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Island Stories

4. Wellington Historians, Collecting, and Oratory

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4. Wellington Historians, Collecting, and Oratory

When T. Lindsay Buick entered the employ of the Dominion Museum in August 1934 he was told that his title would not be 'Government Historiographer', as he had hoped. Though he would be doing historical work, he would appear in official documents as 'clerk'—the same title Elsdon Best had had when he worked writing up ethnological data.1 When angling for a government job writing history, Buick suggested that the Department of Internal Affairs revive Best's job 'in a modified way': 'Mr. Best's employment, as you are aware, chiefly centred round the recording of Maori customs, but as there is now no one to take his place, my suggestion is that the office should be devoted to the recording of the phases of European history still unrecorded …. The point of importance is the setting down in black and white of many facts relating to the settlement and development of New Zealand which call for a permanent record while it is yet possible to make that record.'2 Accordingly, Buick took Best's place on the Dominion Museum's payroll and succeeded him in the newspaper room on the top floor of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Bowen Street in Wellington.3

I do not want to suggest that history supplanted ethnology in Pakeha intellectual circles some, time in August 1934. There are other 'morals' to be taken from this episode. The first is that Buick belonged to a community of historians that is analogous to, and overlapped with, the Polynesian Society of which Best was the leading light. The parallel should not be pushed too far: the Polynesian Society was highly organised, had its own journal, and extended beyond Wellington in formalised ways; the historiographical community to which Buick belonged was not based in one society, but depended on personal contacts and meetings between clients and patrons at Wellington's libraries. It was also comparatively small, and its contacts with other historians in New Zealand and overseas depended on frequent page 53but irregular correspondence. It was, however, the most productive and collaborative group of historians in New Zealand during the interwar period.

The second moral of the juxtaposition of Buick and Best is that some of the concerns of this Wellington-based historiographical circle paralleled the concerns of those paddling in the wake of S. Percy Smith. Part of the mission of Smith and his fellows and successors in the Polynesian Society was the collection of Polynesian 'lore' before the knowledgeable informants died out. For the historians discussed in this chapter, it was vital that obscure journals, letters, books and paintings be preserved and their contents known. As we have seen, local historians, and Cowan, himself a member of the Wellington circle, worried about saving traces of New Zealand's history from oblivion. The local historians dealt mostly in artefacts and reminiscences, and Cowan in oral reminiscence. Other Wellingtonians were more concerned with old manuscripts. Their concern overlapped with their hobby of book-collecting and the library jobs that some of them had. They sought to gather material for their own use and for the histories that would be written in the future. Like all historians, they made a fuss over the discovery of new documents. But for them, salvage was as important a trope as discovery.

The first part of this chapter details the institutional and interpersonal relationships constituting this community. The second looks at the interest in collecting sources, and the fruits of this interest, including its textual embodiments. In particular, I discuss the methods and principles of Guy Scholefield's collection of information for A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. In the third section, I look at a subject dear to these historians, the Bay of Islands in the years 1814-40, and discuss Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi as an important result of this interest.

The historians discussed at the greatest length in this chapter are Buick, Scholefield, and Horace Fildes. Cowan was just as active a participant in historical debate and co-operation as these three, though in the 1930s his contact with others was increasingly through correspondence and the telephone, as his health and Wellington's rain kept him confined to his house.4 I have, however, already discussed him in some detail. Johannes Andersen mattered more in this period as an ethnologist and editor than as a historian, but he was important to the work of historians as an authority on some aspects of New Zealand history, and as the custodian of these historians' greatest resource, the Alexander Turnbull Library. William Downie Stewart and Eric Ramsden lived outside Wellington while they page 54wrote history in the 1930s, but were in regular contact with Buick, Fildes and Scholefield, with whom they discussed their work, and whom they sometimes employed as research assistants.

In 1921 Buick referred to the 'wealth and leisure' needed to write good history.5 Few New Zealanders in the interwar period could afford to devote themselves to the writing of history unless they were of retirement age. Even academic historians had little time for writing, burdened as they were with heavy administrative and teaching loads, and having minimal provision for leave. Despite his files of stories and his habit of recycling, Cowan barely made ends meet writing history full-time. Other historians had to find ways of creating wealth and leisure, or combining their historical work with compatible day-jobs.

From 1926, Scholefield's day-job was running the General Assembly Library. Before that he had worked in journalism, like Cowan, Ramsden and Buick. Some of his early books, such as New Zealand in Evolution: Industrial, Economic and Political, began life as newspaper articles.6 From 1908 to 1919, he worked in London as a syndicated correspondent for the New Zealand press, and then as a doctoral student at the London School of Economics. On his return to New Zealand he spent several years editing the Wairarapa Age and then returned to Wellington, getting the librarian's job ahead of Andersen, who thought he had been promised the position.7 Scholefield made his library position (which he held until 1947) reinforce his historical interests even more than his journalistic work had. The manuscripts he collected and the indexes he compiled facilitated his Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and other reference projects. Scholefield wrote monographs before and after the interwar years, and continued to write and broadcast political comment during this period,8 but from 1926 he concentrated on collecting source material and publishing editions or reference texts such as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. He has been described as the 'one-time doyen of New Zealand historians',9 but it would be more accurate to call him the concierge.

Scholefield lived from 1877 to 1963: the interwar period began in the middle of his career. Buick, by contrast, was born eleven years earlier and died in 1938: the interwar years were the twilight of his career, but also his most productive period.

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Earlier in life Buick had been a Liberal MHR, and was a whip from 1893-6. Leaving politics, he moved into journalism, and bought interests in a succession of newspapers until in 1913 he became a parliamentary reporter for the United Press Association.10 By 1927, he was working nights at United Press, unhappy with his work there and keen to work full-time on the history-writing he had been doing since 1900.11 Eventually, in 1934, he secured the job writing history under the auspices of the Dominion Museum (though, like Best, he was based in the Turnbull Library). As we shall see later, the job was supposed to involve collecting and collating data, but Buick used it to continue his work writing narrative books. Buick thus found wealth and leisure sufficient to permit him to write history full-time for the last three-and-a-half years of his life.12

Fildes enjoyed the greatest wealth and leisure of any of the historians discussed here, though he published nothing apart from several pamphlets and numerous newspaper pieces on 'recondite subjects relative to the beginnings of New Zealand'.13 What his material comfort did allow him to do was to collect, organise and digest books and other historical sources to make himself a fount of detail on a wide range of subjects. His significance in this historiographical milieu lay in his roles as authority, gadfly and assistant to others—'your helpfulness … and your standing as a collector of historical data', as Cowan told him.14

Fildes had not had any education past Standard Seven; he spent all his working life in the Post Office at various offices round the country, retiring in 1929 (at the age of 54) as assistant chief postmaster of Wellington. He did not marry until 1931, when he was 56 years old, and he remained childless. His job and family status meant that page 56he was reasonably well off, though he had to economise somewhat after he bought his large house in Kelburn.15 Fildes spent a lot of his money on books, manuscripts and art. Unlike some book-collectors, Fildes collected more out of an interest in books' contents than for the joys of the hunt. Like Hocken and unlike Turnbull, he spent much time and effort transcribing and taking notes on others' books and manuscripts.16 He kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, notes and other stray data and diligently indexed his collection, thus facilitating the retrieval of information for himself and others.17 Fildes' knowledge of New Zealand history was encyclopaedic, not just in its extent but also in its organisation. Fildes arguably knew, or was able to find, more facts of New Zealand history than anyone else at the time.

These three met each other and others in a variety of settings. Each belonged to a variety of associations in Wellington's active intellectual life. Scholefield, wearing his hat as political commentator, was a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations and later the Institute of International Relations; wearing his author's hat, he was a prominent member of PEN, in the course of whose business he dealt with Cowan.18 Buick, Fildes, Cowan and, of course, Andersen, were members of the Polynesian Society, which met regularly in the Turnbull Library. There was, however, no stable central body for historical discussions. From 1918 to 1924 the Wellington Philosophical Society had a History Section, to which Buick, Andersen and Best lectured, but the section could not keep up interest.19 From the manuscript sources that remain, it does not seem that the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association was an important forum for well known historians.

Consequently, specifically historiographical networks formed informally, through chance acquaintance and repeated contact. Buick made regular use of the telephone, and Fildes rang the increasingly housebound Cowan to talk about books.20 Buick met for morning tea with Fildes and Dora Wilcox, a poet (she wrote page 57the poem from which came the title of the Kowhai Gold anthology)21 with an abiding interest in the French artist Charles Meryon, who had painted scenes of Akaroa and its environs in the 1830s.22 In addition, there was correspondence, within Wellington and without. Stewart's career as a writer began in earnest after he had retired from national politics and had returned to Dunedin. From Dunedin he corresponded regularly with Fildes and Scholefield, both of whom he drew on for research favours. Ramsden did likewise. He was a New Zealander by birth, and later an Evening Post journalist, but when he began writing New Zealand history in the 1930s he was living in Sydney. He working for the Sydney Morning Herald until forced to resign in 1934 'owing to some trouble over a scoop concerning Test Match pictures'.23 After this time he seems to have done some freelance journalism, and his wife, a journalist too, helped support him financially.24 Ramsden did research on Samuel Marsden for several years before his book Marsden and the Missions was published in 1936.25 The Mitchell Library and the papers of one of Marsden's granddaughters living in Sydney provided some of the book's sources, but he also had Fildes do research for him in Wellington, and corresponded with Scholefield and Stewart.26

Historians also met at the Turnbull and parliamentary libraries. Cowan, Buick and Fildes met at the Turnbull as clients; from 1934 to 1938, Buick had an office there. At the Turnbull they had frequent contact with Andersen, the librarian, and its other regulars, such as teacher Nellie Coad, teachers' college lecturer Fanny Irvine-Smith, and judge Frederick Chapman.27 Both libraries were vital bases for the work of these and other writers. The staff alone were an asset Andersen supplied information to A. G. Butchers as he wrote his history of education in New Zealand; page 58two of Andersen's 'lady assistants', Grace Davidson and Alice Woodhouse, translated French documents for Buick's The French at Akaroa.28

More important, though, were the two libraries' collections. The Turnbull's strength for New Zealand history lay in its collections of New Zealand and Pacific books and manuscripts; the GAL's strengths were its official publications, archives and newspapers. The archival strength of the GAL owed much to Scholefield, who travelled the country collecting archival material, and acquired the papers of some notable politicians.29 For most of those historians researching topics other than political ones, though, the Turnbull Library was a more important resource. Technically the GAL was much bigger—in 1936 it had 140,000 volumes compared to the Turnbull's 80,000—but in a letter to Gordon Coates ten years earlier Andersen, the librarian from 1919 to 1937, had said that the Turnbull contained 'more than two-thirds as many books' as the GAL.30 Presumably many of the GAL's 140,000 books were volumes in government series. Size aside, the quality of the Turnbull's collection made the GAL's look like 'a sort of sublimated card-index', according to a scholarly friend whom Heenan asked to spy on the Turnbull in 1935.31

It would be wrong to present Buick, Fildes, Scholefield and so on as a happy and harmonious grouping. This was not a closely knit community. It was riven by fighting and silences. Fildes quarrelled with everyone, with varying degrees of severity, and it was said that Buick and Andersen did not speak to each other, despite the fact that each worked in an office in the Turnbull.32 However, the members of this community did (at most times) co-operate, and the work they and others produced owed much to the collaborations of this community.

These collaborations took the forms of historical debate and research undertaken for other people. Buick, Fildes, Cowan and the others debated the merits of histories written by each other and by other people. Fildes had a habit of sending authors unsolicited critiques of their works. His critiques usually concerned points of detail, as did the debates of these historians generally. Whether Hone Heke was page 59the first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi was a matter of some interest to them.33 Buick, Fildes and Ramsden expended much energy in an argument over whether the house depicted in a sketch by Lieutenant Thomas Woore was really James Busby's house at Waitangi.34 Cowan and Fildes argued over Henare Taratoa's actions at Gate Pa.35 These debates did not bring about much change. The participants tended to stick to their guns.

More fruitful were the exchanges of information that took place. While on a trip to London in 1935, Scholefield checked the log of the Herald in the Public Record Office for the third edition of Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi.36 Buick gave Fildes a facsimile of a letter from Hobson to Busby at a time when Fildes was working on Busby.37 Fildes did substantial research for Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions, working for '3 weeks morning & afternoon at the Turnbull Library, with City lunch & afternoon tea, reading the whole of Busby's despatches, copying out 70 or 80 sheets of paper … & writing you long letters'.38

Doing research for others was Fildes' main contribution to interwar historiography. Unlike, for example, Scholefield, he did not express disappointed literary pretensions, but it is difficult not to see him as a frustrated writer.39 His slender publications were written very heavily, in a style quite different from his wry correspondence.40 That he kept doing work for others for years while complaining about their ingratitude suggests that he derived some vicarious satisfaction from it. Aside from the help he rendered Ramsden, he also assisted Woodhouse, Elder, Guthrie-Smith, Andersen, Chappell, the Auckland Star proprietor and historian of the Albertland settlement Henry Brett, the Wellington Teachers' Training College lecturer Fanny Irvine-Smith, the Dunedin historian Basil Howard, Edward Gibbon Wakefield's relatives and others.41 Fildes did long-distance research page 60for Stewart's biography of William Rolleston,42 and helped Buick greatly, with research from Fildes' own collection, compiling reports for Buick and proofing his works, including the second edition of The Treaty of Waitangi, The French at Akaroa, The Mystery of the Moa, and a lecture on James Cook.43 Fildes felt that Buick's acknowledgements pages did not sufficiently credit him.44 In the case of Buick's Jubilee of the Port of Wellington 1880-1930, Fildes made amends for himself by writing '& to no one more than to Mr H. Fildes who was practically joint author' on his copy at the end of Buick's list of thanks to 'a number of gentlemen who have aided me with their research and advice.'45 Fildes reported similar misdemeanours by Buick with regard to Wilcox and Grace Davidson.46 Even allowing for exaggeration on Fildes' part, Buick's extensive and somewhat unprincipled use of other people dents the image of Buick as a selfless craftsman who started as a carpenter and finished as a historian.47

No working drafts remain of Buick's books or of Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions, so it is not possible to trace the substantial impact of Fildes' work on them. The consequences of this collective activity cannot be traced through the texts. It is, nevertheless, important to disclose some of the working relationships that are obscured by putting one person's name on the title page of a book. Something of their collaborative habits can be followed in their attempts to collect historical sources.

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Cowan and many local historians talked about the need to collect remnants of the past before it was too late. In Cowan's case the objects collected were memories; the local historians also wanted pioneer implements, the furnishings of life. Appeals to collect for the sake of the memory of the pioneers or 'the old-time Maori' carried emotional weight, and some historians doubtless played on that. But not all appeals for the preservation of history made reference to elderly pioneers or Maori, and the calls for salvage were not mere cloaks for historians' hunger for sources for their own work. There were good anecdotal reasons for saying that records were in danger of destruction. Some time in the 1890s Thomas Hocken found the Treaty of Waitangi 'buried in a heap of old papers and rubbish in a dungeon' underneath the Parliament Buildings and damaged by rats.48

But the urgency of the task of salvage may also have owed something to Pakeha perceptions of present and past. Some writers treated the rapidity of New Zealand's transformation from a 'wilderness' to a prosperous dominion with assured satisfaction.49 Others found a disorienting rapidity in New Zealand history. Guthrie-Smith and Cowan remarked on this,50 and Buick wrote of 'our fast receding history'.51 A pointed sense that the past was both recent and distant may have been a 'common problem of the imagination' for Pakeha who had lived the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.

For the historians discussed in this chapter, collecting historical sources overlapped with the library positions of some of them and their hobby of book-collecting. Fildes, Stewart, Scholefield and Andersen were active bibliophiles; Andersen wrote a book called The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting.52 I will not go any further in detailing the collections of this circle, and of the government institutions that their work revolved around, but will examine some of their attempts to fuse their roles as collectors and historians.53 As book-collectors and historians these people were well aware of Hocken's combination of the two roles, page 62but their role-model for salvaging of New Zealand historical records was Robert McNab. Scholefield paid tribute to McNab's influence, and Buick dedicated the first edition of his Treaty of Waitangi 'to Robert M'Nab … to whose enterprise and self-sacrifice we owe the recovery' of so much of that 'fast receding history'.54

From about 1898 until his death in 1917, McNab worked at excavating historical source material.55 He did his research in Sydney, London and Paris,56 and in the libraries of Hocken and Turnbull. McNab made considerable use of Alexander Turnbull's library, much as his followers depended on the library when it became public property.57 He also appealed to readers to send him old manuscripts, since 'generations may pass before another individual is found foolish enough to worry out all the detail of our early history'.58 McNab made no pretensions to literature: 'The reader is given the results of the Author's research, not the fruits of his thought.'59 His two volumes of Historical Records of New Zealand (1908, 1914) were outright compendia. His other publications fell somewhere between anthology and synthesis, tending toward the former. McNab constructed relentlessly factual, chronologically ordered narratives, punctuated with large chunks of quotation. It was deemed important to let sources speak for themselves. There are clear similarities between his work and later local historical compilations.

Buick's position on the payroll of the Dominion Museum was conceived as a continuation of McNab's work. At least, the Department of Internal Affairs saw it that way. An early suggestion of such a position was made by Downie Stewart in 1926. Writing to one of his successors as Minister of Internal Affairs, Stewart said that McNab's work should be continued. He recommended Jessie Hetherington, a secondary schools inspector, Cambridge alumna, and author of New Zealand: Its Political Connection with Great Britain.60 Nothing seems to have come of this suggestion, but Buick recommended himself for a similar job from 1927 onwards.61 He wanted to work full-time on 'the compilation of the historical records of New page 63Zealand and the preparation and publication of the results'. His efforts did not need to be published immediately.62 Buick was careful to point out that he wasn't asking for a job which was all research and no publishing—rather, documentary salvage and 'recording in narrative form' were to be twin aims.63 W. R. B. Oliver, the Director of the Dominion Museum, was sympathetic: 'As far as I am aware, a considerable proportion of the history of New Zealand is still awaiting a properly documented exposition. Besides filling this gap there is work for a historian to do in collecting for publication more historical records of the type published by the Hon. R. McNab.'64

In the light of subsequent events, however, it seems that Buick had no intention of becoming a compiler rather than an author. The tentative list of projects he submitted to Oliver just after he was hired included an examination of the unindexed Great Britain Parliamentary Papers in the GAL in search of interesting material on New Zealand, but that was the only retrieval work suggested. Other projects included 'Te Whiti and His Times', 'A History of the Province of Nelson', 'The Governorship of Governor FitzRoy', and a book on the New Zealand Constitution Act. These were suggestions for monographs, not compilations. The proposed works on Te Whiti and FitzRoy were conceived as revisionist, countering existing 'stereotyped' interpretations.65 Buick also proposed a re-writing of his own Old Marlborough, the writing of The Discovery of Dinornis, a sequel to his Mystery of the Moa, and 'An Appreciation of Thomas Bracken'—a project he had entertained as early as 1914.66

Oliver approved of this agenda,67 and compilation work thus became subordinate to Buick's assisting members of the public and pursuing his own interests.68 But Buick's appointment was not entirely without value for the gathering of officially useful historical data. Buick gathered information on New Zealand's first national flag and compiled lists of dates for the coming Centennial celebrations,69 though he died in February 1938 before much of the preparatory work of the Centennial had been done. The closest Buick came to compiling historical records was transcribing a 343-page manuscript by Baron de Thierry in the page 64Auckland Public Library.70 His appointment thus failed to combine history-writing with record-gathering in the way McNab had.

Historians also worked in their private capacities to augment the collections of public libraries,71 but the remaining connections between history and collection that I want to discuss here are textual ones. As with the local histories and Cowan's works, practices of collection were repeated in some texts. Buick, Ramsden and Stewart wrote in the mode of extensive quotation practised by McNab, Cowan and the local historians. McNab had written in 1913: 'The publication of the Author's paraphrase of the material would rob the events of that accuracy which is the feature of many of the rough unlettered accounts of the principals, and would never prove the last word on the question.'72 For McNab, avoiding paraphrase and synthesis was part of his quest to establish factual foundations for histories of New Zealand; with others, extensive quotation was important for its personal flavour as much as for its accuracy. While he was working on his biography of Rolleston, Stewart discussed the matter explicitly in a letter to James Rutherford, Professor of History at Auckland University College:

I have the book about finished but not being like you a trained historian I am constantly puzzled how far to interrupt the narrative by inserting letters. If one merely tears out of the letter a few sentences, or paraphrases it, one has the feeling that having used that part of the letter for its immediate purpose means that the full letter will never be published. My inclination is to put in the full letter, even though it deals with other topics and interrupts the flow of the narrative. I notice some biographers use practically no letters and merely state the substance of them where necessary in their own language. This makes the story run smoothly but if the man is a good letter writer it seems a pity to lose his mode of expressing himself.73

Other texts repeated collecting practices more obviously. Stewart edited the diary of his grandfather, George Hepburn.74 At his relatives' behest Fildes wrote up a mélange of reminiscences and diary entries of his grandfather, James John Taine. The work ran to 592 typed pages. Fildes added copious notes and queries, but did not attempt to synthesise the jagged fragments into any kind of coherent narrative.75

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The most impressive textual analogue of the will to collect and protect historical data was Scholefield's Dictionary. It was not entirely 'Scholefield's Dictionary'. Rutherford, J. B. Condliffe and others wrote a few of the entries. Airini Woodhouse supplied him with information for the Rhodes entries and Cowan gave him material on Donald McLean.76 Fildes, A. E. Currie and Bishop Herbert Williams, a correspondent on Maori matters with many historians of this time, made suggestions and corrections.77 In its final stages, J. C. Beaglehole 'spent much time and enormous pains on the book'.78 Nevertheless, Scholefield did the bulk of the work. It was his pet project, and he worked on it for more than thirty years.

The project's origins lay in the first edition of Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific, which Scholefield compiled with fellow New Zealand Times journalist Emil Schwabe in 1907-8. Unlike those in the Cyclopedia of New Zealand, published from 1897 to 1907, the entries in Who's Who were not paid for by their subjects. Biographical information was supplied by the subjects themselves but was, said Scholefield, 'carefully checked by reliable sources'.79 Without Schwabe, Scholefield kept Who's Who alive, putting out further editions in 1925, 1932, 1941 and 1951. As new information came to hand, he included it in his growing biographical database.80

In the early 1930s, by his own account, Scholefield began to consider using this database as the foundation of a New Zealand equivalent of the immense British Dictionary of National Biography. He recalled in his autobiography: 'As I fed fresh cards into [the card catalogue built up for Who's Who] I could envisage the publication in a decade or so of a National Biography of New Zealand. That now became a feature of my work.'81 Scholefield worked on the Dictionary as a personal project until the announcement in 1936 that the Centennial celebrations would involve an extensive publishing programme. He wrote to the Under-secretary for Internal Affairs suggesting the inclusion of the Dictionary among the Centennial publications.82 A committee considered the proposal,83 and the Dictionary became one of the official Centennial publications.

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Scholefield's card catalogue for Who's Who was a major resource for the Dictionary, but it had its limitations. Scholefield observed that 'public men' were more reticent about 'this type of publicity' in 1908 than in the 1930s, and many were omitted because they were too modest to supply information.84 Secondly, Who's Who could not include everyone of significance in New Zealand history because it dealt only with people alive at or just before the time of publication (the Dictionary included no living persons).85 For those who had died before the first Who's Who, Scholefield's starting point was the scattering of compendia on New Zealanders of note published in New Zealand in 1910, including what Andersen called 'that great repository of fiction', the Cyclopedia of New Zealand.86 In the years between the first Who's Who and the Dictionary, what Scholefield regarded as some good works of 'collective biography' were published, notably Acland's Early Canterbury Runs and Fulton's Medical Practice in Otago and Southland.87 There were also some adequate book-length biographies.

Despite this, Scholefield still had to undertake a massive amount of primary research. His main primary sources were information from relatives of the subjects to be written about, and obituaries in newspapers. A large number of the entries in the Dictionary end with a citation of an obituary. As the General Assembly Librarian, Scholefield had access to a wide range of newspapers from the country's history.88 He also hunted down notices in less mainstream publications. The Old Boys' lists of private schools were an important source,89 and copies of the Christ's College Register frequently turn up in Scholefield's papers in the Turnbull. Other journals from which he gleaned biographical essays included Katipo, Newspaper News, The Church Chronicle, Flashlight, Church Gazette, and even the Hampstead Parish Church Magazine of April 1909 for an article on Bishop Selwyn. He kept a fairly complete collection of page 67clippings of Cowan's series on 'Famous New Zealanders', published every month in the New Zealand Railways Magazine from 1933 to 1936.90

Scholefield also drew upon the knowledge of the descendants of his subjects. He lamented that people did not know enough about their relatives, and often could not tell him anything that he did not already know.91 However, his correspondence reveals that Scholefield was helped to a great degree by the information supplied by relatives and local historians.92

When he began to work seriously on the Dictionary, Scholefield wrote a series of potted biographies for the daily press, 'in the hope that this outline of the lives of some of the more prominent figures in the history of the provinces would lead to verification or correction of errors in advance of publication' in the Dictionary.93 No fewer than 118 of these biographies were published in the Christchurch Press, the Evening Post and the Otago Daily Times in 1929-31. Several years later Scholefield wrote a companion series on national rather than provincial figures. These articles, Scholefield recalled, served their purpose: they 'interested many in the great figures of the past' and 'induced those already having some knowledge of the subject to point out inaccuracies and suggest additions'.94

Scholefield's research methods interacted with the principles of collection and selection that the Dictionary embodied. Despite Scholefield's claim to have eschewed 'evaluation' and adopted 'a purely factual approach', many Dictionary articles were constrained by his dependence on information from relatives.95 Family members were selective in the information they wished to publicise, and Scholefield consequently shouldered some of the filio-pietistic constraints of local history. Among those constraints was the habit of disclosing only those personal, 'private' matters that would not be embarrassing if aired in public. In this and other respects, the Dictionary was a monument to the 'public' values of local histories and other biographical works. The criterion for admission to the Dictionary was 'significance'. 'Neither birth nor wealth in itself is a valid qualification. Significance in our national history, from whatever standpoint, is the sole consideration.'96 Scholefield defined significance as public impact—hence his phrase 'public men', 'Commoners', who from different perspectives might be thought significant by virtue of their typicality, page 68found no place in Scholefield's scheme. Few women other than writers, artists or school principals appear in the Dictionary.

Holding a position in national politics guaranteed entry virtually ex officio. Other groups who fell into the category of the publicly significant were noted in D. O. W. Hall's public-relations account of the forthcoming Dictionary. They included Maori leaders, members of the old Provincial Councils, judges, 'the more notable magistrates', and bishops. Other 'men who fall outside' the aforementioned categories could also gain entry, depending on their 'significance'. These 'men' included missionaries, soldiers, public servants, educationalists, writers, artists, prominent women, and mayors of 'any of the chief cities'.97

Te Wherowhero, Wiremu Tamehana Tarapipipi, Te Kooti and other Maori leaders were 'significant', but some Maori 'public men' slipped through Scholefield's net. Scholefield found Maori 'difficult to obtain information from'.98 Part of this difficulty must be attributable to Scholefield's own character. Maori who had played an important part in New Zealand history, and their descendants, had fewer qualms about sharing their life stories with Cowan and Ramsden. There is also evidence that Scholefield had difficulty identifying publicly significant Maori. A year before the Dictionary was published, he wrote to Te Kauru Karaitiana, whose acquaintance he seemed to have made only recently, and asked, 'By the way, can you tell me who Henare Matua was? He was chosen as candidate at the election of 1879 at which Henare Tomoana was elected.'99 That the author of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography did not know who the founder of the Hawke's Bay Repudiation Movement was did not augur well for the quality of his Maori biographies.

In the introduction to the Dictionary, Scholefield drew attention to his inclusion of malefactors such as James Mackenzie, and 'persons of special interest' such as William Stedman Aldis and William Lane.100 'Despite his efforts to take due note of all walks of life, however', wrote a contemporary academic reviewer, 'the politicians definitely dominate Dr. Scholefield's pages'.101 One of the peculiarities of Scholefield's introduction was that most of the obscure figures he claimed to have made 'a genuine effort to 'rescue from oblivion' were not commoners or artists but members of the Provincial Councils.102 Despite his claims, Scholefield was not struggling against an orthodoxy. W. P. Morrell's substantial and academically respectable book on the provincial system had been published eight years before the page 69Dictionary, and Elder's New Zealand: An Outline History explicitly acknowledged the provinces and admitted their councillors to the national pantheon.103 Scholefield's 'rescue' of the provinces had less to do with historiographical orthodoxy than with his personal investment in old provincial figures, some of whom he had come to know through correspondence, and in whom he had had a long-standing interest.104 Like Cowan and the local historians, he had strong personal ties to his subjects.

Late in his life Scholefield regretted that his potential for 'creative' work had been frustrated by his attention to the Dictionary and other reference compendia.105 He was less comfortable than McNab was about forsaking 'literary edifices' for factual compilations.106 However its practitioners regarded the matter, though, the collection of historical sources and the publication of source material and factual digests formed an important strand of interwar historiography. Its importance lay not only in the information and sources harvested and preserved, but also in the way collection shaped the texts written in the Wellington milieu and by local historians around New Zealand. The textual analogues of collection were the closest the non-university historians came to an over-arching disciplinary convention.

Scholefield and Stewart had the biography of 'New Zealand statesmen', and Fildes busied himself with all manner of subjects, but the subject that generated the most common interest among the historians discussed in this chapter was the Bay of Islands between 1814 and 1840. Buick and Ramsden wrote books on Maori and Pakeha interaction in the North. Fildes wrote some newspaper articles and collected material on the subject. Correspondents in other centres, such as Chappell in Auckland and Elder in Dunedin, worked over the same ground. Their work focused on a limited area, but it was significantly different from local history. It lacked the specifically local commemorative aspect, and it made developments in the North emblematic of the story of New Zealand as a whole. Many other places in New Zealand had witnessed missionary and Maori interaction, and signings of the Treaty of Waitangi, but nowhere else attracted study by so many non-residents. The North had a 'picturesque' appeal for outsiders. 'The Bay of Islands', with its beautiful landscapes, its Maori inhabitants, and its licentious European population, was almost a stock device as well as a subject.

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Cowan's portrait of Kororareka's 'licence and lawlessness' as appealingly 'red-blooded' was the most positive.107 Fildes argued that Kororareka had not been as bad as other places in the Pacific.108 Ramsden had a different view: 'Hardened, vicious, loose-living, resentful of law and order in any form, the scum of Port Jackson and the Pacific generally had, before 1837, congregated in the Bay of Islands'.109 Kororareka's raffish inhabitants threatened the missionary enterprise in the Bay of Islands. For Ramsden, this was regrettable in itself, because his book attempted to make New Zealand's story the story of Maori-Pakeha unity through Christianity. Others valued the missions more for their contribution to the British annexation and settlement of New Zealand. Where Marsden conceived the adoption of western ways as a tool of Christianisation, some historians praised the missionaries for 'civilising' through Christianisation. Their own strategy thus almost inverted, the missionaries became 'pioneer[s]' and paved the way for British settlement.110

Of the historical studies written in the interwar period on the Bay of Islands, racial contact and the steps toward annexation, Buick's The Treaty of Waitangi was perhaps the best known, the most enduring and in some ways the most representative. It is this book that I have singled out for an extended discussion here. The book was first published in 1914, and was considerably expanded for the second edition published in 1933. This is the edition I will be discussing.

The discussion that follows does not pretend to sum up Buick's life work. Buick wrote history for forty years. The Treaty of Waitangi is quite different from some of his other work, such as the books on Te Rauparaha and 'old Manawatu' that he wrote in the first decade of the twentieth century. One enthusiastic reader's response indicates the flavour of some of Buick's other work: 'If you want to write a Lindsay Buick history with real adventure, pioneering and "atmosphere"—go to the Chathams. The place reeks of early whalers, canons [sic], full riggers, cosmopolitans, bullock teams, Te Kooti, etc. There are "old people" who yarn all night and their dope is of universal interest. Rape and murder, shipwreck and waterspouts—oh, I wish I could weave it into a saga. I can only recommend you to advise Lindsay B. of the opportunity he is losing.'111 The Treaty of Waitangi, by contrast, created an air of what might be called literary statesmanship.

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Buick claimed that the treaty had never been seriously breached; he made the treaty symbolic of Maori acceptance of 'British' ways. The treaty both enabled British settlement and created responsibilities to Maori. Buick's book was a signal attempt at pressing the treaty upon Pakeha. By the 1930s, the treaty 'had almost gone out of the public mind', according to Vernon Reed, the MHR for the Bay of Islands from 1908 to 1922 and a Legislative Councillor from 1924 to 1931, who had attempted since 1908 to stimulate Pakeha interest in the treaty.112 The treaty was 'barely mentioned' in the celebration of the colony's fiftieth jubilee in 1890.113 While he did not have Vernon Reed's concern for Bay of Islands tourism, Buick's purposes were just as celebratory. How he managed to make such a positive book out of such a fraught history is the subject of my discussion.

Buick's celebration extends to most of the book's characters. He made a point of emphasising the upright character of his important Maori and Pakeha actors, such as William Hobson and Tamati Waka Nene.114 He took an extremely benevolent view of New Zealand's colonial administrators generally,115 and wrote that George Grey had an 'innate love of justice'.116 Good sorts abounded in cameo parts. For instance, in taking the treaty south, Henry Williams is assisted by 'Captain Clayton, who, like the loyal sailor he was, readily agreed to forgo his more lucrative coastal trade in order that his vessel might remain at the disposal of the Government'.117 The only real disreputables are the Pakeha ruffians and grog-shop-owners littering the Bay of Islands. Maori do not act 'barbarically'—cannibalism, for instance, is played down.118

The waste lands debate and everything else after 1840 are dealt with comparatively briefly. Buick's focus is on the treaty's birth, not its career. His story begins with the missionaries and James Busby, and rumblings in England and New page 72Zealand towards British annexation. There follows an account of Hobson's activities and the drafting and translation of the treaty, and then a lengthy treatment of the negotiations with Maori over the treaty, drawn primarily from William Colenso's Authentic and Genuine History of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Buick then surveys the terms of the treaty and how they had been implemented; the bulk of the final chapter concerns the debate in England over the proposed New Zealand constitution and its bearing on the treaty and the New Zealand Company.

Even without discussing the career of the treaty at length, Buick still had to do a considerable amount of whitewashing to make the treaty look like the founding document of a wholesome mythology of 'he iwi tahi tatou'. Buick's treatment of the problems with the Maori translation of the treaty are particularly suspect. The only part of the English text which was poorly translated was 'forests and fisheries [sic]', which was subsumed under the general category 'taonga katoa'.119 Buick takes kawanatanga to mean sovereignty or supreme authority, and interprets Nopera Panakareao's famous dictum as follows: 'The sovereignty was the shadow, the land was the substance'.120

To criticise Buick for not seeing the problems involved in the terms rangatiratanga and kawanatanga runs the risk of anachronism. In his explication of the treaty for Maori in 1922, Apirana Ngata had characterised Te Tiriti as a treaty of 'complete cession',121 There, Ngata too interpreted Nopera Panakareao's dictum to take the shadow of the land to be authority.122 Ngata had advised Buick about the Maori translations for Buick's book.123 It was, however, possible for Pakeha to come to different understandings of Te Tiriti which made it quite different from the English text but still meaningful. In 1939 or 1940, James Rutherford, hardly a 'philo-Maori', wrote that the English term 'possession' in the treaty was 'very imperfectly translated'. Rangatiratanga 'literally' meant '"chieftainship"'. 'But it was not very easy for them [the chiefs] to distinguish at all clearly between the territorial sovereignty to be ceded to the Queen, and their individual territorial ownership.'124 Ten years after the final edition of Buick's book, but well before the work of Ruth Ross, Rutherford could write: 'The Maori text of the Treaty guarantees to the chiefs and tribes the "Rangatira-tanga" of their lands—i.e. the "Chieftainship", or "the power of the Rangatira"—which taken literally seemed to imply that, on their own page 73lands, the Maori chiefs would, retain all their power [,] authority and "mana" as rangatira over their own people. No wonder Nopera could say, "The shadow of the land goes to the Queen. The substance remains with us."'125

It would therefore be overly permissive to treat Buick's version of Te Tiriti simply as a product 'of its time'. Moreover, Buick's claims of the unanimity of the two texts—and it is this notion of accord, not the precise content of that accord, which is central to his myth-making project—efface important facts, in particular T. E. Young's re-writing of the treaty in 1869. Walter Mantell, formerly a Native Minister and from 1866 until his death a Legislative Councillor, had insisted on a new translation into Maori, one more in line with current government thinking. Young's translation replaced 'kawanatanga' with 'rangatiratanga', and replaced 'rangatiratanga' with 'tuturutanga' (absolute guarantee).126 Buick must have been aware of this because at one stage he refers to Young's compilation of 'an official list of the treaty signatories for the information of the Legislative Council, which is printed in the Blue Books of the Dominion'.127 This list begins on the page facing Young's translation.128 If the treaty was indeed accurately translated in 1840, and if Te Tiriti really did provide for a cession of supreme authority, why was it necessary for the government to re-write the Maori text in 1869? It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Buick simply excluded evidence that did not accord with his argument that the two texts were unanimous.

Buick's style in The Treaty of Waitangi contributes to the smoothness of his story. The rhetorical strategies of his discussion of confiscation and war are of particular importance, but his general practice of creating an impression of authority requires attention first. Generally, Buick wrote measured, sedate prose disturbed by the occasional garish adjective. He often wrote in periods, with multiple clauses queuing up behind semicolons. Archaisms such as 'ere' gave the text a staid, authoritative feel. Though adulatory, the tone seldom savoured of propaganda. The narrator frequently considered contrasting opinions of a person's character and came out on the side of the more generous estimate, thus maintaining both amicability and an impression of judiciousness.

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The Treaty of Waitangi has two principal stylistic voices, those of the chronicler and the orator. The chronicler follows the model of McNab, writing chronologically, quoting often and very extensively (and often to the detriment of narrative flow), retaining for each character what Stewart called 'his mode of expressing himself'. This style is particularly evident in the account of the signing of the treaty, where Buick reproduces lengthy passages from speeches recorded in Colenso's Authentic and Genuine History. But Buick's chronicler is different from McNab's. There are much stronger narrative sinews. Though his chapters sometimes lose their focus (partly because of their length), individual paragraphs and episodes do not jar against each other. A reviewer comparing McNab and Buick wrote that Buick had less detail and a stronger 'simply told but directly consecutive narrative which, though not without value as to detail, has its chief importance as a comprehensive picture. To put it briefly, with Mr. Buick the whole is greater than its part[s].'129 Not only was Buick's work more cohesive, it was also more 'sympathetic'. The reviewer was presumably referring to Buick's speculations on characters' motives and feelings. Buick adopted a comfortably superior tone and wrote as if he knew the actors personally.130 This is the scholarly equivalent of name-dropping, building up an air of authority through hints of intimacy.

Buick also differed from McNab by adding 'imaginative colour' to his account.131 Contemporaries described Buick's writing as evocative, the work of a writer who brought the past to life.132 But Buick's really colourful turns are the exception rather than the rule, placed for dramatic effect. The fire of indignation ran through the Maori veins as they contemplated the deception; the rumble of discontent grew as the tidings spread; the breath of battle was in the air'.133 In The Treaty of Waitangi, the most common kind of imaginative embellishment is the 'poetic' description of the weather, sometimes with Ruskin's pathetic fallacy blown up to cosmic proportions: 'under the approving smile of Heaven'; 'The morning of the auspicious day (Wednesday, 5th February) broke with nature's approving smile upon it. The sun shining brightly in the heavens, lit up the blue waters of the bay, page 75the slopes of the brown hills, the shadows of the sombre forest in which the birds sang even more blithely than was their wont'.134

The other voice in The Treaty of Waitangi occurred mainly on the margins of the work, in the prefaces and at the end of the final chapter. These were the parts of the text that discussed the beneficial consequences of the treaty—in particular its purported long-term assimilative benefits—and circumscribed its breaches. This was the voice of Buick the orator: these passages clearly paralleled speeches that Buick made in the 1930s. One of these was a speech on the treaty to an unspecified audience of 'Gentlemen' some time in the 1930s,135 and the other was the sanguine, paternalistic and social-Darwinian address Buick wrote for Lord Bledisloe to deliver at the ceremony when Bledisloe presented the treaty grounds to the dominion in 1934.136

Buick the orator's main rhetorical strategy was the way he skilfully trod a fine line between apology and apologia. The Taranaki war of 1860-61 was said to be unjust, but this was undercut somewhat by Buick's reference to it in the same paragraph, twice, as a 'blunder'.137 To the same end—the combination of repentance and unrepentance—Buick conceded lesser points to retain more important ones. Thus he admitted in mild terms that the Taranaki confiscations and the treatment of Te Whiti were unjust, creating an air of magnanimity which may have been sufficient to blind some readers to the way the text moved, in the next few paragraphs, straight from the defeat in the Waikato war to the Kauhanganui without any reference to the confiscation of two million acres of Waikato land.138

Buick glossed over conflict and broken promises in other ways too. A footnote on the last page of the text referred in a grotesque fashion to Wiremu Ratana's petition concerning treaty grievances. It is used as evidence that 'to-day the Maori is more insistent upon a due observation of its covenants than is the European': nothing is said of the content of the petition apart from the fact that it requests that page 76the treaty be embodied in New Zealand and imperial statutes.139 Buick placed a paternalistic emphasis on maintaining Maori trust, but he did not frankly admit past breaches of trust.140

Buick's story of Maori-Pakeha concord and Maori endorsement of 'British' ways found a place in New Zealand culture in several ways. It sold moderately well, and at least one reader described it as a book 'which all New Zealanders ought to read'.141 It ran to three editions, the second of which the government subsidised by buying copies for cabinet ministers and thirty-six government departments.142 Buick's story reached the height of its prominence in 1934. Two years previously, Bledisloe had announced that he had bought the site where the treaty was signed and was giving it to the nation. Bledisloe also subsidised the second edition of Buick's book to commemorate the gift further.143 At the ceremonies at Waitangi in February 1934, practically all the speakers, Maori and Pakeha, followed Buick's line on the treaty—that it was 'the Maori Magna Carta', that Pakeha had never seriously breached it, and that Pakeha had an ongoing duty to minister to Maori.144 Bledisloe certainly followed Buick's line—Buick wrote his speech for him.145 Though Pakeha enthusiasm for the treaty as a founding document waned after 1934, Buick's myth did eventually take hold. However, by the time a New Zealand government made the sixth of February the national day, the public profile of the treaty was beginning to erode assimilationist rhetoric, not reinforce it.

Like Cowan, Buick fashioned a narrative of New Zealand's development which involved concord between Maori and Pakeha. Their stories were vastly different: Cowan saw compact arising from conflict; Buick edited conflict from his story, and saw Maori as the subordinates of Pakeha guardians. Ramsden's Marsden and the Missions is more concerned with Christianity than sovereignty, and it does not defend European governments the way Buick's book does. But the differences in argument, subject matter and moral import should not obscure the fact that the works of Cowan, Buick and Ramsden were the only ones in the interwar period to page 77concentrate on Maori-Pakeha relations as a formative aspect of New Zealand history.

Buick mattered more for his writing than for his contributions to the accumulation of historical sources. Others collected material whose usefulness has long outlasted that of their books. Given the scope of this thesis, however, I have concentrated less on the archival acquisitions of Scholefield and Fildes than I have on the textual analogues of their collecting. Historians around New Zealand amassed data for their own and others' usage, and wrote in ways that echoed this practice. The weighty body of work produced by Buick, Scholefield, Cowan, Ramsden and Stewart in the interwar period, and in particular Scholefield's Dictionary, were the most substantial instances of this kind of historical writing.

The ties of collaboration and debate between Fildes, Scholefield, Buick, Cowan, Andersen, Stewart, Ramsden and others have been described in some detail in this chapter because these ties constituted an important historiographical community. To be sure, its debates and disputes sometimes seem trivial to an outsider. But this circle's members were prolific given the extent of their 'wealth and leisure', and their work often depended on the labour of others, especially Fildes. Because of the accidents of evidence I cannot be sure that no similar historiographical communities existed in New Zealand. I can, however, say that no other historiographical community produced as much historical literature as the one discussed here.

The Wellington community was also unusual in its separation from academic historians. Buick crossed swords with Rutherford over the accuracy of an Auckland compilation of dates for the Centennial, but otherwise seems to have had no contact with academics.146 The only academic with whom these historians were in regular contact was Elder, and he was not a Wellington resident. In Auckland, Rutherford mixed with Chappell, Forbes Eadie and other non-university historians; in Dunedin, Elder did likewise. The Wellingtonians' local professor until 1935 was F. P. Wilson, who wrote no New Zealand history. He was president of the Wellington Early Settlers' Association during the 1930s, and until 1931 was president of the Wellington Historical Association (that is, the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association), but he seems to have had little contact with Buick, Fildes, Cowan, Scholefield and the others.147 When Beaglehole and F. L. W. Wood took up posts at Victoria in 1936, they greatly enlivened historical studies at the college. Within two years of their arrival, Buick and Fildes were dead. Cowan slid page 78into incapacitation three years later.148 The community had broken down, and the question of how it would have related to—or dealt with—the community that formed around Beaglehole and Wood was not posed.

When Buick died in 1938, his office in the Turnbull Library was not occupied by another resident historian. Later that year, however, Heenan appointed Beaglehole 'research adviser' to the library, though in practice he was a research adviser to the Historical Branch of Internal Affairs.149 The change is an indication, perhaps too convenient, of the shift in government approval from non-university historians to historians working in the academy. This shift was most pronounced in the Centennial history programme. As we shall see, however, the differences between the university historians and the Wellington circle were not always as clear-cut as the differences between Buick and Beaglehole.

1 J. A. Young to T. Lindsay Buick, 9 August 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.

2 Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1 1935/187/128.

3 Rachel Barrowman, The Turnbull: A Library and Its World, Auckland, 1995, pp. 34-5.

4 Cowan to Scholefield, 12 March 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.

5 Buick to the editor, Christchurch Press, 15 July 1921, T. Lindsay Buick Papers, MS Papers 58/25, ATL.

6 Guy H. Scholefield, New Zealand in Evolution: Industrial, Economic and Political, London, 1909.

7 G. H. Scholefield, 'Autobiography', unpublished typescript, nd [c. 1960] pp. 196-204, Scholefield Papers, 212/67; Andersen to Sir Joseph Kinsey, July or August 1926, Andersen Papers, 148/1. I am grateful to Peter Gibbons for giving me notes on this letter.

8 V. Rigg to Scholefield, 26 October 1939, Scholefield Papers, 212/C9; Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 283-4.

9 Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand 1860-1950, Wellington, 1990, p. 35.

10 J. E. Traue, Thomas Lindsay Buick', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, p. 77. As is suggested by the government subsidies on some of his books, and his eventual securing of a government job, Buick maintained useful contacts with people in high places, perhaps through parliamentary reporting as much as through his earlier connections as an MHR.

11 Buick to Gordon Coates, 4 April 1927; Buick to H. R. H. Balneavis, 22 April 1928, IA1, 1935/187/128. Traue, 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', p. 77, erroneously claims that Buick was doing parliamentary reporting until his retirement from journalism in 1933.

12 'Sufficient' is the key word. Buick's salary was only £250 a year. He had originally asked for £500. Cowan had been paid £300 a year for his work on The New Zealand Wars fifteen years earlier. Young to Buick, 3 August 1934; Balneavis to Coates, 7 September 1928, IA1, 1935/187/128; Hislop to R. F. Bollard, 4 January 1924, IA1 126/8/23.

13 Fildes to J. A. Young, 6 October 1933, IA1, 1935/187/128.

14 Cowan to Fildes, 28 December 1935, Fildes Papers, box 34. The references in this chapter to the Fildes collection in the Victoria University of Wellington Library require a note of explanation. In the two preceding chapters I have cited Fildes' correspondence and other personal papers—the Fildes Papers. Items in this category are cited in the following way: [item description], Fildes Papers, [box number]. In this chapter, I also cite Fildes' collection of books. Fildes annotated his copies of books and kept related notes and letters in them. References to correspondence or notes kept in these books are followed by the citation: Fildes [series-number of volume]. Where I have cited one of Fildes' annotations to a book, the reference takes the following form: [author of book], [title of book], p. [page annotated], Fildes [series-number of volume].

15 K. A. Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes and His Collection', New Zealand Libraries, 38, 5 (October 1975), pp. 254, 265-6.

16 Fildes to A. J. Harrop, 28 July 1930, A. J. Harrop Papers, MS Papers 1271/1, ATL; H. J. Barnett to Fildes, 14 August 1930, Fildes Papers, box 37.

17 Fildes, Scrapbook on Porirua, MS Papers 1081, ATL; Selective Indexes to Certain Books Relating to Early New Zealand, Compiled by H. E. M. Fildes, ca. 1920 to 1937, and Now Transcribed by the Victoria University of Wellington Library, Wellington, 1984.

18 Scholefield, 'Autobiography, pp. 230-1; Cowan to Scholefield, 12 March 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.

19 David Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making in New Zealand 1840-1930', draft of a research essay for Diploma in Museum Studies, Massey University, 1996, pp. 41-2; Buick to the editor, Christchurch Press, 15 July 1921, Buick Papers, 58/25.

20 Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801; Fildes to Buick, 2 August 1933, in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353, ATL.

21 G. H. Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific, 4th edn, Wellington, 1941, p. 352; Pat Lawlor, Confessions of a Journalist: with Observations on Some Australian and New Zealand Writers, Auckland, 1935, pp. 255-6; Quentin Pope, ed., Kowhai Gold: An Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Verse, London, 1930, p. ii. Wilcox later became Mrs Hamelius and then Mrs Moore but seems to have kept her maiden name as a pen name.

22 Wilcox to Fildes, 10 June 1923, Fildes Papers, box 39; Wilcox, 'Charles Meryon: A French Artist in New Zealand', United Empire: The Royal Colonial Institute Journal, 9, 10 (October 1921), pp. 690-93, Fildes 1235a.

23 Ramsden to Fildes, 5 July 1934, Fildes Papers, box 8.

24 Ramsden to W. E. Parry, 29 October 1936, IA1, 126/8/20.

25 Eric Ramsden, 'Early History', Auckland Star, 4 February 1933; Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions: Prelude to Waitangi, Dunedin, 1936.

26 Fildes to Ramsden, 10 February 1937, 'short copy in Fildes 122; Ramsden to Scholefield, '29 February 1933' (presumably 1 March: 1933 was not a leap year); Ramsden to Stewart, 29 October 1937, Scholefield Papers, 212/C9.

27 Barrowman, Turnbull, pp. 34-6, 204n.

28 Gibbons, '"Going Native"', vol. 2, p. 435; see also pp. 436-8; Alice Woodhouse, 'Early Days in the Turnbull Library', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 116. Alice Woodhouse was Airini Woodhouse's sister-in-law: Airini Woodhouse to Fildes, 19 September 1935, box 16, Fildes Papers.

29 Ralph Munn and John Barr, New Zealand Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for Their Improvement, Christchurch, 1934, p. 30; Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 207, 216; Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, H-32, 1958, p. 17.

30 Munn and Barr, New Zealand Libraries, p. 30; Report of the Alexander Turnbull Library for the Year Ended 31st March 1937, Wellington, 1937, p. 3; Andersen to Coates, 13 July 1926, quoted in A. G. Bagnall, 'A Troubled Childhood: "The Nucleus of a National Collection"', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 105.

31 Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 55.

32 Ibid., p. 35.

33 Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers, 196/169; Kenneth Ledward to Fildes, 29 June 1933 (as transcribed by Fildes); 'Matanga' [Chappell], 'Our Famous Treaty: New Light on Old Facts', New Zealand Herald, 17 June 1933, both in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353.

34 Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers, 196/169; Buick to Ramsden, 13 August 1933, Ramsden Papers, 196/170; Ramsden to Fildes, 4 December 1933, Fildes Papers, box 8.

35 Cowan to Fildes, 30 July 1935; Cowan to Fildes, August 1935 (no day given); Fildes to Cowan, 22 December 1935 (copy by Fildes), Fildes Papers, box 34.

36 Scholefield to Buick, 6 August 1935, Buick Papers, 58/112.

37 Fildes to Buick, 2 August 1933, in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353; Fildes, 'Busby's Victoria', New Zealand Herald, 15 May 1934.

38 Fildes to Ramsden, 10 February 1937, 'short copy' in Fildes 122.

39 Scholefield, 'Autobiography', pp. 204, 226.

40 H. Fildes, The Last of the Ngati Mamoe: The Wild People of the New Zealand Mountain and Bush, Dunedin, 1936.

41 Woodhouse to Fildes, 15 June 1937, 18 July 1937, and 3 September 1937, Fildes Papers, box 16; Elder to Fildes, 21 December 1935, Fildes Papers, box 39; Guthrie-Smith to Fildes, 24 March 1937, Fildes Papers, box 5; Andersen to Fildes, 20 June 1932, Fildes Papers, box 1; Chappell to Fildes, 12 June 1933; Fildes to Chappell, 14 June 1933, Fildes Papers, box 1; Brett to Fildes, 25 July 1923, Fildes Papers, box 34; F. L. Irvine-Smith, The Streets of My City; Wellington, New Zealand, Wellington, 1948, pp, 7, 26, 61; Howard to Fildes, 26 November 1933, Fildes Papers, box 39; Edith Jervis to Fildes, 30 August 1931, Fildes Papers, box 39.

42 Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 265.

43 Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers 196/169; Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801; Fildes to Ramsden, 30 May 1934, Ramsden Papers, 196/171. The lecture was 'Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S.: A Lecture Delivered by T. Lindsay Buick, C.M.G., F.R. Hist.S. before the Members of the Yorkshire Society of New Zealand at Wellington 6th June 1934', qMS-0296, ATL.

44 Fildes, 'T. Lindsay Buick & H. Fildes', 4 October 1929, Fildes 1801.

45 T. Lindsay Buick, Jubilee of the Port of Wellington 1880-1930, Wellington, 1930, p. 5, Fildes 1801.

46 Fildes to Ramsden, 30 May 1934, Ramsden Papers 196/171; Fildes to Ramsden, 19 September 1932, Ramsden Papers 196/169. Hugh Wright, the Mitchell Librarian, wrote to Fildes about Buick's treatment of him over the Jubilee of the Port of Wellington: 'I am surprised to learn that T. Lindsay Buick treated you as he did Dora Wilcox. The least an author can do is to publicly acknowledge the assistance given him by others.' Wright to Fildes, 29 January 1930, Fildes 1801.

47 Accounts depicting Buick in this way include Traue, 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', and D. O. W. H[all], 'Thomas Lindsay Buick', in A. H. McClintock, ed., An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 3 vols, Wellington, 1966, vol. 1.

48 Otago Daily Times, 11 August 1909, quoted in E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr. Hocken and His Fellow Collectors, Dunedin, 1961, p. 46; Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making', p. 21. Colquhoun also cites, but does not quote, a letter from the under-secretary of Internal Affairs to his Minister, which, says Colquhoun, 'suggests that there has been some exaggeration in archives lore about the Department's neglect'. Ibid.

49 Gillespie, 'Preface' to Gillespie, ed., New Zealand Short Stories, pp. v-vi,

50 Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, p. vii; Cowan, 'Chapter I: The Old Race and the New', typescript, nd, Cowan Papers 39/42C.

51 T. Lindsay Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi, or, How New Zealand Became a British Colony, Wellington, 1914, p. v.

52 Johannes Andersen, The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, Auckland, 1936; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes'. For Stewart, see E. H. McCormick, Alexander Turnbull: His Life, His Circle, His Collections, Wellington, 1974, p. 221. For Scholefield, see P. A. Lawlor, Books and Bookmen: New Zealand and Overseas, Wellington, 1954, p. 101.

53 On government collecting see Barrowman, Turnbull, chs 2-3; Bagnall, 'A Troubled Childhood'; Colquhoun, 'The State, Archives Keeping and History Making'.

54 Scholefield to Thomas Mackenzie, 28 October 1913, IA1, 126/8/10; Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, 1st edn, p. v.

55 J. E. Traue, 'Robert McNab', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, p. 315.

56 McNab to Scholefield, 1 April 1910; McNab to Scholefield, 24 December 1913, Scholefield Papers, 212/C10.

57 McCormick, Alexander Turnbull, p. 206.

58 Robert McNab, From Tasman to Marsden: A History of Northern New Zealand from 1642 to 1818, Dunedin, 1914, p. xii.

59 Robert McNab, The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840, Christchurch, 1913, p. vii.

60 Stewart to R. F. Bollard, 6 April 1926, IA1, 1935/187/128; Beryl Hughes, 'Jessie Isabel Hetherington', in Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3.

61 Buick to Coates, 4 April 1927; Buick to Balneavis, 22 April 1928; P. A. de la Perrelle to Apirana Ngata, 7 November 1929; Buick to Young, 25 September 1933; Fildes to Young, 6 October 1933; Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.

62 Buick to Young, 25 June 1934, IA1 1935/187/128.

63 Ibid.

64 Oliver to Malcolm Fraser, 5 July 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128.

65 Buick to Oliver, 20 August 1934, IA1, 1935/187/128. Fragmentary drafts of both the Te Whiti and FitzRoy works exist in Buick's papers in the Turnbull.

66 Buick to Fildes, 13 June 1914, Fildes Papers, box 15.

67 Oliver to Fraser, 24 August 1934; Oliver to J. W. Heenan, 3 February 1936, IA1, 1935/187/128.

68 Buick to Oliver, 21 September 1935, IA1, 1935/187/128; M. J. Thorp to Buick, 16 August 1937, Buick Papers, 58/2; Buick to Heenan, 11 November 1937, Buick Papers, 58/8.

69 Buick to Heenan or Oliver, 10 December 1936, IA1, 1935/187/128.

70 Buick to Heenan, 19 October 1937 and 2 November 1937, IA1, 1935/187/128; Charles, Baron de Thierry, 'Historical Narrative of an Attempt to Form a Settlement in New Zealand', ed. T. Lindsay Buick, nd, qMS-2014, ATL.

71 Ramsden to Scholefield, '29 February 1933', Scholefield Papers, 212/C9; Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 88; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 263.

72 McNab, Old Whaling Days, p. vii.

73 Stewart to Rutherford, 16 March 1939, James Rutherford Papers, MSS A-42, folder E26/8, UA.

74 Dale, 'Gentleman of Polities', p. 174.

75 'Reminiscences of James John Taine, a Wellington and New Zealand Pioneer Settler of 1839, Compiled by H. E. M. Fildes, with Portraits and Illustrations', Micro MS 218, ATL.

76 Woodhouse to Scholefield, 19 August 1938, Scholefield Papers, 212/C3A; Cowan to Scholefield, 23 July 1940, Scholefield Papers, 212/C1.

77 A. E. Currie, 'D.N.Z.B.', nd [1940?], Scholefield Papers, 212/C6; G. H. Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 2 vols, Wellington, 1940, vol. 1, p. xvi; vol. 2, p. 197; Coleridge, 'Horace Fildes', p. 263.

78 McCormick to Heenan, 13 October 1939, IA1, 62/9/2.

79 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.

80 Scholefield, 'Autobiography', p. 223.

81 Ibid.

82 Scholefield to Heenan, 12 May 1936, IA1, 62/8, part 1.

83 Minutes of National Historical Committee meeting, 10 June 1937, IA1 62/7/1. The committee comprised James Hight, James Rutherford, James Thorn, J. T. Paul, A. D. McIntosh and E. H. McCormick, most of whom will be discussed later in this thesis.

84 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.

85 In official documents this is assumed as a given; there is no record of any suggestion that the Dictionary should include living people. The British Dictionary of National Biography also had excluded the living. Given the deferential nature of writing about living people at this time, it would have been difficult to apply to their lives such scrutiny as was applied to the dead. Scholefield's prefaces to Who's Who and the Dictionary indicate that the spectre of the Cyclopedia of New Zealand weighed heavily on him. The Dunedin journalist D. W. M. Burn suggested a Centennial survey on expatriates doing well overseas. The Editorial Committee rejected the suggestion for fear that it would 'excite jealousies' and 'degenerate into a catalogue of undistinguished names'. Burn to Peter Fraser, 7 September 1937, IA1, 62/8, Part 1; Oliver Duff to Heenan, 23 March 1938, IA1, 62/8/1, Part 1. (However, during 1940, the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission 'devoted ten talks to "New Zealand Brains Abroad", and these did not pretend to exhaust the subject': Alan Mulgan, 'The Population Problems: The Cultural Aspect', undated typescript, Alan Mulgan Papers, MS Papers 224/19, ATL.)

86 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, pp. v-vii; Andersen, Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, p. 77.

87 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.

88 Munn and Barr, New Zealand Libraries, p. 30.

89 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. vii.

90 There are copies of the Cowan pieces and the other journal articles referred to in this paragraph in Scholefield Papers, 212/58.

91 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xiv.

92 There is a mass of letters from relatives and local historians in Scholefield Papers, 212 /C1.

93 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. ix.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid., p. xii; G. F. James, review of Scholefield, Dictionary, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1, 3 (April 1941), p. 200.

96 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xi.

97 D. O. W. Hall, 'The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography', 17 February 1939, IA1, 62/9/2.

98 Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand and the Western Pacific 1925, Masterton, 1924, p. 4.

99 Scholefield to Te Kauru Karaitiana, 4 May 1939, Scholefield Papers, 212/43.

100 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, pp. xii, xiii.

101 James, review of Scholefield, Dictionary, p. 196.

102 Scholefield, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. xiii.

103 W. P. Morrell, The Provincial System in New Zealand 1852-76, London, 1932; John Rawson Elder, New Zealand: An Outline History, London, 1928, p. 76.

104 Scholefield, 'Autobiography', p. 218.

105 Ibid., pp. 204, 226; Scholefield to John Meech, 27 April 1961, IA1, 62/9/2.

106 McNab, Old Whaling Days, p. viii.

107 Cowan, New Zealand Wars, vol. 1, p. 7.

108 H. Fildes, 'In 1837: Some Early History: The First Brewery', Dominion, 24 December 1936.

109 Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions, p. 45; see also pp. 55, 60, 66-8, 74, 150-1.

110 John Rawson Elder, 'The Senior Chaplain in New South Wales', in Elder, ed., The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden 1765-1838, Dunedin, 1932, p. 46; Elder, Outline History, p. 35; W. G. McClymont, The Exploration of New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, p. 36.

111 Charles Fleming to 'Mr Sutherland', 2 February 1938, Buick Papers, 58/8,

112 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, Wellington, 1987, p. 234; Scholefield, Who's Who in New Zealand, 5th edn, Wellington, 1951, p. 196; Reed to W. E. Parry, 26 June 1936, IA1, 62/25, part 1.

113 Jock Phillips, '1940—The Centennial', unpublished paper, 1994, unpaginated.

114 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, 2nd edn, pp. 65, 69, 143-5. Subsequent references are to the second edition unless otherwise stated.

115 Ibid., p. 350.

116 Ibid., p. 328.

117 Ibid., p. 211.

118 Ibid., p. 345. Buick was, however, critical of Captain Joseph Nias of the Herald, with whom William Hobson quarrelled. Buick so defamed Nias that his daughter Caroline (not his granddaughter: Joseph Nias married at the age of 61) protested to the office of the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, searched through official records to vindicate her father, and then travelled to New Zealand, where she denounced Buick in the New Zealand Herald on 6 February 1937. The following year a friend of Caroline Nias published a 100-page book based on her research. It was a sustained refutation of Buick's claims. Buick died while the book was in press. T. D. H. Hall, Captain Joseph Nias and the Treaty of Waitangi: A Vindication, Wellington, 1938; Caroline Nias to C. Burdekin, 3 January 1934; Buick to the editor, New Zealand Herald, 11 March 1937, T. D. H. Hall Papers, MS Papers 24/3, ATL.

119 Ibid., p. 113.

120 Ibid., pp. 282-4 (quotation from p. 284).

121 Apirana Ngata, The Treaty of Waitangi: An Explanation/Te Tiriti o Waitangi: He Whakamarama, trans. M. R. Jones, Christchurch, 1963 (first published in Maori alone in 1922), p. 5; see also p. 8.

122 Ibid., p. 10.

123 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. xii.

124 James Rutherford, 'The Meaning of Waitangi', nd [1939 or 1940], Rutherford Papers A-42, folder F28/5.

125 J. Rutherford, Hone Heke's Rebellion 1844-1846: An Episode in the Establishment of British Rule in New Zealand, Auckland, 1947, p. 8 (italics and inconsistencies in punctuation and capitalisation as in original). Rutherford's essay had been delivered as a lecture the year before. The two texts are not greatly different. Rutherford, 'Hone Heke's War, 1844-46: An Analysis of Its Origins and Nature', typescript of lecture, 1946, Rutherford Papers, MSS A-42, folder E23/1.

126 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 182-3.

127 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. 157.

128 Appendices to the Journals of the Legislative Council, 1869, pp. 69-70 (the translation), 71-76 (the list of signatories).

129 'Liber', "The Book of the Day', Dominion, April 1914, clipping in IA1, 126/8/2. 'Liber' was Charles Wilson, Scholefield's predecessor as parliamentary librarian and 'our Sainte-Beuve or Edmund Gosse': J. C. Beaglehole, 'The Library and the Cosmos', Turnbull Library Record, 3, 2 (August 1970), p. 68. Two volumes of Wilson's literary criticism were published, but they contain no reviews of New Zealand matter. Wilson, Rambles in Bookland, Wellington, 1922, and New Rambles in Bookland, Wellington, 1923.

130 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 354-5.

131 Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', p. 65.

132 Percy J. H. White to Buick, 14 July 1929, IA1, 1935/187/128; clippings in Buick, Scrapbook on The Treaty of Waitangi, MS-0353.

133 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, p. 335.

134 Ibid., pp. 114, 163.

135 Buick, 'The Treaty of Waitangi', notes for speech, nd [after 1932], Buick Papers, 58/66.

136 This latter speech was republished masquerading as Bledisloe's own work in the collection Ideals of Nationhood, where it was described by the editor—one T. Lindsay Buick—as a 'classic … of [its] kind', containing 'words of justice' and 'a true appreciation of the real significance of the Treaty of Waitangi'. Buick, 'Introduction' to Lord Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood: A Selection of Addresses Delivered in New Zealand by The Right Hon, Lord Bledisloe, P.C., G.C.M.G, K.B.E., F.S.A., M.A., F.C.S., M.R.A.C., during His Governor-Generalship of the Dominion, ed. T. Lindsay Buick, New Plymouth, 1935, p. 7. The speech appears on pp. 146-55. Buick's copy, and copies of the accompanying letters to Bledisloe, are in Buick Papers, 58/1.

137 Ibid., p. 354. Speaking of the Waitara purchase as a 'blunder' was an established practice by Buick's time, but William Pember Reeves' statement of this position was much more severe: he called Waitara 'a blunder worse than a crime'. William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, 4th edn, London, 1950, p. 199.

138 Buick, Treaty of Waitangi, pp. 354-7.

139 Ibid., p. 359 and n.

140 Ibid., p. vii; Buick, The Treaty of Waitangi', notes for speech, nd [after 1932], Buick Papers, 58/66.

141 Ellinor Hunter Brown to 'chicks', 2 June 1914, quoted in Sinclair, Destiny Apart, p. 60.

142 Malcolm Fraser to J. A. Young, 27 June 1933; '"The Treaty of Waitangi" by T. Lindsay Buick: List of Departments to Receive a Copy of the Book When Printed', 20 May 1933, IA1, 126/8/2.

143 Cecil Day to Malcolm Fraser, 17 June 1933, IA1, 126/8/2.

144 T. Lindsay Buick, Waitangi: Ninety Four Years After, New Plymouth, 1934, ch. 5.

145 Ibid., pp. 70-80; Bledisloe, Ideals of Nationhood, pp. 146-55.

146 Buick to Heenan, 25 August 1936; Rutherford to Chappell, 29 October 1936, Rutherford Papers, A-42, folder F29/4.

147 Scholefield, Who's Who, 3rd edn, p. 351; 4th edn, p. 355.

148 Colquhoun, 'James Cowan', p. 121; E. C. Huie, notes on Cowan's funeral, nd [1943], Scholefield Papers, 212/C6.

149 Barrowman, Turnbull, p. 74.