History is a culture war

In the beginning were the birds. The opening chapter of Michael King’s The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand offers readers a lovely image of the raucous avian beauty of these islands at the time of European discovery, or “a last vibration of primordial New Zealand”, as King puts it. He drew on Joseph Banks’ impressions of Queen Charlotte Sound on January 17, 1770, when Banks was woken by birds on shore a quarter of a mile away. They were creating the most melodious wild music Banks had ever heard, “almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable”.

But Banks, Cook and the rest of the men on the Endeavour were late for the orchestra. As King writes, that dawn chorus was “a mere echo” of what could have been heard 400 years earlier, when the moa could still supply the bass notes, and other extinct species such as native ducks and giant geese might also have joined in. 

King’s account of the devastation that came with human contact, first Māori, then Pākehā, supplies its own tone of quiet sorrow that persists through an otherwise positive and hopeful history of Aotearoa New Zealand that has been through multiple editions since its first appearance 20 years ago, when it was simply The Penguin History of New Zealand. It now appears with a new foreword, a slightly altered title and a cover line that says “Over 300,000 copies sold”, as though it was the Edmonds Cookery Book of New Zealand history. 

To go back to the birds, though, King’s history was praised in 2003 for the novelty of focusing on the negative environmental impact of human settlement, and that still feels novel. The first chapter runs like a pre-credits sequence showing the lush abundance of life here before people arrived to ruin it. King goes way back, as far as Gondwana. One of his influences was the Australian writer Tim Flannery, whose book The Future Eaters appeared less than a decade before King started on this history and who argued that humanity had a disastrous, profound impact on Australia’s natural environment, which seems far from a controversial idea now. King argues that the swift consumption of moa, seals and other slow-moving sources of protein by early Māori was a form of future-eating. Māori arrived, they ate well, and then had to adapt. 

That environmental consciousness was novel but it does not explain the remarkable success of this book. The best explanation is that it was simply the right book by the right person at the right moment. King, who was only in his late 50s when he died prematurely in 2004, had earned his position as the writer New Zealand trusted to tell its stories. He was a historian who could speak clearly to the public. Or he was a journalist who could think deeply and had a longer view of time than last week. As a writer and a public intellectual, he was thoughtful and generous.

If no writer with the same combination of skills and abilities has emerged since, then that would justify Penguin Random House’s decision to mark the 20th anniversary of the book with a new edition rather than commissioning a new writer who might move the story along a little and perhaps offer a different slant on the same events. But of course there are historians who could attempt this. Paul Moon comes to mind, as does Jock Phillips. Those are two obvious names, with a long trail of bestsellers behind them. But there are less obvious ones. What would a national history by Charlotte Macdonald look like? Or Tony Ballantyne? Or some younger, less well-known, Māori historians? History departments of our universities are surely packed with candidates who could take a shot. 

There is something perverse about reissuing a history that was inevitably a product of a time and a mindset. The text has not changed at all, but macrons have been added to Māori words and there are four more names on the list of New Zealand prime ministers (you have to add a fifth yourself: the new edition predates Christopher Luxon). Two short essays have been added as introductions. One, by Phillips, was originally published in the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography. The other is by Sir Tipene O’Regan, who would once have been another candidate on our list of hypothetical successors. 

Is it more controversial to identify Pākehā culture as indigenous in 2023 than it was in the 1980s, 1990s or early 2000s? Probably. The view is hard to defend

O’Regan praises King for “putting Māori-Pākehā relationships at the forefront of our public conversation”, which included pioneering books on Māori history in the 1970s, before it became politically difficult for a Pākehā writer to do that kind of work. O’Regan also acknowledges King for “identifying Pākehā as an indigenous culture in Aotearoa New Zealand”, which is a controversial view that O’Regan happens to agree with. 

Is it more controversial to identify Pākehā culture as indigenous in 2023 than it was in the 1980s, 1990s or early 2000s? Probably. The view is hard to defend, and not just because it seems to be in contradiction with the basic definition of indigeneity. Nor is it an argument that has caught on much with the public or one for which King is roped in posthumously to provide intellectual support, as he is in other areas. It’s one of several ideas that a mainstream Pākehā writer would probably avoid in 2023.

The culture wars play out in the closing chapter, which act as a summing-up of New Zealand’s progress and general mood. King notes that Doug Graham, in his role as Treaty Negotiations Minister, said in 1997 that Māori had spiritual feelings for mountains, lakes and rivers that Pākehā lacked. King calls this “a statement strongly resented by the large number of non-Māori New Zealanders who … regarded them with a respect and a reverence that at least equalled and in some instances exceeded that displayed by Māori”. Exceeded? When the background is Treaty negotiations, that is a tricky line to take. 

King then compares two art outrages from 1998. One was the Virgin in a Condom sculpture that upset Catholics who protested outside Te Papa. The national museum, King writes, “refused” to remove the sculpture. Yet the Waikato Museum of Art was sufficiently worried by the Tainui reaction to a Dick Frizzell painting of the Four Square grocer wearing a moko that it took the offending work down. The inference is that we, as Pākehā, have been forced to be more sensitive about Māori culture than about the Catholic church and other European exports that contribute to our own so-called indigeneity.  

There are other jarring notes. Earlier in the book, King writes that if any chapter in New Zealand history deserved to be called a “holocaust”, it was the musket wars. If this sounds puzzling in 2023, it’s because King was clearly having a crack at Tariana Turia who was forced to apologise for calling colonisation a holocaust in 2000. In doing so, he sounds eerily close to those who argue that Māori-on-Māori violence was worse than anything Pākehā ever did. You only have to scratch the surface of arguments about the new history curriculum to hear that one. 

These views have, as they say, not aged well. Would King have changed his mind about these ideas? Possibly. And if so, that shows why a work of history needs to be contextualised rather than simply reproduced as though it is, in the inaccurate words of the blurb-writer, “more relevant than ever”. 

That makes the addition of Aotearoa to the title a nice move. It also undermines those who have been using, or misusing, King in their fight against official adoption of the Māori language. This issue goes back to the third chapter in the book, “The Great New Zealand Myth”. The myth in question was Kupe’s discovery of New Zealand and the Great Fleet, but there was a sub-myth, if you like, which is that pre-European Māori called the country Aotearoa. King explained that the word Aotearoa was actually “popularised and entrenched” by William Pember Reeves in The Long White Cloud (1898) and that “Māori had no name for the country as a whole”.  

You can see the problem that arises when that claim is included in a book that sells hundreds of thousands of copies to people who may not otherwise read much New Zealand history. The problem was noticed in one of the few critical reviews of the Penguin History that was published at the time, which was Caroline Daley’s review in the New Zealand Journal of History. “Throughout the text King offers talkback radio callers ammunition in their war against racially based policy,” Daley wrote. She predicted the future, although we could substitute fringe online media for talkback. 

Right-wing culture-war figures such as former TV presenter Peter Williams and historian Michael Bassett have enlisted King as support for their argument that New Zealand should not become Aotearoa. “Instead of being proud New Zealanders, we’ll be expected to call ourselves Aotearoaians,” Bassett grumbled. Former newspaper editor Karl du Fresne has referred to the “dubious authenticity” of the name but said he could accept it if agreed by public referendum.

Some have misread King and thought he said Reeves had invented the tradition of Aotearoa, which is clearly not the case. Yet the history remains complicated and still contested and if any chapter in the Penguin History could have been revised for 2023, it is probably that one. 

In King’s defence, his relatives have said he would have been horrified at his work being used to provide ammunition against the growing use of the Māori language. His new-found fans also miss an important point made by King in the same chapter which is that even if New Zealand was “certainly not known” to Māori as Aotearoa, “just as certainly, it is called that now by most Māori of the modern era”. And since 2003, increasing numbers of Pākehā.

There is an ease, confidence and readability to King’s prose that few New Zealand historians have matched. Some historians are wittier. Some are more academic. Some are possibly more lyrical. But none of them have King’s rare blend of skills, as Phillips pointed out when he wrote about the Penguin History in 2004:

“The story races along with verve and delightful anecdotes. The judgments remain fair and acute. Few professional historians will quarrel with many of the interpretations. Yet on the other hand few will find much that is new in the book; there is none of the creativity or originality to be found in [James] Belich’s two volumes. Yet many thousands who have been gripped by King can’t finish Belich. Michael’s skills were in a masterful synthesis.”

Journalism taught King to get out and talk to people, to see things for himself, and to write in a relatable way. More than that, it taught him to be productive. You couldn’t afford to have a case of writer’s block if you were a reporter on the Waikato Times (where King got his start) facing a blank page and a deadline. You just had to write. His skill as a writer is obvious in some of the concise portraits of earlier prime ministers, such as George Forbes, “a bull-necked farmer from Cheviot who had captained the Canterbury rugby team … he was tough and stubborn but not inspiring”. That’s a very good journalist at work. 

Of course there are moments when the narrative slumps. Passages on infrastructure in the 19th century feel like homework, and he downplays the importance of the New Zealand Wars compared to the Boer War and World War I, which is another position he might have gone on to revise. But to write the national story in this way is both a remarkable thing to attempt and a remarkable thing to achieve. It seems like a generous act. King did it succinctly and clearly and with, to use a word that was well-chosen by Phillips, fairness. The tone feels wise and reassuring and the New Zealand that emerges is moderate and even-tempered, not inclined towards the extremes of the left and right or the extremes of religious sectarianism – not inclined towards any extremes at all, really. His New Zealand was the land of the decent bloke. The farmer who worked hard on the land. The soldier who went to war. The man who came home and raised his family in the post-war suburbs. But his decent bloke was more than that. His decent bloke appreciated the arts as well. 

If you look for traces of personality in what is supposed to be a neutral and even-handed history, one of the places you find it is in King’s elevation of artists and writers. Phillips calls King “a committed cultural nationalist who regarded himself as much part of the community of writers as the circle of historians”. That was in relation to King’s substantial biographies of Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, who also appear as national types in a chapter on conformity and nonconformity. King’s lionising of writers and artists who led fairly marginal lives is only one of the ways in which his view of New Zealand seems ultimately positive and even inclusive. And maybe the ongoing success of this book is a further demonstration that we do value writers and want to hear what they tell us, although it’s becoming harder to agree with that with every passing year. Perhaps our appreciation of culture looked better in 2003. 

After four pages on good, keen New Zealand heroes, King devotes a single paragraph to figures who “held heroic stature more specifically for women”, and a further paragraph explaining that “the Māori world too had its heroes and heroines”

There is a way in which The Penguin History of New Zealand, with or without Aotearoa in the title, will always remain moving as King’s unexpected last word on the place he loved and the people in it. It is a summary that draws deeply on, and refers back to, the different strains of his work – on Māori and Moriori, on what it means to be Pākehā, and the struggles and small victories of creative people in a remote country. And it concludes with a very flattering view of decent New Zealanders, embodied in a single person, Sir Edmund Hillary. 

Sir Ed was practical, modest and laconic. He even looked like an “ordinary” bloke from one of the cartoons Neville Lodge used to draw in the Evening Post. He used his fame and success to do good. And “through all this he remained reticent, strong, dependable, unboastful, good-humoured, a man who accepted with patience and grace the relationship his country had forged with him and the responsibilities and burdens that accompanied it.” Colin Meads, Charles Upham, Peter Blake and Jonah Lomu were other men who approached Hillary’s stature, in King’s view. 

After four pages on these and more good, keen New Zealand heroes, King devotes a single paragraph to figures who “held heroic stature more specifically for women”, such as Kate Sheppard, and a further paragraph explaining that “the Māori world too had its heroes and heroines”. It’s pretty clear that a historian writing in 2023 would probably rethink those choices, or be forced to by an editor. 

That aside, there was an uplifting quality in the view of this country that King offered us. He saw the best in us. And the book was well-timed in that it arrived at a moment of relative goodwill and prosperity, early in a hopeful new millennium. This is how the book’s final paragraph goes:

“And most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant. Those qualities are part of the national cultural capital that has in the past saved the country from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism seen in other parts of the world. They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future.” 

That sounds a bit like a speech delivered by a prime minister, but then New Zealand wasn’t a bad place to be living in 2003. But now? It’s harder to say. In King’s absence, O’Regan gets to update the story in his foreword. He writes that even as the book was being written, New Zealand was undergoing dynamic cultural and structural change. 

“We have been reshaped since by a global pandemic, destructive cyclones and new forms of technological, political and social division, some of which do not promise peaceful outcomes, even as we age and increase in both demographic and ethnic diversity.” 

In other words, these are darker, tougher, meaner, less tolerant times and there is no bright future. Optimism feels like a luxury, democracy is becoming outmoded and a belief in progress has stalled. You can’t help wondering how King would have concluded a Penguin History written for readers in 2023 not 2003. 

*An earlier version of this review listed Karl du Fresne among those arguing that Aotearoa ought not to become the country’s name. While he has doubted its ‘authenicity” he has written he could accept the name if the public voted for it.

The new edition of The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand by Michael King (Penguin, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.