History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars (Essay‪)‬

It is now a relative commonplace in New Zealand literary studies to say that Pakeha culture has a fraught relationship with its colonial origins. This relationship has been foregrounded by the Settlement Studies project in particular, and is neatly summarised in Alex Calder and Stephen Turner's introduction to the recent issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature devoted to the project: 'Our goal, in these essays and elsewhere, has been to investigate the ways in which foundational problems of settlement are enacted, repeated, modified and continued in literature, art, and other cultural forms'. (1) According to Calder and Turner, all Pakeha writing (white settlers are their primary interest, although Settlement Studies promises to incorporate 'colonisers and colonized [...] in the complexities of encounter and exchange') bears the structural traces of the original moment of (un)settlement: 'similar impasses are likely to inhabit and deform all the narratives, fictional and non-fictional, of settler societies'. (2) In one of the most intriguing formulations of this thesis, Stephen Turner has argued that contemporary Pakeha culture is constructed around a problematic of 'living in the present, or living without history'. (3) Yet while such formulations are both rhetorically powerful and rich in theoretical potential, they are themselves curiously without history. Based around a handful of exemplary foundational texts (notably F. E. Maning's Old New Zealand [1863], Samuel Butler's Erewhon [1872], and William Satchell's The Greenstone Door [1914]), Settlement Studies implies that Pakeha identity is an unchanging, stable and historically continuous entity: 'Maning's failure sets the pattern', Turner argues, 'for settler writings which continue to manifest the difficulties of narrativising settlement'. (4) In what follows I wish to unsettle the ahistoric structure of Pakeha identity assumed by Settlement Studies on the basis of its foundational texts by way of turning to the archive of novels depicting New Zealand's colonial wars. (5) The occasional surges in popularity enjoyed by this subgenre suggest that neither the contours of Pakeha identity nor Pakeha attitudes towards the history of settlement have been as monolithic as are currently implied. This article takes its origin from Nelson Wattie's observation that well over thirty novels have been written on the subject of the New Zealand wars, and--a point neither Wattie nor any other critic has noted--that three distinct periods of a decade or so (1887-1899, 1959-1968 and 1982-1993) each saw between eight and eleven novels written on the subject. (6) I begin by arguing that the New Zealand wars provide a paradoxically vital yet fraught foundational narrative for Pakeha, and it was the combination of certain historical factors during the periods in question that rendered it particularly useful for engaging with that identity. Next, treating the texts and context of the 1960s as exemplary for patterns apparent in all three periods, I argue that this cluster of novels arose at a moment when Pakeha identity was under pressures--both domestic and international that necessitated the realignment of its boundaries. Writers turned to the subject of the New Zealand wars in order to assist that realignment: through a thematic analysis, I demonstrate how the novels of the 1960s collaborate in an attempt to re-establish Pakeha identity upon a new relationship with Maori and in greater distinction to Britain. I then more briefly address the two other upsurges in fiction written about the wars and the concurrent realignments of Pakeha identity that they engaged with, before concluding with some further thoughts on how the perspective offered by historical novels of the New Zealand wars modify current notions about the relationship between settler identity and history.