Nicholas Reid
Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press, 2024), 648pp, $65
When historians attempt to chronicle the whole history of a country, they always write out of the present moment. For each generation, history will be judged afresh by what we know now. Read Keith Sinclair’s slim History of New Zealand, published in 1958, and you have an historian mainly content with New Zealand as a good working liberal democracy. Read James Belich’s two-volume history of New Zealand, Making Peoples (1996) and Paradise Reforged (2001), and there is more awareness of Māori culture and the growing diversity of the population. And, similarly, soon after Belich’s books, there was Michael King’s populist The Penguin History of New Zealand, published in 2003, ultimately seeing most New Zealanders as open-minded, helpful people living in a multicultural society. Michael Belgrave also works with the present moment, very much concerned with how we judge the past from our contemporary perspective and its values—and thus detecting or identifying former failings and blind spots.
Becoming Aotearoa is a long, detailed, heavyweight history, with 531 packed pages of narrational text, tightly-printed, followed by 105 pages of notes and index. Belgrave is a long-time academic historian, based at Massey University . He has a wide knowledge of New Zealand settlements, wars, politics, customs and demographics, and he is able to offer informed comment on what he sees as flaws in other historians’ works. He follows up with a number of surprising, but justified, judgements of his own.
British missionaries who landed in Aotearoa New Zealand in the early nineteenth century have often been caricatured, or seen two-dimensionally and negatively. Belgrave judges them in a more nuanced way, as they, at least to begin with, were humanitarians who opposed exploitative colonialism and who did their best to protect Māori from ‘white savages’ bringing a lawless frontier mentality: the sealers, the whalers, the escaped convicts from Australia. In this context, Belgrave also gives a drubbing to the whole Wakefield New Zealand Company enterprise and its various questionable deals. He draws a very ambivalent picture of Governor George Grey, noting his skills but also his bluster and aggression, and behaviour that was often ‘ruthless, supporting his policies with a sticky web of lies created to undermine his enemies and advance himself’.
Belgrave is a revisionist historian who views the old Liberal Party under Premier Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon, elected in 1893, as having far more impact on New Zealand than the often-praised Michael Joseph Savage / Peter Fraser victories and reforms of the Labour Party in the 1930s and 1940s. He says of Seddon: ‘this larger-than-life populist led the most reformist administration in the country’s history before 1984, even when compared with the first Labour government of 1935’. As for the Depression of the 1930s, ‘voters [who voted Labour] wanted the restoration of things lost rather than revolution.’ If there ever was a revolution in New Zealand in the true sense of the word, it was the introduction of so-called Rogernomics neoliberalism in 1984, brought in by a Labour government. Belgrave wryly calls the chapter dealing with this, ‘Comes the Revolution’. And he makes the surprising claim of National’s Keith Holyoake that he was ‘by far New Zealand’s most effective prime minister in the second half of the twentieth century’.
Belgrave deals in detail with the tectonic impact of the two World Wars on New Zealand (and mercifully he does not glamourise the botched Gallipoli campaign). He correctly notes that from the 1940s to the 1970s: ‘little of real substance divided the two major parties. National and Labour competed to promise the electorate more goodies at the end of each three-year electorate cycle’. New Zealand, a wealthy little country through its role as Great Britain’s Big Farm, seemed mainly a complacent land during that era. And there’s nothing particularly challenging in his retelling of the saga of social transformation beginning in the 1960s, with assorted protest movements and the emergence of a self-conscious non-conformity that became the norm. However, his examination of the transformed social status of women from the late 20th century on, and their nation-defining contributions in commerce and politics—with three women so far becoming prime minister and often as many women as men in Parliament—is exemplary. He acknowledges too the greater interest now in conservation and environmentalism, and also considers New Zealand’s struggle as a minnow against titans in dealing with our allies Australia and the United States. He notes the general decline of religion. And many of the final chapters of Becoming Aotearoa deal with party political manoeuvring under the new regime of MMP (the Mixed Member Proportional system), almost up to the present moment: these are the chapters that will date most quickly.
All of which might seem to cover everything Professor Belgrave has to say—but of course it isn’t. The standard chronicle outlined so far in this review is actually not the heart of Belgrave’s history. As the book’s title Becoming Aotearoa signals, Belgrave’s greatest concern is with the status of Māori in relation to Pākehā; and the nature of racism in New Zealand, as the nation struggles to become Aotearoa. His opening gambit—in his Preface—is to remind us of the massacre of Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019. He questions then prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s statement that the mass murderer was ‘not us’, which suggested that New Zealand was essentially a peaceable country with little racial tension. Throughout Becoming Aotearoa Michael Belgrave’s strategy is to challenge this assumption.
Belgrave gives an admirably detailed account of the Treaty of Waitangi and follows what is now the accepted truth, first determined by forensic historian Ruth Ross, that the Māori language version of the treaty is the only valid treaty. In itself, the treaty was a benign thing, concerned with protecting Māori rights. But the treaty was soon abused as more colonists arrived and Māori were increasingly alienated. There were wars, as Māori resisted. When Britain approved the setting up of a New Zealand parliament in 1850, Māori were not given the same level of suffrage and had only token representation. It was at this point that the Māori King movement emerged, to challenge this one-sided state of affairs. Nevertheless, increasingly, especially after Donald McLean’s Native Land Court was set up, more and more land was taken from Māori. Following the Waikato war, land was simply confiscated. Even more alarmingly, the number of Māori shrank in the wake of diseases hitherto unknown to the indigenous populace, while the number of Pākehā grew relentlessly. By the late nineteenth century, it was a common belief among Pākehā colonisers that Māori were a dying race. The Māori language was widely forbidden in schools, under pain of corporal punishment. It took many years before the Māori population began to revive, nurtured by a state policy of benign paternalism. In time, Māori politicians became a presence to be reckoned with in parliament. By the middle of the twentieth century, there had been some reparations for land that had been taken, although it was only in 1985 that the recently-formed Waitangi Tribunal accepted Māori claims going back to 1840.
How Māori were maltreated over land rights is just one of the ways Belgrave reveals the history of intolerance and racism as officially and unofficially practised in New Zealand. He considers the waves of xenophobia that have passed this way. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Protestants resented incoming Irish Catholics. In the gold fields of Central Otago, Chinese were relegated to almost worked-out digs and were forced to pay exorbitant fees for licences. At different times, Croats were regarded as unwanted intruders. Australia adopted a ‘White Australia’ policy. New Zealand did not overtly adopt a ‘White New Zealand’ policy, but in fact found more devious ways of keeping non-Europeans out. During the time of Robert Muldoon as prime minister, there was targeting of Pasifika migrants; this was at its height in the 1970s when Polynesian ‘overstayers’ were subject to ‘dawn raids’, which often meant deporting and breaking up families whose children had been born in New Zealand. In his Epilogue, Belgrave states:
As this book has shown, it is not very difficult to find, in this country’s history, echoes of the current language of white supremacy, a fear of migrants, particularly of those who were different, and a series of policies aimed at excluding a range of non-white migrants, and which treated Māori as socially and economically inferior, and sometimes as racially inferior.
But almost as soon as he has said this, Belgrave has to modify his polemic a little. He agrees with what Keith Sinclair said long ago: that the poor treatment of Māori was very real—although it was milder in comparison with other English colonial countries, such as Australia where Aboriginal peoples were brutally treated, denied full citizenship, and subjected to the trauma of the Stolen Generations, They were not granted full voting rights at the federal level until 1962. This does not excuse or expunge the negative aspects of New Zealand history, but it does remind us that not all New Zealanders have been xenophobic or bigoted—even if there is much concern among some Pākehā about ‘co-governance’ and there is present an extremist and sometimes violent ‘white supremacy’ fringe. Government census figures reveal that in the last few years more foreign ethic communities have been welcomed into New Zealand than ever before. In Auckland alone there are now very large groups of Indian, Chinese and Filipino New Zealanders contributing to the economy, not to mention the thriving Samoan, Tongan and Cook Island communities, and other aspirational peoples of the Pacific. And yet it is still true that Māori and Pasifika tend to be amongst the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens.
And what of Belgrave’s title, Becoming Aotearoa? Stepping away from Belgrave’s text, various polls suggest that most New Zealanders still prefer ‘New Zealand’ as the country’s name—however, ‘Aotearoa’ is fast catching up. Te reo Māori has been revitalised and is now widely taught, even in largely Pākehā schools. It is a vital part of the nation’s sense of identity, reflected, for instance, in the custom of singing the national anthem first in Māori at public events. Many English names of mountains and other locations have been officially replaced with their original Māori names—Taranaki, for instance, has long since stopped being called Mount Egmont. Māori voices are strongly represented across journalism, broadcasting, literature and historical scholarship. ßAs important, if not more so, is the greater representation of Māori in parliament (on all sides of the aisle), supported by sustained Māori activism and the implementation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, backed by the Waitangi Tribunal. Currently, those who identify as Māori make up 17.8 per cent of the population, so it may be some time before Aotearoa becomes the country’s sole name. But it will surely happen.
NICHOLAS REID is a writer, reviewer and historian who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. As well as conducting the regular book-blog Reid’s Reader, he is a poetry columnist for the New Zealand Listener.
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