The Journal of New Zealand Studies

Editor's Introduction

Peter Whiteford — 2024-07-02

At this time last year, and in this context, I noted the high degree of uncertainty that Victoria University was experiencing – an uncertainty that was the outcome of an exceptionally difficult financial situation. The financial difficulties that the University faced led to the loss of significant numbers of staff, with consequential changes to the kind of teaching and research that Victoria University was able to engage in.

Still Shines: Vincent O’Sullivan (1937-2024)

Heidi Thomson — 2024-07-02

When Peter Whiteford asked me to write something about Vincent, he generously gave me ‘free reign as to length and style’. So this portrait of Vincent is a personal one, with an emphasis on certain of his works over others. For the thirty-four years I knew Vincent, he was always and everywhere a writer at work. But what made him so likeable was the fact that he never ‘acted the writer’. Vincent displayed insatiable curiosity for everything, but never resorted to ‘look at me’ affectations, and remained a resolutely private person while gregariously fulfilling his role as a public literary figure.

Gifted and “Possessed”: Reading and Writing the Adaptable Frame

Jan Cronin — 2024-07-02

This article explores Patrick Evans’s neglected novel Gifted, arguing that Evans, as novelist, wilfully forges, inhabits and defends the same authorial ground his criticism of the work of Janet Frame assailed for decades. Positioning Gifted as part penance, part reparation, part justification for Evans’s literary criticism, this essay negotiates the dynamics of equivocal blend that characterise Evans’s “gifted” relationship with Frame and finds, within Gifted, an enactment of the continuum between paratext and adaptation.

Poles Apart? Eileen Duggan and Katherine Mansfield

Peter Whiteford — 2024-07-02

At first glance, there might seem to be few connections between Katherine Mansfield and her younger contemporary, Eileen Duggan, despite occasional critical efforts to link them within a tradition of women’s writing in New Zealand. The differences between the two women, in their lives and in their writing, are striking. In spite of those marked differences, Duggan wrote about Mansfield on a number of occasions and with considerable sympathy. One interesting connection between the two can be found in their youthful responses to two remote and controversial Polish figures – the writer Stanislaw Wyspianski and the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In this article, I consider Mansfield’s “To Stanislaw Wyspianski” and Duggan’s “Rosa Luxemburg”, noting the very different circumstances of their composition, and suggesting what might have appealed to each of the poets in the subjects they chose to write about.

Changing language hierarchies and ideologies in New Zealand dual language picturebooks: 1973-2020

Nicola Daly — 2024-07-02

Aotearoa New Zealand is a multilingual country with three official languages, Te Reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, and English. The presence of Māori and English in picturebooks published in New Zealand between 1973 and 2020 offers a method of exploring and documenting the changing language hierarchies and ideologies across a 47-year period. This is of particular importance because of the contribution of children’s literature to developing language attitudes in child and adult readers. In this article, a sociolinguistic lens called Linguistic Landscape is used to analyse a sample of seven picturebooks, showing how picturebooks reflect language beliefs and attitudes to official yet minority languages in an English-dominant society. The picturebooks are analysed in terms of the relative space and dominance afforded each language. Links to language status in law and education are examined exploring the potential of picturebooks as a source for the study of changing language hierarchies and ideologies.

Women naturalists in Tūhura Otago Museum, Dunedin

Rosi Crane — 2024-07-02

Historical studies on naturalists who contributed their expertise to Tūhura Otago Museum, are few and invariably deal with men. The roles that women played in the formation of its collections in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are uncovered. The paucity of information in the handwritten museum registers and archive is supplemented to a small extent by newsprint and annual reports. Women’s expertise included field collecting and academic studies. Donations arose because of changing family circumstances or through friendships with the male curators. A few businesswomen also featured. The career of Lily Daff, the museum’s first female appointment, is described as she rose to become chief designer.

Even More Loyalist than Most: The Round Table Movement in New Zealand, 1910–1923

Martin George Holmes — 2024-07-02

This article illustrates the extent of the Round Table movement’s influence in New Zealand from 1910 until its decline in the early 1920s. There have been several in-depth analyses of this political movement in Australia, Britain, Canada, and South Africa. In contrast, the Round Table movement in New Zealand has received startlingly little attention. The article highlights that the New Zealand movement became a noteworthy lobby group and recruited some prominent members. However, it also highlights that the movement’s social elitism and internal tensions marred the effectiveness of its outreach.

The redemption of Ian Bing: Chinese nationalist, conspiratorialist antisemite, genealogist

J. Montgomerie — 2024-07-02

Ian Bing has until now been best known as a pioneering Chinese genealogist and hotelier in New Zealand. His previously unresearched journal, China Calling (中國呼聲), the unofficial newsletter of the Chinese Nationalist Guomindang's (國民黨) New Life Movement (新生活運動, NLM) in New Zealand, spent its final days reprinting Social Credit theory and antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Bing later disseminated literature that influenced New Zealand’s postwar antisemitic right. Social Credit is the key to explaining both Bing’s transformation, and the small but outsized and hitherto little documented role he played in developing New Zealand postwar antisemitism.

Christian-Māoriesque – A Transcultural Pictorial Artform

Christopher Evan Longhurst — 2024-07-02

This exploration develops the field of intercultural aesthetics by exploring the use of Māori motifs used by non-Māori artists, and looking at the use of those motifs in the context of Christian art.[i] It surveys a selection of paintings that blend Māori and Christian motifs, and critically evaluates their interculturality. It then looks at how intercultural artworks of religious subject matter can create an instance of pictorial transculturality. An identity for an artistic cross-fertilization between Christianity, Māoritanga, and Pākehā culture is linked with the defining principle of transculturality, and a new term is suggested to categorise this identity, the Christian-Māoriesque.

[i] By “non-Māori artists” I mean all artists who do not identify as Māori, that is, who do not have whakapapa.

Frances Hodgkins’ Cataracts

Francesc March de Ribot — 2024-07-02

As Vickie Hearnshaw and Mark Stocker have explained, the late work of Frances Hodgkins was affected by her cataracts,[i] which are very common at 70 years of age.[ii] As her cataracts progressed, her use of colour shifted to muted tones and earthy hues; her compositions were simplified, with broader brushwork and fewer details apparent.

Women Will Rise! Recalling the Working Women’s Charter.

Phoebe Kelloway — 2024-07-02

Editors Marie Russell and the late Gay Simpkin set out to share knowledge about the late 1970s campaign for the Working Women’s Charter with a younger generation. Their book provides interesting insights into the history of both the trade union movement and the struggle for women’s rights in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. The Charter was a set of sixteen demands aimed at redressing the inequity and oppression women faced in the workplace and beyond, like “a bill of rights for working women” (21). Its clauses ranged from demands for equality and an end to all discrimination, to access to childcare and reproductive rights. The first five chapters are largely focused on the efforts to win support for it within the labour movement.

New Zealand Nurses: Caring for Our People 1880 – 1950

Helen Rook — 2024-07-02

Pamela Wood’s New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our People 1880-1950 reveals nursing through the eyes of fierce pioneers of New Zealand nursing. It provides a valuable window on the foundations of professional nursing and is likely to be of interest to nursing scholars and other curious readers. At the same time, however, it is missing the voice of Māori, the tangata whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand. By failing to consider the nursing practices before colonisation, or the impact of colonisation, Wood falls into the trap of colonial nostalgia, focussing on imported systems, rather than on their contextualisation in Aotearoa.

Comrade: Bill Anderson: A Communist, Working-Class Life

Ross Webb — 2024-07-02

In 2011, Nick Salvatore reflected on the ‘intimate relationship’ between biography and social history. Challenging the suggestions made by some historians that biography was outside the ‘discipline of history’, Salvatore argued that the recent turn to biography in labour and social history was a welcome development. It opened the possibility of a broader understanding of ‘the interplay between an individual and social forces beyond one’s ability to control’. Such biography, he continued, could shed light far beyond any individual, even if it does not always reach into every corner of social life’. Like any historical work, however, it demanded a ‘disciplinary rigor and thorough research effort that treats equally seriously both the subject and the context that shapes that life’. In his excellent biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, Salvatore referred to the book as a ‘social biography’, one that ‘intended to explore both the individual and the broader social context’.

Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand

Fengshi Wu — 2024-07-02

With an ensemble of experts, Maria Bargh and Julie L. MacArthur have done a timely service to the communities of academic research, teaching-and-learning, and public policymaking by editing the book Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is timely as we witness another year of record-breaking dramatic weather and climate-related disasters worldwide. More than ever, all sectors of society at large are compelled to learn more about the environment we live in, the histories of the lands, waters, and forests around us, interconnections across complex geological, ecological, and socio-economical systems, and, ultimately, the relationship between individuals and the future of Aotearoa and beyond.

Complete Poems

Geoffrey Miles — 2024-07-02

Fifty years after James K. Baxter’s death, we finally have an edition of his Complete Poems. This four-volume collection completes the heroic project of editor John Weir and Te Herenga Waka University Press, begun in Complete Prose (2015) and Letters of a Poet (2018), to collect together and publish in scholarly form all of Baxter’s scattered writings. The publisher’s blurb reaches for an appropriately Baxterian image in calling this a ‘Herculean task’. Indeed, the scale of the collection invites superheroic imagery: 2,977 poems in 3,155 pages – to say nothing of the appendices (and I will say something of the appendices later). Weir’s earlier, long-standard Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1980) ran to only 656 pages. Gathering in the unpublished contents of the manuscript notebooks in the Hocken Library, together with poems published in obscure journals or recovered from friends and acquaintances, his new edition more or less triples the quantity of Baxter’s poetry now accessible to scholars and the general reader.

Contributors

Peter Whiteford — 2024-07-02

Bios of contributors.