Book of the Week: NZ becomes Aotearoa

Was the Christchurch terrorist one of us? We know he wasn’t literally, of course. He came from Australia, was radicalised online and in Europe, before he moved to New Zealand, which he found to be a laid-back and convenient place from which to stage attacks on two, potentially three mosques, despite his ‘great replacement’ rhetoric having no real meaning in this country. He was an import, and so were his ideas, but was he also one of us? 
What the contradictory question really means is this: was the appearance of the terrorist (let’s maintain the convention of not naming him) somehow an inevitable byproduct of a culture of both casual and systemic racism or white supremacy in New Zealand? Was it especially obvious that this attack should have happened in Christchurch, a city that had its own much-publicised history of white-supremacist activism and lasting racial divisions? The answer is no. People outside Christchurch liked to say that if the mosque attack happened anywhere in New Zealand it had to be there, but the terrorist was based in Dunedin and according to the Royal Commission, he initially planned to target that city’s mosque. If he had, would people have identified it as a very Dunedin crime? Probably not. 
Anyway, Michael Belgrave, professor emeritus of history at Massey University, was one of many people who were thinking about the greater meaning of the horror of March 15, 2019. He originally planned to respond with “a short and quickly produced history that explored ideas of inclusion and exclusion in New Zealand’s past”. But here we are five years later with Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand, a 600-page monster that covers roughly 800 years from the first Polynesian settlement to the 2023 election. It is a book that will be taken as a successor to or update of Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, or as the back cover blurb announces, it is “the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published in 20 years”. Comparisons with King’s best-seller are not just unavoidable, therefore, they are invited. But we all know that King left big shoes behind.
Belgrave begins where King ended. King closed the Penguin History with a paean to the decent, ordinary New Zealander. Most New Zealanders, “whatever their cultural background, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant”, King wrote. Those good-bloke qualities have saved us “from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism seen in other parts of the world”. That was in 2003. But was that mild, humble, tolerant Kiwi still ‘us’ in 2019? Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern thought so when she said New Zealand can be a place that is diverse, welcoming, kind and compassionate. We can be a nation that is the exception, not the rule. Remember the grand aspirations behind “They are us”? But others weren’t convinced, as Belgrave points out. Moana Jackson said the Christchurch terror attack was a manifestation of a founding view that “so-called white people were inherently superior to everyone else”, and the killer drew on “shared ideas and history that still lurk in the shadows of every country that has been colonised”. Anne Salmond believed the promise of the Treaty of Waitangi was “utterly smashed by the incoming settler government, which proclaimed and practised white supremacy”. Film director Taika Waititi was more succinct a year earlier when he famously said New Zealand is “racist as fuck”, although Belgrave points out in a footnote that Waititi then added “New Zealand is the best place on the planet”. 
Racist as fuck or exceptional, that is still the question. Ultimately Belgrave sides with exceptional. Going full circle from the preface to the epilogue, he concludes that while there have been echoes of white supremacist language and thinking in New Zealand, we have been better than other comparable societies. He agrees that this puts him squarely in the tradition of historian Keith Sinclair’s 1968 paper, ‘Why are Race Relations in New Zealand Better Than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?’ There was “no apartheid, no social colour bar, no segregation in public transport or in living areas” in New Zealand, Sinclair said. That was the kind of opinion you often heard in the old New Zealand, when people (usually Pākehā) said at least we treated the natives better than other countries did. But even if Sinclair overstated the level of equality and the absence of racism in post-World War II New Zealand, “the premise remains true”, Belgrave says. That is a pretty unfashionable view to hold in 2024. That doesn’t make it wrong. It’s just unexpected. 
Therefore, if you were to guess which period of New Zealand was best to live in, according to Belgrave, you would probably go for those Sinclair years. Belgrave likes the post-war era of stability and consensus. A time of single-income families and tidy new homes in the suburbs, a time when security was the leading concern.
“Security meant not having to live through the Depression again,” he writes. “Security meant protecting farmers from the cyclical nature of commodity price rises and falls. Security meant ensuring that children had access to doctors and medicines, schools and sufficient food. Security meant reinforcing the idea of New Zealand as a unique society, one that could be shielded from the worst elements of what was occurring overseas; only the very best aspect of the outside world would be allowed in.” 
We tend to mock the New Zealand of the 1950s and 60s, led by men like Sid Holland and Keith Holyoake as inward-looking and complacent, sleepy and conformist, narrow-minded and bland. It was a country run by old men. And while Belgrave can see the problems, he argues that the post-war baby boom created a society “that was more inclusive, more egalitarian and more equal than at any time in the past, and certainly in comparison with the decades after the 1980s”. He even gives the patrician Holyoake some good press as “by far New Zealand’s most effective Prime Minister in the second half of the twentieth century”. 
There is a sense of sunny calm in this part of the story (‘Paradise Shared’ is a chapter title) and an appreciation of a state that looked after its citizens and liked to plan. Big planners come in for special praise here (people like Clarence Beeby in education). Belgrave likes order, consensus and stability. That word again: security. When the book gets to the Rogernomics era, he is especially bothered by “the chaos of reform”, its irrationality and unpredictability. He likes a New Zealand that sticks to the middle of the road and doesn’t deviate into the extremes of left and right. 
In a book that feels uneven, not least because it has so much ground to cover, the 1980s and 1990s chapters are possibly the best, simply because they are the angriest. Belgrave sounds genuinely furious about the rash, careless dismantling of the better world he remembers. Ideological purity replaced caution, and pragmatism and tradition went out the window. The economic consensus since 1935 had been to achieve and maintain full employment. As Robert Muldoon reportedly said, the public would not know a deficit if it fell over it, but unemployment was real. Yet the Labour government destroyed that consensus. The National government that followed was even worse: “Dramatic cuts to welfare and labour market reforms were announced, insisted on as economically essential for the country’s survival. This was just an excuse: Treasury, [Ruth] Richardson and her dry Cabinet colleagues embraced these assaults on the living standards of the poor with enthusiasm.”
But equally, in a book that doesn’t have many laughs, that chaotic era provides one when Belgrave suggests that David Lange and Roger Douglas had a kind of Paul McCartney and John Lennon relationship, with Douglas providing the critical edge and Lange adding warmth and lyricism. The Beatles of politics? That’s a good observation.
Belgrave makes just one personal appearance in Becoming Aotearoa, but it is a revealing one. He pops up in ‘Paradise Shared’, that section on the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, to show how ethnic migrants slotted into New Zealand life like jigsaw pieces. The setting was Frankton, a suburb of Hamilton, where Indian or Chinese families owned fruit and vegetable shops, Yugoslav families ran restaurants and takeaways and the Dutch had a bakery. And Belgrave? His family had a drapery store founded by his grandfather, and it was “an entirely appropriate enterprise for a Jewish migrant at the beginning of the twentieth century”. It is a sweet moment: they were us, and they fitted in nicely. 
All historians have their interests and idiosyncrasies. That there is more here about Massey University than other universities must reflect that Belgrave taught there and once wrote the history of it. Christianity is stressed more than in other recent histories, which is appropriate. It is treated as a largely positive force, and Belgrave finds a historical pattern in the tension between the humanitarians, who are the missionaries, and the developers, who are the New Zealand Company. This tension between the well-meaning and the rapacious has recurred again and again in our history. He sees the New Zealand Company as “zealots who were contemptuous of Māori rights”, while stressing the Christian opposition to racism and land alienation that fits perfectly with the recent news about the 440 Christian leaders’ widely misunderstood opposition to the Act Party’s Treaty Principles Bill. The Treaty was always a “sacred compact” or “sacred agreement” that was intended to defend rather than extinguish Māori authority and self-determination. Belgrave is good on what we could call the tragedy of the Treaty of Waitangi. 
There are more women in this story, and more Māori, which is in keeping with trends in New Zealand history over the past few decades. When he looks for an example of racism that undermines the pleasant, dozy picture of Sinclair-era New Zealand, he borrows the story of Anglican Bishop Manuhuia Bennett who recalled being excluded from the balcony of a cinema in Napier as a child because he was Māori. His older brother, a doctor, was refused a drink in an Auckland pub for the same reason. These occasional appearances from ordinary people aren’t always shoehorned into the text as elegantly as they could be but they add some personality to the otherwise dry and impersonal-seeming sweep of history. 
As a writer, Belgrave lacks King’s ease and fluidity. This book is less likely to be read for pleasure than King’s Penguin History was. Belgrave also lacks King’s facility with arts and culture, and his chapter on the 1960s is routine (one 60s subheading even reads ‘flowers and flares’), as are his references to defining cultural moments from ‘She’s a Mod’ to What We Do in the Shadows. But he is good on politics, and he is a good organiser of his material. His sections on the two world wars are suitably unheroic and disillusioning, and they again emphasise the roles played by women and Māori, but his accounts of 19th century New Zealand battles such as the attack on Rangiaowhia or the invasion of Parihaka seem oddly underplayed when compared to the new prominence the New Zealand Wars have had in the past two decades. 
If you were to write an optimistic book about New Zealand exceptionalism and national identity, one that suggests a deep belief in progress and improvement, 2019 or 2020 would have been a great place at which to end it. They are us. The team of five million. The triumph of Ardernian inclusion and tolerance, the slow-moving progressive politics, the sense that kindness was a national virtue. 
But that’s not us now. A history of New Zealand has to take into account the ugliness of the parliamentary occupation, and the disinformation, distrust and reactive, confusing and anti-Māori politics that followed. Yet Belgrave can still find a place for tentative hope when he argues that “New Zealand is organically becoming Aotearoa, although, as the 2023 election has demonstrated, there may be bumps and setbacks along the way”. Unless I’m mistaken, that is the only appearance of that idea, becoming Aotearoa, which is never fully explained but like an Ardernian concept from 2019, you can feel it. 
Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press, $65) is available in bookstores nationwide.