Sarah Christie
‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the making of history by Bain Attwood (Auckland University Press, 2023), 288pp, $59.99
In A Bloody Difficult Subject, Bain Attwood has taken the overlooked papers of an overlooked historian and used them as the basis for a deliberation on the historiography of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and on the act of writing New Zealand history.
Ruth Guscott, later Ross, (1920–1982) was an academically trained historian who developed a strong interest in what was then known as the Treaty of Waitangi and the historic events surrounding its signing. After working outside the academy for three decades Ross authored an article for the New Zealand Journal of History (NZJH) in 1972, which proved profoundly influential in how we now view Te Tiriti and its relationship to our national history. The first section of Attwood’s book traces Ross’s personal journey in the post-war decades. It follows her research relationship with Te Tiriti, charting her intellectual tenacity and the willingness to challenge received thinking that led her to write her seminal article.
Historians rarely turn a spotlight on their own caste as a historical subject. Attwood deftly uses Ross’s papers, which contain drafts and plans of her work, along with correspondence with major academic and literary figures of her day, to investigate Ross’s life. By tracing the development of a specific piece of work, he provides a rare glimpse into the motivations, insecurities and intellectual challenges that occur as a result of grappling with and writing history. Ross’s correspondence reveals a complex and sometimes feisty character who was full of anxieties about her work. Attwood draws out Ross’s relationship with her research, which will be familiar to many; a cycle of self-belief and passion for a project followed by a loss of confidence in one’s own abilities, becoming ‘bogged down’ and frustrated, before the joy of finding a new perspective. Through telling Ross’s story, Attwood cleverly reveals the writing of history, and Te Tiriti itself, to be ‘bloody difficult subjects’ in their own unique ways.
Attwood’s biography of Ross adds to the historiography of women, especially academic women in post-war New Zealand. Ross’s difficulties in researching Te Tiriti did not simply spring from the topic itself. Attwood illustrates how the gendered realities of Ross’s life shaped the history that she came to write.
One of the small number of women who attended university in New Zealand in the late 1930s, Ross studied English literature and history at Victoria University College where she was a bright and diligent student, keen for a debate and critical of established orthodoxies. With few academic pathways available to women in 1940s New Zealand, gaining a position in 1941 at the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs to work on the creation of a historical atlas, turned out to be a turning point in Ross’s career as a historian. While women like Ross were mostly confined to work as research assistants, it was compelling and interesting work amongst like-minded people and provided a good training ground for the research she would later undertake. It was here that she developed an interest in New Zealand history and land rights. It is fascinating to read Attwood’s account of this period in Ross’s life.
The reader witnesses Ross’s awakening to new perspectives as she discovered a ‘rich body of historical sources’ at the Department of Lands and Survey that had hitherto been ignored by historians and which provided new evidence on land issues that ran contrary to perceived wisdom. Her work on early Pākehā traders and the Native Land Court highlighted the complexities of colonial actors. Ross also looked beyond the libraries and archives of Wellington to find the information she needed. Travelling to Northland she hitched rides on cream trucks, visited mission houses, and talked to local Māori. At a time when these approaches were not seen as typical and when the lines between academic history and amateur history were fairly rigid, she was, without knowing it, pioneering new methodologies for engaging with New Zealand history.
One of Attwood’s major themes is exploring the tensions and intersections between the ‘personal life of history’—the ‘intellectual, political and personal circumstances’ of the researcher—and how these rational and irrational forces shape the histories that are investigated and told within the academy and public life. Attwood illustrates how events in the wider world, and within Ross’s personal life, went on to shape her engagement with Te Tiriti and its history. While at the Historical Branch, Ross met and married a young lawyer, George Burnard, who increased her awareness of and interest in constitutional history. After Burnard’s untimely death less than a year later from Hodgkin’s disease, Ross was transferred to the War History Branch where gendered assumptions restricted her to cataloguing books and to ‘badger[ing] five unwilling men into washing the dishes’. It was at this time that she met Ian Ross.
Like many couples at the end of the war they had a speedy courtship and added to New Zealand’s baby boom with two children in quick succession. And as with most women of her generation she resigned from paid work when she became pregnant to refocus her energies within the domestic sphere. Attwood describes Ross as feeling ‘confined’ by the post-war reality of babies and homemaking. In 1952 she jumped at the chance to take up some freelance work for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education, beginning with writing an introduction to a reprint of the Facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence and Te Tiriti of Waitangi, which was first published in 1877. This work, and subsequent School Publications commissions on Te Tiriti, saw Ross wrestle with new ideas about doing history.
For Attwood, the event that played the most significant role in Ross’s work on Te Tiriti was the family’s move to Motukiore, a small, mostly Māori community in the Hokianga. While it took time, Ross developed relationships with the locals. She immersed herself in the Māori community and the Hokianga environment, where she had in-depth discussions on Te Tiriti with Tūtere Korori, Eru Te Whata and Jack Taylor who led her to see value in Māori sources and to understand that there was a bigger Treaty picture beyond a single meeting at Waitangi.
Her work for School Publications allowed her to pursue a growing interest in Māori history and to urge Pākehā to stop ‘ignoring the unpalatable past’. Freed of academic modes of writing, Ross could use dialogue to bring alive writing that required story and pace. It was in undertaking this work that Ross developed her arguments that Māori and Pākehā had different understandings of Te Tiriti and her conviction that, because it was the version primarily signed by the Māori chiefs, the Māori version of Te Tiriti was the true Treaty document.
Attwood’s biography of Ross also illustrates the challenges that Ross faced in attempting to undertake this research in the 1950s and 1960s, juggling her family and community life with her work, and doing so from a position both physically and mentally remote from the academy. As the wife of the local school teacher she had community responsibilities: she acted as a teaching assistant, cooked, cleaned, and cared for her children, grew a vegetable garden, travelled by bus from Motukiore to Auckland to care for sick family members and to access books and typewriter ribbons. She also set up a branch of the Country Library Service and found time for part-time research and writing.
Chapter Three specifically deals with Ross’s NZJH article on Te Tiriti and the response to it. Ross had trialled some of her arguments in 1956 to an academic audience at Victoria University College. The cavilling response she received then had knocked her confidence. As a result, her work, which Attwood describes as ‘one of the most influential pieces of work a New Zealand historian has ever written’, was not presented again to an academic audience until 1972. Much had changed in New Zealand in this intervening period.
Attwood focuses on what he describes as the major and minor arguments of Ross’s article. In Attwood’s assessment, Ross’s major point is that Te Tiriti was ‘inexpertly and hastily’ drawn up and ‘chaotic in its execution’, ensuring that it was contradictory and ambiguous. The article made minor points, almost in passing, around the substantive differences between Māori and English texts with a conclusion that the Māori text constitutes THE Treaty, but Attwood argues that these are the points that have received the most attention from historians and legal scholars.
Part One of this book provides an insightful biography of a woman who deserves to be remembered. It is an enjoyable examination of a fraught personal journey to research and write on a topic of intense personal and national interest. It charts how she worked within the confines of the post-war world, at times challenging historical conventions but ultimately significantly shaping how future academics and the public would view Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This section is an interesting read for not only those interested in the history of Te Tiriti but also those interested in biography, women’s history, mid-twentieth century New Zealand, and the writing process.
While the final two-thirds of the book take Ross’s arguments as a starting point, she disappears from the book. Instead, in Parts Two and Three the focus shifts to the historiography of Te Tiriti and Attwood’s arguments about the various schools of academic thought and revisionism. This is heavier work for the reader and may not appeal to the same audience as Part One. But for those who enjoy being challenged by the intricacies of historiographical debate, or are scholars specifically focused on Te Tiriti, these later sections are more likely to be of interest.
Attwood argues that both Te Tiriti and Ross’s article illustrate the life that written documents can have beyond their creation, and their inherent ambiguity and contestability—especially those that come to have a public resonance. He examines the ways in which authors are not in control of how their work is interpreted, which can often contradict the creator’s intent. It is an interesting exercise to attempt to trace the influence of one piece of work (that is, Ross’s NZJH article) throughout the historiography of Te Tiriti and the legal and historical work of the Waitangi Tribunal. However, structuring the discussion of the historiography primarily as a response to Ross’s arguments means that the influence of other ideas is often presented as either an acceptance or rejection of Ross’s work suggesting that subsequent historians have veered from the ‘correct’ way to interpret Ross’s work, despite Attwood’s arguments for its ambiguity. In Attwood’s estimation of Ross, it is the deeply personal connection to the topic that enables her to write her influential history, yet he conversely advocates historians and legal scholars, especially those who work within the Waitangi Tribunal process, now require more objectivity and distance from their subject.
While Attwood claims there is value in building on both the Pākehā and Māori traditions of history, his analysis has a binary quality between Pākehā academic history, especially that termed ‘post-foundational’, and the way in which he presents Māori conceptions of the past and history. This old duality sees Māori knowledge of the past as ‘subjective’ and uncritical and European academic history as dealing in ‘reason and logic’. A significant body of scholarship by Māori historians addresses the critical and interdisciplinary methodologies employed when dealing with Māori historical sources. Not engaging with this literature feels like a distinct oversight which could have added much to Attwood’s discussion.
It is beneficial to grapple with assumptions about how we do history. As a historian with a background primarily focused on social history, I think others are better placed to review Attwood’s take on the historiographic traditions he lays out here. This interesting and challenging book forces the reader to assess their own journey with and connection to history and Te Tiriti. But it also leaves one with the feeling that it would take a more extensive reading of other perspectives to form a fuller, more rounded picture of Te Tiriti and its past and present in Aotearoa New Zealand. Ross’s story is a worthwhile read, whether or not you are interested in the later parts of the book. If this is your first foray into the historiography of Te Tiriti make sure this is not your only source. The historiography that Attwood charts would make a good reading list to begin with.
SARAH CHRISTIE is a Christchurch-based historian. Her work has focused on women in the workplace and more recently on Māori communities during World War II as part of a post-doctoral fellowship on the project ‘Te Hau Kāinga: Histories and legacies of the Māori home front’ at the University of Otago.
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