Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands since the First World War

The Changing Perspective on New Zealand History

The New Zealand historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not search in Colonial Office records and rarely referred to unpublished sources at all in collecting their data. They had not been trained in the school of von Ranke or, with rare exceptions, in any rigorous intellectual discipline. But it does not seem that many striking features of their subject escaped their attention altogether. Nor is that surprising. Few of them were fools. And the perspectives in which New Zealand history could be viewed, the aspects which could be emphasized, were very restricted. Almost nothing certain about prehistory, before Abel Tasman’s discovery of the country in 1642 and between then and Captain James Cook’s rediscovery in 1769, was known to Europeans. The effective range of historical vision began in 1769, and after that little was certain before, say, 1800.

It was impossible to ignore the dominant role of the Maoris up to the mid-nineteenth century. The first history, A. S. Thomson’s The Story of New Zealand (1859), like the books of G. W. Rusden and William Pember Reeves at the end of the century, placed the Maoris in or near the focus of attention. General histories before 1900 also stressed the Anglo-Maori wars of the 1840s and 1860s as principal historical features.

Other happenings that seemed without reflection to assume the status of historical events were the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris, the British annexation of the country, and the arrival of the first New Zealand Company settlers, all in 1840. Usually not much was said of the earlier, putatively raffish and unprepossessing if not positively criminal, European settlers on the principle of “the less said the better.” The foundations of other organized settlements, such as Otago in 1848 and Canterbury in 1850, were also landmarks, as were the gold rushes of the 1860s and Julius Vogel’s overseas borrowing and economic development program of the 1870s, both of which brought in large numbers of immigrants.

One striking political phenomenon was the evolution of the constitution and of the practice of responsible government. The new status was symbolized by the assumption in 1907 of the title “Dominion of New Zealand,” though that title did not denote the wholly independent condition known later as dominion status. At that time the name seemed to many people grandiloquent. No one appears to have thought it might imply British dominion over, and hence continuing possession of, the former colony.

The other political feature given most emphasis in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries was the Liberal government of 1891–1911. William Pember Reeves was a prominent and the most radical member of that ministry and later the country’s best-known historian. When he wrote his short history, The Long White Cloud, in 1898 he had already, like most of the leading writers, artists, and intellectuals for another forty years, become an expatriate, living in Great Britain. In his books he stressed state control—radical governmentalism—as the predominant feature of New Zealand politics. So did the French political scientist, André Siegfried, in La Démocratie en Nouvelle-Zélande (1904). In 1909 Guy H. Scholefield’s pioneering attempt to write an “industrial, economic, and political” history, New Zealand in Evolution, likewise stressed New Zealand socialism. There was in fact little “socialism” in a Marxist sense. But there was a tradition of public ownership of railways and other utilities and much government initiative in economic and social affairs, which commonly passed for socialism in those days.

To historians, to politicians, and to the public, reasonably enough, indeed inescapably, their history was that of a British colony. It was traditional to stress that the pioneers were not refugees or convicts but “selected stock”—selected by the supposedly efficient filtering screens of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theories of colonization and the companies they inspired. New Zealand, it had been proclaimed since 1840, was, and would be, “the Britain of the South.” It was the Britishness of the colony which most impressed its white population and the many visitors who wrote travel books about it.

That new Britain had its own imperial “civilizing” mission in the Pacific, and it was by virtue of that mission that the Pacific Ocean entered the New Zealand Europeans’ consciousness. An eminent line of missionaries, governors, and politicians, like their Australian counterparts and rivals, had wished that the Australasian colonies should administer an array of Pacific islands, including at least part of New Guinea. Those ambitions received emphasis in an early history of the Pacific, The Pacific: Its Past and Future (1919), by Scholefield. But it was the recent and continuing connection with Great Britain—not New Zealand’s ancient past, when for a thousand years or more it had been the largest of the Polynesian island groups—on which the white New Zealanders focused their attention.¹

Not much change in these emphases is to be detected in the decade after the First World War, or even in the 1930s. W. P. Morrell, stressing the inspiring influence of the Gallipoli campaign and the heroic—near mythical—deeds of the Anzacs (members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), wrote in New Zealand (1935)² of his country’s history as the growth of a nation. But little overt nationalism is to be detected in books written at that time. A school book, widely used in the 1930s, was called Our Nation’s Story. It did, indeed, refer to the need to develop a national spirit. But it was subtitled A Course of British History. It contained long sections on the British and other empires and concluded with a list of the English sovereigns since 1066.³

Nor is this surprising. Even in the 1920s, most of the adult males of mature years, who presumably ran the country, were immigrants, though a majority of the white population had been New Zealand-born as long ago as the 1880s.⁴ Almost all the members of the first Labour cabinet, elected to power in 1935, were immigrants, mostly from Australia.

Colonial history, British history, were still what mattered. That was true for historians and, in a more general sense, for politicians, newspaper editors, and the public. Speeches and editorials were littered with pious references to Home, Mother Country, and the Empire.

Writers who were self-consciously New Zealanders, like the historian J. C. Beaglehole or the poet Allen Curnow, wondered what it meant to be a New Zealander. The latter wrote:

Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.

The lack of change in historical and hence sociological perspective (or mythology) may be illustrated by two quotations. In 1902 two writers, R. F. Irvine and O. T. J. Alpers, dogmatically asserted that the “stock from which the New Zealanders are sprung” was “not only British but the best British.”⁵ In 1930 the economic historian J. B. Condliffe (later an expatriate in the United States) wrote that this “stock” had been “rigidly selected…physically, mentally, and morally.”⁶

To historians writing in the late 1930s there had been change, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. To Beaglehole, in his essay New Zealand: A Short History (1936),⁷ and to W. B. Sutch, in his The Quest for Security in New Zealand (1942),⁸ the long depression of the 1880s and the radical Liberal legislation of the 1890s seemed as important as they had seemed to Reeves. Those notable events had been followed by the First World War, conservative inaction in the 1920s, and then another traumatic economic depression in the early 1930s, which led to further radical and welfare legislation. Thus twice, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, economic history (boom, slump, boom, slump) was paralleled by and produced its political history (conservative, radical, conservative, radical). Both Beaglehole’s and Sutch’s books were largely, as the latter said in his preface, studies of poverty, unemployment, and their legislative products.

There were signs of new outlooks, for instance, in the series of books edited by E. H. McCormick and published in 1940 by the Labour government to celebrate the country’s centenary of being British. McCormick’s own contribution, Art and Letters in New Zealand, examined with sensitive scrupulosity a feature of history previously scarcely mentioned. F. L. W. Wood’s New Zealand in the World was the first history of foreign relations and the beginnings of foreign policy. But it is difficult to feel that new approaches had made much of a dent in the received historical traditions originally summed up so neatly and memorably by Reeves.

There is little doubt that the perspectives in which their country’s past is viewed by New Zealanders have changed much more since the Second World War than they did in the previous half century. For this conclusion several reasons will be suggested. Some of the main changes in outlook occurred no doubt in response to developments in the outside world. As the world changes, so does New Zealand, and its history appears different as perspectives change. But some of the new points of view have also arisen internally. Great social or political problems of the past have receded, faded, been dropped or solved. One example is the temperance and prohibition movements, which were as strong in the colony as the drink generously imbibed by its population. The pubs closed at 6 P.M., by popular will, from during the First World War until 1967. Now they close at 10 P.M.; licensed restaurants are permitted and numerous. The public seems, if anything, more sober. Consequently, the quasi-religious, moralistic band of anti-alcohol reformers appears as a passing phase of New Zealand’s puritanism and not as a trend. Marijuana, moreover, in the opinions of many of the not-so-young, makes alcohol seem almost harmless. Such social changes must affect as yet unwritten general histories, not by causing historical strands to be excised altogether—censored (as it were) from the historical consciousness—but because some past events will be seen as completed and “in perspective.”

Politics has changed, and past political issues already appear in new lights. For instance, one of the major political issues from the 1880S to the 1920s concerned land taxation and land tenure: land nationalization, freehold versus leasehold, and the taxation of the unearned increment on land. Those were once hot political issues, gone cool since the 1920s. Historians will continue to discuss them as they seek to know the scarcely penetrable minds of the dead, but to the public the issues recede into a dark background.

The former vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury, the historian N. C. Phillips, once playfully referred to New Zealand’s history as “the Long Pink Cloud.” Certainly, most of its most prominent historians from Reeves to Beaglehole, Sutch, and W. T. G. Airey have sounded politically left of center. For some reason that might be debated, much the same could be said of Australian historians, many of whom, at least until recently, were conspicuously “lefties.”

In New Zealand some of the more prominent features of the historical landscape have appeared in a lurid light to observers at all points of the political compass. The great strikes of 1890 and 1913 and the wharf conflict of 1951 can scarcely be ignored. Indeed, the present writer would give greater prominence now to the 1913 strike of the “Red Feds” (disciples of the American IWW) than would have seemed reasonable a few years ago. The physical confrontation of urban striking unionists with the government and its mounted (farmer) special police, W. F. Massey’s “Cossacks” or “Uhlans,” was the most dramatic example of class, or ideological, conflict that this country has experienced. The 1951 strike, as that of 1890, also aroused violent class and sectional emotions. The depressions of 1879 to 1879 and of about 1928 to 1935 also retain their historical importance, not merely because they changed social attitudes but because they gave birth, as we have seen, to brief periods of radical politics, in 1891–1898 (Liberal) and 1936–1938 (Labour).

These periods of radicalism were of major importance because they greatly sharpened the welfare and statist features of our historical profile. They were periods of volcanic eruption, mountain forming. But sober and later reflection showed that they were indeed brief phases. Of the long years of Liberal and Labour government, few were devoted to such radical legislation. The Liberals under Richard J. (“King Dick”) Seddon after 1893 and J. G. Ward after 1906 can scarcely be regarded as left-wing. They became substantially a farmers’ and lower-middle-class respectable or establishment party after Reeves left, despite notable achievements like old-age pensions in 1898. Labour introduced the most comprehensive system in the world of social security (pensions, “free” medicine and medical care, etc.) in 1938. But, then, Prime Minister Peter Fraser created an efficient wartime administration. Despite major legislative innovations, such as universal and generous child allowances in 1946, his became a right-wing government. Indeed, he was a cold war warrior in the late 1940s, introducing compulsory military training, after a referendum in which the government threw all its weight into achieving a “yes” vote.

During the Second World War, it was possible for people to overlook, not to see, this change, but in 1949 a National party government, led by Sidney Holland, was elected to power. Under him and then Keith Holyoake, Jack Marshall, and R. D. Muldoon, it retained power to the late 1970s, with only brief and tenuous interruptions under Walter Nash, who had a parliamentary majority of two (minus the Speaker) from 1957 to 1960, and again under Norman Kirk and Wallace (“Bill”) Rowling from 1972 to 1975. Twenty years of non-Labour power—often relatively right-wing—have altered the way things look. Twenty years of almost uninterrupted and increasing prosperity have made people less radical, have made the radical episodes of the past seem briefer, and have made both the poverty of depression and the old class feelings seem remote.

New Zealand history now seems more capitalist and more conservative than it did to Reeves, Beaglehole, or Sutch. The economic depressions have for many years ceased to be experiences central to the public vision of the past. One would hesitate, however, to say that this change is permanent. It is true that, while deflation used to be the economic devil of the poor and the unemployed, inflation came to replace it as the nightmare of a wealthy, property-owning democracy. But inflation now stimulates renewed fears of a depression.

Perhaps the clearest way of expressing how time alters appearances is simply to say that New Zealanders enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world from 1865 to 1879, from 1895 to 1921, less surely from 1922 to 1928, and from 1935 to 1973. Although their standing in the world statistics of GNP per person has slipped from about fourth to about twentieth, as that of Japan and western European countries has risen, it is still very high.

A modern history of New Zealand would be about a capitalist society, but one that on two occasions was somewhat ahead of other capitalist societies in modifying the effects of competition by state action to redistribute income and protect the helpless. In this altered view, some past achievements seem less notable. For instance, the tradition of state control and intervention in the economy goes back to Vogel and even earlier governments and still continues. But what was fascinating to late-nineteenth-century English, American, or French radicals is now a commonplace in the world. Similarly, the welfare state has been sustained and extended. The poor are still with us, mostly old-age pensioners, superannuitants, and some Polynesians, but they are not as hungry as the unemployed were during two major depressions. What has changed is that welfare systems are now as widespread as the labor legislation which made Reeves an innovator in the 1890s.

Whether the points of view outlined in these paragraphs will persist depends upon world economic trends and also upon domestic political developments.

Some of New Zealand’s historical experiences, however, are of increasing importance in the modern world, relevant to modern problems, and still living in the thoughts of many New Zealanders. Race relations, which loomed large in the historical memories of 1859 or of 1898, still seem quite as important as they did then, perhaps more so.

In some respects this renewed emphasis undoubtedly reflects the growing importance of race relations—and racism—in international politics, and in the domestic politics of many countries, in Africa, in the U.S., Australia, Malaysia, and even in Great Britain. But this is not the whole truth. Except for a brief period in the late nineteenth century, racial questions have always been predominant concerns in New Zealand to Maoris and Pakehas (whites) alike.

The Maoris since 1840 have formed an important proportion of the population—not quite half in 1858, and nearly 10 percent in 1970. With large, well-organized tribal political units, they could have prevented at will the initial settlement or destroyed the early townships, whatever backlash from the British army and navy that might have produced. In published histories, as we have seen, their importance has always been recognized. In the histories of the U.S., Canada, or Australia (but not South Africa), the pre-European populations have received less attention. Yet, strangely, though the Maoris themselves have loomed large in European thinking, the Maori (or Anglo-Maori) wars have never captured the popular imagination. When the author was young, New Zealand boys played cowboys and Indians, with six-shooters and bows and arrows. No one then or since relived the defense of Rewi Maniapoto at Orakau in 1864: “Ka whawhai tonu ake! ake! ake!” (“We shall fight on forever!”) he cried—and escaped when their ammunition had run out.

In European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), the Australian scholar, Bernard Smith, wrote of European conceptions of “soft” and “hard” primitives. In the early nineteenth century and later, the Maoris were regarded as intelligent, tough, warlike—and these adjectives were warranted. After European settlement began, curiously ambivalent attitudes developed toward them. Sometimes, especially during the wars of the 1860s, they were referred to as “niggers.” But at the same time attitudes of regard and respect were also expressed. Visitors often noted that the Maoris were regarded by settlers as superior to other “savages,” and especially to the Australian Aborigines. Humanitarian and missionary opinion joined with this popular notion and proclaimed that the Maoris were eminently civilizable. To “elevate” them, this patronizing but benevolent opinion held, meant that they should be induced to abandon their own culture and become brown Europeans.

Most of the early books describing the Maoris express markedly favorable sentiments toward them. After the wars, as the Maori population declined, a certain sentimentality crept in too toward a supposedly dying race. Although it is easy to cite striking exceptions, at no stage did the English-language literature, except for some newspapers and pamphlets, generally express anti-Maori prejudice. Although white people bought and confiscated Maori lands, from the Treaty of Waitangi onward, there were always many Europeans who hoped for a happy solution to the problems of racial and cultural conflict.⁹

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Maoris produced new leaders—prophets like T. W. Ratana,¹⁰ politicians (in the New Zealand Parliament), lawyers and doctors, like Apirana Ngata and Peter Buck—to direct a new effort to come to terms with European society.

Although in many ways modern Maoris suffer disadvantages—in education, housing, and income—their situation is favorable in comparison with that of North American Indians or Australian Aborigines. There is no room, however, for smugness. Young Maoris now often assert their Maoritanga, their Maoriness, their cultural identity, in aggressive voices echoing those of American blacks or of Africans. The term “brown power” is sometimes heard but is not yet always taken seriously.

Another factor has made race relations a cause of active concern. Nearly thirty thousand Polynesian immigrants—from Samoa, Niue, the Cook Islands, and elsewhere—have come to New Zealand. The adaptation to European and urban life has not always been easy. For this reason, too, interracial questions are likely to maintain their place near the center of future histories, as of past ones, of New Zealand.

There are other ways in which world changes have combined with local evolution to produce reassessments of New Zealand’s past and of new social attitudes. Confident, even brash assertions of national identity, rare in the 1930s, became more common after the Second World War. Perhaps it is true, as Karl Stead wrote in an essay on New Zealand literature, that such affirmations, at least in poetry, were in some ways less convincing than “the apparent gestures of defeat” of older poets like Allen Curnow.¹¹ They had the merit, however, of being new.

The growth of a postcolonial sense of nationalism was due in part to the fact that, for most New Zealanders, Great Britain, no longer talked of with nostalgia by parents and grandparents, became increasingly remote, not central to their sense of identity. But that was paralleled by the decline of Britain as a world power, especially as a Pacific power, and the decline of the once British Commonwealth as a useful international organization. Thus events necessitated what sentiment demanded—the search for a meaningful and regional sense of identity to replace “the Empire” and the consciousness of being British as the focus of self-regard.

Changes in the Pacific basin also profoundly altered the world in which New Zealanders had to exist. Once, white New Zealanders felt themselves members of a remote and isolated community cast up on antipodean islands by an imperialist wave. That imperialism was their link with the great European world where things happened. Now that wave has receded, but they no longer feel cut off. Air travel has been important but, more important, all the great world powers now border on the Pacific. Some of the secondary powers, like France, retain a Pacific presence. (In that particular case, one strikingly unpacific, as the French persist in making tests at Mururoa of “safe” nuclear devices. Those tests would be inexpedient at home, whether under- or overground.) Moreover, some of the major world crises since 1941 have occurred in Asia and Southeast Asia and have involved New Zealand. All of those changes have forced New Zealanders toward new attitudes, new policies, and a new independence of outlook.

All histories of New Zealand have stressed the British imperial connection. Historically that was and is just. But the conception of patriotism and citizenship “almost wholly in imperial terms” encouraged an “imperviousness to happenings in the outside world,” except in Great Britain.¹² It was possible for Reeves to write a history which scarcely mentioned any foreigners except explorers and the few early French settlers. That would scarcely be feasible now. Britain seems diminished and has joined the European Economic Community. Australia and New Zealand joined defensive alliances with the U.S.—the ANZUS treaty of 1951 and the SEATO treaty of 1954—in response to the real or supposed threats from a possibly remilitarized Japan or from communist China. Pearl Harbor and the Korean and Vietnam wars meant that New Zealanders have looked somewhat less toward Britain and more toward Asia, the U.S., and the Pacific.

Symptomatic of this changing attitude is the rise of the study of Asian, Pacific, and American history in the schools and universities and the publication of numerous pamphlets and a few books on foreign policy, such as M. P. Lissington’s surveys of New Zealand’s relations with the U.S. and Japan.¹³ Foreign policy, particularly in regard to Vietnam, became an election issue for the first time in 1966. Australia and New Zealand signed a free (or freer) trade agreement (NAFTA) in 1965. Both government and business are increasingly active in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Future historians are likely to give more emphasis to the origins of the external policies of this small, independent state, such as its numerous activities in the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the complex world of international diplomacy.

Parallel to and part of this more cosmopolitan attitude toward the country’s past and future is a growing interest in its ancient history. After about 1915—when S. Percy Smith promulgated the theory that the Maoris came in a fleet of canoes¹⁴—it became usual to believe that the Polynesians arrived in New Zealand about 1350. Little could be said of the supposed earlier inhabitants. As far as is known, New Zealand was one of the last groups of Pacific islands to be occupied by humans. But archeology has shown that by the eleventh century the country was settled from the north to its southern tip, a thousand miles in length. The original settlement must have been over a thousand years ago.

That date in prehistory reinforces the new emphasis on Pacific history rather than merely on a western European one and provides ancient links with the western Polynesians, the Malay-speaking people, and probably with southern China, through a long history of maritime migration. Austro-Polynesian-speaking peoples had spread over a greater part of the earth than any others before the migrations of English-speakers to America, South Africa, and Australasia.

Some of the new attitudes which have been outlined have already affected the writing of New Zealand history. Other, even more recent points of view may lead to equally great reassessments, though which of today’s interests will persist and lead to historical investigations is as yet speculative. A student once asked the writer why the Labour government of 1935–1949 did not introduce “equal pay” for women doing the same work as men. Good question? It had been discussed, of course, long before and had been part of the policy of the Political Labour League in 1905. But at the end of the depression of the 1930s, to give pay to unemployed men seemed an all-absorbing problem. The next Labour government, 1957–1960, did introduce equal pay for white women public servants, while in 1972 a National government extended the principle to the whole working population. One may imagine that future historical attitudes will stress the subjection of women, even in one of the first places to introduce votes for women (in 1893).¹⁵

If present, usually youthful, talk of zero population growth persists, it too will lead to historical reevaluations. Almost always it has been assumed by politicians, historians, and the public that a reasonably high population increase was desirable and a sign of achievement. Similarly the modern stress on protecting the environment from pollution and desecration may lead people to regard with a jaundiced eye the brutal assaults on the landscape by settlers, businesses, local and central governments, railway, electricity, and other departments. But that would not really be novel. In 1898 Reeves published his poem, “The Passing of the Forest,” which lamented that the price of progress was “beauty passed away.” It was learned and recited by the next generation of schoolchildren.

Our increasing insight into prehistory largely derives from the application of modern archeological techniques in the Pacific. Much has been discovered about the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand. Moreover, it is seen in a new perspective because archeologists have shown that people have inhabited the Pacific for thousands of years. Southeast Asia and Australia now seem not prehistorical backwaters but early centers of human settlement and even of civilization. Archeology used to be Europe-centered too.

Revisionism in historical research has also been fruitful. Much of it has been in the history of the Maoris and race relations. These subjects are far from exhausted: no significant book has appeared based on a thorough knowledge of the written Maori language sources. But some progress has been made. Andrew Sharp’s Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (1956) produced a lively debate on Polynesian migrations. H. M. Wright’s New Zealand, 1769–1840 (1959) and Judith Binney’s The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (1968) have led to a continuing debate on the effects of European contact on Maori society, and particularly on the response of the Maoris to Christianity, which has greatly deepened our understanding of pre-1840 history. We also know infinitely more than before the Second World War about government Maori policy, the Maori king movement, and the Anglo-Maori wars of the 1860s, as about later Maori political and religious movements. Perhaps this has not produced a radically new way of looking at the past, but increasing understanding may not be without its returns to society at large.

Many other historical topics have similarly been subjects of detailed investigation—for instance, the politics of the period 1870 to 1900, which saw the establishment of the tradition of statism and of radical and democratic legislation. Very much more is known about Vogel, Seddon, and Reeves and their works. It is doubtful whether that has led to a substantial reassessment. Governors have fared less well. The “Good Governor Grey” (Sir George Grey) of the school books has become, if not bad, at least shifty.

New social interests that have caused novel inquiries have included university history: the records of four universities have been published out of a possible six—plus one agricultural college. Some work has been done on urban and business history. Provincial histories, which reflect states of mind in the original settlements and provincial governments, have not attracted much attention recently. The provinces seem less important. Their powers were not great, and they did not always correspond with economic regions. Provincial rivalries survive in sport but (except in rugby football) are scarcely as savage as they were a century ago. Local histories, based on real regional differences, are flourishing.

Not all efforts at revision have succeeded. Attempts to suggest that the Treaty of Waitangi did not derive mainly from a humanitarian concern for Maori welfare have been unconvincing to historians and public. Indeed February 6, when the first group of chiefs signed the treaty in 1840, has been appointed a national holiday. And this seems justified. It still appears accurate to say, with C. Hartley Grattan, that the treaty was “a statement of intent,” of an intention to establish a “biracial society in New Zealand with equality of rights for both races.”¹⁶

It would not be difficult (though it might be tedious) to go on with a list of historical reassessments.¹⁷ It is equally easy to say where historians (and political scientists) have failed to make the assessments which might have changed public attitudes. There are two recent biographies of Labour leaders, Keith Sinclair’s Walter Nash and Erik Olssen’s John A. Lee,¹⁸ but no history of any government since 1935 has been published by any of the legion of academics. Perhaps it is too recent to permit many significant works to have appeared. But the gap is important. Since we have no detailed investigation of the non-Labour (and sometimes un-conservative) National governments since 1949, it is difficult for historians to see the past, except dimly, in the light which the present and recent past might shed on it. For this reason and many others, New Zealand’s history will continue to be seen in ever changing perspectives.¹⁹

Notes

1	For earlier views on New Zealand history the reader should refer to Arthur S. Thomson, The Story of New Zealand (originally published 1859; reissued 1970 by Praeger, New York, with an introduction by C. Hartley Grattan), and William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud (London: Horace Marshall & Son, 1898). For the sense of position in the Pacific see Angus Ross, New Zealand Aspirations in the Pacific in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Peter Munz, The Feel of Truth (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed for the Victoria University of Wellington, 1969).
2	William Parker Morrell, New Zealand (London: Ernest Benn, 1935).
3	Anonymous, Our Nation’s Story: A Course of British History (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, n.d. [ca. 1930]).
4	F. Rogers, “The Single-Tax Movement in New Zealand” (M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 1949), 135–136.
5	R. F. Irvine and O. T. J. Alpers, The Progress of New Zealand in the Century (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1902), 421.
6	J. B. Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930), 373.
7	John C. Beaglehole, New Zealand: A Short History (London: Allen &. Unwin, 1936). The most recent short histories are William H. Oliver, The Story of New Zealand (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), and Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959).
8	William B. Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand (2d ed., Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1966). Sutch’s book is a radical account of some aspects of economic, social, and political history, not reliable in detail but written with the “inside knowledge” of a senior civil servant.
9	On the early period see Ian Wards, The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand, 1832–1852 (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1968), and John A. Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891–1909 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). For further references on the role and position of the Maoris, see the essay by M. P. K. Sorrenson in this volume.
10	See J. McLeod Henderson, Ratona: The Man, the Church, the Political Movement (2d ed., Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed and the Polynesian Society, 1972).
11	Keith Sinclair (ed.), Distance Looks Our Way (Auckland: Hamilton, 1961), 90.
12	Condliffe, op. cit., 470–471.
13	M. P. Lissington, New Zealand and the United States, 1840–1940 and New Zealand and Japan, 1900–1941 (both Wellington: Government Printer, 1972).
14	D. R. Simmons, “A New Zealand Myth: Kupe, Toi and the ‘Fleet,’” New Zealand Journal of History, 3, no. 1 (April 1969).
15	On votes for women, see Patricia Grimshaw, Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1972).
16	C. Hartley Grattan, The Southwest Pacific to 1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 375.
17	Other recent studies exemplifying a new departure or new interests include Robert McD. Chapman, William K. Jackson, and Austin V. Mitchell, New Zealand Politics in Action: The 1960 General Election (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Gary K. Hawke, Between Government and Banks: A History of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer, 1973); Robin Kay (ed.), The Australian-New Zealand Agreement, 1944 (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1972); William H. Oliver and fane M. Thomson, Challenge and Response: A Study of the Development of the Gisborne East Coast Region (Gisborne: East Coast Development Research Association, 1971); Herbert O. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present (Wellington: Reed Education, 1973); and Russell C. J. Stone, Makers of Fortune: A Colonial Business Community and Its Fall (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1973).
18	Keith Sinclair, Walter Nash (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1976), and Erik Olssen, John A. Lee (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1977).
19	For further references on New Zealand history see the detailed bibliographical essay by Keith Sinclair, “New Zealand,” in Robin W Winks (ed.), The Historiography of the British Empire Commonwealth (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1966), 174–196.