Thomas McLean
The Art of Colonisation: Images of Europe’s encounters with New Zealand by Paul Moon (Ugly Hill Press, 2026), 266pp, $55
On the opening page of The Art of Colonisation, Paul Moon argues that ‘the art that depicted various aspects of Europe’s intervention in New Zealand […] has rarely received the attention of historians, other than usually as an aesthetic accoutrement in some book or journal article’. Moon’s new volume examines 23 visual images—prints, drawings and paintings—that together ‘trac[e] the progression of art’s intricate allegiance with Europe’s colonisation of New Zealand’.
Moon is a veteran scholar of New Zealand history, with publications that include a study of the artist Augustus Earle and a biography of the photographer Ans Westra; so he is no newcomer to the subject of how visual images shape public understandings of peoples and events. It would be hard to disagree with the basic arguments of The Art of Colonisation. Moon believes that the European understanding of New Zealand was in part shaped by visual images, and that these images tended to promote British colonisation as positive and benevolent while presenting Māori as either a dying race or one fortunate to have been colonised by such an enlightened power. Such myths of colonial relations are reductive and often ridiculous—and they were sometimes recognised as being so at the time—but many found them compelling and convincing.
Moon’s subtitle is a little misleading, since almost all his artists are British, and the South Island is hardly mentioned. The book’s coverage is limited in other ways. It features no women artists. Many notable figures whose works might have appeared—Petrus van der Velden, Frances Hodgkins, her father William—are left out, as are many famous locations (the Pink and White Terraces, anywhere south of Wellington). A particularly striking omission is the portraits of Māori by Gottfried Lindauer and Charles Frederick Goldie (Moon does discuss ‘The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand’, by Goldie and his teacher Louis Steele, briefly in the final chapter). No photographic works are included. Moon could, perhaps, argue that his particular focus concerns images closely associated with key battles or encounters. If so, the title and subtitle might have reflected these narrower interests.
The introductory chapter covers some of the key terminology of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting—the bucolic countrysides of the ‘picturesque’, the awe-inspiring mountains and storms of the ‘sublime’—as well as aspects of colonial art that have vexed many viewers and most art historians for decades: the demeaning or melancholy portrayal of Indigenous communities; the representation of expansive land free for the taking; the cultural assumptions imported from Britain. ‘Confronted with an unfamiliar land and people,’ writes Moon, ‘these artists navigated their way through New Zealand with a cultural map they had brought with them.’ This observation seems true enough, though it says little about the specific experiences of artists in New Zealand. One could easily substitute Australia, Canada or South Africa into Moon’s formulation.
The opening chapter concerns the 1482 Ulm Ptolemy map of the world and, more generally, the power of early maps to encourage viewers to imagine lands that had yet to be discovered. Chapter 2 fast-forwards to Isaac Gilsemans’s ‘A View of the Murderers’ Bay’ (1643), the visual record of a violent encounter between Māori and some of Abel Tasman’s men. The heart of Moon’s book—170 pages—covers images made in the century from James Cook’s voyages to the New Zealand Wars. A final, miscellaneous chapter races through four paintings made between 1893 and 1938.
The most interesting chapters are those where a challenging or unexpectedly ambivalent image is the starting point. These include James Barry’s group portrait ‘The Rev Thomas Kendall and the Maori Chiefs Hongi and Waikato’ (1820), in which the standing chiefs tower over the seated missionary, whose expression could be read as one of sternness or admiration; and Cyprian Bridge’s ‘Battle at Ohaeawai’ (c. 1845), where a group of Māori and British soldiers, all fighting on the side of the Crown, view the battle from an elevated location. Such images complicate or undercut the usual narratives that exult or attack one side or the other. The least engaging chapters are those, like the one on ‘Omata Stockade’ (1860), where descriptions of a historical event take centre stage, and the accompanying image feels like supporting material rather than the analytical focus.
Sometimes Moon misses an opportunity to bring out a picture’s ambiguity or strangeness. Augustus Earle’s ‘Distant View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand’ (c. 1827–28) shows a group of Māori men on the move, carrying goods along a path, while in the picture’s centre, a European (presumably Earle), with his back to the viewer, surveys a vast landscape. To the right stands a pouwhenua, with a carved visage that gazes directly, and defiantly, at the viewer. In this image, argues Moon, ‘Earle left viewers in no doubt that British dominance—in various manifestations—was practically inevitable’. I have some doubts. The stiffness of the solitary European echoes the pouwhenua; neither seems particularly powerful in this presentation. The landscape, at least in reproduction, appears in dull browns and yellows, with grey clouds lowering and, in the distance, perhaps a smoking volcano. Earle’s land isn’t sublime or picturesque; it’s apocalyptic.
Such a reading of Earle’s picture is nothing new: Hamish Keith, Alex Calder, W.J.T. Mitchell, Ingrid Horrocks and others have all explored the fascinating strangeness of Earle’s image. Oddly, Moon does not cite any of these scholars in this chapter.
The scattershot quality of the book’s citations risks misleading readers. In his chapter on William Allsworth’s ‘The Emigrants’ (1844), Moon describes how James Mackay (or Mackie) staged his Scottish connections by getting Allsworth to create an image that represented his family as departing from the Highlands, when in fact they set sail from Plymouth, in the west of England. At least one previous reviewer of The Art of Colonisation has suggested that this was Moon’s discovery, when in fact the credit goes to Michael Fitzgerald, who wrote about it in Art at Te Papa (2009). But Moon buries Fitzgerald’s significant contribution in a vague footnote.
Occasionally Moon’s assertions lead the reader into very awkward places. Chapter 17 begins, ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century, any vestiges of the perception of Māori as savages—noble or otherwise—had long since departed.’ Since the New Zealand Wars carried on into the 1870s, this seems a particularly debatable point. Moon’s source for this pronouncement is a 2017 article of his own. However, in that work, Moon declares that ‘the European presumption of Maori as savages maintained some influence on how Maori were represented by Europeans even into the early twentieth century’. In the article’s conclusion, he confirms, ‘rather than the term falling out of favour from the 1850s, when the large-scale colonisation of New Zealand commenced, the perception of Maori as “savage” (in the various connotations of the term discussed above) had taken root and was difficult to dislodge’. Perhaps Moon’s view has changed on the issue; but if this is the case, he surely should have drawn on a different source to back up his evolving opinions.
There is an even stranger moment in the final chapter. ‘Over time,’ Moon writes, ‘our ability to get morally anxious about events which took place in the past diminishes. While a recent occurrence might revive strong responses when recalled, things that happened several generations ago are usually less likely to provoke a similar level of emotional intensity.’ This statement seems so obviously wrong that I wonder if I’ve somehow misunderstood Moon’s point. I’m reminded of the famous line from William Faulkner’s 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ It is difficult to think of a part of the world (Ireland, the Middle East, the American South, anywhere in the former British Empire) where events and actions of the past have not left a legacy of pain, social injustice and inequality, let alone the ‘moral anxiety’ to which Moon points.
There are occasional factual slips. Moon claims that the phrase ‘Children of the Mist’ was ‘a Pre-Raphaelite term’, but it was the title of an 1853 painting by Edwin Landseer, who was not a Pre-Raphaelite, and it probably originated in Walter Scott’s 1819 novel A Legend of Montrose. William Hodges’s ‘View of Cape Stephens’ shows three figures, not two (the woman holds an infant). The artist Joseph Jenner Merrett is misnamed William. The engraver of Allsworth’s ‘Emigrants’ could have been Edmund rather than Elizabeth Walker (the image simply states ‘E. Walker’). I spotted about forty printing errors, from missed macrons to wrong words (‘and’ for ‘in’; ‘completing’ for ‘competing’). Cumulatively, these errors detract from the authority of Moon’s argument and suggest a work that was hastily put together.
The Art of Colonisation is a handsome production, with fine reproductions of the artwork discussed. Most of the images are produced across two pages, but (at least in my copy) the inevitable loss at the gutter is minimal. Moon’s general arguments are persuasive if not ground-breaking, and at his best he is an inspired reader of New Zealand’s colonial art. But greater attention to detail and to recent scholarship would have made this a much better book.
THOMAS McLEAN is a Professor of English at the University of Otago. His writings on art in Aotearoa appear in the NZ Listener, North & South and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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