Ash Davida Jane
Where in All the World by Vanessa Croft (David Bateman, 2025), 384pp, $40
Where in All the World is the debut novel from Australia-born, New Zealand-based author Vanessa Croft, set at the end of the nineteenth century and traversing parts of New Zealand, England and Kenya. We follow Harriet, a young Pākehā woman born in South Canterbury to wealthy colonial settlers. We’re told very little of how her father acquired the ‘sprawling expanse of acreage’ he owns—only that ‘he established himself on the rich soil of the Canterbury plains and began building’. The action begins when two guests arrive from England and Harriet falls blindly in love with one of them, against the better judgement of her family.
Harriet’s narration comes in the form of a diaristic account, though evidence of this appears infrequently. Occasionally she reflects on her actions or her response to something with the knowledge of hindsight—for example, early in the romance that drives the plot, she tells us, ‘It has since occurred to me that I was a territory too easily acquired.’ The land-grab metaphor is in line with the themes we’ll see later in the book, but is also literal, as Harriet comes with a hefty inheritance of wealth and property. In an epilogue dated April 1919 (24 years after the novel’s beginning), the narrator speaks of ‘what occasioned [her] to write this story of one girl’s tribulations,’ confirming that Harriet is intended as the fictional writer of the text we’re reading. As with many books that employ this framing, we have to suspend our disbelief, knowing that nobody typically writes a diary by simply recounting events in chronological order with every line of dialogue perfectly documented. Otherwise, it achieves the intended effect. Harriet addresses us directly at times, but not so often that it distracts from the story. While she starts out as a very naive character, seeing everything around her—especially the man who seduces her—as perfect and well-intentioned, these rare insights from the Harriet of the future build suspense as we wait for the events that will open her eyes to the truth.
Croft adopts a faux-Victorian prose style, though this doesn’t stretch to the complexity and pacing we expect from writers of that era. This means the novel remains accessible and easy to read, albeit with some of the linguistic airs of Hardy or Eliot. This style helps ground us effectively in the world of the novel while still appealing to a wide readership. There is the occasional moment where the writing slips into romantic cliché, as when Harriet asks, ‘[W]here in all the world are we now?’ and her beloved (a cartographer) responds, ‘Terra incognita’, but this may be forgiven considering the nature of the genre and the naivety of the narrator.
While the prose is satisfactory enough and the characters well formed, Where in All the World makes for a troubling read. Early in the novel, Croft introduces the motif of brown and rainbow trout as a symbol of Harriet’s growth and journey. One of the first scenes shows her releasing hundreds of young trout into a stream near her home, fantasising about how ‘in a few years they’ll be immense’ and ‘come back here to spawn.’ The trout reappear 24 years later at the very end of the novel when Harriet, back in New Zealand, spots them ‘silvery, sleek and thriving’ in the streams. This is an effective, though unsubtle, image, but it’s a strange choice considering the invasive trout’s catastrophic impacts on New Zealand’s native freshwater fish and biodiversity. We might not expect Harriet, given her origins, to pause before introducing hundreds of trout into the waterways—though it doesn’t endear her to the reader either way—but it’s reasonable to expect the author to. With the framing of the novel, where Harriet is positioned as the one penning the text, there isn’t much room for other perspectives to enter, which raises questions about the value of this narrative choice. The suspense created could be achieved with close third-person narration without restricting the novel to Harriet’s views alone. Uncritical colonial narratives from wealthy Pākehā settlers are plentiful, as these are the stories that have long been prioritised. While there’s value in other elements of Harriet’s story—as a young woman stuck in an abusive marriage, trying to extricate herself despite the difficulties of a biased legal system—the blasé acceptance and passive support of colonisation (at least in New Zealand) shown in the novel are significant enough that those other aspects are hard to focus on.
The only time the novel really acknowledges that there were people living in New Zealand before it was colonised by Europeans is during a scene in Kenya, near Mombasa, where Harriet and her husband are staying at the house of wealthy English settlers. The topic of servants comes up, and the other guests are outraged by the idea that Harriet’s home in New Zealand doesn’t have servants beyond a housekeeper. One asks, ‘There are natives in New Zealand … don’t you offer them employment as servants?’ to which Harriet replies, ‘The Māori where I come from are a proud and self-sufficient people.’ She is positioned as the outsider in this scene because of the faux pas she has committed by offering to help the cook—and her husband’s embarrassment over her behaviour is the main focus. Despite this description she gives of tangata whenua, the one Māori character we meet in the novel is a young stockman called Manaaki who helps her carry the trout to the stream at the start of the book, whose only purpose in the narrative is to report, ‘I seen tuna big as my leg.’
As a character, Harriet is shown to be curious and enthusiastic about the world, spending time studying her father’s model of the solar system and, later, books of wild animals she hopes to encounter in East Africa. She expresses interest in furthering her education and studying the sciences and, when she first meets Curtis de Courcy, eagerly questions him about the places he’s been. Given all this, it seems strange that she doesn’t show any interest in the history of her birthplace. She was born the year after the New Zealand Wars ended, whose impacts would surely have continued in the years following. In writing this novel, Croft had an opportunity to explore the realities of colonisation, both in New Zealand and in parts of Africa that Harriet and Curtis visit, through the eyes of a curious, bright and empathetic character, but this is strangely absent.
Harriet hears second-hand accounts of the atrocities committed in the Congo by colonial powers, but they’re always in the background, as if there to build the historical setting. It’s only when she needs evidence of Curtis’s cruelty to take to court that she pays these events any attention, and even then the narration fails to look past the immediate picture to consider what this means beyond her marriage. Again, considering her family’s recent settlement in New Zealand as part of the colonial project there, it’s strange that she doesn’t draw any connections between the exploitation of people and resources in the Congo Free State or Mombasa—which she sees with her own eyes—and what happened (and was still happening) in New Zealand. Instead, she continues to view New Zealand as an idyllic paradise, free of the trials of her marriage, the rigid societal norms of Britain and the harsh conditions of Kenya.
On the surface, Where in All the World is decently written with a cohesive narrative, but beyond that it feels wildly out of touch and devoid of context. No one is obligated to write about a particular subject, but to choose New Zealand at this point in history as a key part of your novel’s setting and erase any evidence of colonisation and its impacts is a poor judgement call. It perpetuates the colonial myth of New Zealand as a wild but charming, untouched place at the end of the world, where settlers arrived peacefully and no wrongdoings were committed. There’s nothing wrong with an author not wanting to tell stories they feel aren’t theirs to tell, but the solution cannot be to simply erase that important context from a narrative that claims to be based on historical fact—even citing, in the author’s note at the end of the novel, the real woman that Harriet’s story is based on and her real explorer husband. The novel presents a romanticised view of the historical period that is unsatisfying to read, as the gaping holes are too distracting to ignore. It’s hard to imagine many New Zealand readers comfortably looking past this colonial fantasy of Aotearoa—and if the intended audience is readers outside of New Zealand with less awareness of our history, who does this narrative serve?
ASH DAVIDA JANE is a poet, editor and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, currently living in Melbourne.
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