. 81 This also included calls for the establishment of some kind of national collection of Aboriginal cultural materials. 82 Michael Cannon, Old Melbourne Town before the Gold Rush (Main Ridge 1991), p. 318. 83 Charles Daley, Victorian Historical Memorials to Explorers and Discoverers (Melbourne 1944), p. 5.

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New Z ealand in context 84 Phillip King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (London 1827); George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia (London 1841); Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria (Melbourne 1878). 85 Fred McCarthy, ‘The Carved Trees of New South Wales’, The Australian Museum Magazine, 7:5 (June 1940), pp. 161–6; Fred McCarthy, Aboriginal Antiquities in Australia: Their Nature and Preservation (Canberra 1970), pp. 19–20. Also see Robert Etheridge, The Dendroglyphs, or ‘Carved Trees’ of New South Wales (Sydney 1918). 86 McCarthy, Aboriginal Antiquities in Australia, p. xii. 87 In the 1890s public interest was similarly the key argument behind the Western Australia government’s reservation of the Yallingup Caves, while the NSW government’s reservation of the Jenolan caves mid-decade was motivated by the more explicit recognition of their tourist potential. 88 McCarthy, Aboriginal Antiquities in Australia, pp. xii, 156; Fred McCarthy, ‘Australia: Aboriginal Relics and Their Preservation’, Mankind, 2:5 (August 1938), p. 121. 89 Davis, Writing Heritage, p. 32–3 90 Sydney Morning Herald, 21 March 1922; 26 April 1924; 4 November 1932; Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 82–3. 91 The West Australian, 19 March 1937; ‘Memorandum to the Prime Minister from General Secretary of the Australian and NZ Association for the Advancement of Science’, 15 February 1937, Preservation of Aboriginal Relics, Fossils and Geological Specimens, 1937–1940, NAA: A659, 1939/1/10936. 92 Joseph Shellshear, ‘An Appeal for the Preservation of Prehistoric Remains in Australia’, The Australian Museum Magazine, 6:5 (1937), pp. 173–5. 93 McCarthy, Aboriginal Antiquities in Australia, p. xii. 94 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 76. 95 Tom Griffiths, ‘In Search of Classical Soil: A Bicentennial Reflection’, Victorian Historical Journal, 59:3–4 (1988), p. 23. 96 Eric Rolls, A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest (Melbourne 1981), p. 77. 97 Richard Flannagan, A Terrible Beauty (Richmond 1985), p. 74. 98 The Mercury, 4 January 1898. 99 Alexandra Hasluck, Unwilling Emigrants: A Study of the Convict Period in Western Australia (Melbourne 1959), p. xiii. 100 Graeme Davison, ‘Centennial Celebrations’, in Graeme Davison, et al., Australia 1888 (Broadway 1987), p. 24. 101 Sydney Empire, 27 January 1853. 102 Ibid., 11 April 1863. 103 The bush, with its ‘stony hills and sandy plains, bare rocks and rushy swamps’, as Alexander Harris would write in 1847, would form the backbone of Australia’s first genuinely national consciousness in the late nineteenth century. Yet, in something of a double paradox, the bush itself had been significantly transformed by the end of the century, particularly through the development of rail and telecommunication links, while the mythology of the bush also seems to have gained its strongest traction within the urban working and middle classes, despite the very high degree of urbanisation in Australia at the time (two-thirds of the population already lived in towns in 1890). A number of historians have argued that this phenomenon can be explained by the socialising values that it conveyed and that were taken up by the labour movement, while others claim that it could scarcely have been otherwise, with the city’s heterogeneity and British symbolism offering little material for a myth of original identity. 104 Davison, ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend’. 105 Henry Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria from Its Discovery to Its Absorption into the Commonwealth of Australia (London 1904), p. 216. 106 Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism, pp. 102–3.

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114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

Sydney Empire, 5 December 1871; Launceston Examiner, 7 March 1895. Kalgoorlie Miner, 7 July 1910. South Australian Register, 28 Dec 1886. Proceedings of the Geographical Society of Australasia, 1883–4 (Sydney 1884), p. viii. The Argus, 9 May 1885. The Queenslander, 30 May 1885. John Reilly, Papers collected by the AHRS, 1896–1906, Ballarat Library, cited in Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 204. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1897; 25 April 1900; 22 October 1900. K. Cramp, ‘The Australian Historical Society: The Story of Its Foundations’, Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, 4 (1917–18), pp. 1–14. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 January 1908. The West Australian, 11 September 1926. Guy Featherstone, ‘James Bonwick, 1817–1906’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bonwick-james-3022/text4429, accessed 2 January 2013. Barrier Miner, 14 November 1914. The Register, 7 February 1925. Ibid., 18 February 1911. D. H. Borchard (ed.), Australians, A Guide to Sources (Broadway 1987), pp. 16–18. Charles Bertie, Old Sydney (Sydney 1911), preface. Ebenezer Watts, Stories from Australian History (Sydney 1908), Preface. Charles Long in James Barrett (ed.), Save Australia: A Plea for the Right Use of our Flora and Fauna (Melbourne 1925), pp. 33–4. Subsequently usurped by ‘Eight Hours’ Day’, ‘Shakespeare Day’, and ultimately ‘Anzac Day’ (all of which fell in the second half of April), in 1921 it was renamed ‘Pioneers’ Day’, and the date changed to 19 November – the date on which Victoria’s first permanent settler Edward Henty landed at Portland in 1834. The Argus, 19 November 1921. Ibid., 5 February 1910. Griffiths, ‘In Search of Classical Soil’, pp. 25–7. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 April 1912 and 30 November 1912. The Argus, 21 April 1913; The Horsham Times, 6 May 1913. The Argus, 30 September 1913. The Mercury, 13 January 1923. This would also form a model for other similar initiative – South Australia, for example, establishing in 1924 its own historical monuments committee, whose first major job was to mark the path of Sturt’s path down the Murray as part of the state’s centenary celebrations in 1936. The Capricornian, 18 February 1922; A. W. Jose, History of Australasia from the Earliest Times to the Present Day with a Chapter on Australian Literature (Sydney 1899). Long, in Barrett, Save Australia, pp. 25–6. Australian Town and Country Journal, 12 March 1881. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1905; 24 May 1913. See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1908; The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 11 August 1909. Walch’s Tasmanian Guide Book: A Handbook of Information for All Parts of the Colony (Hobart 1871). Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company’s Guide for Visitors to Tasmania, or, How to Spend My Holiday, 1886–7 (Hobart 1886), p. 65. The New Tasmanian Guide Book for Visitors, Intending Settlers, Miners etc. (Launceston 1889), p. 33. Beverly Coultman Smith, Shadow over Tasmania: For the First Time – the Truth about the State’s Convict History, 7th ed. (Hobart 1948), p. 11. Tasmanian Mail, 3 April 1880. The Mercury, 2 March 1889.

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New Z ealand in context 145 The Mercury, 7 March 1889. 146 The Mercury, 16 February 1889; 11 March 1889. 147 Such as Garnet Walch’s 1890 Guide to Tasmania, and Button’s Picturesque Tasmania (Launceston 1893), both of which devote attention to the convict ruins of Settlement Island. 148 Smith, Shadow over Tasmania, p. 68. 149 Michael Roe, ‘John Watt Beattie, 1859–1930’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/beattie-john-watt-5171/text8687, accessed 17 May 2013. 150 Jack Cato, The Story of the Camera in Australia, 2nd ed. (Melbourne 1977), p. 83. 151 Margaret Tassell and David Wood, Tasmanian Photographer: From the John Watt Beattie Collection (Melbourne 1981), p. 11 152 Tasmanian Mail, 21 January 1893. 153 Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol. II (Melbourne 1991), pp. 210–11. 154 Just the Thing: For Use of Tourists and Travellers (Hobart 1904), p. 44. 155 The Mercury, 2 February 1916. 156 See AA264/1/1, ‘Scenery Preservation Board – Minutes of Meetings, 7 June 1916–16 July 1937’, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office (TAHO). 157 The Mercury, 1 January 1902. 158 Fowler to Mulcahy, 26 August 1913, ‘Letterbook of the Secretary and Engineer in Chief’, PWD227/1/2, TAHO. Also see Mercury, 23 December 1913. 159 The Mercury, 13 November 1913 160 See ‘General Correspondence’, PD1/1/419/114, TAHO, for details. 161 Examiner, 27 September 1927. 162 The Mercury, 27 July 1926; 5 August 1926. 163 For more on the film and the circumstances of its production see Michael Roe, ‘Vandiemenism Debated: The Filming of “His Natural Life”, 1926–7’, Journal of Australian Studies, 13:24 (1989), pp. 35–51. 164 Port Arthur, Tasmania: ‘Australia’s only bona fide ruin’ (Hobart 1937). 165 The Mercury, 23 February 1928; 11 June 1947; NS1086/1/1 ‘Minutes of meetings of the Port Arthur Tourist and Progress Association’, TAHO. 166 John Mosley, ‘Aspects of the Geography of Recreation in Tasmania’, PhD, Australian National University, 1963, p. 53. 167 AA264, Minutes of the Scenery Preservation Board, 6 October 1938, TAHO.

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C ONC L USIO N

Considering the place of history and heritage in early ­twentieth-century Australia and Canada alongside that of New Zealand, a number of things become clear. First is the ubiquity of colonial concern with ‘history making’, and in particular the perceived didactic power of the past in the preservation and maintenance of ‘values’ – values that were typically construed within the familial frame of empire and colonial endeavour, and were of concern to amateur and professional historians alike. In part the importance of such values centred on the perception of their fundamentality to success of the colonial project, with monuments and historic sites seen as reminders of pioneering virtue and sacrifice while history’s duty more generally was to highlight the inevitability of the colonial project and the ‘progress of civilisation’. As Charles Daley, secretary of the Victorian Memorials Association in Australia concluded in 1944, the story of which a memorial is a tangible witness forms a link not only with the past but also with the future: It is a focus for thought, a spur to imagination, and valuable source of inspiration. It serves to convey a worthy example of courage, fortitude, resource, persistence and unselfishness which to the minds of children – fresh, eager, observant, receptive, attracted by concrete expression of an idea – is an incentive to honour the memory and imitate the sterling qualities and virtues of the hardy pioneers – Who bore the burden of the day, That we might tread the opened way; Who sowed the seed ’mid toil and pain, That we might reap the ripened grain.1

As Daley suggests here, the past was seen to be equally central to the maintenance of imperial citizenship. While in 1899, for example, the Ontario Historical Society’s president James Coyne told society members that by nurturing an interest in Canadian history ‘we shall be better men and women, more patriotic citizens, and therefore ... truer cosmopolitans’, thirty-three years and half a world away New Zealand’s Governor General Charles Bledisloe was arguing that a sense of nationhood among New Zealanders was ‘a vital condition of the effectiveness of Empire partnership’ and a knowledge of national history a ‘fundamental part of the intellectual equipment of all classes’.2 Linking these realms was the Victorian reverence for ‘home’ which manifested in [ 230 ]

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C onclusion

both the ties to Britain as a homeland and the establishment of colonial ‘better Britains’. Second, if the absence of Britain’s antiquity and historical halo in colonial society was seen as a handicap, it also provoked polar responses, on the one hand perpetuating a colonial gaze not back but forward, while at the same time impressing a determination within certain sections of society to identify, protect, and ultimately promote what were seen as unique colonial pasts. Ironically, in time the focus on the future would also feed the appetite for the past, with many of the monumental structures that originated as celebrations of progress in later years becoming monuments to past achievement and bulwarks against decline. Yet this was also more the response of the state than individual communities, where a local sense of place translated into enthusiasm for historical geography that manifested in regionalism and local pride, and generally cut across class divisions. While a number of historical societies were themselves regional in their concern – often passionately so – others, together with the bulk of pioneer societies and interest groups, were more national if not imperial in their perspective. They were also typically class-centred and heavily gendered institutions that were centrally concerned with reinforcing the intellectual and social hegemony of the educated middle class in controlling and shaping culture. In the absence of state intervention in historical matters – which was generally reactionary rather than progressive – however, the leaders of such institutions typically saw themselves as having to take on, by necessity, the role of moral guardians of the community. Believing that historical consciousness was intrinsically linked to patriotism, and thus good citizenry, such groups were especially active in the promotion of imperial and eventually colonial history in schools. The perceived moral value of history here cannot be overstated. As an arbiter of civic virtue, historical knowledge offered redemption, offered solutions to the problems that arose as young countries rapidly industrialised, and as a cultural anchor could provide stability in the fluidity and rapid change of colonial society and imperial connection. Third is the significance of imperial ideals and networks in both the production and use of historical narrative. Indeed, both the idea that as a young country New Zealand would by definition have little in the way of ‘real’ history worthy of preservation, and the perceived importance of history to the nation, were grounded in wider Victorian notions of culture and historicism, while the pervasiveness of such ideas (keeping in mind that in 1901 67 per cent of the New Zealand population was native-born) is illustrative of the influence of British cultural values. These same networks, however, were equally important in shaping colonial endeavours to collect, preserve, and use the past. Brymner’s [ 231 ]

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and Doughty’s manuscript copying programmes for the Canadian provincial governments, for example, served as a the model for Bonwick’s transcription programme for the Australian colonial governments, which served as a model for McNab’s Historical Records of New Zealand, in the same way that New Zealand’s Scenery Preservation Act was a model for similar legislation in Australia. Indeed, when it came to state initiatives pertaining to history and heritage – be they legislative, institutional, or educational – colonial governments tended to look to one another first and foremost, with strong networks of exchange of ideas and information being in place as well as artefacts. In part this was also, of course, a consequence of the nature of colonial societies, which owing to their youth and fluidity generally did not have the collective class-based economic might or will to undertake independent preservation activities on the scale of the English National Trust until well after the Second World War. Imperial networks of ideas and knowledge also ultimately defined the value of tikanga Maori that was the backbone of Pakeha interest in the collection, commodification, and preservation of Maori material culture and historic sites. The implications of this are particularly clear when juxtaposing the New Zealand experience with Australian interest in Aboriginal culture – the former by the early twentieth century having been closely drawn into the New Zealand cultural world, while interest in the latter was limited principally to scientific curiosity. The key point here is that it was fundamentally transnational as opposed to domestic values and interests that guided Pakeha perceptions of the worth of tikanga Maori, and in particular wider western racial notions which revered Maori as one of the most evolved black races, and whose performative and material culture sat neatly within western notions of art and romanticism. This same frame relegated Aborigines to the very bottom rung of the evolution ladder, and as being of limited cultural worth. Interest in the collection of Aboriginal material culture accordingly emerged not owing to its perceived value to colonial Australian culture and society, but owing to the demand from western museums and scientific institutions. Indeed for Baldwin Spencer – Australia’s foremost anthropologist in the early twentieth century and director of the country’s national museum – the primary reason for collection was to secure ‘useful’ material for the museum through the sending of consignments of Aboriginal objects to museums in Britain, Europe, and the United States in exchange for ‘real’ antiquities. The same transnational influences drove the collection and preservation of Maori material culture in New Zealand, with the strength of tourist interest in ‘the authentic’ Maori establishing Maori culture as a fundamental dimension of New Zealand’s distinct identity, which in turn reinforced [ 232 ]

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its presentation to tourists as emblematic of New Zealand. It was, however, fundamentally the economic value of Maori culture that for Pakeha informed its cultural value. These same notions were also relevant to the wider colonial context, with interest in indigenous culture (material and narrative) essentially coming down to its usefulness. The idea that indigenous peoples were dying out, for example, justified the expropriation of their land, while in Canada and New Zealand an emphasis on the warlike qualities of the country’s indigenous inhabitants suggested a certain inevitability to conflict with colonists. To professional collectors, indigenous assimilation and corruption of cultural practice bolstered their own authority as scholars and provided a reason why they should be the stewards of traditional material culture preserved in museums. Collection – even of Maori material culture–thus initially had little to do with sentimentality, identity, or an acceptance that Maori material culture was inherently important. The emergence of Pakeha interest in the Maori historic landscape plugged into these same themes; however, there was here also a domestic motivation – notably the increased leisure time and a growing interest in the outdoors which were a part of the social, cultural, and technological changes of the early twentieth century. While New Zealand lacked Europe’s stately ruins, by the early 1900s the overgrown palisades of derelict pa had developed some appeal, especially when located in picturesque scenes such as beside rivers or atop cliffs. Areas such as Tauranga and Taranaki, rich in such remains, became extremely popular as destinations for walking, picnicking, and exploration. ‘Historic’ value here was generally measured in ‘picturesque’ terms. Finally, while colonial yearnings for environmental antiquity was also a factor behind the growing appreciation of the Maori cultural landscape, for Pakeha in areas such as Taranaki and Tauranga that had more immediate relationships with these landscapes – both historically and spatially – Maori ‘ruins’ were also powerful triggers for the development of a more direct relationship with local pasts. While state interest in historic sites was grounded in their perceived ability to convey the values of ‘the nation’ and to mould collective memory, local perspectives on the historic landscape tended to be driven by more tangible connections and the importance of sites as frames of reference for existing collective memory. They were, to borrow Raphael Samuel’s term, local ‘theatres of memory’. As both physical and metaphorical points of community stability, they were both markers of change and continuity. Indeed, it was principally for this very reason that most calls for preservation originated from local attachment or association. Certainly the existence of histories was a precondition for the growth of interest in a given site, and these histories cannot be separated from [ 233 ]

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the cultural contexts in which they were created. Familiarity with a place or buildings history, however, was rarely itself sufficient to provoke active concern for preservation – there needed to be some additional local factor. Sometimes, such as in the case of the Canterbury Provincial Chambers, this was introspective, while in others, such as Gisborne’s efforts to mark Cook’s local landing sites, it was about local claims to national pre-eminence. Often it was a combination of both, but almost always the essential drive was predominantly local. Even conscious efforts to break down ‘parochial’ identities, such as the New Zealand Centennial, only strengthened the very identities they sought to diminish. This was inevitable, as the attempt to force local celebrations into a national framework tended to trivialise local pride while also pitting local claims to historical importance against one another. As the responses of Otago, Canterbury, and Nelson showed, regional and local pride would always trump national. With this in mind it can also be argued that there was often little difference between community efforts to preserve the Maori and the European historic landscape. Both were about the writing of community identities into the landscape. Inevitably this also made them processes of colonisation. While a case can certainly be made that the later growth of interest in sites of European origins in the New Zealand landscape was an ongoing part of this process of cultural colonisation, a more convincing explanation is that, as New Zealand became an increasingly urbanised country, the mnemonic significance of the distant racial frontier of the early colonial period and the New Zealand Wars was trumped by the remnants of European history in the landscape. This was not a political act, but the simple reality that, as much as the physical remnants of history exist as relics of the past, they are also part of the everyday present. Attachment need not also be emotionally grounded, with the preservation of Tasmania’s Port Arthur prison complex, for example, grounded in the economics of tourism. Indeed, Port Arthur offers a valuable window into local attitudes to the historical fabric, as in the face of strong regional opposition the thrust of ‘sentiment’ was extremely local, originating with the small Port Arthur community which was so dependent upon the visitors that the site brought in. For this community, the ‘stain’ of the past was bleached away by the livelihoods that the site with its dark past secured for the present.

Notes 1 Daley, Victorian Historical Memorials to Explorers and Discoverers, p. 26. 2 Annual Report of the Ontario Historical Society, 1899, p. 34; Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood, p. 119.

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Primary resources Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington MS-papers-1132–296, ‘New Zealand Centenary – publications’ MS-papers-3670, ‘Restoration of the Treaty House at Waitangi’ MS-Group-0178, ‘Early Settlers and Historical Association of Wellington Records’ MSX-3559, ‘Wellington Early Settlers and Historical Association Minute Book, 1912–1921’ PAColl-3030, ‘Russell Duncan, Photograph Albums’ Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga, Wellington Department of Tourism and Health Resorts TO1, 8/6 part 1, ‘Maori carving – general’ TO1, 1904/191/12, ‘Scenery Preservation Commission: Maori protests against land being taken under Scenery Preservation Act’ TO1, 1904/191/32, ‘Scenery Preservation Commission: dissolution of Commission’ TO1, 1904/288, ‘Whakarewarewa, model pa’ TO1/64 1906/315, ‘Bay of Islands – Old Anglican church’ Colonial Office/Internal Affairs IA1, 4/2/13, ‘Departmental – Records – Historical – Appointment of Mr. J. Cowan as writer of history of New Zealand wars, etc’ IA1, 7/4/2, ‘War Graves – Monthly and General Reports’ IA1, 7/4/21, ‘War Graves – Cemetery – Pokeno Graves’ IA1, 7/4/38, ‘War Graves – Orakau’ IA1, 7/4/206, ‘War Graves – Subsidy’ IA1, 13/27/45, ‘Dominion Museum – national historical collection’ IA1, 60/12, ‘Management of Government Buildings – Provincial Chambers Christchurch’ IA1, 60/70, ‘Management of Government Buildings – Historical – Preservation of – Resolution by Australia and New Zealand Association for the advancement of science’ IA1, 60/70/1, ‘Management of Government Buildings – Historic Places Act’ IA1, 62/5/1, ‘Centennial Records – Centennial – 1940 Provincial Centennial Organisations – Conference re’ IA1, 62/5/8, ‘Centennial Records – Centennial – 1940 Provincial Organisations – Poverty Bay East Coast’ IA1, 62/6/6, ‘Centennial Records – Centennial – Provincial Historical Committee – Formation in Auckland’

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INDE X

Aborigines (Australia) 81, 203–8 and Australian identity 14, 109, 204–6, 209–10 and the museum 203–8 carved trees 206–7 culture, collection of 203–4 historic sites, preservation of 206–8 memorials 204–6, 205 rock art 206–8 Adams, Arthur 61 Adelaide Public Library 213 advertising 30, 31, 34, 221 Akaroa 140, 179 Aikins, Thomas 193–4 Albert, Alfred Ernest (Duke of Edinburgh) 114 Albert Barracks 115 Albrecht, Joseph 161 Alexander, James 35, 106 Alexander Turnbull Library 133–5, 166 see also Turnbull, Alexander Alexandra redoubt 118 All Blacks 59, 76, 108 Ancient Monuments Protection Act (UK) 118, 136, 202 Anderson, Johannes 63, 76, 85, 147 anniversaries 97, 100, 103, 109, 120, 126, 130–1, 138, 139, 142, 145, 152, 159–84, 196, 198, 208–9, 212, 215–16 see also Australia, Australia Day; Australia, centenary; Australia, sesquicentenary; Canada, tercentenary; New South Wales, Jubilee; New South Wales, Centenary; New Zealand, Centennial; New Zealand, Jubilee Anthropological Society of New South Wales 207 Anthropological Society of Victoria 207 Antiquities Act (1901) 49 archaeology, see Aborigines (Australia); Maori, archaeology of; Canada, aboriginal history and culture, preservation of Archives Act (1912) 193 Aryan Maori 40, 64, 84 see also Tregear, Edward

Auckland 30, 67, 69, 77, 79, 94, 99–101, 103, 106, 114–15, 117, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 149, 159, 162, 172–3, 179–82 provincial anniversary 159 Auckland Civic League 108, 181 Auckland Museum 29–31, 68, 70 Auckland Old Colonists’ Society and Museum 129–30, 132 Auckland Public Library and Art Gallery 132 Auckland University 181 Australia Australia Day 159, 209, 214 bushranging 209–10 centenary 160–1 convict history 208–9, 215–23 foundation myths 160–1 historiographical tradition 204–5, 208–10 history and education in 204–5, 209–10, 213–17 landscape and identity 29, 160–1, 206, 209–10, 213–23 memorials 205 national celebrations 159–62 National Parks Association 214–15 sesquicentennial 161–2 state collection of historical documents 210 state preservation of historic sites 208–11, 213–23 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science 208 Australian Historical Society 211–12 Australian Historical Records Society 205, 211 Australian Museum 204–6, 208 Australian Natives Association 205–6 Australian Patriotic Association 209 Australian Philosophical Society 216 Australasian Pioneers’ Club 210 Ballarat 204 Banks, Joseph 216 Banks Peninsula 44 Barr, John 131

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Index

Barrett, Richard 125, Barrier Field Naturalists’ Club 207 Barrett, James 214 Bass, George 214 Battle of Beaver Dams 198 Battle of Lundy’s Lane 196, 198 Battle of Queenston Heights 195 Bay of Islands 126, 140, 144, 148, 154, 172, 177–8 Bay of Plenty 39, 74, 101 Beaglehole, John Cawte 166–9, 173, 175, 178 Beattie, John 219–20, 222 Bell, Francis 145–6 Bell, George 33, 108 Benham, William 48 Bertie, Charles 213 Best, Elsdon 49, 58, 63, 74–6, 85, 104, 113, 125, 152, 175 biculturalism (New Zealand) 35, 58–9, 77–8, 95, 96, 149–53, 170–2 see also Tregear, Edward; Cowan, James; New Zealand Wars, in popular culture/mythology binationalism 189–203 Birks, Lawrence 37–8, 41, 73, 82 Blair, David 210 Bledisloe, Charles Bathurst (Viscount of) 77, 149–52, 230 Board of Maori Arts and Crafts 84 Board of Maori Ethnological Research 74, 83–4 Bollard, Richard 106 Bolton Street Cemetery 139 Botany Bay 160, 209, 215 Bowen, George 148 Boyle, David (archaeologist) 200–1 Boyle, David (Earl of Glasgow) 140 Brant, Joseph 202–3 Brett, Henry 159–60 British Museum 68, 75, 77, 135 Browne, Thomas 209–10 Bruny Island 207 Brydon, Thomas 138 Buck, Peter 74, 78, 83–4 Buick, T. Lindsay 107, 131, 148, 152, 166, 168, 175, 182 Butler, Annie 35 Buller, Walter 29, 60, 76 Burns, Robert 137, 138 Burns, Thomas (Revd) 138 Burwash, Nathanael 197 Busby, James 148, 149, 152 Butterfield, Herbert 1 Brock, Isaac (Sir) 195

Bruce, Robert 65 Brymner, Douglas 193, 231 Canada 94, 189–203, 212, 230 aboriginal history and culture, preservation of 199–203 aboriginal culture and tourism 200–1 aborigines, counter-colonialism 201 confederation 190–1 historiographical tradition 190–2 history and education in 192–3, 195–7 Lower Canada Rebellion (1837) 190 Orange Day 189 preservation of historic sites 195–203 St Jean Baptiste Day 189 state collection of historical documents 192–3, 194 tercentenary 196–7 Canadian Education Association 190 Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire 3 Canadian Institute 201, 202 Canterbury 16, 44, 48, 60, 105, 109, 129, 132, 138, 146–7, 153, 166, 170, 173–4, 180 see also Christchurch Canterbury Early Colonists’ Association 140 Canterbury Museum 28, 29, 49, 129, 131 Canterbury Philosophical Institute 44 Canterbury Pilgrims’ and Early Settlers Association 146, 164 Canterbury Provincial Buildings 143, 144–7 Canterbury Provincial Buildings Vesting Act (1928) 145–6 Canterbury University 105, 109, 166 Cape Town Public Library 134 Captain Cook Memorial Committee 142–4 Cargill, Captain William 138 Carnarvon, see Port Arthur Carroll, James 41, 67, 69, 83 Carruthers, Joseph 216 Chapman, Robert 138 Cheeseman, Thomas 70 Cholmondeley, Thomas 14, 107 Christchurch 16, 28, 40, 41, 64, 80, 139, 144–7, 150, 152

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I ndex

Christchurch Beautifying Association 144–5 Church Missionary Society 134 Clandon Park 59, 77 Clark, William Mortimer (Sir) 197 Clarke, Marcus 209–10, 218 Cockburn Association (Edinburgh) 42 Collingwood 202 Collins, William 145 Colonial Museum (Wellington) 26–8, 41, 69, 71, 132, 180 see also Dominion Museum Commons Preservation Society 128 Cook, Captain James 2, 14, 25, 43, 45, 127, 140–4, 150, 153, 160, 166, 172–3, 179–80, 209, 215–16, 234 Cook County 173 Coultman Smith, Beverly 218, 219 Cowan, James 9, 33–4, 36, 58–9, 62–5, 82, 85, 97, 104, 108–14, 117–19, 134, 136–7, 143, 166, 168–9, 172–8 Coyne, James 230 Crawford, James Coutts 125 Crown Lands Alienation Act (1861) 207 Crown Lands Consolidation Act (1913) 207 cultural appropriation 14–15, 33, 59–80, see also cultural colonisation cultural colonisation 10–12, 27–9, 49–51, 71, 191 see also cultural appropriation; Maori, counter-colonialism; Aborigines, and Australian identity Cunningham, Ann Pamela 13, 128 Daley, Charles 230 dark tourism 32, 219 see also Tasmania, tourism Dawson, James 205–6 Daughters of the American Revolution 128 Daughters of the Republic of Texas 128 Davies, Ernest 162 Dennan, Rangitiaria 81 Department of Defence 99, 115 Department of Indian Affairs 201–2 Department of Industries and Commerce 163 Department of Internal Affairs 49, 75,

101, 106, 113, 118–19, 135–6, 153, 162, 172 Department of Lands and Survey 42–3, 47, 136 Department of Militia and Defence 199 Department of Maori Affairs 63, 79, 83, 85, 105 Department of Tourism and Health Resorts 33–4, 37, 44, 46, 64, 66, 82, 114–15, 142, 177 Department of War Graves 118 Designation of Districts Act (1894) 65 Dewdney, Edgar 201 Dittmer, Wilhelm 63 Domett, Alfred 62 Dominion Museum 36, 49, 72, 73–6, 79, 127, 132–5, 152–3, 175 see also Colonial Museum Dominion Parks Branch (Canada) 198–9 Donne, Thomas 33–4, 38, 40–1, 42, 47, 71, 83, 114 Doughty, Arthur 193, 232 Downes, Thomas 130 Drew, Henry 108 Duff, Oliver 168, 169 Dufferin, Lord 194 DuFresne, Marion 45 Duncan, Russell 141 Dunedin 16, 26, 29, 42, 79, 137–8 see also Otago Dunedin and Suburban Reserves Conservation Society 42 Dunedin Public Library 134 Dusky Sound 180 Earle, Augustus 35 Early Colonists’ and Natives’ Guild of Victoria 128 early settler societies 127–33, 140, 146, 164, 174–7, 191–2 see also historical societies Elder, John Rawson 3, 166 Elmore, James Lee 48 Emmett, Evelyn 223 ethnology 48–9, 66–76, 203–4, 206–8 see also Aborigines, and the museum; Maori, national ethnology collection Eureka Rebellion 211 exhibitions British Empire (1924) 77 Colonial – Christchurch (1872) 28 Dunedin (1865) 26

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exhibitions (cont.) Great (1851) 26 International Exhibition – Christchurch (1906) 41, 64, 86 International Exhibition – Melbourne (1888) 160 New Zealand Centennial (1940) 164, 169, 173 New Zealand and South Seas (1925) 77 Paris Universelle (1867) 203 St Louis (1904) 40, 41 Sydney International (1879) Vienna Universal (1873) 28 Favenc, Ernest 160 Featherston, Isaac 28 Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisations 161 Fenton, Francis Dart 69 Field, James 204 Field, Thomas 136 First World War 49, 76, 77, 79, 99, 104, 108, 111, 118, 130, 133, 139, 143, 164, 177, 207 Firth, Raymond 49 Flinders, Mathew 206, 214 Forbes, George 149 Forest and Bird Protection Society 180 Fort Malden 198 Fort Paremata 179 Fort York 197 Fowlds, George 101 Fowler, Thomas 222 Freycinet Peninsula 207 Furneaux, Tobias (Captain) 141 Gallipoli 77, 108–9, 111 Galway, George Vere Arundell Monckton-Arundell (Viscount) 162 Garnett, Richard 139 Gate Pa 96–7, 102, 108–9, 114, 117, 119, 172 gender, and history/heritage 3, 127–8 genealogy 12, 128 General Assembly Library 133–5, 174 Geographical Society of Australasia 210–11 Geological Survey (Canada) 201 Geological Survey (New Zealand) 71 geothermal attractions 32–4, 81 see also Ohinemutu; Rotorua; Whakarewarewa

Giblin, Ronald 221 Gillespie, Oliver 109 Gillies, Thomas 69 Gisborne 74, 142–4, 153, 172–3, 178, 234 Godley, John Robert 139 gold/gold mining 127, 138, 166–7, 178, 211 Goldie, Charles 63 Grant, George Munro 200 Grass Cove 141 Great Depression 163 Greece 67, 73, 108, 109 Grey, Albert Henry George (Earl) 196 Grey, George 41, 61, 134, 206 Grey, Zane 178 Grossman, Edith Searle 60, 62, 106 Gudgeon, Thomas 106 Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa 3 Hairini 103 haka 76 Halbwachs, Maurice 6 Hale, Horatio 200 Hall, D. O. W. 168, 174, 175 Hamilton 180 Hamilton, Augustus 36, 39, 41, 48, 66–7, 71, 72, 74, 85, 87, 131–2 Hamilton, Harold 78, 85 Hamilton-Browne, George 106 Hammond, Hugh 200 Harcourt, Melville 172 Harkin, James 198 Harrop, Angus J. 166 Hasluck, Alexandra 209 Hauhau, see Pai Marire Hawera 104 Hay, George 192 Hayward, Rudall 104, 111 Hector, James 26–8, 71 Heenan, Joe 162, 165, 168–71, 174–5, 177, 183 hei-tiki 59 Heidelberg School 209 Heke, Hone 144 Heke Pokai, Hone 93, 111, 182 Herangi, Princess Te Kirihaehae Te Puea 83 Herbert, George Robert Charles (Earl of Pembroke) 114 Hight, James 105, 109, 166 Hill, Octavia 128 Hislop, James 118–19 Hislop, Thomas 173

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historic sites, preservation of 42–9, 135–6, 148–53, 195–203, 206–11, 213–23 see also scenery preservation Historic Sites and Monuments Board 198–9 historic trees 179–80, 206–7 Historical Memorials Committee 215–16 historical societies 12, 13, 27, 58, 126–30, 132, 140, 146, 164, 176–7, 191–5, 197–8, 202, 204–7, 209, 211–12 and collection of material culture 129–32, 174–84, 192–3, 210–12 Historical Society of Australasia 211 Hobart 217–21 Hobart Chamber of Commerce 219 Hobson, William 126, 139, 149 Hocken, Thomas 1–2, 9–10, 127, 131, 134–5, 140–1 Hocken Library 166, 174 Hodgkinson, Samuel 139 Hookey, Mabel 220–1 Horowhenua 60 Hoskins, James 216 Hovell, William 215 Hume, Hamilton 215 Hunter, Andrew 200 Huxley, Thomas 203 Indian Grave Ordinance (1865) 200 Jenkins, William 24–5 Jervois, William Francis Drummond (Sir) 148 Johnson, Evelyn 201 Jones, Owen 59 Kapiti Island 50 Kapua, Neke 41, 85, 86 Kawhia 179 Kawiti, Te Ruki 93 Kelly, Leslie 49 Kelly, Thomas 67, 70 Kemp House 177 Kerikeri 15 King Movement 28, 77, 105–6 King, Phillip Parker 206 Knight, Cyril 181 Knox, Uchter, Earl of Ranfurly 140 kowhaiwhai 59 Kororareka 93, 182 see also Russell Kreymberg, Charles (Revd) 39

Kupe, Te Pehi 26 Kurnell 215–17 Lambton, John George (Earl) 190 Land Act (1892) 42, 65 Lawson, Henry 209 Launceston Museum 210 Laurier, Wilfrid 196 Lefebvre, Henri 5–6 libraries 1, 101, 132–5, 139, 166, 174–5, 195, 212–13 Lighthall, William 199 Lindauer, Gottfried 63 Literary and Historical Society of Québec 191–3 local history 4, 125–32, 165–71, 197–8, 211–13 theories of 4–5, 131–2 see also historical societies Long, Charles 214 Lundy’s Lane Historical Society 195, 197, 198 Lyttleton 139, 145 McCarthy, Fred 207–8 McCormick, Eric 4, 167 McDonald, James 72, 74, 85 McDonald, K. C. 127 McEwan, Jock 85 McMullen, John 190 McNab, Robert 42, 66, 100, 134–5, 142, 174, 231 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 100 Macandrew, James 138 MacKenzie, Thomas 67, 83 Macquarie Harbour 219 Maning, Frederick 105 Mahupuku, Tamahau 69 Mair, Gilbert 30, 37, 109, 113, 117 Mangere 94 Manaia 97, 116, 117, 119 Maniapoto, Rewi 98, 104, 111 Mantell, Walter 48 Maori archaeology of 49, and museums 25–31, 48–9, 66–76, 80–6 and tourism 15, 24, 29–48, 62–3, 66, 80–6 attitudes to the past and material culture 10, 37–8, 69–71, 80–6 counter-colonialism 78, 80–6 culture, collection of 59, 66–76, 83–5 culture and authenticity 36–42

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Maori (cont.) culture and Pakeha identity 14–16, 24–44, 58–86, 105–11, 128–9, 149–53, 232–3 heritage as scenery 42–8 historic sites and recreation 42 historic sites, preservation of 44–9, houses 26–8, 31, 37, 39–42, 72, 81, 82, 85, 149, 151, 152, 170–1 material culture as art 36–9, 58, 66–76 national ethnology collection 71–6 protest 50–52 reform movement 40–1 rock art 48–9 welfare 80–5 woodcarving 36–9, 40, 58, 66–76, 72, 78–9, 79, 81, 82–5 Maori Antiquities Act (1901) 67–76, 83 Maori Purposes Fund 84 Maori War Films Ltd 111 Marsden, Samuel 2, 134, 140 Marlborough Sounds 46, 47, 127, 142, 179 Massey, William 101, 136 Mataatua 28 Maugakohutu 46 mechanics’ institutes 206, 210 see also libraries media/popular press 24–5, 67, 99, 109, 125, 132–4, 135, 139, 140–1, 151, 159, 165, 170–2, 175–6, 182, 205, 219 Melbourne 80 Melbourne Museum 213 Melbourne Public Library 212 memorials 13, 96–7, 137, 139 Australia 214–23 First World War 79 Maori Wars 44 New Zealand Centennial 163–83 New Zealand Wars 94–104, 95 South African War 99 see also monuments missionaries 2, 10, 27, 31, 35, 44, 48, 134, 144, 147, 152, 166, 172, 180, 182 Mitchel Library 213 Mitchell, Thomas 214 Moehanga 25 Mokoia Island 32 monuments British tradition of 138 Canada 194–6 New Zealand 138–44

Waitangi 148–9 see also memorials Montgomery Richard (General) 192 Moorhouse, William 139 Morrell, William Parker 167–9 Morris, Edward 135 Morris, William 12, 59 Motuara Island 141–4 Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association 13, 128 Mountford, Benjamin 61 Moutoa 95 Mulcahy, Edward 222 museums 3, 24–31, 36–7, 41, 48–9, 52, 60, 65–77, 78–80, 84–5, 127, 129–34, 144, 146, 152, 175–7, 193, 197, 201–4, 206–8, 210, 213, 219, 222 Napier 79, 163 National Museum of Victoria 203–4 National Parks Committee (Victoria) 214 National Trust (UK) 128 Native Americans 36, 65, 93, 108, 203 see also Six Nations Native Land Court 50, 69 Native Schools Amendment Act (1871) 71 Nelson 174, 180, 233 Nelson, Charles 36–7 New Plymouth 43, 70, 140 New South Wales 159, 161–2, 207, 211–12, 215 Jubilee 159 Centenary 160–1, 209, 216 New South Wales Public Library 212 New Zealand Centennial (1940) 143, 162–84 and historic preservation 177–83 Centennial Surveys 165–71 National Centennial Committee 165, 170 National Historical Committee 168, 172, 176–8 Otago Provincial Committee 174 history and education in 39, 101, 111, 148, 163–7 Jubilee (1890) 61–2, 126–7, 159–61 landscape and identity 60–1 literary tradition 61–2, 104–11, 165–74 see also Maori culture and Pakeha

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identity; New Zealand Wars in popular culture/mythology National Archives 135 architectural style 145–7, 162, 181–2 National Art Gallery 73 see also Maori national ethnology collection; Maori material culture as art National Historical Collection 133–5 national vs local identity 126–32, 171–4 official ceremonial practice 59, 77–80 state collection of historical documents 132–7, 174–9 state preservation of historic sites 135–6, 148–53 see also Scenery Preservation Act New Zealand Automobile Association 178 New Zealand Company 93, 134, 152, 166, 176 New Zealand Education Institute 166 New Zealand Forestry League Council 152 New Zealand Founders’ Association 177 New Zealand Historic Places Trust 75, 184 New Zealand Institute 48, 66, 133 New Zealand Institute of Town Planners 152 New Zealand Natives Association 7, 129 New Zealand Railways Magazine 78, 178 New Zealand Tourist League 137 New Zealand Wars 9, 27, 35, 43, 45, 82, 93–120, 116, 134 and imperial relations 107–8 collection and preservation of memory of 95–104, 130 comparisons to Plains Indian Wars 107, 109–10, 111 in popular culture/mythology 95–6, 98–104, 105–11, 135 sites, and tourism 114–16 sites, preservation of 97, 112–19 war graves 98–101, 103–4, 111–14, 117–18 Ngai Tahu 44 Ngakaho, Tamati 27 Ngaruawahia 64–5, 104

Ngata, Apirana 50–1, 74, 83–5, 151, 165, 169–70 Ngati Awa 28, 77, 82 Ngati Haua 69 Ngati Kahungunu 45, 69 Ngati Maniapoto 104 Ngati Pikiao 39 Ngati Porou 27, 111, 140 Ngati Rangi 103 Ngati Rangitihi 37 Ngati Rangiwewehi 33 Ngati Raukawa 104 Ngati Tarawera 35 Ngati Tarawhai 34, 36, 39, 41 Ngati Toa 26, 44 Ngati Tuwharetoa 104 Ngati Whakaue 69, 70 Ngauranga Gorge 163 Niagara 197–8, 200 Niagara Historical Society 198 Niagara Parks Commission 198–9 Nicholson, Byron 196 Nixon, Marmaduke 94–5, 97 Nora, Pierre 6–7 Northern Territory 206 Northland 96, 148, 173 Oamaru 138 Ohaeawai 96 Ohinemutu 32, 40–1 Okaihau 99 Oliver, W. H. 1, 167 Ollivant, Joseph 62 Onslow, William Hillier Onslow (Earl) 59, 61, 126, 140 Onslow, Victor Alexander Herbert Huia 61, 77 Ontario 195, 197–203 Ontario Historical Society 192, 195, 197, 202, 230 Ontario Provincial Museum 201 Opotiki 101 O’Regan, Patrick 62 Orakau 95, 96, 98, 103–4, 106, 109, 111–12, 117, 150 Otago 7, 48, 126–7, 138, 174, 178, 234 centenary 174 settlement of 127 see also Dunedin Otago Early History Society 129 Otago Early Settlers’ Association and Museum 126, 129–30, 132 Otago Museum 49, 77 Otago University 3, 134, 166, 174 Otakou 127

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pa 37–42, 40, 43–7, 69, 72, 74–5, 82–3, 96–8, 100, 113–14, 117, 150, 180, 233 Pai Marire 84, 96, 166 Paihia 148, 149, 182 Papakura, Makereti 80, 81, 84 Parata, Tame 69, 83 Parkes, Henry (Sir) 160, 216 Parkman, Francis 110 Parry, William 162, 168, 170–3 Pascoe, John 175 pataka 29, 31, 41, 60, 68, 72, 76, 83 Paterson, ‘Banjo’ 209 pedagogy, and history/heritage 2–4 see also Australia, history and education in; Canada, history and education in; New Zealand, history and education in; United States, history and education in Perceval, Westby 108 Percy Smith, Stevenson 43, 46–7, 63–4, 71, 74, 113, 133 Petone 126 Phillip, Arthur 160, 161, 209–11 Phillipps, William 49 Picton 181 Pillinger, Alfred 219 Pink and White Terraces (Rotomahana) 32 pioneers 4, 58, 66, 96, 100, 110–12, 127–9, 130–33, 139–40, 145, 146–7, 151–31, 159–60, 163–5, 166, 168–9, 171, 173, 175–6, 179–80, 182, 190, 191, 195, 209–11, 213–14 230–1 place attachment/place identity 5–10, 179–83, 230–1 Plains Indian Wars 93 Plains of Abraham 196 Plunket 163 Plymouth 176 Pocock, J. G. A. 2 Pokeno 99 Polack, Joel Samuel 140 Polynesian Society 63 Pomare, Maui 83–4 Pompallier, Jean Baptiste François (Bishop) 177 Pontoko redoubt 113 Port Arthur 208, 217–23, 221, 234 Port Arthur Museum 219–20, 222 Port Jackson 211 Potae, Henare 27 Potts, Thomas 27 Poverty Bay 79, 140, 142, 144, 172, 173

Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia 193 Provincial Archives of British Columbia 193 Provincial Archives of Ontario 193 Public Records Office (Kew) 134, 135 Public Works Act (1894) 45, 51 Puhirake, Rawiri 103 Pukaki 69 Pukekohe 118, 179 Québec 190–2, 194, 195–6 historic sites 194 Queen Charlotte Sound 43, 141–2 Queen Victoria 99, 139 see also Victoria League Queensland 207, 212, 215 Queensland Museum 204 Rae, Duncan 183 Rangaiowhia 94 Rangers’ League 207 Rangiriri 98, 106, 108–9, 111 Rankin, Heke 50 Read, Gabriel 138 Reed, A. H. 111 Reed, Vernon 148–9 Reeves, William Pember 61, 63, 167–8 Reynolds, Richard 26 Richmond, James 27 Rivers, W. H. R. 74 Robert Burns 137 Roberts, W. H. S. 130 rock art, see Aborigines, rock art; Maori, rock art Rolleston, William 139 Ross, Angus 174 Rotorua 37–42, 69, 78–9, 84 Royal Australian Historical Society 207 Royal Society 198, 223 Ruapekapeka 109, 180 Rukupo, Raharuhi 27 Ruskin, John 12 Russell 100, 177–8, 181–2 Russell, George 135 Russell, Peter 200 Rutland Stockade 115 Samuel, Raphael 7, 8, 199, 233 Savage, Joseph 163 Sayer, Charles 146–7 Science and Art Act (1913) 73, 132–3

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scenery preservation (New Zealand) 42–8, Scenery Preservation Act (1903) 44–7, 49–52, 113, 115, 135–6, 178, 232 Scenery Preservation Commission 45–7 Scenery Preservation Board 46–7, 75, 135–6 scenery preservation (Tasmania) Scenery Preservation Act (1915) 207, 217–22 Schmidt, L. J. 177 Scholefield, Guy 135 School of Maori Art and Craft 78, 83–4 Scott, Ernest 3 Second World War 4, 167, 191, 222, 231 Seddon, Richard (Sir) 42, 45, 50, 62, 64, 66, 99, 139 Selwyn, George Augustus (Bishop) 181 Sharp, Andrew 167 Shellshear, Joseph 208 Ship Cove 43, 47 Sinclair, Keith 167 Six Nations 201, 210 see also Native Americans Skinner, Henry Devenish 76, 77 Skinner, William Henry 47 Smith, William Walter 66 Smyth, Robert Brough 206 Society of the Colonial Dames of America 128 Sons of the American Revolution 192 South Africa landscape and identity 59, 161 Voortrekker centenary 161 South African War 59, 99–100, 111 see also memorials, South African War South Australia 206–7 South Australian Archives 213 South Australian Museum 204 South Australian Old Colonists’ Association 210 Spencer, Baldwin 203–4, 232 Speight, James 49 Stack, James 27, 44 Statham, Edith 101–3, 112, 118 Steele, Louis 63 Stewart, William Downie 127, 135 Stone Store 177 Stowell, Henry 72 Sullivan, Daniel 163

Sulte, Benjamin 196 Sutch, William 169 Sutherland, Alexander 160, 204, 214 Sydney (NSW) 80, 160, 211–12 Sydney Public Library 213 Taranaki 43, 46–7, 94, 98, 109, 117, 125, 150, 170, 179, 233 Taranaki Scenery Preservation Society 42–3 , 47 Tasman, Abel Janszoon 127 Tasman’s Peninsula 207 Tasmania 207, 208 tourism 217–23 Tasmanian Government Tourist and Information Bureau 220 Tasmanian Museum 222 Tasmanian Tourist Association 220 Tate, Frank 214 Tauranga 46, 98–9, 114, 117, 172, 233 Tawhiao 77 Taylor, T. E. 144 Te Arawa 69 Te Awaiti 179 Te Awamutu 95, 98, 103, 149 Te Awamutu Historical Society 176–7 Te Hau ki Turanga 26–7, 28 Te Kani-a-Takirau 140 Te Kooti 28, 32–3, 82, 84, 93, 96, 104, 111, 113, 166 Te Oha 31 Te Popo, Hira 82 Te Puni, Ivor Arthur 170–1 Te Ranga 96, 103 Te Rangikaheke, Wiremu Maihi 33 Te Rauparaha 44, 107, 176, 179 Te Wairoa 32 Tecumseh 202–3 Thomas Cook 31 Thomson, James Allan 49, 74–5, 132–3, 134–6, 153 Thorold and Beaverdams Historical Society 198 Titokowaru, Riwha 94, 97, 111 Tohunga Suppression Act (1907) 71 Tolaga Bay 140, 141 Toronto Public Library 195 tourism and heritage 3, 13, 15–17, 30, 24–52, 59, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 77, 80–6, 114–15, 137, 141–2, 170, 177, 197–200, 207, 217, 219–23, 221, 232–2, 234

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trade in indigenous artefacts 35–6, 64, 66–76, 80, 203–4, 206, 208 see also Maori Antiquities Act travel guides 31–2, 34, 113–14, 178, 200, 217–18, 219–20 Treaty of Waitangi 77, 93, 134, 139, 144, 147, 148–52, 150, 170, 172 Treaty House 148–53, 150 Tregear, Edward 35, 61, 63–4, 74, 106 see also Aryan Maori Tunuiarangi, Hoani 45 Turnbull, Alexander 133–5, 141 Turnbull, Michael 167 Turner, Frederick Jackson 59, 107, 168 Turner, Henry 210 Turuturmokai redoubt 104 Twain, Mark 96 United Canadian Association 191 United Kingdom local history in 175 United States of America frontier thesis 59, 107, 109–10 history and education in 165 local history in 175 University of Toronto 191 Van Diemen’s Land, see Tasmania Verge, John 152 Victoria and Albert Museum 26, 28, 77 Victoria College (Canada) 197 Victoria League 3, 101, 128 Victorian Memorials Association 230 Vogel, Julius 164 von Haast, Julius 27, 48 von Tempsky, Gustavus Ferdinand 98, 106, 109 Waikato 83, Waitangi 148–53, 150 Waitere, Tene 39, 85 Wairau 96, 178 waka 35, 70, 72 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 16, 64, 127, 139–40, 166, 173–4, 176 Wakefield, William (Colonel) 127 Walsh, Philip (Archdeacon) 140 war graves, see New Zealand Wars, war graves War Graves Commission 104

War of 1812 195, 197–8, 202–3 Warbrick, Alfred 37–8, Ward, Joseph 33, 44, 73, 101, 115, 139–40 Ward, Louis 130, 169 Warung, Price 209–10 Washington, George 13, 152 Watts, Ebenezer 214 Waverley 117, 118 Webb, Leicester 167 Wellington 26, 27, 31, 41, 42, 71–2, 77, 125, 126–7, 129–30, 133, 139–40, 147, 159, 162–3, 170, 173, 176, 179–80 Wellington Early Colonists’ Association 129 Wellington Early Settlers’ and Historical Association 127, 129, 140 Wellington Philosophical Society 27, 58 Wentworth Historical Society 195, 198 West Australian Historical Society 209, 212 Westall, William 206 Westminster Abbey 215 Whakarewarewa 32, 37–42, 81–2 Whanganui 95–6, 115, 130, 170, 178 Whanganui River 42, 51 whare, see Maori, houses White, John 37–8 Whiteley, John (Revd) 98 Wightman, Frederick 196 Williams, Henry (Archdeacon) 148 Williams, William Herbert (Bishop) 166 Williamson, William 219 Wilson, Frank ‘King Billy’ 204 Wily, Henry 172 Wombeyan Caves 207 Wood, Frederick Lloyd 167, 178 Wrong, George 191 You Yang mountains 214 Young, Frederick 139–40 Young, George 125 Young Maori Party 83–5 see also Ngata, Apirana; Buck, Peter; Pomare, Maui

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