Fresno Calleja, Paloma

Coolabah

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,  
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 
 
 
239 
 
 
“For Was I Not Born Here?” Identity and Culture in the Work of Yvonne 
du Fresne. Anne Holden Rønning (2010). Cross Cultures 124. Readings in 
Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English. Amsterdam and New 
York: Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2957-6. 187 pp. 
Paloma Fresno Calleja 
 
 
 
 
 
We wouldn’t know that we are a multicultural society by looking at our 
literature. Maori writing has gained much more focus now, but there is still 
a lot missing from people of other backgrounds. I think it would be good 
to be more proactive about encouraging writers from all sorts of 
backgrounds as New Zealanders, because until that happens, our literature 
is not showing fully who we are in this country. (Patricia Grace, in Fresno 
2003: 115) 
As Patricia Grace argues above, New Zealand literature has not fully managed to reflect 
the cultural and ethnic diversity that has characterized its society from the beginning of 
the colonial period. Although, as she points out, Maori literature is now firmly 
established and has been subject to numerous critical studies, the same does not apply to 
the literature produced by writers of other backgrounds, whose works have tended to be 
ignored as constitutive of the body of New Zealand literature (Nola 1999). The tendency 
to present debates on New Zealand national identity as exclusively affecting Pakeha and 
Maori derives from the official bicultural policy established in the 1980s and has 
resulted not only in the homogenization of these two communities ─in themselves 
internally diverse─ but also in the exclusion of other ethnic groups as alien to this 
dichotomy and apparently unrelated to these national debates. This has had a direct 
reflection in literature, affecting writers of Asian and Pacific backgrounds, but also of 
European but non-Anglo-Celtic origin.  
Holden Rønning’s monograph engages in this neglected area of study by looking at the 
works of Yvonne du Fresne, a New Zealand novelist and short story writer of Danish 
and Danish-Huguenot descent whose literary production had not previously been the 
object of such a detailed study, with the exception of Nina Nola’s PhD thesis (2000a). 
Copyright©2014 Paloma Fresno Calleja. This text may be 
archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard 
copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited 
and no fee is charged. 
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,  
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In this sense, Holden Rønning’s book has come to fill an important gap and will 
hopefully pave the way for subsequent studies on writers like du Fresne who, as Nola 
argues, “have been relegated […] to a marginal position in New Zealand literature, 
[although they] have enjoyed a considerable degree of reader support and popularity” 
(2000b: 204). Holden Rønning’s work attempts to solve some of these deficiencies by 
focusing on du Fresne’s complete literary output with a double purpose in mind: to fill 
existing gaps in critical studies of what we might call New Zealand’s multicultural 
literature and to illuminate the use of du Fresne’s postcolonial narrative strategies; 
although not all chapters are equally successful, the book will nevertheless be of interest 
to scholars working in the field of New Zealand studies, as well as to researchers of 
postcolonial or diasporic literatures.  
Chapter 1, “Identities in Dialogue in the Work of Yvonne du Fresne”, traces the main 
aspects and preoccupations of du Fresne’s work by establishing a basic division 
between her short stories, mainly concerned with “depicting identities in dialogue” (1) 
and her novels, centered on issues of memory, history and mythology. As the author 
explains, du Fresne’s work contributes both to a discussion of New Zealand’s national 
identity and to more general debates about multicultural and hybrid identities in this age 
of global movement and of national uncertainties. The author discusses these aspects 
drawing from a number of well-known postcolonial critics, like Stuart Hall, Homi 
Bhabha or Helen Tiffin, to analyze ‒in a perhaps insufficient way‒ the most relevant 
building blocks of du Fresne’s project of social reconstruction as well as the narrative 
strategies employed by the author to develop this project. She considers, for example, 
du Fresne’s need to secure a sense of belonging, inscribing the self “in place”, and her 
simultaneous search for roots in her past. Although the theoretical and critical sources 
employed in this chapter are suitable for the further commentary on du Fresne’s work, 
my impression is that some of the points are merely hinted at, but not fully developed. 
Considering that this introductory chapter is meant to position du Fresne’s work within 
contemporary debates on identity, I miss, for instance, a more detailed discussion of the 
development of New Zealand’s bicultural policy in the 1980s and of how these official 
measures intervened in du Fresne’s own conception of biculturalism. Likewise, I would 
have liked to read a more pertinent contextualization of her latest works as related to the 
events that, from the mid 1990s, have resulted in a growing multicultural awareness and 
prompted official measures to finally acknowledge and recognize the multiethnic make-
up of New Zealand’s society.  
A more detailed and pertinent contextualization is nevertheless found in chapter 2, 
where Holden Rønning offers an interesting historical exploration of the Danish 
settlement in New Zealand. This is a necessary introduction to du Fresne’s work, in 
particular to her novels, where she fictionally reworks some of this historical material. 
The chapter begins with an account of the first Danish migrations and engages in details 
related to the settlers’ lives in the Manawatu and Dannervirke regions. This chapter also 
Coolabah, No.13, 2014, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians,  
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considers the relevance of the church in the process of settlement and the role played by 
the Monrad family, 19
th
 century migrants who joined a small but well-established 
community of Danes and struggled to make a living while keeping the cultural links 
with their homeland. The chapter concludes with a section on Danish books and 
collections kept in New Zealand as evidence of that effort to maintain those cultural and 
linguistic connections, a constant preoccupation in du Fresne’s works, as the author 
explains in subsequent chapters.  
The rest of the book is devoted to the discussion of these individual works, starting with 
her first two novels The Book of Esther (1982) and Frédérique (1987). The Book of 
Esther, discussed in Chapter 3, tells the story of a middle-aged woman who tries to 
make sense of her life by looking back at her family history and tracing the lives of her 
migrant ancestors. Du Fresne thus reshapes and fictionalizes the historical material to 
illustrate Esther’s personal and contemporary predicaments. The novel reflects some of 
the most common features of exilic and diasporic writing in its investigation of 
“intergroup relations and the concomitant conflict of values and customs, as well as the 
balancing of confusing and clashing emotions, resultant on a transference from one 
culture to another” (58). Among these features, Holden Rønning comments on the 
problematic view of the often idealized exilic memory, the temporal and spatial shifts in 
the narrative, or the relevance of the New Zealand land/scape to illustrate Esther’s sense 
of dis/placement. Chapter 4 moves on to consider du Fresne’s second novel, 
Frédérique, about a 19
th
 century Danish woman who is forced to migrate to New 
Zealand with her Huguenot father, leaving her childhood love behind. The novel thus 
explores the more historical dimensions of the exilic experience, employing narrative 
strategies inspired by Victorian literature and engaging, as Holden Rønning effectively 
demonstrates, in interesting linguistic games to reflect social and cultural diversity and 
to explore how identity and biculturalism are negotiated through language. Du Fresne 
also articulates these issues through the use of folklore and mythology, in particular 
through the legend of the Snaveskind, used to illustrate the separation of Frédérique 
from her Danish fiancé and operating at a symbolic level to show “how the protagonist 
if entrapped between and imprisoned by conflicting cultures” (107). The chapter ends 
with a reflection on how the very specific cultural predicaments of the protagonist can 
refer to contemporary conflicts of un/belonging common in our globalized world. 
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with du Fresne’s short stories, compiled in the volumes The 
Growing of Astrid Westergaard (1985), Farvel and Other Stories (1980) and The Bear 
from the North: Tales of a New Zealand Childhood (1988). Holden Rønning departs 
from the assumption that the short fiction genre serves the author to employ the form as 
vehicle for a distinctively female expression and a useful way to “reverse and subvert 
traditional stereotyping, not only of nationality but also of gender” (111). Chapter 5, in 
my view the most comprehensive and interesting, starts by briefly outlining the defining 
features of the short story form, and then moves on to look in more detail at the New 
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Zealand short story, a format that seems to be specially suitable for a country with a 
small population and little resources for the full time writer, but also one where the 
short story tradition has allowed aspiring authors ‒of Pakeha, Maori and other 
ethnicities‒ to forge a specific New Zealand style which consists in “the presentation of 
a situation, interwoven with comments on identity problems and cultural difference […] 
expressive of the relation between textual space and topographical space, as brief 
impressions of an emotional response to what is strange, exotic, foreign” (116). Holden 
Rønning considers du Fresne’s childhood tales as sketches rather than conventional 
short stories which differ from her novels in that “they are not concerned with the 
problem of cultural identity as such directly […] but instead deal with the child’s 
positioning of the ‘self’ in a semi-hostile world” (128). The author then comments on du 
Fresne’s use of interior monologue, humour, strategies of narrative delay and mix of 
thoughts to reflect Astrid’s way of thinking and the personal dilemmas she faces. 
Although issues dealing with cultural identity are important in her childhood stories, it 
is in the adult stories, discussed in chapter 6, where these aspects acquire a greater 
relevance. With their focus on women, these stories “foreshadow the themes in her later 
novels [and] illustrate the feminist issues in du Fresne’s work” (140). Holden Rønning 
classifies these stories into two groups, those dealing with the older generation of 
Danes, and those dealing mostly with second generation female characters who are 
“highly conscious of their biculturalism” (140), a situation reflected in recurrent topics 
like intermarriage, the pain of un/belonging, the sadness of ageing and death, and the 
exploration of grief as a result of different personal and social conflicts.  
After the analysis of du Fresne’s short stories, the book concludes with a study of her 
last novel, Motherland (1996), a fictional autobiography in which the episodic structure 
of earlier works gives way to a more conventional chronological narrative. The novel is 
narrated by an adult Astrid who returns to Denmark and tries to reconcile herself with 
the state of cultural ambiguity in which she lives; as Holden Rønning concludes, the 
novel eventually demonstrates “her ability to come to terms with this sense of the 
incompatibility of her two worlds and to find coherence in her life” (158). The novel 
reiterates some of du Fresne’s preoccupations and creative choices, such as the focus on 
female characters, the exploration of cultural differences between Denmark and New 
Zealand, and the topic of teaching as constitutive of her characters’ experiences and 
personalities. This last novel “represents the culmination of the themes taken up in [du 
Fresne’s] writing about the Danish immigrants, at the same time as it poses salient 
questions about aspects of life at the end of the twentieth century” (153). 
Holden Rønning concludes her analysis by pointing at some of these salient questions, 
thus reinforcing the multiple reasons that justify the relevance of her study: the need to 
start looking at New Zealand as a country that “has been multicultural for over a 
hundred years” (175), although this is a point that evidently needs further elaboration; 
the urge to increase scholarly work on authors who have been neglected by the critics 
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until recently, and the necessity to incorporate the works of writers like du Fresne in 
courses on postcolonial and diasporic literatures. Holden Rønning’s monograph 
undoubtedly contributes to all three aspects in an appropriate manner. 
 
 
 
Works cited 
Fresno Calleja, Paloma 2003: “An Interview with Patricia Grace”. Atlantis 16.1: 109-
120. 
Nola, Nina 2000a: “My two countries firmly under my feet”: Explorations of 
multicultural identity in the fiction of Amelia Batistich and Yvonne du Fresne. 
PhD Thesis, University of Auckland. 
------------------ 2000b: “Exploring Disallowed Territory: Introducing the Multicultural 
Subject into New Zealand Literature”. Docker, John and Gerard Fischer eds: Race, 
Colour and Identity in Australian and New Zealand. Sydney: University of New 
South Wales Press, 203-217. 
------------------ 1997: “Ethnic Minority Writing in Multicultural Aotearoa/New 
Zealand”. Triln, A.D. and Paul Spoonley eds: New Zealand and International 
Migration. Palmerston North: Massey University, 60-74. 
 
 
Paloma Fresno Calleja Paloma Fresno-Calleja is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at 
the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). Her current research interests are 
multiculturalism, identity politics, gender and diaspora  in New Zealand and Pacific literature 
and film. 


“For Was I Not Born Here?” Identity and Culture in the Work of Yvonne du Fresne, by Anne Holden Rønning (2010)

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