by Michael King
In the course of its second term, Labour was determined to take advantage of the nation’s centenary, which fell on the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in February 1840. The Government hoped to generate national pride, indicate a growth of national maturity and highlight favourably its own association with the celebrations. The outbreak of World War II eventually put restrictions on the amount of money devoted to the centenary and a damper on the main event, the Centennial Exhibition in Wellington, which was supposed to showcase cultural, agricultural and industrial progress. But a government-appointed National Historical Committee produced an excellent series of publications, including a serial pictorial journal aimed largely at schools, Making New Zealand, and a dozen book-length surveys of ‘the nation’s development’, of which the best were by J. C. Beaglehole (The Discovery of New Zealand), who would later win fame as the world’s greatest authority on James Cook, F. L. W. Wood (New Zealand in the World), Oliver Duff (New Zealand Now) and E. H. McCormick (Letters and Art in New Zealand). McCormick, who would go on to become the country’s leading cultural historian, also edited the series as a whole after Duff had been poached to become the foundation editor of the New Zealand Listener, a national weekly magazine under the control of the country’s broadcasting service for the next 50 years.
Ironically, despite the intention of generating national pride, the Centennial Council rejected an application that the Thomas Bracken hymn God Defend New Zealand be made the country’s national anthem. It opted instead for the retention of God Save the King, for which movie-goers still stood at the beginning of cinema sessions, as the anthem. As a consolation prize, Bracken’s effort was designated ‘national hymn’. Independence from Britain was not a national priority at this time.
There was evidence of rather more nascent nationalism, perhaps, in Labour’s adoption of a degree of independence in foreign affairs. The Government sent former MP and ex-Cockney policeman Bill Jordan to London as High Commissioner and New Zealand representative at the League of Nations (at this time the country’s only other diplomatic post was Canberra). At League meetings in Geneva, Jordan was admired by some for his ‘blunt speech and simple moral judgment’, though not by the British delegation, whose advice he was not prepared to accept automatically. Thanks to one of his votes, made with the approval of the cabinet in Wellington, New Zealand joined the Soviet Union as the only two countries to oppose recognition of the Italian conquest of Abyssinia. This led the National Opposition to accuse Labour of endangering imperial solidarity. But the Government stood firm and insisted that ‘all aggressors be [opposed] by the League, even when they were powerful states such as Japan’. The only thing wrong with the League of Nations, Labour believed, was that it ended up betraying the ideal of collective security.
New Zealand’s willingness to express and invest confidence in the League was in part a response to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and Asia – which alarmed not only the Government but the Labour movement as a whole. And, by the time it was apparent in 1938 that the League was insufficiently functional to prevent another global war, Labour knew that it would have to reconsider its long-held reservations about the role of the British Empire and the British Navy in world affairs and in the affairs of New Zealand. In 1939, when Peter Fraser was in London for the kind of ministerial meeting that had replaced the old Imperial Conference, he was relieved to be assured that the defence of Australia and New Zealand against attack by Japan would be second in Britain’s priorities only to the containment of the German naval fleet. In other words, imperial protection rather than the League of Nations was still New Zealand’s best option for security. That hypothesis would almost immediately be put to the test.
[1] 257 passengers and crew died in the Air New Zealand crash on Mount Erebus in 1979, but that disaster occurred outside New Zealand’s territorial limits.
[2] Articulate Lee may have been, a fine writer and an arresting soapbox orator. But he disliked and was disliked in turn by Savage, excluded from the cabinet (though given an under-secretaryship) and eventually expelled from the party in March 1940 in the wave of emotion that welled up after Savage’s prolonged dying.
[3] It was widely believed that the state house building programme earned a fortune for Fletcher Construction and its Scottish-born founder, James Fletcher. In fact, Fletchers initially incurred heavy losses on the contract as a result of tendering too low and were saved from financial collapse only by the Government’s willingness to guarantee a company overdraft. Under the successive direction of Sir James Fletcher’s son and grandson, J. C. and Hugh, the expanded company, eventually Fletcher Challenge, went on to become the largest in New Zealand in the 1980s, with a wide range of construction and manufacturing subsidiaries, including Tasman Pulp and Paper and Pacific Steel.
Chapter 23
Conformity and Non-conformity
Maori and Pakeha societies, running on separate but parallel tracks in New Zealand in the years preceding World War II, each displayed considerable internal cohesion and conformity. Each also served as the ‘exotic other’ to highlight and confirm its own identity and distinctiveness.
Adherence to Maori values persisted in Maori communities to an extent that surprised such Pakeha observers as journalist Eric Ramsden and Native Land Court Judge Frank Acheson. They noted that mana continued to be the quality that determined status, though increasing importance was being given to mana that was earned by achievement rather than being simply inherited. The personal tapu of persons of rangatira rank – Te Puea Herangi of Tainui or Hoani Te Heuheu of Ngati Tuwharetoa, for example – still invited respect in Maori contexts, where people continued to place weight on personal identification through their whakapapa.
Discussions at hui were held almost exclusively in Maori, and at this time there was no shortage of native speakers in the kaumatua age-group to assume this responsibility (though the fact that outside such exclusively Maori areas as the Urewera many younger Maori were no longer learning the language would result in gaps on the paepae after the passage of two more generations). Such deliberations would be structured according to the conventions of whaikorero, and would centre on the constant preoccupation with whenuatanga (land), rangatiratanga (leadership), whakapapa (relationships), mana and mana motuhake (Maori authority). Speakers were surrounded and protected by marae ceremonial conducted according to the protocol of the tangata whenua.
Tribalism continued to be a dominating feature of Maori life, to the joy of those who felt tribal, and to the exasperation at times of those who felt Maori, such as Bishop Frederick Bennett, since 1928 the first Bishop of Aotearoa, or who were Pakeha. After spending nearly half a lifetime building up material for his Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1940), Parliamentary Librarian G. H. Scholefield concluded: ‘Maori history is sadly distorted and vitiated by the highly developed tribalism and the intense rivalries of the generations that the Maoris have spent in New Zealand … [The] spirit of tribal pride moves even the broadminded Maori to ignore … the vicissitudes of their own tribes and chiefs.’
What was a debilitating and destructive handicap from one point of view (in the case above, a Pakeha one) was a source of strength from another. Tribalism provided much of the group vitality and competitiveness of Maori life. And most Maori continued to draw their strength and identity not from being Maori, but from being a known and knowing member of a particular hapu or tribe, and from being embraced by the people, history and traditions of that tribe. John Rangihau of Tuhoe, who grew up in such a situation at Waikaremoana in the 1920s and 1930s, expressed it this way:
[My] feelings … are my Tuhoetanga rather than my Maoritanga. Because my being Maori is utterly dependent on my history as a Tuhoe person … It seems to me there is no such thing as Maoritanga because Maoritanga is an all-inclusive term … I have a faint suspicion that [it] is a term coined by the Pakeha to bring all the tribes together. Because if you cannot divide and rule, then for tribal people all you can do is
unite them and rule. Because then they lose everything by losing [the] tribal history and traditions that gave them their identity.
The dominant cultural identification of Pakeha at this time was still ‘British’, a continuing reflection of the fact that, for more than 95 per cent of the non-Maori population, their countries of origin were England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, in that order. Lord Jellicoe, the Governor-General, noted in 1924 that New Zealanders were ‘extremely proud’ of their British nationality. ‘They claim, in fact, to be even more British than their kin of the Motherland, and that no doubt accounts for the intensely loyal spirit which characterises the Dominion.’
The only variegations in this pattern were the festivities marking St Patrick’s Day or Burns’ Night, in which New Zealanders of Irish and Scottish stock celebrated their more specific heritages. But even the anti-Irish feeling that had been nurtured by the Protestant Political Association during and after World War I had evaporated in the wake of Irish independence in 1921: if the British Government approved the foundation of the Irish Free State, how could anybody professing ‘Britishness’ object?
One symptom of the intensity of British feeling was the continuing lack of interest New Zealand showed in ratifying the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which had granted the dominions complete autonomy in foreign as well as domestic affairs and put their parliaments on an equal footing with Westminster. Most New Zealanders probably agreed with National MP Charles Bowden when he declared his opposition to the statute and said he would rather be a ‘British subject’ than a ‘national of the British Commonwealth’.
Such certitude in the matter of identity had been confirmed by the length of time that New Zealand had been a British colony, by a continuing inflow of predominantly British immigrants, by the heightened feelings of imperialism – or, at the very least, that ‘double patriotism’ engendered by World War I – and by Britain’s continuing role as receiver of New Zealand’s exports and provider of its imports. New Zealand, as an island nation, had no borders with other countries or cultures to mitigate a sense of racial solipsism – and to describe this feeling as ‘racial’ is no exaggeration. One of the government census reports of the 1920s noted that ‘the importance of racial purity has long been recognised [in New Zealand]. History has shown that the coalescence of the white and the so-called coloured races is not conducive to improvement in racial types.’
The obverse side to this confidence in racial and cultural identity, however, was a fear and dislike of nations and cultures that were not British. Such a fear was at times xenophobic. Despite the very small numbers involved, the presence of Indians working in market gardens around Pukekohe in the 1920s precipitated the establishment of a ‘White New Zealand League’. Poet Anton Vogt reported riding a tram around Wellington’s Basin Reserve in 1936 and talking Norwegian to his father as, standing, they hung onto the roof straps to retain their balance. Another passenger got to his feet – a trade union official, as it turned out – and knocked Vogt senior to the floor with a blow to the jaw. ‘Speak English, damn you,’ said the assailant, glaring down at his victim. While it is probable that few other New Zealanders, confronted with this scene, would have resorted to violence, it is likely that many would have been unnerved by hearing a ‘foreign’ language for the first time.
An example of xenophobia made legal was the fact that, as a consequence of New Zealand’s adopting the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, any New Zealand woman who married an ‘alien’ lost her British citizenship and became herself an alien, without the right to vote. Miriam Soljak, a New Zealander of Irish descent who had married a Dalmatian immigrant, spent most of her adult life fighting for the repeal of this legislation. It was not until after New Zealand had ratified the Statute of Westminster in 1947 that New Zealand married women were given their own independent nationality.
Most non-British immigrants, living or growing up in a country in the formation of whose national identity their own ethnic group had played no part, merged as rapidly and as smoothly as possible into the ranks of mainstream culture. It would be a source of irony that, during World War II, the two most senior officers in the New Zealand Division fighting Germany would be named Freyberg and Kippenberger. Because the families of both men had long since left behind any trace of their Germanic origins, however, nobody in New Zealand thought of them as other than British officers and gentlemen – and, indeed, after his brief time in New Zealand as a dental technician, Bernard Freyberg had enjoyed a distinguished career in the British Army. Members of Wellington’s small Italian community would attract more public suspicion during the war than those with German names.
People whose looks, language and culture made it obvious that they were not British in origin, nor even European, generally faced a far more difficult life. And the group which suffered most from prejudice and misunderstanding was the Chinese, who had been entering New Zealand from Canton since 1865, initially to work the Otago goldfields. Although their number was almost insignificant and most were single men, the New Zealand Parliament passed several Acts in the late nineteenth century specifically to discourage Chinese immigration. A poll tax of at first £10 and later £100 had to be paid by each Chinese person entering the country, and ships were permitted to bring in only one Chinese passenger per 200 tons of cargo.
Once in New Zealand, the Chinese who persisted despite the poll tax and considerable prejudice proved themselves to be law-abiding and hard-working citizens. Some, such as Sam Chew Lain, the Lawrence publican, and Chew Chong, who eventually opened the first butter factory in Taranaki, became widely respected business people. Most, however, graduated from the goldfields to market gardening and retailing fruit and vegetables, occupations which other New Zealanders eventually came to regard as ‘appropriate’ for their Chinese compatriots. But there was general opposition – from Pakeha and Maori – to mixed-race marriages involving Chinese, while Chinese men were discouraged from settling their families in New Zealand. When subsequent generations of New Zealand Chinese moved into professional careers, there was a further round of disapproval.
The poll tax was eventually abolished in 1944 by the Fraser Labour Government. Deputy Prime Minister Walter Nash called it a ‘blot on our legislation … [The] Chinese are as good as any other race [and] we will not in future countenance any discrimination against them.’ It was to be a further 58 years before another Labour Government, that of Helen Clark, apologised to Chinese New Zealanders for both the tax and the wider discrimination it reflected.
Other non-British peoples – Indians, Dalmatians, Lebanese – were also subjected to social discrimination, especially in employment and accommodation, but individually rather than, like the Chinese, as a group. Many Dalmatian men in Northland married into Maori families and thus integrated into New Zealand society by that route. Jewish New Zealanders too faced discrimination, even though they had been in the country since the earliest days of European settlement, and in many instances – Nathans, Levins, Hallensteins, Myers and others – played a prominent role in commercial and cultural activities. One Jew, Sir Julius Vogel, had become Premier; another, Chief Justice Sir Michael Myers, had acted as Administrator of New Zealand four times between the departures and arrivals of governors-general. As late as the 1940s one of the highlights of the annual Wairoa Agricultural and Pastoral Show Parade was the local farmer who donned a mask with an enormous nose, a top hat and a long black coat to appear as ‘Ikey the Jew’.
Unlike its worst manifestations in Europe, anti-Semitism in New Zealand tended to be covert and subtle, arising partly from the tenets of Christianity, which suggested that the Jews as a people had been responsible for the death of Christ, and partly from the conviction that Jews were ‘mean’ with money and ‘looked after their own’ ahead of broader social responsibilities. No amount of largess by the Fels and Hallenstein families of Dunedin, or contributions to local body administration by the likes of Ernest and Moss Davis in Auckland, would diminish prejudice
of this kind. It was even on occasion voiced by officials responsible for the administration of policies on immigration and the settlement of ‘aliens’. One such official was to write in 1946 that ‘the worst thing about [Jews] is that they cringe and fawn when they are weak and bully and exploit when they have power … [and] there is always the Jew’s uncanny ability to see always one move ahead of his competitors’. Views of this kind did not significantly diminish until the decades after World War II when New Zealand society became more pluralistic and less prone to uninformed and pejorative stereotyping. There was by that time, too, the example of the Holocaust in Europe, which revealed the shocking extreme to which anti-Semitism could be taken.
While Maori and Pakeha interacted on a small scale in rural towns and Pakeha and Maori continued to intermarry, Pakeha representations of Maori still tended to be as uninformed, and in some cases as pejorative, as those of other non-British peoples. In other cases it was simply patronising. An editorial in Wellington’s Evening Post newspaper in the mid-1920s noted how tragic it was that the life of a prominent city lawyer had been lost while he attempted to rescue a ‘half-caste girl’ at Otaki Beach, as if a person of mixed race was not worth saving. And articles and books of the ‘coon humour’ variety, the most popular of which was Maori Tales, portrayed Maori in prose and cartoons as simpletons who were comic in their inability to cope with modern civilisation (and this at a time when Apirana Ngata was one of the most highly qualified members, Maori or Pakeha, of the House of Representatives).
The artists and writers who patronised Maori, by contrast, were at least motivated mainly by humanitarianism and compassion. Many of them had a kind of fin de siècle interest in characters they described in such terms as ‘the last of the old type of better Maori’. The leading practitioners of this perception and style were the artists Charles Frederick Goldie and Louis John Steele, and the journalist and historian James Cowan, each of whom regretted the extent to which Western culture had intruded on and – in their eyes – fragmented ‘authentic’ Maori culture.