by Michael King
This persistent reluctance to accept the growing independence on offer from Britain has been linked by some historians to a ‘withering of the country’s spirit’. Another symptom of such ‘withering’ has been identified as the exodus of much of the nation’s talent, which went abroad throughout this era in search of more fertile soil in which to flourish. Some of these talented people – the brilliant physicist Ernest Rutherford, for example, the first scientist to split the atom, the classicist Ronald Syme and the ethnologist Peter Buck – left because New Zealand lacked the institutions and colleagues which would enable them to make full use of their talents at home. Thus Rutherford worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge through the 1920s and 1930s, Syme at Oxford and Buck at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
The case of writers and artists was somewhat different. Here it was a lack as much of an understanding audience as of supportive institutions and colleagues that drove people abroad, usually to London, which was widely viewed as the metropolis to New Zealand’s province. Short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, for example, left New Zealand for the last time in 1908. Her career blossomed in London in the years immediately after World War I and the best of her stories are sharp evocations of the family life and Edwardian middle-class culture that she had left behind in New Zealand. She was both admired professionally and disliked personally by members of the Bloomsbury group in London, and Virginia Woolf viewed her as a serious competitor. But her early death in France from tuberculosis in 1923 meant that she herself witnessed and enjoyed very little of that succès d’estime. She was known in New Zealand, but not well-known until the 1950s and 1960s.
Painter Frances Hodgkins is a comparable figure in the art world. She left New Zealand for good in 1913 and by the 1920s and 1930s had made a name for herself as one of the outstanding British avant-garde painters of her generation. Hodgkins worked in France and, wrote Linda Gill, her ‘pictorial language was transformed as she assimilated modernist ideas. Colour remained all-important: with her muted subtle harmonies Hodgkins became one of the most remarkable colourists of her time. Her work became more abstract, with simplified forms and surfaces enriched with patterning.’ Unlike Mansfield, she lived long enough to appreciate some of the esteem she attracted (she died in 1947 aged 78). But her work provoked misunderstanding and even hostility in New Zealand until the latter half of the twentieth century.
Others who took similar professional paths included the artist Raymond McIntyre, who painted in London from 1909 until his death in 1933, and writer Jane Mander, who lived and worked in New York and London between 1912 and 1932 and wrote half a dozen novels, including the classic The Story of a New Zealand River. Those of her books which reached New Zealand were, like the later work of Frances Hodgkins, reviewed with hostility, largely because of what was regarded as ‘immoral’ content. The poet R. A. K. Mason remained in New Zealand and lived long enough to be recognised by the 1960s as a foundational writer, but he was so disillusioned by the lack of any kind of understanding reception to his first book of poems, The Beggar (1924), that he is said to have pitched the unsold copies into the Waitemata Harbour.
Oddly, the most commercially successful New Zealand writer of the period remained virtually unknown by her own name. Edith Lyttleton wrote popular fiction as G. B. Lancaster and had more than a dozen novels and 250 stories published, largely in London and New York, between 1904 and 1944. In 1933 her novel Pageant topped the American best-seller list for six months. Lyttleton wrote her early work on her parents’ sheep station in Canterbury and later travelled widely, especially through Australia and North America. She died in 1945 without any mark of recognition from her own country, but she had been awarded the Australian Gold Medal for Literature in 1937.
If writers and artists were unclaimed and unacclaimed in New Zealand at this time, prime ministers who died in office were not. William Massey succumbed to cancer in May 1925 at the age of 69. He had not become a hero or a ‘character’ of King Dick proportions, but he was admired and respected for the length of time he had been in office and for the fact that he had successfully steered the country through years of industrial unrest, war and economic downturn. He was given a state funeral and buried on a promontory overlooking Wellington Harbour, where a large memorial was unveiled in 1930. In 1926 the country’s new agricultural college in Palmerston North, later its fifth university, was named after him.
After an interim administration led by Massey’s Attorney-General, Sir Francis Dillon Bell (nominally the country’s first New Zealand-born Prime Minister), Joseph Gordon Coates of Kaipara was elected to the leadership of the Reform Party and thus to the prime ministership. He too was New Zealand-born and, like Massey, a farmer. He had represented the Kaipara electorate since 1911 after experience running a family farm at Matakohe and serving in the local territorial mounted rifles. His biographer Michael Bassett described him as a ‘tall (six-foot), handsome, broad-chested man with auburn hair … [He had] an educated voice with clipped, well-formed vowels, but all his life he had a taste for the vernacular.’ Coates was no orator but he did have the quality known in the military as ‘command presence’. In the course of two years’ service in World War I he won a Military Cross and bar in action in France and ended the war as a major.
Massey put him in cabinet from 1919 and Coates eventually became a highly respected Minister of Public Works and of Railways, the more noticeable because of the lacklustre calibre of the cabinet as a whole. Coates oversaw the completion of the country’s main trunk railway lines, got major hydro-electric projects under way on the Waitaki and Waikato Rivers, and financed the construction of further roads, made necessary by the massive increase in car ownership. He rapidly established a reputation as an ‘active, hard-working minister … who was fair, but brooked no nonsense’. He also had a special affinity with Maori people and issues and took over the portfolio of Native Affairs from William Herries in 1921. In this capacity he worked in close co-operation with his friend, but political opponent, Apirana Ngata. Coates was notably less partisan than most MPs and popular among his colleagues from all parties. The press enjoyed his ‘breezy informality’.
Helped by the brilliant advertising agent A. E. Davy (‘Coats off with Coates’), the new Prime Minister led his party back into office with a landslide victory in November 1925: Reform 55 seats, Labour 12, National (formerly Liberal) 10, and three independents. However, as his biographer notes, Coates was unable to live up to the high expectations generated by this result. He retained too many of Massey’s poorly performing ministers and he lacked the political skills needed to manage both his party and his caucus. His one major measure, the Family Allowances Act, did not please many of his own supporters. And the effects of a major drop in farm export prices in 1926 were laid at the door of his Government. Labour also took steps at this time to increase its own electoral appeal by dropping its land nationalisation policy and undertaking to guarantee freehold. In a 1927 by-election Labour acquired its first farmer MP, William Lee Martin, an indication that it was beginning to broaden its electoral appeal.
The 1928 election was as much a disaster for Coates as the previous one had been a triumph. The recycled Liberal Party, now calling itself United and organised by Coates’s former ally A. E. Davy, won 32 seats. Reform support was slashed by almost half to 28, and Labour won 19. There was one independent. United’s leader, the also-recycled Sir Joseph Ward, was 72 years old and disintegrating from the effects of diabetes. He became Prime Minister again 22 years after he had first assumed the office. His success was due at least in part to the fact that he appeared to misread his speech notes and promised to borrow £70 million in a single year to solve the country’s economic ills.
‘What followed’, Michael Bassett wrote, ‘was pure farce. Ward cracked hearty and optimistic as of old, but very little of the £70 million was, or could be, borrowed.’ The former bankrupt could no longer be considered the country’s ‘financial wizard’, and nobody now claimed this title fo
r him. The economy steadily deteriorated throughout 1929 and early 1930 as commodity prices fell again and the country began to experience the effects of global depression. Unemployment mushroomed. Ward became progressively more ill and left governance to his political lieutenants and one of his sons, Vincent. New Zealand’s disgracefully inept administration of Western Samoa resulted in a riot in Apia on 28 December 1929, in the course of which twelve men died, including the high chief and Mau leader Tamasese. The Governor-General, Sir Charles Fergusson, was at first unable to find any cabinet ministers or public servants available to deal with the crisis. Fergusson left New Zealand in February 1930 relieved to escape from the ‘official torpor’ which had effectively paralysed the business of government.
Finally, in May 1930, Ward was persuaded to resign and hand over authority to one of his protégés, Hurunui MP and Agriculture Minister George Forbes. He died three months later. Thus it was left to another farmer Prime Minister, the third in sixteen years, to try to negotiate the country through the shoals of the Great Depression.
[1] The name ‘Red Feds’ had nothing to do with communism, although it was perhaps related to the red flag that was the symbol of the international socialist revolution (celebrated in James Connell’s 1889 song that begins, ‘The people’s flag is deepest red …’). The term was coined by the Wellington newspaper Evening Post early in 1912. It followed the publication on red paper of a circular outlining the Federation of Labour’s attitude to a local tramways dispute.
[2] The International Workers of the World, known as IWW, was a syndicalist movement established in Chicago in 1905 with the motto ‘the world’s wealth for the world’s workers’. IWW followers were also known as ‘Wobblies’, allegedly after an attempt by a Chinese-American restaurateur to pronounce ‘IWW’. In the disparaging popular idiom in New Zealand, IWW was said to stand for, ‘I won’t work’. It was the IWW element in New Zealand unionism that generated most suspicion and fear among Reform Party ministers and MPs.
[3] Sometimes confused with the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, which stated the British position in favour of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine.
Chapter 21
Maori Survival
In the face of negative statistics and gloomy prognostications, the Maori population had not only survived into the twentieth century but begun to grow again. And with that growth in people came a corresponding increase in Maori social and cultural vitality in many parts of the country.
The national census of 1901 showed a rise in the number of Maori from 42,000 in 1896 to 45,000. As a result of both intermarriage with Europeans and previous exposure, Maori in general were at last acquiring immunity from the diseases that had taken such a terrible toll over the previous half-century. Fertility was improving and the birth rate climbing. Although infant mortality rates remained high, as they were for the country as a whole, more Maori children were being born and more were surviving.
Political consciousness, too, was fermenting on marae all over the country in the last decade of the nineteenth century. There was increasing talk of claims for land unjustly confiscated or (in the South Island) bought without subsequent observation of the agreed terms of sale; of seeking redress for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi; of petitioning the Crown to alleviate Maori grievances (two deputations had gone to Britain for this purpose in the 1880s and been referred back to the New Zealand Government, which declined to accept that the Treaty had any judicial or constitutional force[1]); and of experimentation with new political structures. Inter-tribal hui were being widely held to debate these and other issues. In the national Parliament, a Maori MP, James Carroll, was acquiring considerable influence within the ruling Liberal Party – as a senior cabinet minister, he would eventually serve, on two occasions, as acting Prime Minister. And a group of young Maori, who would become sophisticated in things Pakeha as well as Maori, were completing their education and laying the foundations for new styles of Maori leadership.
James Carroll, known to Maori as Timi Kaara, had been born in Wairoa in 1858, son of a Ngati Kahungunu mother, Tapuke, and a Sydney-born Irish father. After schooling in Wairoa and Napier he joined kupapa troops in the pursuit of Te Kooti and his forces through the Urewera and was mentioned in despatches for his bravery. He later joined the Native Affairs Department and worked in both its Hawke’s Bay and Wellington offices. In 1879 he became interpreter in the House of Representatives, an experience which gave him an intimate association with Maori MPs, a detailed knowledge of parliamentary procedure, and confidence in speaking publicly in both Maori and English.
Carroll first stood for Parliament in his own right in 1883, challenging the sitting member for Eastern Maori, Wi Pere. He lost narrowly. He was successful in 1887, however, and held the seat until 1894, when he contested and won the European electorate of Waiapu, later Gisborne. He thus became the first Maori to hold a non-Maori parliamentary seat. He was a member of the Liberal Government cabinet from 1892 and Minister of Native Affairs from 1899 to 1912. As Alan Ward commented, Carroll administered this portfolio ‘with unsurpassed authority’. It would not be held again by a Maori MP until 1928, when Apirana Ngata became minister.
As Alan Ward has also noted, Carroll’s ebullient and successful lifestyle ‘led him firmly to believe that Maori could succeed very well in European society’. He wanted Maori parliamentarians, for example, to compete with Pakeha on European terms and, where possible, to beat them, as he had done in winning his European seat and in frequently running rings around his political opponents in parliamentary debate. He joined in social occasions with gusto, delivered superb stories and impromptu speeches, and followed horse racing with an impressive knowledge of form and pedigree.
As a member of the Liberal cabinet, Carroll came to accept that Pakeha settlement of undeveloped Maori land in the North Island was inevitable, but ‘he sought a place for Maori to lease land and use the revenue to invest in their own farming, just as [Pakeha] settlers did’. Carroll’s attempts to circumvent the growing influence of the Kotahitanga movement produced the Liberal’s Maori Councils Act of 1900, which proposed elected committees to supervise Maori community and tribal affairs with powers comparable with those exercised by ordinary local authorities. These councils were seen in some Maori eyes as exercising the ‘tino rangatiratanga’ or separate Maori authority guaranteed in the Treaty of Waitangi.
The councils were expected to supervise sanitation and suppress customs which European health authorities regarded as dangerous (the use of tohunga, lengthy tangihanga and the like). It was hoped, too, that they would provide accurate information on Maori births, deaths and marriages and population movements. The proclamation of this system did defuse support for Kotahitanga, but in the long run the experiment was not a success. Councils were embraced with temporary enthusiasm in some districts and ignored in others. Even in areas where they met with initial approval they eventually lapsed through a combination of lack of enduring enthusiasm, unfamiliarity and impatience with Pakeha committee procedure, and lack of commitment to the inter-tribal co-operation that the system tried to promote. By 1910 most councils had ceased to function.
At the same time as James Carroll was serving his apprenticeship for what would become an exceptional public career, traditional modes of leadership persisted in most areas of Maori occupation. Where hapu had not been broken up by mortality or alienation of land, hereditary rangatira families still tended to be spokespersons for their communities. Families with ariki claims – the kahui ariki in Waikato, the Te Heuheus of Ngati Tuwharetoa, the Taiaroas in the South Island – still threw up leaders who acted on behalf of federations of tribes. But patterns of leadership were changing. Increasingly the way was opening for men and women with acquired vocational skills, quick wits and eloquence to make bids for community and tribal leadership against or alongside those whose claims were hereditary, especially for those who had received secondary education or trained for a church ministry.
Some of t
he new breed were prepared to go further than lamentation of Maori grievances on marae. They determined to use the system of government to obtain redress and to secure better living and working conditions for their people. In the South Island, such members of Ngai Tahu used adversity and a sense of injustice to regenerate tribal spirit and loyalty. Conditions on which they had sold much of their land – that reserves be put aside, hospitals and schools built and landmark boundaries observed – had mostly been ignored. Ngai Tahu with education and some familiarity with the Pakeha world exerted pressure on their rangatira and on tribal runanga to seek compensation from the Crown for these grievances. They formed a parliamentary-type body to represent the entire tribe and sent letters, petitions and deputations to Parliament. They elected a succession of members of Parliament for Southern Maori who had the specific task of prosecuting their kerema or claim – the first instance of Maori agitation resulting in the election of an MP for a particular purpose.
In Waikato, after failing to persuade the Government to set up a national Maori parliament with himself at its head, King Tawhiao established his own Kauhanganui at Mangakawa, near Matamata, in 1892. It too debated land claims, especially the question of compensation for the Waikato lands confiscated by the Government in the 1860s. The Kotahitanga or Maori unity movement, which originated in Northland and was based on upholding the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, picked up membership throughout the country, mainly among traditional rangatira such as Te Heuheu Tukino, and held its own ‘Maori Parliament’ meetings from 1892 to 1902, latterly at Papawai marae in Wairarapa under the leadership of Tamahau Mahupuku. It seemed for a time that tribalism was being submerged in a feeling that resembled Maori nationalism. That feeling did not persist, however. The Kingitanga Kauhanganui became increasingly a forum for the Ngati Haua tribe alone; and the Kotahitanga movement was overtaken by another, which came to be called the Young Maori Party.