Introductory Note

Introduction to Journal of New Zealand Studies 2002 No.

The Braided River: Migration and the personal essay

One of my earliest memories is sitting at the table in our rented house in Masterton with Dad and my brothers and hearing our mother crying in the loo. It was an unusual and frightening sound which is why I remember it vividly 67 years later – also Dad had cooked dinner which wasn’t his forte

Romance of the Rail

James Cowan wrote promotional literature and guidebooks for the New Zealand Railways Department. In them he mixes historical and progressivist discourse, revealing tensions between contradictory ideas about New Zealand: its celebration as a modern and technologically advanced state, epitomized by the railway, and nostalgia for the culture and history that the railway aimed to erase

Introduction

This issue of the Journal of New Zealand Studies has been edited by Anna Green, who is the new staff member at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies. Wellknown as an oral historian and formerly of Waikato University, Associate Professor Green comes to us from the University of Exeter, and we are delighted to welcome her as a new colleague as well as the editor of the JNZS. She brings enormous experience and expertise to the role

Crossing the Field

I recently retired from my job as Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. It wasn’t an easy decision after 17 years in the role. One of the most exhausting parts of it was clearing out my office. It wasn’t so much the papers, it was the bookshelves. And then I had to work out what to do with them when I got them home, trying to impose what Walter Benjamin called “the mild boredom of order.” I wish. I would like to be mildly bored if it meant my books were ordered. But what is the order? I can’t see myself implementing the Dewey system, I don’t want to alphabetize my New Zealand books or my Australian collection into the larger conglomerate, and what about poetry, children’s books and crime fiction? Luckily my house has bookshelves in a lot of its rooms so I can impose a geographical and architectural rationale: crime fiction in the spare room, for example. But the question of books has exercised me: what to keep, what to take down to Vinnies, what to put where. I don’t think in tidy categories and nor do my books, and in the course of thinking about this lecture the part books play in our lives seemed germane. Benjamin’s essay is not about the kind of haphazard bookbuyer and reader that I am, it is about book collecting. He had a rather stringent rule at one point in his life which resulted in what he called the militant age of his library—no more than two or three shelves—because no book was allowed to enter unless he had not read it. Needless to say, I have never had such a rule. At the end of his essay Benjamin says that “ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects.” Not, he goes to say, “that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” &nbsp

The View From Here

The View From Her

Opossum Hot Pot: Cooking at the Margins in Colonial New Zealand

One of the most famous and well-read accounts of colonial life in New Zealand is Lady Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand in which she provides rich detail of daily life in the 1860s. Describing Christmas Day 1866, Lady Barker noted that it “is a point of honour to have as little mutton as possible on these occasions, as the greater treat is the complete change of fare.” She didn’t go as far as Opossum Hot Pot (“Skin and clean opossum and cut into pieces, removing backbone for a few inches up from the tail”), or even eel pie, but like most mid-century women in the colonies she struggled to provide nourishing food that resembled British culinary traditions. This paper looks at the stress points of colonial cooking in New Zealand, reading the provision of food as one of the primary borderlands of conflicting cultures, culinary desires, taboos and appetites

Being Pakeha: The Politics of Location

Discusses the work and influence of New Zealand historian Michael King, in particular 'Being Pakeha' and 'Being Pakeha Now'. While commending King on his desire to explore and articulate the Maori worldview the author believes that the views and interpretations given are built on a historically privileged position

Romance of the Rail

James Cowan wrote promotional literature and guidebooks for the New Zealand Railways Department. In them he mixes historical and progressivist discourse, revealing tensions between contradictory ideas about New Zealand: its celebration as a modern and technologically advanced state, epitomized by the railway, and nostalgia for the culture and history that the railway aimed to erase