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New Zealand is unusual among settler countries in that its settler period did not generate a myth of nationhood or transmit a body of literary texts which explained to the descendents of the settlers their transplanted past. In Australia, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a collective narrative founded on the experience of the outback, the democratic nature of relations among itinerant working men, and the peculiar harshness and beauty of the physical world. In Canada, mid twentieth-century literary nationalist critics looked back to a body of canonical texts from the nineteenth century. But in New Zealand, the literature of the colonial period, especially that associated with a dawning nationalism, produced in the succeeding generation a culture of embarrassment, and was virtually unread. For the generation of writers that appeared in the 1930s, who saw themselves as the first to produce a literature true to the particularities of place, colonial writing figured as a kind of whipping boy, despised for its nostalgic backward regard to the centre, its sentimentality (often prejudicially associated with women’s writing), and what was conceived as its colonial deference to English literary forms, contaminated, as they were held to be, by Victorian habits and practices. This stance has occluded and distorted knowledge of a crucial period in the shaping of settler culture. In reality, the nineteenth-century New Zealand literary scene was vigorous, broadly based and central to the culture of the growing nation. Revaluation of this period without modernist prejudice is long overdue, and the publication of a substantial body of colonial fiction by the
Apart from the oral transmission of traditional ballads of sealers and whalers and the occasional travel account, there is little literature in English in New Zealand prior to the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty marked the acceptance by Maori chiefs of British rule in return for which they were promised the rights of British subjects and the protection of their lands and resources. By the time that the British signatory Governor Hobson uttered the words ‘He iwi tahi tatou’, ‘We are one people’, the printing press and those missionaries who saw literacy as a tool of religious conversion had already started work, and European settlers were arriving, bringing their literature—mainstream Victorian with a substantial dash of Scottish. From 1840 to 1850 systematic colonisation was organised from London by the New Zealand Company under the guidance of Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 108–111.
Despite the pragmatic demands of early settlement and the preponderance of non-fiction records and instructional manuals in the earliest written productions of the colony, a surprising number of settlers combined felling the bush and negotiating land purchases with writing epic poems and romantic fiction. The press was the key institution in literary life, as is demonstrated by the career of Raewyn Dalziel, ‘Vogel, Julius 1835–1899’, The Otago Daily Times, described by the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography rubric as ‘journalist, politician, premier, writer’.Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007.
In Britain, this period shows a shift in fictional style from the realism of the first half of the nineteenth century to a revival of romance by the 1880s. Vanessa Smith writes, ‘In opposition to what was perceived as realism’s fictional determinism – its grafting of authorial invention to the social text – romance was represented as dictated by the immediate desire for escapism and adventure: as a literary product of imaginative license’. Vanessa Smith, Robert Dixon, Martin Green, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 12.Writing the Colonial Adventure : Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 4.Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge, 1980), p. xi.
New Zealand novels were not exempt from these influences, tracing a trajectory from the almost prosaic and autobiographical and to the fanciful and romantic. The writers’ orientation throughout this period was firmly towards the imperial centre: explanations, exhortations, self-serving accounts of the exotic registered the sense of an audience elsewhere and superior. The literary forms of colonial cultures elsewhere were replicated in local examples, written according to British models and trimmed to the schematics of international genres. The settler project of taming the land and making a home was celebrated in narratives of the challenges of the physical landscape, and metaphorically rendered in the encounter, trials and final resolution of the romantic plot. The realism of these narratives was shot through with a gothic element acquired from the unsettling aspects of the landscape and from a sensationalised version of the indigenous population. The first local novel, Taranaki: A Tale of the War, not published until 1861, twenty years after first settlement, was received by a critical and unsentimental readership: ‘Is this the very worst, or only the second worst book we have ever met with!’ asked
Dennis McEldowney, ‘Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines’, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, ed. Terry Sturm, 2nd ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 633.
Lawrence Jones, ‘The Novel’, Oxford History, p. 121.
If most European representations of colonial and Maori life in the mid nineteenth century were Victorian in form and tone, they nevertheless had an authentic input, which evaporates subsequently. The difficulty that this generation of writers encountered was common to all settler cultures: how to write about a new place while using the literary language of the old. Victorian forms were imported, and the Romantic poets, especially Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, ed. F. G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), p. 81. Distant Homes: Or, the Graham Family in New Zealand (1862),
Given the imperial orientation of New Zealand writing, its market advantage was that supplied by an exotically conceived native race. The literature of ethnographic encounter is a feature of fiction throughout this period, in a variety of genres, perspectives and agencies, from the gothic to the gruesome, the romanticised and picturesque to the ethnographic. In this collection the range is demonstrated by such titles as Te Rou: or the Maori at Home (1864),
In the latter decades of the century, poetry, novels, short stories and plays using Maori oral literature, legends, art forms and customs came to be characterised by the name ‘Maoriland’, a term derived from the Sydney Bulletin but adopted widely in New Zealand. Such appropriation was seen as not only licensed but necessary, a view based on a tacit and at times highly metaphorical adoption of the ‘dying race’ myth, where such material is available as a tool in fashioning settler identity because the original inhabitants are no longer there to claim it. This was a statistically dubious fact none-the-less rendered in suitably elegiac tones. The beliefs, practices and traditions of the Maori are contexualised and universalised for the European reader unfamiliar with such intriguing barbarisms. Newly indigenised, late-colonial authors could turn their minds to the modern—the brave new world of women’s suffrage, innovative social legislation, and the construction of a modern, albeit still colonial, economy. Maori, as part of the same process, were excluded from the modern nation and relegated to a romanticised status as actors in a highly colored, imaginative fantasy world. A burgeoning tourist industry concentrated on iconic scenery—Mount Cook, the Milford track, the thermal region of the central North Island—produced travel writing both for a local and a British audience. And these increasingly formulaic descriptions were used as a backdrop for fiction, as plot and character were constructed against empurpled descriptions of bush and mountain.
Exploiting the unwritten nature of the landscape was a way of expressing the reformist social and political agendas of the new place in a genre whose surplus of invention supplied the substance and detail that the new colony was felt by its inhabitants to lack. And these aspirations found indirect expression in utopian and science fiction forms such as Erewhon (1872) and
Mansfield’s absence after 1908 meant that the particular modernism of the advanced international feminism of the day—that which recognized the force of female sexuality—was not addressed in New Zealand writing until the 1920s, when the novel of the New Woman was modified in terms of Freudian theory and socialist politics in the works of Rae McGregor, The Reporter, no. 3 (1908), p. 35. National Archives, Wellington, Wellington Girls Archive, AANB, Series 883, Item 4B.The Story of a New Zealand Writer: Jane Mander (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1998), p. 44. The Butcher Shop was banned in New Zealand, and Devanny moved to Australia where she lived for the rest of her career.
Throughout the nineteenth century there was the sense of a local literature as a pious hope to be achieved in the time of some future maturity, a conceit that persists in literary rhetoric into the 1930s. The newly emergent and improvisational nature of publication outlets led to much work that was self-published and ephemeral, while the firmly backward gaze to Britain in the first half of the century magnified the importance of quasi-literary forms such as letters and journals. Novelists had logistical problems which may have inhibited the production of local fiction. While the poet or short-story writer or essayist could easily be accommodated in the columns of the local newspaper, the novelist was more reliant on an established publishing industry and a book-buying market which was slow to emerge. The more successful New Zealand novelists during this period published in Britain, their work either destined solely for ‘Home’ consumption, or re-exported back to New Zealand. Jem Peterkin's Daughter was issued in an ‘Australian edition’ by the London branch of the Australian publishing house Robertson. Publishers exploited the dual market: MacCartie’s
The importance of Melbourne publishing houses such as W. H. Williams and The Bulletin, The Native Companion, and The Lone Hand. This diffuseness meant that the emergence of a local literary culture based on the confident conversation between author and reader was gradual and tentative. But a surprising number of novels were published locally, the costs of publication being presumably carried by the author. Newspapers such as The Otago Daily Times (founded by
Michael Brett, ‘Brett, Henry 1843–1927’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007.
Michael Horton, ‘Horton, Alfred George, 1842/1843?–1903, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007.
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007.
There is a photograph of the firm in 1925 in the Christchurch Public Library collection.
‘Current Literature’, Evening Post, vol. 59, issue 118, 19 May, 1900, p. 2.
A life insular, apart, in a country striving to realise its own individuality and to bring itself into harmonious touch with the great outer world, a land that can hardly realise its own traditions, for, indeed, they belong largely to a distant empire. A land mild and bold, diffident and pertinent, optimistic in its own ideals, but burdened by its own despair. Youngest of all the nations, green, primitive, novel, yet ancient as the hoary mountains, as history, as even the prehistoric. And through all rings the clash of that great battle between life and art, the temporal and the eternal …
‘Lav’gro’, ‘A Decade of Witness Verse’,
Otago Witness, issue 2904, 10 November 1909, p. 88.
In a 1909 essay, ‘Literature in the Colonies’, ‘Literature in the Colonies’, David Kennedy, Jr., J. A. Froude, The Times confessed, ‘The people of an old land, priding themselves on their culture, are rather apt to think of colonial life as an uncultured, shirt-sleeve sort of existence’. But, the writer pointed out, ‘you may find in the same Colony, and even within a few miles of each other, the rough pioneer at grips with Nature, and the professional man, the graduate of a famous University, surrounding himself with books and pictures and keeping abreast of all the latest developments in literature and science and art’.The Times, August 1909, p. 2, issue 39042, col. E.Kennedy’s Colonial Travel: a Narrative of Four Year’s Tour through Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc. (Edinburgh and London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1876), p. 190, quoted in Lydia Wevers, Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand 1809–1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), p. 167.Oceana, or England and her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1886), p. 308, quoted in Wevers, Country of Writing, p. 152.The Times,
that the average dweller there [in New Zealand], belonging to the more educated classes, reads more than people in a corresponding class on this country. Of course I would rather have Mudie’s or The Times library than even the General Assembly Library in New Zealand, especially for foreign books, but I would very much rather have the General Assembly Library or even the Christchurch Public Library in New Zealand than of the suburban libraries, and I feel sure, than many provincial libraries.
Barnicoat goes on to suggest that, far from being provincial and marginalised, Australia and New Zealand had, by the turn of the century, a highly developed literary culture:
About the homes I used to know in New Zealand far more books, old and new, and far more first-rate magazines and weekly papers used to lie than about most of the homes I know in England. Reviewers here, and a few keen readers, get the new books very quickly, but there is not much difference, I believe, between the time when the ordinary person gets a book in England and the time the reading class of Australasians get it. Books get out there astonishingly quickly, and I have known colonial readers tell English relatives of new works, and not the other way round.
Constance A. Barnicoat, Letter to
The Times, August 24, 1909, p. 10, issue 39046, col. F.
This literature, and the nationalist mythology it produced, conceptualised New Zealand as a Romantic landscape of bush, river, mountain, and shore. Yet, although there were no international cities on the scale of Sydney or Melbourne, by 1911 forty-nine per cent of the New Zealand population was urban, and thirty-one per cent lived in the four main cities. This urban population was overwhelmingly European. The movement of Maori to the cities did not occur significantly until after the Second World War and became the central topos of the 1970s generation of Maori writers. By the 1880s, New Zealand-born Europeans outnumbered immigrants, and the early days of settlement and the first-hand experience of its privations had passed. As Blanche Baughan, Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, ‘Young things alter very quickly’.Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven: Being Sketches of Up-country Life in New Zealand (London: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1912), p. v.