In poetry, the first voice of great distinction was that of an untravelled male, R. A. K. Mason. In the 1920s he wrote a small number of highly individual, carefully worded, and deeply melancholy lyrics, which were recognised, in the next decade (No New Thing, 1934, This Dark Will Lighten, 1941, collected the fugitive publications of the 1920s), as an important achievement. Alone among the poets who may be called modern, he shows no trace of the revolution contemporaneously effected in England and America by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His technical equipment is Georgian, his mood one of romantic despair, but his laconic accents quite his own.

In the same decade other poets were aspiring towards and, though less strikingly, achieving individuality. J. R. Hervey, J. C. Beaglehole, Eileen Duggan, Ursula Bethell, D'Arcy Cresswell, A. R. D. Fairburn, Robin Hyde – all to some degree refined their Georgian heritage and proceeded, most substantially in the 1930s, to write poems marked by authentic experience, professional competence, and intellectual stature. But by the 1930s the full impact of the Eliot-Pound revolution had been felt, and the lead was taken by those who assimilated these invigorating influences, and applied the lessons they thus learned to a more determined search for significance – individual, social, historical – than had before been the case. Five names may be singled out for emphasis: Fairburn, Ursula Bethell, and with them, Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, and Denis Glover.

The verse written in the nineteenth century and, with few exceptions, until the 1920s, was a muffled and undistinguished echo of the Romantic Revival. A few volumes may be recalled now, largely for their historical and sociological interest; Charles Bowen's Poems (1861), Thomas Bracken's numerous and portentous volumes in the later nineteenth century (yet Bracken's “Not Understood” remains the best-known single New Zealand poem), Blanche Baughan's early twentieth century work, and, pre-eminently in this period, William Pember Reeves' (q.v.) New Zealand and Other Poems (1898) and The Passing of the Forest (1925). In the last years of the nineteenth century, too, Arnold Wall, began to publish his many collections, though his definitive volume, The Pioneers and Other Poems, did not appear until 1948. Today we are not tempted to greet these and other productions as the foundations of a distinctive New Zealand literature – which is not to say that a few agreeable poems may not be found in them.

Two subsidiary streams may be mentioned; the first a version of Scottish dialect verse running from James Barr of Craigilee (Poems and Songs, 1801–11) to Jessie Mackay (Poems, 1911), and not yet finally extinguished; the second the importation from Australia of the colonial ballad, a vigorous but debased form of versifying used to celebrate the feats of outback notables – gold diggers, drovers, swaggers, and the like. David McKee Wright (Station Ballads and Other Verses, 1897) was the most notable New Zealand practitioner.

Occasional successes on one side, nothing these writers produced, with the exceptions of Reeves and Wall, amounted to a distinguished achievement. That most of them lacked talent is probably a sufficient explanation. Critics have stressed other factors: the insipidity of the prevailing romantic fashion, the preoccupation of their society with concrete colonising tasks, and the inhibiting gulf separating their mental equipment (English and Scottish) from their situation (antipodean and bewildering). Few of them aimed high; those who did fell the more resoundingly fiat. Most were cripplingly self-conscious of their colonial status; many were engaged upon exacting careers – Bracken, Bowen, and Reeves were eminent politicians, especially the last.

The first writer to shake off this mantle of mediocrity, Katherine Mansfield, wrote verse a good deal less notable than her fiction. She spent her mature life in Europe, publishing there a volume of poems (Poems 1923), and setting an example of self-exile which many have followed, but not typically to the point of permanent expatriation.

Poetry in New Zealand is the child of a marriage between inheritance and environment. The inheritance has immense weight – the whole body of English (and European) literature – a weight constantly increasing as literary influences continue to flow from overseas. The environment, an egalitarian society set in a landscape of arresting extremes, is immediate and pressing. A small number of poets, most of them still alive, have succeeded in subduing both inheritance and environment to the exigencies of an individual vision.

The major periods in the development of poetry run parallel to English literary history: mid-Victorian romanticism evolving into Georgianism in the earlier twentieth century (we missed, to our loss, fin de siècle decadence), and giving place to the more astringent accents of the post-Eliot revolution. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present-day, colonists have brought books and literary fashions with them; English publishers have supplied the local market; New Zealand authors have aspired to publication in London. Not a few early settlers were men of taste, for whom regular consignments of books and periodicals were a lifeline to culture. Alfred Domett, the author of a readerless epic Ranolf and Amohia (1872) had known Browning well.

Critical writing by New Zealanders relating to their own literature has been inhibited by two considerations – one, that public interest obliges newspapers to review a large number of books published in England; two, that criticism of local books tends to be more cautious than that of overseas work. Many newspapers have for many years regularly printed a page of reviews, but these vary considerably in authority and, unfortunately, standards seem to be declining rather than rising, though some journals, such as the Press (Christchurch), can be relied on to commission good reviews, by persons with a suitable background of knowledge where this is needed. Even pedestrian reviewing can be sound and successful where the same critics (in, for instance, the Otago Daily Times) are regularly employed to handle the same type of book. The New Zealand Listener maintains much higher standards than do the broadcast review sessions, whose preoccupation with making new books an entertainment shows little understanding of the critic's integrity. Landfall's practice is for once disappointing, for although it can afford the space for a long review and does in fact notice nearly all books of any stature with a New Zealand interest, it too often entrusts them to inexperienced people who are thus induced to enter its pages. Extended critical essays have been rare, and the symposia which it printed on Ursula Bethell and D'Arcy Cresswell, written with a partly lapidary intention, were chiefly of biographical interest.

Hocken's famous bibliography (1909) contains, with gnarled biographical sketches, occasionally equally summary critical judgments. It is impossible to withhold affection from Hocken's commonsensical approach to literature, even when it leads him to self-exposure in his treatment of imaginative writing. He deals with two early novels of G. B. Lancaster in identical terms: “A coarsely told story – locality, New Zealand.”

The first extended critical study of our literature was E. H. McCormick's excellent Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), one of the centennial programme of publications, which in its field set standards of scholarship unlikely to be surpassed if indeed they are ever equalled. McCormick did ample justice to the history of our literature. Moreover, his sensitive, critical judgments are generally accepted and have tended to colour the thinking of most later writers or to oblige them to rationalise their disagreement. McCormick has carefully revised this book in New Zealand Literature (1959) which extends his scrutiny down nearly to the present. (It omits the material on art.) His criticism of art has found a parallel development in his studies of the work of Frances Hodgkins and in other essays.

Just as aware as McCormick of the interaction of life and literature, M. H. Holcroft in his Centennial Prize essay Encircling Seas (1940), the first of a series of complementary studies with somewhat similar overtones, examined the influence of the physical environment on, inter alia, our writers, with originality and deep feeling, valiantly entering a region of intangibles to achieve a valuable synthesis. This passage in The Waiting Hills (1943) will serve to indicate the trend of his mind: “The hills, the rivers, the plains and the forest: all the moulded contours, the granite foundations and the vegetable growths of our moist soil are new things, new combinations of form and colour in the world which poetry builds anew from the flow of appearances. They are not to be reproduced by a conscious artistry, but must come gradually and through an infinite patience of suggestion into the texture of New Zealand poetry”.

In Creative Writing in New Zealand (1946) J. C. Reid covers a good deal of ground competently in short compass. He reacts against Holcroft's mystique and is himself inclined to rely instead on a background of conventional religion, which makes for balanced judgments unimpaired by surprise.

The poets of the nineteen thirties found a superb spokesman and a skilful exponent in Allen Curnow, whose preface to his anthology A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45 was a virile manifesto of his generation. Curnow's preface to his recent Penguin selection is interesting, if a little crochet-ridden, but lacks the fire of his earlier essay and seems to indicate a narrowing of his sympathies in spite of a somewhat fumbling attempt to examine Maori poetry.

The poets of a younger generation found an even more eloquent protagonist in James K. Baxter, first in his 1951 address at the first New Zealand Writers Conference Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry, which seemed to offer some of the apocalyptic satisfactions of a revivalist. In this lecture he sought the rejection of a “purely aesthetic role” for the writer: it was “reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth”. The 1954 Macmillan Brown lectures (published as The Fire and the Anvil) show a rather more mature Baxter who comes to grips with the technical problems of poetry as well as recognising the need for poets to “feel part of a complex spiritual identity” with their own country.

In Spring Fires (1956), another lecture set out in print, the Rev. Ormond Burton vigorously stresses the voluntary nature of literature, which “must rise freely and spontaneously from deep feeling” and reassesses New Zealand writing from this point of view.

Several studies of Katherine Mansfield have appeared, from the short luminous essay by Arthur Sewell (1936), some work by Ruth Manz and Pat Lawlor, down to the thorough and exact but unexhilerating critical study by the American scholar, Sylvia Berkman (1952), Anthony Alpers' excellent life (1954), and Ian A. Gordon's lucid and well-proportioned British Council pamphlet (1954). The last three, together with the fuller text of the letters to John Middleton Murry, equip us better than ever before to assess the work of New Zealand's greatest writer.

In The Puritan and the Waif (1954), edited by Helen Shaw, eight writers as various as D'Arcy Cresswell, Baxter, and Dan Davin contributed studies of the work of Frank Sargeson, but this symposium remains more an act of well deserved homage than an exercise in criticism. Moreover, it was published ahead of some of Sargeson's best work.

Now that New Zealand has produced critics with the scholarship and self-awareness of McCormick, the imaginative insight of Holcroft, and the spirit and “engagement” of Baxter, the quality of future work would seem to be assured. But maturity is still rare enough to need cherishing.

by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).

The forties saw several new enterprises emerging. The quarterly Arena first appeared in Wellington in June 1943 (“We enter the Arena”) and its regular production is a credit to the enthusiasm and steadfastness of its printer-editor, N. F. Hoggard, who has had unusual success in attracting the “first appearances” of writers later to become well known. An enterprising bookseller published in Wellington the bi-monthly journal Parsons' Packet in October 1948 (desisting in 1955), reviewing current imported literature. In 1948 also an Auckland group began Here and Now, which inherited some of the mantle of Tomorrow and for several years provided primarily a journal of opinion with some attention to the arts. A section of the same interests are still served by the cyclostyled Auckland trade union literary journal Fernfire.

In March 1947 the Caxton Press began publishing Landfall, edited by Charles Brasch. This quarterly has kept up a quality which has disarmed the gloomy prognostications based on the fate of journals of the same scope (it has lasted longer than either Life and Letters or Horizon), and has become the recognised vehicle for the best work of New Zealand writers.

Today several journals exist to express the mind of a group. Victoria University of Wellington produced Hilltop in 1949, which became Arachne but did not survive. Numbers (“edited” by a committee of five which included Baxter and Johnson) flourished for several issues. Mate, beginning in Auckland in 1958, has achieved a flavour of its own. So, too, has Image (1958, Auckland). These periodicals, never tied to a dismal regularity of appearance, have produced some fiction and poetry of excellent quality. A quarterly journal of opinion, Comment, begun in Christchurch in 1959 and now edited in Wellington, expresses the point of view of a group of younger Roman Catholic writers and is vigorous within its chosen field, sticking closely to events in this country, including those in the arts. The New Zealand Monthly Review began in Christchurch in May 1960 edited by H. Winston Rhodes and resumed some of the themes of Tomorrow and Here and Now.

The New Zealand Poetry Yearbook began in 1952. Its editor, Louis Johnson, has conscientiously cast his net as wide as possible, including a proportion of reprinted work; the critical material occasionally included has been markedly below the standard generally achieved by the verse.

One of the casualties of wartime paper shortages was the occasional publication of fiction or poetry by local newspapers. Few journals today will accept literary material. The Weekly News and the monthly Mirror occasionally print fiction. (As did the defunct Free Lance and Railways Magazine.) Periodicals of national scope have a difficult task to survive because the scattered centres of New Zealand make distribution expensive. One journal should be mentioned which is published outside New Zealand, the Sydney Bulletin, which has often opened its pages to our writers, even though it irritatingly persists in deriving them from an entity in its own mind, “Maoriland”.

Looking back with the privileged clairvoyance of hindsight wisdom, we are perhaps more impressed with the successes rather than the failures of New Zealand literary magazines. The Triad and the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine have the flavour of their times, something too of provinciality it must be admitted. The precocious brilliance of Phoenix and the social conscience of Tomorrow reflect the maturity that came to a generation which in the slump years had been given to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In our own day the steady performance of the Listener and the more leisurely voyages of Landfall are rewarding and offer some of the satisfactions of the ship come home.

Late in 1932 a Canterbury journal of student opinion, Oriflamme, was suppressed after one issue by the governing body of the University College, but had a brief continuance as Sirocco.

University magazines have always been a source of wit and liveliness. Phoenix in Auckland in 1932 and 1933 was something more. For one thing, it was superbly produced. Contributors included all the bright young men of the day, however slender their connection with Auckland – A. R. D. Fairburn, Ian Milner, Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, J. C. Beaglehole – and its editors were James Bertram and R. A. K. Mason. It is astonishing that so lavish a production braved the slump years even for four quarterly issues.

The harsh facts of the slump prompted a heightened consciousness of social problems and found a voice in the radical weekly (soon to be a fortnightly) Tomorrow, first published in July 1934 in Christchurch by its editor-cartoonist, Kennaway Henderson, who was to make great personal sacrifices to keep it going. This journal (“Tomorrow is a satire on today and shows its weakness”) kept in close touch with world affairs and deplored the rise of Fascism. Although closely linked to the Labour Government of 1935 (W. N. Pharazyn and Ormond Wilson were contributors), it had a feeling for the unpopular cause or person (e.g., John A. Lee in April 1940). It is said that its hospitality, courageously continued after the outbreak of war, to pacifist writers (the Rev. O. E. Burton and A. C. Barrington among others) brought about the circumstances that caused it to cease publication in May 1940. Although it clipped a good deal from overseas journals and had never quite reconciled its Marxist crusaders and its less engaged writers, its list of contributors is a proud one, ranging from the irony of G. W. von Zedlitz, the rectitude of W. J. Scott, and the dedicated fervour of H. Winston Rhodes to the keenest satires of Denis Glover and A. R. D. Fairburn or the “straight” literary offerings of Sargeson, Dowling, and Brasch.

More exclusively literary periodicals were springing up at this time, both stimulated and hindered by the war. The typewritten Oriflamme (Christchurch 1939) produced four issues in two years. Christchurch's Caxton Press, a powerhouse of good taste and good writing, produced the first copy of Book in March 1941; the ninth and final issue appeared in July 1947. With a roll call including Glover, Curnow, Vogt, J. R. Hervey, Isobel Andrews, G. R. Gilbert, Holcroft, J. R. Cole, Baxter, Sargeson, de Mauny, Smithyman, Dennis McEldowney, A. P. Gaskell, G. leF. Young, Duggan, and Louis Johnson, Book had cast its snares over the future. The Progressive Publishing Society's New Zealand New Writing (four issues 1943–45) with a greater seriousness of tone attracted many of the same contributors and under Ian A. Gordon's editorship might well have flourished at a more propitious time.

The New Zealand Listener first appeared in 1939. Under its successive editors, Oliver Duff and M. H. Holcroft, this national weekly journal of the Broadcasting Service has made its own place as a journal of opinion relating especially to the arts and has transcended its narrower task (still punctually performed) of printing the broadcast programmes and explaining them. The stories, poems, and articles have been contributed by New Zealand's best writers, many of whom have been encouraged to do work for which no other journal offers scope.

The nineties were to see a good deal of literary activity. First in the field was the monthly Triad, begun in Dunedin in July 1893. Its editor, C. N. Baeyertz, later transferred it to Wellington and, after some years of simultaneous publication in Sydney, in 1925 removed there, where the journal lasted into the nineteen thirties. The Triad's links with music and the stage were closer than with literature (it was owned at first by the Dresden, later Bristol, Piano Co.), but it provided a profusion of stories, poems, and reviews, and lively sallies somewhat in the vein of its Sydney contemporary, the Bulletin. It carried a good many illustrations, occasionally original caricatures, but more often portrait photographs or reproductions of the “story pictures” which still adorned Royal Academy exhibitions. Such writers as A. A. Grace, Charles Wilson, Frank Morton, and Alice A. Kenny were frequent contributors.

The Citizen, a monthly announcing itself in September 1895 as the “journal of the Forward Movement”, lasted eight issues. Its tone was serious and its contributors frighteningly respectable – A. R. Atkinson, Stout, T. W. Hislop, George Fowlds, D. E. Beaglehole, T. H. Sprott. It was preoccupied with social and political topics, but was not above “borrowing” poems by the pen of Whitman or W. E. Henley.

Near the end of the decade (October 1899) the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine first appeared and kept on until 1905. This was at last a successful general-interest monthly, copiously illustrated both by photographs and by the original work of Frances Hodgkins, Bowring, and Herbert Fitzherbert. It noticed sport, as well as everything of importance in drama (delighting in photographing visiting actresses), music, and literature. It printed a good deal of verse and fiction, including serials. It attracted the best talent of the day – James Hight, Professors Bickerton and Maclaurin, Forrest, and Malcolm Ross, James Cowan, Guy H. Scholefield, Elsdon Best, H. M. Stowell, Johannes Andersen, Jessie Mackay, Alan Mulgan, and Robert Stout. It was perhaps too self-conscious in its determination to be New Zealand, but to a great extent succeeded in reflecting the best of its epoch.

The lean period that followed lasted until the appearance in November 1924 of E. J. McEldowney's New Nation, a weekly with close links with the academic world, particularly Victoria College. When it gave up publication, in July 1925, it had printed work by Stout, T. A. Hunter, I. L. G. Sutherland, P. W. Robertson, J. C. Beaglehole, H. C. D. Somerset, F. L. Combs, R. F. Fortune, H. von Haast, H. D. Skinner, and Mona Tracey.

In September 1928 a man of faith, the printer H. H. Tombs, brought out the quarterly Art in New Zealand. For the first time paintings were regularly reproduced in colour. Such writers as Eileen Duggan, Robin Hyde, C. R. Allen, and Mona Tracey – and in later years many more – had found a suitably dignified vehicle. Dignity was perhaps overdone, as the journal tended to be too expensively produced ever to pay, but it continued even through the war years, though with a change of format, and finally in 1945 became the Arts Year Book which, under Howard Wadman's editorship, lasted several years more. Mr Tombs could take pride in looking back at a periodical which had rendered signal services to the arts.

Short-lived literary magazines and journals of opinion have occurred in New Zealand from the earliest years, even though they have not always equalled the quality of ordinary journalism, their relentless competitor. The first, the quarterly New Zealand Magazine, appeared in 1850 in Wellington, exactly twice. It was founded to “aid the progress” of the new colony and its articles were on utilitarian themes (whaling, geology, the Maori) by such writers as the Rev. Richard Taylor, W. B. D. Mantell, and William Swainson, whose tiff with Jerningham Wakefield provides one of the few gleams of liveliness in a worthy production which in tone anticipated the learned articles of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, a series that began their stately progress in 1869. Again in Wellington, in 1857, a New Zealand Quarterly appeared for three issues. It was in a strict sense a review, and the leisurely and informative articles were based wholly on published books.

In 1860 Taranaki of all places, ironically when one considers the fortunes of war, produced the first of a series of short-lived imitations of Punch which proliferated throughout the country until the eighties. Some of these reached a standard not too far behind the original, and their crude, vigorous cartoons added zest to political encounters and were an amusing distorting mirror of provincial personalities. The most successful of the early versions (which somehow never survived more than a few issues) was Punch in Canterbury (1865), which carried cartoons of quite sophisticated artistry and succeeded in imposing on the popular imagination its own version of stock colonial types, such as the squatter, a rather raffish character combining both privilege and enterprise. Next in merit was Otago Punch. Twenty years later, in 1888, the Dunedin-published New Zealand Punch was a distinguished production and the last in the succession.

Chapman's New Zealand Monthly Magazine appeared in Auckland in August 1862, surviving until December. Its articles were in the same vein as the New Zealand Magazine and attracted some of the same writers.

In spite of this discouraging augury, Aucklanders in 1863 founded the Southern Monthly Magazine which flourished for three years. Aimed more consciously at the “general reader”, it regaled him with fiction, verse (much of it frankly lifted from overseas sources), “colonial experiences”, and good advice on such engrossing topics as draining and fencing. It kept a close eye on the events of the Maori Wars but also scrutinised overseas affairs. The sixties also saw, in gold-endowed Dunedin, the emergence of the first virulent publication of a licensed eccentric, J. G. S. Grant. His weekly Saturday Review (1864) was the vehicle for his waspish attacks on his political and personal enemies and, in fact, on society as a whole, as its editor-author showed marked persecution mania. In 1868 he founded the Delphic Oracle, later to become The Stoic, to be followed by further journals in the eighties. R. M. Burdon gives Grant credit for critical ability and genuine appreciation of the beauties of nature and of the romantic in literature. “When dealing with people or things with which he did not come into immediate contact he kept his head, put some restraint on his prejudices and wrote fairly well.” Grant's chequered career has an eighteenth century flavour: he built his own Grub Street in Dunedin.

In January 1876 the New Zealand Magazine, a quarterly “journal of general literature”, began publication in Dunedin and lasted eight issues. Its editor, R. L. Stanford, enlisted the leading intellectuals of the day – J. E. FitzGerald, William Fox, Robert Stout, the Rev. W. Salmond – and re-examined the scientific and religious topics of earlier journals, but with a new emphasis on political and social questions.

New Zealand biography has been hampered by several inhibiting factors, including the smallness of the stage (as well as the market) and the consequent intimacy of society and politics; the understandable feelings of a prominent man's family in such a community; the difficulties of combining free access to private papers with objective assessment; and the careless or deliberate destruction of records common in colonial societies. These points may be illustrated succinctly by the fact that so far-sighted and articulate a statesman as Sir Francis Bell gave orders that his political papers should be destroyed at his death. The results have been that very few full-scale biographies have been written; that the collection of material has been either impossible or left too late; that many of the best biographies are about relatively minor uncontroversial figures; and that our most important men have been presented in outlines smoother and larger than life.

Biography requires experience of men and affairs in those who attempt it, but there has not been found among later parliamentarians another William Gisborne or another William Pember Reeves, who sketched their fellow politicians in firm but lasting lines; the former in New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen (1897), and the latter in the Long White Cloud. To a certain extent the scholar-statesman W. Downie Stewart has approached them, though his two valuable studies, Sir Francis Bell (1937) and William Rolleston (q.v.) (1940), illustrate most of the difficulties surrounding New Zealand political biography. The standard and comprehensive work in this field is G. H. Scholefield'sDictionary of New Zealand Biography (two vols., 1940).

Our most active biographer has been R. M. Burdon, who has dealt with a wide range of men in his New Zealand Notables (1941, 1945, 1950), his chief work being a perceptive study of Seddon's character, King Dick (1955). Other noteworthy studies have been those of A. G. Bagnall and G. C. Peterson on William Colenso (1948), and L. J. Wild on Sir James Wilson (1953). The outstanding biography so far written in New Zealand is James Rutherford's Sir George Grey (q.v.) (1961), which deals with a remarkable career in South Africa and Australia as well as in this country.

The dilemmas of the New Zealand biographer are shown in the contrast between W. H. Dunn and I. L. M. Richardson's Sir Robert Stout (q.v.) (1961) and D. A. Hamer's as yet unpublished M.A. thesis on Stout's political career (1960); at times they hardly seem to concern the same man. The former is competent and conventional; the latter lays bare the contradictions between Stout's radical professions and his professional interests. Hamer's study is not written in a “debunking” spirit, but the general reader would find that its effect is to “debunk” the Stout he knows. Perhaps Hamer has demonstrated the difficulties of reducing a man to life size, both in his own times and in the eyes of posterity, and generally of keeping biography in perspective. Namierite studies of New Zealand institutions are badly needed. They would possibly show that Stout went into Parliament for the same reasons as the great majority of his fellows, and that his radicalism must be more realistically but sympathetically viewed in this context. Though practically all our major figures await definitive biographies, there is much groundwork to be done in institutional studies and in revising both popular and academic attitudes to personality and motive before such studies can be undertaken with real confidence.

The following may be singled out among valuable recent work in various fields:

1. Biography: Sir George Grey, Rutherford, J. (1961);

2. Collections of documents: Richmond-Atkinson Papers, Scholefield, G. H. (1961); Early Travellers in New Zealand, Taylor, N. M. (1959);

3. Economic history: New Zealand in the Making, Condliffe, J. B. (1959); Welfare State in New Zealand, Condliffe, J. B. (1959); Open Account, Sinclair, K., and Mandle, W. F. (1961);

4. Maori history and Maori-Pakeha relations: Moahunter Period of Maori Culture, Duff, R. S. (1950); Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, Sharp, C. A. (1956); Origins of the Maori Wars, Sinclair, K. (1957); The Maori King, Gorst, J. E., Sinclair, K. (ed.) (1959);

5. Military history: Italy, Vol. I, Phillips, N. C. (1957); New Zealand People at War, Wood, F. L. (1958);

6. Pacific: The Journals of Captain Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Beaglehole, J. C. (ed.) (1955);

7. Political history: Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, McLintock, A. H. (1958); History of the New Zealand Labour Party, Brown, B. M. (1962);

8. Provincial and local histories: History of Otago, McLintock, A. H. (1948); and the Otago local histories under his editorship (17 vols., 1948–58); History of Canterbury, Vol. I, Hight, J., and Straubel, C. R. (eds.) (1957);

9. Social history: Early Victorian New Zealand, Miller, J. O. (1958); West Coast Gold Rushes, May, P. R. (1962).

by William James Gardner, M.A., Senior Lecturer, History Department, University of Canterbury.

The output and standards – at least in technical competence – of writing on New Zealand history have risen since the Second World War. The most important factors in this development (as elsewhere) have been the expansion of university history departments and the increase in the numbers of research students. Other factors include Government sponsorships of official history, notably war history, but covering such fields as Parliament; the unfailing, indeed increasing interest in local history; and the steady demand for limited editions of journals and records of exploration and early settlement. For its size New Zealand produces a considerable volume of historical writing, but this effort is unevenly and sometimes unsatisfactorily distributed over the various fields.

It is an often-repeated truism that New Zealand general histories are written in advance of proper research. This gap has been narrowed in the two most recent accounts, those of Keith Sinclair (1959) and W. H. Oliver (1960). There is still a pressing need for a full-scale academic general history. The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume VII, Part II, New Zealand (1933) has never fulfilled this role adequately, and now less so than ever. The principal sources for such a work (and others of a general nature) are at present the M.A. theses written under supervision at any one of the universities. So far there has been no coordinated plan of academic research, the universities preferring to work independently. There seems little prospect of a post-graduate school in any centre. The greatest volume of New Zealand research has been done at Auckland, where three students – R. M. Chapman, on the 1928 election (1948), T. G. Wilson, on the rise of the Liberal Party (1952), and R. T. Shannon, on the decline of the Liberal Government (1953) – opened up new lines and methods of investigation, which they as teachers have communicated to a new generation, with valuable results. Indeed, the great majority of post-war M.A. theses in all centres have been on political history.

To make this new work readily available to scholars and teachers is still, for various reasons, a difficult problem. There is need for an academic journal of New Zealand history, though some of its functions are at present carried out by Historical Studies (Melbourne) and Political Science (Wellington). The presses of the universities may now be expected to provide other avenues, following the example of the Auckland bulletins. Much will, however, depend on the growth of the university, school, and general reader market, and a useful work in popularising academic history is being done by Historical News (Christchurch).

An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand historical writing is a difficult, indeed an invidious task, particularly at this point when rapid expansion is taking place. Perhaps the chief strand in our academic tradition has been a radical political one. The book which has most influenced New Zealanders' view of their past is William Pember Reeves'sLong White Cloud (1st ed., 1898; 4th ed., 1950). Reeves qualified his picture of Liberalism emerging triumphant in 1890 for those with eyes to see, but writers such as L. Lipson (Politics of Equality, 1948) have ignored the qualifications and built up a “Reevesian” version of our history, adding 1935 to 1890 as a second watershed, and giving a quasi-Marxist “class” interpretation to our political struggles, and to some extent reasoning back from political tension to exaggerated social disharmony. The main needs in historical scholarship are to re-examine and balance this radical tradition, and to break down the primacy of politics by social, economic, religious, and regional studies. The pressing need is for more mature historians other than M.A. students to work in these fields, and not much progress will be made until there are chairs of social and economic history in at least one of the universities. Such studies will no doubt bring to light more of the variety of life, even in a small country, and substitute new and more complex patterns for the bold sweeping “Reevesian” ones which have dominated our general history.

Besides the political preoccupation, there has been concentration on the origins of European settlement and on Maori-Pakeha relations up to the 1860s. Until Maori social history is covered at all levels and in all decades since the wars, our understanding of the past and present race relationship in this country will be partial.