Of Verandahs and Fish and Chips and Footie on Saturday Afternoon: Reflections on 100 Years of New Zealand Historiography

Abstract

IF 1990 is a year to reflect on New Zealand history, it is also a time to reflect on the historians who have given us that history. The invitation to contribute an overview for this journal was intelligently conceived. But I was loath to accept. I was a recent convert to the study of New Zealand history, having done all my training in other fields. The invitation seemed but an opportunity to expose my ignorance and to make enemies by invidious comments about my peers. Two events changed my mind. First I visited Gallipoli. Walking over those precipitous hills, stumbling over the unburied leg-bones of nameless Anzacs and even a skull blown dry in the wind, I kept thinking of that powerful and ambivalent statement on the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair, 'From the uttermost ends of the earth'. What business was it for men from the distant South Pacific to die here? — and such thoughts were only intensified by the uncanny resemblance of the landscape to New Zealand hills. Gallipoli brought home the tragedy of a colonial and (in view of the Maori names on the memorial there) a colonized people. I returned to New Zealand in time for Anzac Day, in time to hear politicians and even, it has to be said, a historian arguing that at Gallipoli New Zealand came of age as a nation. In 1915 New Zealanders certainly made such claims, but this only exposed how much their sense of nationhood was contained within an imperial framework. The texts and images on the Great War memorials were overwhelmingly of a British derivation. To hear the nationalistic claims about Gallipoli repeated in 1990 was intolerable to one who had just returned from the place. Surely historians could do better than this? If, in this year of commemoration, New Zealanders wished to remember the nation's growth to identity, we needed to provide a more accurate and meaningful history than an exclusive focus upon 25 April 1915. But where could I turn for a richer and more honest account of our evolution? I wanted a history which explored in detail the