Nicholas Reid reviews Becoming Aotearoa by Michael Belgrave for Landfall Online:
‘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.’
Read the rest of the review here.
