The present is constantly trying to remake the past for its own purposes; people so keenly feel that they are the product of their origins that they tend always to find in those origins what they choose to see rather than what is, in fact, there. So it has been in New Zealand's historical thinking, and the distortions which have resulted are not entirely without value. They mean, at the very least, that the past is still alive; were it not so people would not seek to alter it. But the academic historian, dedicated to reconstructing the past as faithfully as he may, must make it his business to detect and expose the myths, legends, and fallacies which accumulate around the past of his country. But he will not limit himself to mere exposure. The myths and legends, used themselves as evidence, are valuable clues to the mentality of the people who, more often than not unconsciously, constructed them.
The most notable myth about the New Zealand past arose in the attempt to explain, and at the same time to glorify, the process by which this country became British, as a matter of law and as a fact of human settlement. It is a myth at once radical and conservative: radical because it selects as villains the most notable representatives of State and Church in early New Zealand; conservative because it canonises those who, in the long run, successfully opposed officialdom at home and in the United Kingdom. Here it will be referred to as “the myth of origins” and “the myth of the possessors”.
The basic assumption of this myth is that Great Britain was a nation with a manifest imperial destiny. Her own leaders sought to thwart this destiny in the early nineteenth century by retiring from expansion after British fingers had been burned in the War of American Independence. At the outset this theory ignores the not inconsiderable British expansion accompanying the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). Cook, on this reckoning, is shown as having annexed New Zealand in 1769, and the likelihood that he exceeded his instructions in so doing is forgotten. From 1769 to 1840 British policymakers, statesmen, and officials, are described as “reluctant” to make British sovereignty actual in New Zealand, men who were timid where they should have been bold, men who wilfully neglected a golden imperial opportunity awaiting Great Britain in the South Pacific. The mere fact of the matter is that Great Britain was not “reluctant” to expand into New Zealand: such a description implies that such expansion was seen as a possibility and rejected. For the greater part of this period Great Britain was neither reluctant nor anxious to take New Zealand; the possibility did not enter the realm of the practicable. In the past overseas territories had been annexed for concrete reasons, such as strategic considerations, the presence of eagerly sought raw materials or treasure, the settlement of a substantial number of British inhabitants. At no time did the first two conditions apply in New Zealand; the third came to apply in the later 1830s and British annexation followed without undue delay.
The convention of historical myths demand heroes to balance and, eventually, to defeat the villains. They are not lacking, and the most notable mythic hero is Edward Gibbon Wakefield. In his person imperial destiny, checked by timid and unworthy men, and New Zealand, saved in the nick of time for a British future, merge harmoniously. In the light of legend Wakefield, in fact a man of sufficient stature to bear the weight of the myth, takes on heroic proportions. In the first place he becomes the great protagonist of imperial destiny, the man who successfully recalled Great Britain to a sense of mission in the world at large, the victor over timid politicians like Lord Glenelg, meddling and obstructionist officials like James Stephen, the anti-imperialist ecclesiastical pressure group headed by Dandeson Coates, of the Church Missionary Society, and those diabolical men who saw in colonies merely a fit place to dump convicts (as had been done in New South Wales) or paupers (as was advocated by Fowell Buxton). In particular, Wakefield and the Colonial Reformers whom he gathered around as the chivalric Arthur gathered his Knights, are represented as victors over those who made a pretended care for the welfare of native peoples their excuse for opposition to colonies of settlement, that is, as their pretext for anti-imperialism. Glenelg, Stephen, Coates, Buxton, can all be classified under this head.
Here one must exercise great care to separate the truth from the legend, the wheat from the chaff. It is indeed the case that an important body of opinion, itself a by-product of the Evangelical Revival and influential among politicians, officials and the missionary bodies, looked with horror at the past history of colonisation and, in particular, at the harm to native peoples this history recorded. The Evangelicals were not alone in seeing in the chance it afforded to spread Christianity and civilisation the main raison d'âtre of European expansion. Spanish Dominicans and Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had held the same view. It is difficult to see why Christians should be condemned for a belief which springs so readily from their faith. Where the Wakefield myth errs is in supposing that this concern for native welfare was simply, or at best partly, an insincere disguise for cowardly anti-imperialism. The Evangelicals and their allies were successful and zealous imperialists, but their imperialism was other than that of the Colonial Reformers. It is at least an open question, and one that involves the historian in a value judgment, which of the two was the more noble concept. In the mid-twentieth century it is more than likely that historians will take an approving view of an imperialist theory which begins with a wish to safeguard the welfare of the people already living in the country about to be colonised.
Again, the myth errs when it supposes that the efforts of the Colonial Reformers were alone instrumental in converting British policymakers from anti-imperialism to imperialism. Their propaganda was certainly among those factors which led, first, to an accelerated pace of expansion in the mid-nineteenth century and, secondly, to that evolution of British colonial policy which saw the creation of the self-governing Empire. But other factors had a greater effect: first, the increasing stream of British subjects going overseas from the 1840s on, many to the United States, but a number to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and secondly, the prevailing laissez-faire liberalism of the age and the vital part played by Gladstone, Cobden, and Bright.
Further, the myth errs when it supposes that all the opposition which Wakefield's New Zealand enterprises, the New Zealand Association and the New Zealand Company, met from the Colonial Office was due to the Evangelical affiliations of Stephen, the permanent head. Stephen, on this view, was in the pocket of Dandeson Coates and the Church Missionary Society, was firmly opposed to the annexation and colonisation of New Zealand, and was a diehard enemy of colonial self-government. It is perfectly clear, on the contrary, that though Stephen was an Evangelical, he was in no sense a Church Missionary Society puppet; he thought, not without reason, that the association's original plans were designed by the promoters to combine opportunities for enrichment with a total absence of risk, and that the company itself was a dangerously speculative venture; that he and the Colonial Office were in fact planning for annexation, even as he was rebuffing Wakefield; that he saw the colonisation of New Zealand as inevitable and wished to see it proceed with safeguards; that, finally, he had no wish to prevent the introduction of self-government at what he believed to be the proper time.
Some of the more flamboyant details of the myth lead to the conclusion that only resolute action on the part of Wakefield personally and the company corporately saved New Zealand from annexation by France, a fate which the blindness and timidity of the Colonial Office made all too probable. Wakefield has been represented as dashing, in a post-chaise, variously to the London docks or to Portsmouth, to send the company ship Tory on its way before the officials could detain her, thus forcing the hand of the Colonial Office and saving New Zealand from the French. His dash, if it in fact occurred, had no effect upon the movements of the Tory. The Tory itself sailed, not because it had been learned that the Colonial Office had set its face against annexation, but because (according to a likely reconstruction) it had been learned that, in fact, annexation was at a mature stage of planning and would be accompanied by a Crown monopoly of land buying from the natives. The company, indeed, wished to present the British Government with a fait accompli; not that of a New Zealand irrevocably British (for the Tory was a survey, not an emigrant ship), but that of land bought in quantity, and cheaply, from the Maoris.
A grace note to this aspect of the myth by the so called “Race for Akaroa”. A French colonising expedition, led by C. F. Lavaud, in fact arrived in New Zealand in July 1840; its leaders were disappointed to find that the annexation of the South Island had already been proclaimed by Governor Hobson. The settlers were taken on to Akaroa, but the assertion that Hobson dispatched a vessel post haste to raise the flag before the French could arrive has no foundation. The Britomart was, in fact, dispatched to assert a sovereignty already proclaimed.
This is the solitary occasion upon which any official is permitted to play a virtuous role in the myth, for essentially they are the villains: Hobson, depicted as a weakling (in fact his illness led to indecision), his entourage as grasping and semi-literate; FitzRoy, as a vain fool (he was not notably wise, but his circumstances limited him more than his incapacities); and Grey, as a designing autocrat (he was indeed autocratic in temper, but conspicuously radical in his opinions). Missionaries in New Zealand, close to Hobson and FitzRoy, missionary agencies in London, close to the Colonial Office, share in this condemnation. The fault, if it be one, in these early governors and their advisers lay in the pursuit of policies which ran counter to the interests of the company and its settlements. This in any event falls a good deal short of villainy and recent historians have tended to judge the officials rather more favourably than the settlement promoters. In passing, it may be noted that the designation “New Zealand's first Governor”, commonly attached to Hobson, is less than accurate; strictly speaking, New Zealand began her life as a possession of the British Crown inside the boundaries of New South Wales, whose Governor at that time, Sir George Gipps, has thus a better claim to the distinction.
The myth of New Zealand's origins does not stop short with the identification of heroes and villains; it goes on to describe the virtues and vices characteristic of each side. Briefly, the villains, officials, and missionaries, were meddlesome, incompetent, selfish, and corrupt; while the heroes, the company, its agents and its settlers, were an epitome of all that was truly honest, upright, self-reliant, all, in a word, that was British. This part of the myth has two aspects; on the one hand it asserts that the company, having saved New Zealand for British imperialism, went on to populate that country; on the other it makes assertions as to the character of that population that, simply, the settlers were the best possible type of Briton. Neither aspect has been able to stand up to examination.
In the first place the settlers brought out by the company and by allied organisations, the Canterbury and Otago Associations, though numerous, were by no means the only, or even the predominating stream of settlers arriving in New Zealand in the period of foundation. Initial attention is more correctly directed towards Australia, a source of New Zealand population from the mid-1830s on, and still a source through the forties, the fifties, and the sixties, drawn considerably by the opportunities for pastoralism and the quest for gold. In the perspective of a period running from 1830 to 1870, the company's and the associations' settlers are numerous and important, but hardly dominant. They provided the nucleus of Wellington, New Plymouth, Nelson, Canterbury, and Otago; they do not account for more northerly settlement, especially at Auckland, nor for the subsequent population of the settlements they founded.
In the second place it is no longer possible to argue that Wakefield's celebrated theory of “systematic colonisation” was of material significance. Certainly this plan postulated the careful selection of emigrants and the transplantation of English social strata. Equally certain, no scrupulous selection of emigrants was carried out, and social stratification did not survive a sea change. Colonisation is normally a haphazard business, and it was so with New Zealand. Company and association settlement was in itself very far from being an example of meticulous planning; further, any effect “planned colonisation” might have had was quickly obliterated by the concurrent and subsequent stream of wholly unselected emigrants. To put it baldly, the dissatisfied, ranging from riff-raff to agitators, cannot be kept out of a colony, and the organisers of “systematic” colonisation did not try very hard to do so.
The myth persists past the period of early settlement and the achievement of self-government (that is, the 1840s and the 1850s) into the period of racial conflict (that is, the later 1850s and 1860s). Heroes need villains to provide contrast. Once the officials and the missionaries had been defeated, the native race itself came to occupy this position. Here the story may begin with George Grey.
Grey, in the 1840s, certainly held up the grant of self-government until he had, as he thought, settled the land and native problems. But he did not, as has been asserted, oppose self-government as such, nor was it wrested from him and from an obtuse Colonial Office by settler agitation. Rather, the settlers were agitating for what Grey and his superiors had already decided they should have in due course. Grey had, early in his administration, fought Maoris with signal success; nevertheless, he, together with Hobson and FitzRoy, were condemned at the time, and by some subsequent historians, for preferring the interest of doomed natives to that of heroic settlers. To some extent they did, but they were not quite without reason: the Maoris, as we know now, were not doomed; they were at the time both numerous and powerful, and many settlers were, at the very least, capable of avariciousness and fraud. Apart from his pro-Maori policy, Grey has been unrealistically castigated for a sinister design to perpetuate autocracy even in the course of implementing the 1852 Act conferring self-government. His chosen method, on this view, was to set the provincial governments in operation before the general, or central, legislature could meet. Indeed, he did this, but the fact that he did so cannot be made the cause for the dominance of provincial institutions in New Zealand government throughout the 1850s and even beyond. The social, economic, and demographic facts of New Zealand life postulated provincialism, and would have required it whatever arrangements Grey had made in 1852–53.
Here it may be noted, on the side, that James Edward FitzGerald, who joined a still non-responsible Executive Council in 1854, cannot be called, as he sometimes is, New Zealand's first premier. That distinction must be reserved for the leader of the first executive responsible to the elected house of legislature – Henry Sewell, who took office briefly in 1856.
The myth of origins persists into the period of racial strife. Self-government had put the settlers in the saddle; even in the important realm of native affairs, and especially of native land purchase and policy, which was in theory reserved for the discretion of the Governor, they could, thanks to Governor Gore Browne's weakness, Native Secretary Donald McLean's responsiveness to public opinion, and to the constant pressure of the General Assembly, secure the dominance of their views. Yet the settlers and speculators remained frustrated in the North Island, notably in Taranaki and south of Auckland. Why? Patently because there were new villains to cope with – the Maoris themselves, who were, it was argued, engaged upon conspiracy against the authority of the Crown. Some of them were, in fact, acting in unison to bring land alienation to a stop – quite a different matter. Politicians in the 1860s constructed the myth of the Land League, and described it as a tightly-knit illegal conspiracy, a deliberate flouting of the law. The myth entered subsequent history; it is now clear that no such league was ever contemplated or formed, but it figures prominently in books written between the 1860s and 1940s.
Two further Maori War aspects of the myth may be noted. First, it became common form among some earlier historians to criticise the role of missionaries and clergymen as alleged instigators of Maori resistance – Octavius Hadfield in particular. Hadfield did, in fact, counsel some Maoris to hold on to their lands, but this no longer appears as a disloyal activity. But a missionary was always a fit villain for the myth of origins and pioneer virtue: missionaries, earlier, had assisted Hobson, had staffed the Protectorate Department, and had been relied upon by FitzRoy.
Secondly, it is still widely believed that Imperial troops were of no effect in fighting Maoris, that settler militia alone brought the resisting tribes to heel. Indeed, they played their part (together with Maori allies), but it was far from such a dominant role. This aspect of the myth, again, emerged in the conditions of the decade of fighting, the 1860s. Beleaguered settlers, who hated the officials, from the Governor down, for not defeating the Maoris in one swift blow and driving them from their lands, were quick to pass on to the further argument that the Imperial troops at the disposal of the Governor were, in any case, quite useless, and that colonial troops, settlers under arms, would do the job quickly if given their head. This view, which has entered subsequent history, may be classed as an extension of the antipathy to officialdom, both local and British, which characterised the 1840s. Related assertions of official incapacity, folly, and wickedness, persist into the post-war years.
Towards the end of the 1860s the British Government made plain its determination to withdraw troops from New Zealand unless the New Zealand Government made arrangements for their payment. The Liberal Government in the United Kingdom had, in fact, become reconciled to colonial self-government, believed that self-government should carry with it financial self-reliance, and was further anxious to reduce its own expenditure as far as possible. Notification of its intention to withdraw the troops prompted in New Zealand a veritable tirade of accusation – the Liberal “Little Englanders”, it was asserted, were bent upon the destruction of the Empire as a whole, and were making a start upon New Zealand. This wholly unsupportable view has found its way into many subsequent histories.
The commonly accepted myth of settler uprightness may also be designated “the myth of the possessors” – the myth of those who entered upon their inheritance in the 1870s, having tamed the Governors, freed themselves from the Colonial Office, abolished the Church (in the person of the missionaries) as an effective force, and defeated the Maoris. Not all the settlers, of course, were possessors: men of considerable property, in land, commerce, and finance, dominated the country socially, economically, and politically. The non-possessors, subsistence farmers, artisans, and labourers, were numerous, and their numbers were swelled by the emigration policies of the 1870s. Their condition, further, was worsened by the depression of the 1880s. By 1890 they were a political force, thanks to manhood and equal suffrage; their adhesion to the political party headed first by John Ballance and then by Richard Seddon inaugurated and maintained the Liberal era. From their aspirations and successes emerged what might be called a counter myth, “the myth of the non-possessors”.
Again, this myth involves the person of George Grey, this time in a heroic role, though he was not responsible for its creation. Credit for that must go to the journalist, politician, and historian, William Pember Reeves. Grey certainly used the label “Liberal” in the 1879 election; Ballance's successful party in 1890 was indeed called “Liberal”. It was temptingly easy, and the great majority of historians from Reeves to the present day succumbed to the temptation, to assume that the 1880s saw “the rise of the Liberal Party” as a continuous development from Grey to Ballance. The politics of this decade do not permit much certainty even yet, but one thing that is certain is the absence of any Liberal Party, or of any other political party in a modern sense, during the period. The continuous development of Liberalism as an organised movement cannot, it seems likely, be placed earlier than 1887.
The myth of the non-possessors can account for the whole of New Zealand history from Grey's premiership (1877–79) to the present day. Indeed, the myth is still in the process of formulation: “the quest for equality” is its current designation. The heroes are all champions of the non-possessors, busy using the power of the State to turn them into possessors. The list will include John Ballance; Richard Seddon; John McKenzie; William Pember Reeves; Joseph Ward; and the trade unionists and socialists who founded the Labour Party, Henry Holland, Michael Savage, Peter Fraser, and Walter Nash. They are heroes, and eminently successful ones; the tradition they set was from time to time interrupted, but not for long, by some rather low-keyed villains: Harry Atkinson, W. F. Massey, J. G. Coates, George Forbes, Adam Hamilton, and Sidney Holland.
The error of this myth is not that it asserts that the main impetus in New Zealand politics since 1890 has come from a succession of parties grouped around leaders who run from Ballance to Nash; and not that it asserts that these men and parties were, at least in considerable part, concerned with social welfare: these two assertions are quite true. The error is rather that the myth exaggerates the identity between leaders and parties it canonised, as well as the difference between the “heroic” left and the “villainous” right in New Zealand politics. It serves to obscure the antipathy between Grey and Ballance, between Ballance and Seddon, and between Seddon and Reeves. Ballance's chosen successor was Stout, not Seddon, a fact which has only recently become known and accepted. It serves further to transform a political line-up into a social cleavage. Parties, to continue to exist, must fight each other, but we do not need to suppose that they are always, or even often, fighting about anything that matters. As far as policies and achievements go, Massey and Coates are a good deal closer to Ballance and Seddon before them and to Savage and Fraser after them than this reconstruction would suppose.
It remains to be said that the myth of the possessors and the myth of the non-possessors have one thing in common. They are myths of the settler New Zealand which sealed its victory in the 1860s, myths of the initial and of the subsequent inheritors of the country. Not until the advent of a Labour Government in 1935 did the myth of the non-possessors expand to include the Maoris as a deprived group; until that time the heroes of the right and the heroes of the left were at one in regarding the Maori as a vanishing race, an inferior race, a race whose land was a settler legacy, the gift of a Pakeha providence.
Not all the errors in the interpretation of the past can be related to the evolution of myths: only the interesting and significant ones. They may be made simply by mistaking the nature and the tendency of evidence. Generations of New Zealanders have learned (and perhaps still learn) to distinguish sharply between the so-called “Moriori” and the Maori, the first and the second wave of pre-European inhabitants. The term Moriori should, in fact, be limited to the inhabitants of the Chatham Islands, people who were largely killed and assimilated by Maori invaders early in the nineteenth century. It should never be employed to identify a very dark-skinned, primitive non-Polynesian (perhaps Melanesian) race of New Zealanders, an inferior people wiped out by the superior, subsequent, and conquering Maoris. All early inhabitants of New Zealand were certainly Polynesian and the likelihood is that Maori culture developed continuously from the time of the first settlers from the Pacific Islands, without sharp breaks, and determined by isolation and by the conditions of the environment.
And yet, one may be permitted to wonder, is not this “error” strangely related to the myth of the possessors? If the Maoris themselves could be represented as an invading, conquering, expropriating people, would not this story serve to justify the activities of a race of subsequent conquerors, to turn the charge of expropriation upon the victims themselves?
by William Hosking Oliver, M.A.(N.Z.), D.PHIL.(OXON.), Professor of History, Massey University of Manawatu.
At present the circumstances attending the prehistoric settlement of New Zealand are matters of learned controversy and three rival theories are being debated. The older school, which bases its view on the canon of Polynesian tradition, asserts that Tahitian explorers discovered New Zealand and that they or their descendants later decided to emigrate there. Another group accepts this but insists that these explorers and settlers found aboriginal inhabitants whom they killed or enslaved. The third school holds that New Zealand was settled solely as the result of accidental one-way voyages of people who were blown off course during local canoe journeys.
Recent research appears to confirm that the “Great Fleet” of Maori tradition is a myth coined by European Maori-phils in the generation after the Maori Wars. The myth, which arose out of popular scholastic attempts to systematise conflicting tribal arrival-traditions, gained wide acceptance owing to the belief that European contact had doomed the Maori race to rapid extinction. In any case, the Maori-phil image of the Maori as the classical “noble savage” called for a historical background of similarly heroic proportions. Thus certain interested Europeans interpreted the “Canoe” traditions to fit their own preconceived notions, with the result that a specious theory was gradually accepted by other Europeans, and many Maoris, as being historically accurate. In fact, because few of the early Maori-phils were trained scholars, they often misunderstood, glossed over, or suppressed, inconsistencies in the traditions, references to earlier inhabitants in some versions being a case in point. Present-day historians, while not doubting that the legendary canoes arrived in New Zealand, believe that such arrivals were the result of accidental voyages rather than of organised attempts to migrate and colonise. A re-examination of the legends shows that, far from there having been a large fleet of canoes, those which reached New Zealand came at irregular intervals during the 300 or so years following Kupe. The legends also show that only Tainui and Arawa came together.
by Bernard John Foster, M.A., Research Officer, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.