by Michael King
Appointed superintendent at Seacliff, the largest asylum in the country, when he was only 31, King transformed the position into his own personal fiefdom and experimented widely with what would come to be known as the practice of psychiatry. As Barbara Brookes has noted, he turned ‘a badly designed farm asylum into a working institution with a productive farm and beautifully planted grounds … [He] promoted fresh air, exercise, good diet, work and recreation as the appropriate treatments for mental illness. He worked towards improved classification of patients [and] took voluntary boarders before provision was made in legislation for voluntary admission …’
King’s work on infant care arose from the need to find a satisfactorily beneficial feeding formula for a baby girl whom he and his wife, Bella, adopted in 1905. Being now responsible, at the age of 47, for the care of an infant of his own, he turned his considerable intelligence to the many issues involved in raising children. His full range of theories about feeding babies, timing of feeding, wider nutrition, toilet training and exercise of discipline were eventually published in his extraordinarily popular book Feeding and Care of Baby (1913). Because the medical profession turned its collective back on him, regarding him as an eccentric, King enlisted the help of society women to promote both his ideas and the wider cause of child welfare. His wife Bella and later their adopted daughter, Mary, acted as devoted secretaries for this aspect of his work. Specially trained ‘Karitane nurses’ visited mothers in their homes to help equip them with all the skills of babycraft and to monitor infant development. The name came from the location of the Kings’ holiday home on the Karitane peninsula at the entrance to the Waikouaiti estuary. King used the house as an extension of Seacliff and, after 1907, as a cottage hospital for training nurses in maternal and infant welfare. It became the prototype for Karitane hospitals, of which there were eventually half a dozen nationwide.
In 1912 King was seconded to the Department of Public Health in order to take his message about infant welfare to the country as a whole. Subsequently, through his writings and attendance at international conferences, he promoted his ideas in Britain and Australia. In both countries, his dramatic form of delivery, his exaggeration of the benefits of his methods and his utter lack of self-doubt won him a following every bit as enthusiastic as that which he enjoyed in New Zealand. Although the rigidities of his theories would eventually be challenged and supplanted, King lived long enough to see his infant welfare campaign taken up internationally. In 1921 he was appointed national director of child welfare for what had become, the previous year, the Department of Health, and he subsequently became director of mental health. Sadly, his own mental health declined to the point where he could have been forced to become a patient in one of his own hospitals. Instead, he was cared for at his magnificently gardened home in Melrose, Wellington, where he died in 1938. He had been knighted in 1925 and was the first private citizen in New Zealand to be given a state funeral. To enhance his iconic status, he became in 1957 the first New Zealander to appear on a postage stamp.
After John McKenzie’s retirement from public life, the man regarded as Richard Seddon’s deputy, and ultimately as his successor as Prime Minister, was the Colonial Secretary and Minister of Industries and Commerce and of Health, Sir Joseph Ward (he had been knighted in 1901 on account of organising a successful royal tour for the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, the future King George V and Queen Mary). Ward, a Catholic merchant of Irish descent born in Melbourne, represented the country’s most southerly electorate, Awarua. He had made what was surely the most dramatic comeback ever seen in New Zealand politics. While he was Colonial Treasurer in the Seddon ministry in the mid-1890s, his own business had collapsed and he was eventually declared bankrupt in 1897. In these circumstances he was, of course, required to resign as Treasurer. But he exploited a loophole in the electoral law by resigning from Parliament and then standing again in the resulting by-election, at which he was re-elected with an increased majority.
Seddon had no reservations about his protégé’s fall and rise. Ward had mercantile experience held by few other Liberal MPs and had, on the whole, performed very satisfactorily in the administration of his portfolios, especially in securing an enormous loan in 1895 to finance the Government’s land settlement programme. By the early 1900s he was, according to his biographer, an impressive figure with his ‘expanding girth, gold watch-chain and waxed moustache … [He] was inclined to be more pompous and paranoid after his personal trauma, yet he still possessed his enterprise and commercial drive and … an “inexhaustible stock of splendid optimism”.’
That optimism would be fully drawn upon when he did, as expected, succeed Seddon in 1906. The Prime Minister had been visiting Australia in June and was several hours out of Sydney on the way home with his wife and daughter when he suffered a sudden heart attack and died. The ship put back to Sydney so that the body could be embalmed for its return to New Zealand. Like his predecessor, Seddon was given a state funeral and a statue in the grounds of Parliament – this one a dramatically good likeness. Ward was in London at the time and a temporary ministry was sworn in under the leadership of William Hall-Jones, who up to that time had been Minister of Justice and of Public Works. As soon as Ward returned in August 1906 he was elected leader of the Liberal Party and thus began his first term as Prime Minister of New Zealand.
While the Liberals would remain in office for a further six years, the steam had gone out of their performance and the reforming zeal was exhausted. This was a consequence partly of their having fulfilled their legislative programme, and partly of the loss of Seddon, who even in his period of declining health had exuded energy and purposefulness. Seddon also proved to have been a far more skilled political manager than Ward, who at times seemed to lack the authority to control his caucus. He was also ridiculed by some of his own MPs, in addition to Opposition ones, for an indulgent preoccupation with imperial affairs (he was absent in London for parts of 1907, 1909 and 1911). ‘While the economy prospered,’ Michael Bassett has written – and it did, giving New Zealanders one of the highest standards of living in the world – ‘Ward’s government lacked clear direction. Bold promises of legislation would be lost in controversy, retraction, prevarication and then paralysis.’
At the same time, the Opposition in Parliament was becoming increasingly better organised and controlled under the leadership since 1903 of William Ferguson (‘Bill’) Massey. In 1909 Massey announced that his supporters within Parliament and those outside in the Political Reform League would henceforth be known as the Reform Party. From this time New Zealand did have a political system based on party politics, and Massey began to impose a degree of discipline on his MPs and candidates comparable with that exercised by the Liberals nearly two decades earlier. Ironically, he was doing this at the very time that Ward’s grip on his followers, particularly those from the Labour movement, was weakening.
The problem for Ward was that the entire constituency on which the Liberals had built their original support was breaking up. The Labour part of the ‘lib-lab’ association was now talking of putting up its own parliamentary candidates. And much of the support from farmers and the small business sector was leaching away to Reform. Farmers had formed their own union in 1899 and shown an increasing determination to promote their interests and those of the agriculture sector. In their view, ‘Farmer Bill’ Massey was one of them; the townie merchant Joe Ward was not.
In contrast to Seddon’s record of leading his party to five election victories, Ward managed only one, in 1908. The 1911 poll produced a deadlocked Parliament. Full of disappointment and feelings of rejection, Ward resigned, to give the Liberal survivors a greater chance of maintaining a slim majority. A ministry was formed under the leadership of the Minister of Agriculture, Thomas Mackenzie, in March 1912. But this collapsed in July when four Liberal MPs voted against the Government in a no-confidence motion. After 21 years, the Liberals were out. Reform, a coalition of farming, urban professional and business in
terests, was in. One month after this the New Zealand Political Reform League was formally constituted as a political party.
Among the many changes which took place during the term of the Liberal Government was that in 1907 the country ceased to call itself a colony and became a dominion, implying the beginnings of a sense of independent identity. Another was that in 1911 the urban population of New Zealand exceeded the rural for the first time since the earliest years of British colonisation. The population of Auckland alone jumped from 51,000 in 1896 to 103,000 by 1911. These changes provoked a feeling that, despite the continuing reliance on farmers to produce its wealth, New Zealand was no longer a pioneering country composed of Pakeha people quarrying a living from the land and from building the infrastructure of roads and railways. It was now an urban society with a predominantly urban culture.
Over the same period the population of the North Island raced ahead of the South Island’s, 56 per cent to 44 per cent by 1911. The long period of South Island ascendancy in population and wealth, generated largely by the gold rushes, was over. The expression ‘mainland’ to denote the south would now be used only ironically. The drift of people and business to the north would be a continuing feature of the national profile throughout most of the twentieth century.
The coincidence of these demographic and economic changes with anniversaries of the European foundings of dozens of New Zealand’s towns and districts in the 1840s and 1850s generated a perception that one major era of New Zealand’s history and development was over and another just beginning. Here on the one hand were the now grey-haired and grey-bearded ‘pioneers’ (‘Oh the Pioneers, kiddies,’ Janet Frame’s mother, who grew up in the 1890s and early 1900s, used to say to her children over and over again, her voice brimming with admiration and nostalgia), and on the other their descendants, by this time more than 60 per cent of the population, who had been born in New Zealand as children and grandchildren of pioneers and who were expected to carry forward the old vision of their country as a ‘Better Britain’.
For the first time a ‘double patriotism’ was emerging which took pride in being both British and New Zealand. One expression of it was the growing interest in New Zealand rugby teams that travelled abroad, as they did to the United Kingdom in 1888–89 (the New Zealand Native Team) and in 1905 (the first All Blacks). The pride in the victories of the latter, and the deep shock and discussion provoked by a controversial loss to Wales, suggested that a large part of the country’s emerging identity would be invested in this particular sport, as it would be also in war. Another expression of similar feelings could be found in a modest first florescence of literature which revealed the beginnings of a sense of history (Reeves’s The Long White Cloud in 1898, Robert McNab’s Historical Records of New Zealand ten years later, and T. M. Hocken’s A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand in 1909[4]); and of nostalgia for what was passing away (William Satchell’s novels The Toll of the Bush (1905) and The Greenstone Door (1914)).
With the nostalgia came a strong sense, encouraged by both Liberal politicians and writers in the party’s ranks – Reeves, McNab, T. Lindsay Buick and Thomas Bracken (of God Defend New Zealand fame) – that the Government’s programme had achieved something in New Zealand that offered an example to humankind as a whole. The view emerged that, with votes for women, old age pensions and labour legislation in particular, New Zealand was ‘showing the way’ to the rest of the world – that Seddon’s ‘God’s Own Country’ was, among other things, a social laboratory which other countries could study with envy and profit. Indeed, a whole procession of luminaries – Mark Twain, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Keir Hardy, Tom Mann, Ben Tillet and Michael Davitt among them – all came to inspect the country and its institutions during the Liberal era. This sense of the country’s special mission to the world at large persisted right through the twentieth century and was voiced at various times by political parties of all persuasions seeking either further social innovation or preservation of the status quo.
Such feeling was linked also, in the Liberal era and beyond it, to the notion that New Zealand was one of the most loyal – if not the most loyal – of Britain’s children. And this notion was expressed and exploited by national leaders to persuade their compatriots to become involved for the first time in wars which were not of New Zealand’s making and which were taking place far away from the country’s national boundaries.
[1] As a result of this law, New Zealand was indeed for some years a ‘land without strikes’. See page 308.
[2] As far as conditions in Auckland were concerned, a poem published in the New Zealand Herald on 11 March 1882 commented:
The foul putrescence lieth on each side of the street,
And in each festering backyard, slops swelter in the heat.
The cess-pits belch forth gases on fever-laden air,
And fever-damp uprolleth from sewer-gullies there.
[3] Seacliff, like some other asylums in the country – Sunnyside, Avondale, Cherry Farm – had the kind of name that suggests a rural estate or cheerful holiday resort; this served to mask what some patients experienced as the horror of having to live in such institutions.
[4] Hocken and the bibliophile Alexander Turnbull would leave valuable collections of books and manuscripts that became the bases for the country’s premier research libraries, the Hocken Library, which opened in Dunedin in 1910, and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, which opened in 1920.
Chapter 19
Baptism of Blood?
As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, New Zealand had been a British colony for a mere six decades, less than the course of a human lifetime. In that short period, its citizens had achieved a great many things of which they believed they could be proud: stabilisation of relations between Maori and Pakeha to the point where each people lived parallel lives in separate spheres; functioning political and legal systems based on Westminster models; near-universal primary education; transport and communications networks across a land characterised more by mountains and gorges than by plains; a viable meat, wool and dairy industry supplying the British market and generating national income; and social progress in such forms as votes for women, an industrial arbitration system and pensions for the deserving elderly.
The one thing the country had not yet done, and was thirsting to do, was send troops abroad to represent it in combat. There were old soldiers in New Zealand – most of them, Maori and Pakeha, veterans of the New Zealand Wars. There were others who had fought as imperial troops in earlier wars: in the Crimea in 1854, and in many other campaigns on the continents of Africa and Asia. One former officer who lived in New Zealand, Surgeon Captain Robert H. Bakewell, had worked at Florence Nightingale’s shoulder at Balaclava; another, Sergeant Major John Bevin of the Otago Mounted Police, had survived the charge of the Light Brigade. And Captain Henry Cecil Dudgeon D’Arcy, born in Wanganui, had won a Victoria Cross in the Zulu War of 1878–79.
Not until the South African War broke out in October 1899 was a force raised in New Zealand and sent abroad specifically to represent the country in combat. In April of that year, Premier Richard John Seddon had offered the British Government 500 troops to put down an uprising in Samoa, and Native Affairs Minister James Carroll, who had fought as a kupapa in the Te Kooti campaign, was keen to lead a 300-strong Maori contingent there. Parliamentary debates and newspaper editorials of the time convey the impression that sections of the country were bored with peacetime (27 years had elapsed since the close of the war against Te Kooti and his followers). Members of permanent militia and volunteer corps were keen to put their rugged training to practical test.
The turn of the century and Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 were also generating nascent imperialism and nationalism. Patriotic men wanted to show their mettle in a scrap and to demonstrate the country’s unswerving loyalty to Mother Britain, but at the same time to establish traditions and precedents that were New Zealand in origin and fla
vour. In the case of Samoa, to Seddon’s and Carroll’s disappointment, the British Government declined offers of assistance. In the case of South Africa five months later, Britain accepted. And the qualities which Seddon had identified as being advantageous for fighting on a Pacific island – European troops accustomed to bush warfare and bush life, and Maori warriors ‘loyal, prepared and desirous of … restoring law and order’ – might have seemed equally to be assets against the commando tactics of the Boers.
New Zealand was the first colony to volunteer a contingent, of mounted rifles, for this war, and did so two weeks before war itself was declared. The first 200 troops and their horses were despatched only ten days after the declaration. At the send-off at the Wellington wharves an enormous crowd heard Seddon proclaim that New Zealanders ‘would fight for one flag, one Queen, one tongue, and for one country – Britain’. An onlooker wrote:
It was all magnificently fine. The heart of a young nation was going out in throbbing farewell to the flower of its youth, banded together at duty’s call to fight for the Mother Land … The bands played, the people sang, and cheer after cheer was sent across the water. Women were weeping now, and there were even sober-sided businessmen whose eyes were just a trifle dim … The sloping sun gleamed on the waters, lit up the streaming flags, and fell upon the thousands of faces that watched as the two lines of steamers, with the troopship in the centre, went slow ahead down the harbour.