The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes

Abstract

Does New Zealand matter to the rest of the world? For various reasons the question has always seemed important here, a kind of hollow echo bouncing around national politics, economics and culture, and reflecting back most strongly from concrete measures of overseas recognition: a seat on the United Nations Security Council; an Oscar or a Booker Prize; a World Cup; a global milk auction. For scholars working on New Zealand studies, a version of this question is prompted by the rise of institutional incentives such as the Marsden Fund and the PBRF, which frame “research excellence” in large part in terms of global visibility. It’s a challenge, perhaps, of speaking to two audiences at the same time: a local readership familiar with a narrow but deep national archive, and an international readership who must be persuaded of its relevance to their more “mainstream” concerns. Yet the question can also be asked another way: Does the study of New Zealand have to be framed solely in national terms? Shaped for so long by the ethos and aesthetics of mid-twentieth century cultural nationalism, humanistic inquiry in New Zealand still tends to use the nation as its unquestioned unit of measurement.