Published in the same year he was appointed as the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Herbert Butterfield’sThe Englishman and His History(1944) provided a remarkable illustration of the strength of a nationalist interpretation of history – Butterfield concluding that the richness of England’s past was both an all-pervasive influence on the present and a unique source of strength. Writing thirteen years later, the young New Zealand historian William Hosking Oliver’s description of the New Zealand past would seem to be as stark a contrast as one could image – highlighting the apparent lightness of history’s touch on the...

In late 1862 the former lay preacher William Jenkins secured financial and moral support for a travelling exhibition of Maori chiefs to England. Within months he had signed up thirteen Maori volunteers from six different tribes to participate in the venture. As curator of the exhibition, Jenkins chose his living ‘objects’ carefully, with all but two of the Maori wearing facialmoko. During the passage to England, Jenkins developed his exhibition from an ethnographic text – probably Charles Davis’sMaori Mementos.¹ Clad in their native costumes, the Maori were to present themselves as Davis’s text dictated. Having spent quite some...

Considering the question of Maori art at a meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society in early 1915, the historian James Cowan and ethnographer Elsdon Best lamented the apparent failure of Maori culture to influence Pakeha New Zealand. Was this not due to New Zealand’s youth as a country? questioned one amateur artist. ‘We are supposed to be too busy to attend to such expensive luxuries as art and literature. We are also supposed to be a rough, primitive race of pioneers, engaged in a struggle with the wilderness. Perhaps in about fifty years’ time there will be a revival in...

As dawn approached on 11 March 1845, a force of around five hundred Maori warriors, led by the Nga Puhi chief Hone Heke Pokai, moved on the northern centre of Kororareka in three groups. One, under Te Ruki Kawiti, launched an attack on the gun battery at the southern end of the town. A second group pinned down the British defenders by firing on the main blockhouse at the northern end of the settlement. The third group, led by Heke, attacked the guard post, killing the defenders, and cut down the flagstaff – seen by Heke as a symbol of...

In mid-1913 a letter published in Wellington’sDominionnewspaper drew attention to a pair of elm trees that stood where construction of the new parliamentary buildings was about to begin. ‘It may not be known to the present generation’, remarked the writer, ‘that where these two trees are growing is the site of the home of the first white man to live in Wellington. Here, in a manuka whare, with a roof thatched with toitoi, lived one Richard Barrett, or “Dicky Barrett,” as he was familiarly known at the time.’ Barrett had been there in late 1839, continued the correspondent,...

Anniversaries are a natural time to take stock, all the more so in colonial societies, who – all too aware of the apparent weakness of their pasts and lack of tradition – have historically seen major anniversaries as moments of validation. In colonial societies such concerns developed rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with history and tradition earlier assuming little importance as commemorations tended to focus on the past not as a marker of cultural tradition or public remembrance but as a yardstick of progress and change. While 26 January had been observed as Foundation Day or...

While many elements of New Zealand’s ‘use and abuse’ of history and heritage are representative of the wider colonial experience, one of this book’s core arguments has been that, in considering how societies use the past, ‘empire’, ‘nation’, and the ‘local’ cannot be considered outside of the context of one another. This final chapter accordingly offers a counterpoint to the New Zealand experience through an exploration of what were on the surface two vastly different colonial experience of history making – Canada and Australia. In doing so it highlights the broader continuity of the perceived place and role of history...

Considering the place of history and heritage in early twentieth-century Australia and Canada alongside that of New Zealand, a number of things become clear. First is the ubiquity of colonial concern with ‘history making’, and in particular the perceived didactic power of the past in the preservation and maintenance of ‘values’ – values that were typically construed within the familial frame of empire and colonial endeavour, and were of concern to amateur and professional historians alike. In part the importance of such values centred on the perception of their fundamentality to success of the colonial project, with monuments and historic...