An Exemplary Leader?: New Zealand and Decolonization of the Cook Islands and Niue

ABSTRACT

New Zealand is proud of its decolonization record: Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s role in developing provisions for non-self-governing territories in the United Nations; New Zealand’s support for the 1960 declaration on colonialism; its leadership on decolonization in the Pacific; the innovative decolonization solution of self-government in free association with New Zealand adopted by the Cook Islands in 1965, and similar arrangement by Niue in 1974. This record is ascribed to a New Zealand belief in self-determination. Closer examination shows many officials, ministers and parliamentarians were opposed to self-government for the Cook Islands, and concerns lingered about Niue. The arrangements reached reflected New Zealand’s reluctance to let go. Yet self-government was granted, in the context of a reassuring New Zealand view of itself as the centre of the South Pacific region. With new competition for influence in the region, it is important that New Zealand does not seek to constrain the Cook Islands’ and Niue’s self-government and potential future self-determination.     

‘The Conscience of the Community’: the Au Vaine of Rarotonga

ABSTRACT

The Au Vaine (‘several women’ in Cook Islands Māori), grassroots women’s committees, worked to promote agricultural efforts and food security in Rarotonga during the 1920s and 1930s. A unique organization, the Au Vaine actively encouraged the growing of commercial crops alongside subsistence plantings at a time when women were being pushed towards the home and hearth, and men pulled to wage labour jobs. These women illustrate the powerful and often unheard voices Pacific women retained throughout this period, as well as the critical role of food in Pacific history. In this article I examine the context within which the Au Vaine emerged, discuss what distinguished them from other women’s committees in Polynesia, highlight their purpose and impact on Cook Islands foodways, and explore some of the reasons they declined by the 1940s.     

Harry Holland's ‘Samoan Complex’

ABSTRACT

‘Harry’ Holland, one of the early leaders of the parliamentary Labour Party in New Zealand, was an anomalous figure in early 20th-century New Zealand politics. In addition to a principled adoption of militant socialism, he stood apart from the rest of the House of Representatives due to his pronounced interest in Samoan affairs. This interest was so acute that one of his Labour colleagues, John A. Lee, remarked that he possessed a ‘Samoan complex’. This paper addresses the lack of critical attention paid to this facet of his career. Even though Holland's attitudes towards Samoa were sometimes couched in the same vocabulary as the coloniser, he always stood on the side of the colonised. His endorsement of Indigenous self-government was ahead of its time, and his campaigning played a key role in the Samoan struggle for independence. At a broader level, Holland was possibly the most significant of a cohort of colonial critics who questioned New Zealand's right to govern Pacific Islanders and who sought to rein in New Zealand's more overbearing Pacific Island administrations.     

Gender Justice and (In)security in Pakistan and Afghanistan†

ABSTRACT

This article argues that gender justice becomes a politicised issue in counterproductive ways in conflict zones. Despite claims of following democratic principles, cultural norms have often taken precedence over ensuring gender-sensitive security practices on the ground. The rightness of the ‘war on terror’ justified by evoking fear and enforced through colonial methods of surveillance, torture, and repression in counter-terrorism measures, reproduces colonial strategies of governance. In the current context, the postcolonial sovereign state with its colonial memories and structures of violence attempts to control women’s identities. This article analyses some of these debates within the context of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s security dynamics. It begins with the premise that a deliberate focus on the exclusion and limitation of women in Muslim and traditional societies sustains and reinforces the stereotypes of women as silent and silenced actors only. However, while the control of women within and beyond the nexus of patriarchal family'society'state is central to extremist ideologies and institutionalisation practices, women’s vulnerabilities and insecurities increase in times of conflict not only because of the action of religious forces, but also because of ‘progressive’, ‘secular’, ‘humanitarian’ interventions.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

The Declaration of Independence: A Global History

Twenty years after the publication of John MacKenzie's Empire of Nature, his characterisation of sport hunting tourism as a symbol of elite and imperial privilege remains strong. Using the example of two white hunters from New Zealand and their trip to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1926, this article elaborates upon MacKenzie's brief mention of hunters in Africa from cultures other than Britain. In particular, the article argues that ‘home’ hunting cultures—in this case of New Zealand—need to be considered thoroughly when examining meanings of hunting tourism, and, second, that hunting trips could serve a range of purposes beyond the notion of reinforcing colonial rule.     

(Troubling) spaces of mountains and men: New Zealand's Mount Cook and Hermitage Lodge

In this paper we trace one pervasive expression of hegemonic New Zealand national identity that developed around the sport of mountaineering from the 1880s, culminating in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic first climb of Mount Everest in 1953. The image of the masculine mountaineering hero, developed on and around New Zealand's highest peak, Mount Cook, is, however, inherently unstable, and we focus on two sites of potential disruption. First, we examine the experiences of white mountaineering women on Mount Cook. These women both embraced the masculinist identity of hero and destabilized it. Women's mountaineering points to the active and complex construction (rather than simple reproduction) of imperialisms, nationalisms and masculinities. Second, we examine the role played by the Hermitage Lodge situated at the base of Mount Cook. Narratives about mountaineering too often ignore the huts, lodges, the places of staying behind. The roles performed by women (and some men) who never had the opportunity and/or the desire to climb but instead 'kept the home fires burning' and supported the efforts of others can be examined as a way of productively challenging the entrenchment of national identity around the masculine mountaineering hero.     

To‘uluwa and the Magistrates: Coconuts and Yams,Governance and Indigenous Agency in the Trobriand Islands,Papua New Guinea, 1912–41

ABSTRACT

In the Trobriand Islands of today’s Papua New Guinea, the coconut has long been mainly an accompaniment to yams – the primary staple food, central cultural icon and source of much of the chiefs’ economic and political power. From the early 19th century, surplus yams were traded to Europeans operating in a regional economy, but the Assistant Resident Magistrates (ARMs) of the Australian government of colonial Papua in charge of the islands overlooked this industry in favour of copra, a global commodity. Beginning with a wholesale planting campaign in the 1910s and continuing with a ‘native plantation scheme’ in the 1920s, the ARMS exhorted Trobrianders to take time away from their beloved gardens to plant and tend coconut trees. Traces of resistance to this overzealous project come mainly through the voice and actions of Paramount Chief To‘uluwa of Omarakana, as recorded by the ARMs in patrol reports and station journals. The colonial vision of a copra-based link to the global economy was dimmed by a fall in commodity prices in the mid 1920s, whilst the regional yam trade persisted for decades more. Hence the indigenous yam prevailed over the colonial coconut in a symbolic struggle for primacy in the islands, and the yam remains a symbol of a vibrant traditional Trobriand culture to this day.     

A link in ‘the great chain of Empire friendship’: the Victoria League in New Zealand

With the objective of exploring New Zealand women's part in imperialism, this article focuses on the history of the Victoria League. Through its activities during war and peace, the League promoted New Zealand's place as a loyal part of the British Empire. The League in New Zealand was part of a ‘female imperialism’ whereby elite women in the ‘white’ settler societies performed gendered work to promote the strength and unity of the Empire. Women's work considered suitable for empire friendliness and unity ranged from hospitality and socialising in the ‘private’ female world, to the support of immigration and education. Wartime saw patriotic ‘mothers of empire’ in full force. The article covers the League's work into the second half of the twentieth century when, despite the ‘end of empire’, imperial loyalty endured, entwined with emerging national identities. Maternal imperial identity slowly waned, the legacy of Queen Victoria lasting until local challenges to the process of colonisation became vocal.     

The End of Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (2003–17)

The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) ended in June 2017 after 14 years. It was an initiative of the Pacific Islands Forum authorized under the Biketawa Declaration of 2000, which enabled a regional response to crises in the region. Between 1998 and 2003, Solomon Islands had undergone a period usually called the ‘tenson’ in Solomons Pijin, or the ‘Tension’ or ‘Ethnic Tension’ in English, when government processes failed and two rival militia groups out of Malaita and Guadalcanal terrorized Honiara and its surrounds. Prime Minister Ulufa‘alu was removed in a de facto coup in 2000. Although all Pacific Islands Forum nations participated, Australia paid 95 per cent of the costs. This was the first time Australia and New Zealand had led a substantial intervention mission beyond their borders that was not under United Nations auspices. The article places Solomon Islands politics and governance issues into a 20-year perspective and examines the success and failures of RAMSI, which was far more adaptable than is usually admitted. The article also considers the appropriateness of the Westminster system to government in Solomon Islands.     

Pan-Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean

From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

Ornamentalism,Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.     

A Spanish Man‐o‐War in New Zealand? The 1864 wreck of Grafton and its lessons for pre‐Cook shipwreck claims

This paper considers the 1864 wreck of Grafton in the Auckland Islands, and its implications for wreck analysis and pre‐Cook exploration claims. The captain of Grafton, Thomas Musgrave, stated that the schooner was built from the wreck of a Spanish man‐o‐war, and archaeological analysis of the wreck found that the timbers are a tropical South American species, and had possibly been reused. The implications of this are clear; it is possible that timbers that originated in pre‐Cook (1769) ships lie in New Zealand, but without a full understanding of the historical and archaeological context of any such timbers, including their reuse in later ships, it is not possible to claim proof of pre‐Cook European exploration of New Zealand.     

Official Statistics and the Contemporary Politics of Indigeneity

Critical scholarship on colonisation tells us that official statistics have reflected the perspectives of the colonisers. However, the colonised, in asserting ‘Indigenous rights,’ have begun to use official statistics to advocate policies that will relieve the continuing structural injustice that is colonisation's legacy. This paper examines Aboriginal and Maori intellectuals' efforts to quantify, using official statistics, the ‘unfinished business’ of settler colonial liberalism. Examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners' annual Reports, the paper argues that their quantitative comparisons of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations highlighted the contested implications of ‘equality.’ Turning to New Zealand, the paper reviews two issues: the appropriate boundary of the ‘Māori population,’ and whether it is possible to measure Māori well-being according to Māori norms. The paper draws on the work of Andrew Sharp to make sense of the difficulties and opportunities that face Indigenous intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand when they operationalise ‘social justice’ in the terms of a comparative statistical archive. The paper argues that there are now two distinct idioms in which to represent the collective Indigenous presence within settler colonial nation-state—one signified by the concept ‘population,’ the other by the concept ‘people.’ The tensions between ‘population’ and ‘people,’ resonating with undecided issues about the claims of Indigenous citizenship upon a liberal policy, are a feature of contemporary Indigenous political discourse.     

To not reinstate the past:

Abstract

Most interpretations stress a qualitative shift in colonial policy at the end of World War II, reflecting a major reorientation of outlook towards development, welfare and ultimately independence. There are, however, continuities before and after the war that call for a shift of emphasis.

Because the British Solomon Islands Protectorate is conventionally represented as an extreme case of backwardness and severity before the war, it should present the putative contrast sharply. On the contrary, the pre-war administration field staff had aspirations for a more progressive regime, but these were thwarted by the protectorate's poverty and were shelved by the eruption of the war. The war-time destruction prompted administrators to consider afresh the problems of colonial development, coinciding with Colonial Office demands for post-war development submissions. Proposals proved too ambitious for the limited imperial purse, but even the attenuated plans proved unrealistic given the acute shortages of material and human resources.

Thus, while ‘post-war thinking’ began well before the war, the era of ‘post-war development’ could not properly begin until several years after the end of the war.     

Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism: Felix and Marie Keesing and the (White) Future of the ‘Native’ Pan-Pacific

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns transnational and international debate about the function of education as a progressive force in modernising colonial and race relations. It focuses on aspects of the published work and careers of New Zealanders Felix and Marie Keesing in the interwar and early post-war years in order to investigate the role these debates played in imagining new processes of adaptation and cohabitation in the settler/colonial Pacific. The paper argues that transnational networks were crucial to that project: as internationally recognised anthropologists, during the interwar years the Keesings were involved in the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Pan-Pacific Women's Association, operating out of Honolulu. Through these communities of expertise, the couple sought to promote and ultimately popularise the contemporary idea that ‘applied anthropology’ would be essential to modernising the norms of governance between ‘native peoples’ and Western citizen-subjects.     

Even ‘Wilder Workhouse Girls’: The Problem of Institutionalisation among Irish Immigrants to New Zealand 1874

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective ‘identities’. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities—marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few—and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of ‘wild workhouse girls’ undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of ‘modulation’ used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.1 Clark, ‘Wild Workhouse Girls’; Crossman, ‘The New Ross Workhouse Riot 1887’; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 62–68. This article traces and links the ‘institutionalised’ behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of ‘modulation’ in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the ‘outside’.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Critiquing the heteronormativity of the banal citizen in New Zealand's mediated civil union debate

This article extends Billig's (1995) landmark thesis on banal nationalism by considering how processes of national deixis circumscribe the boundaries of citizenship and forms of belonging within nation-states. Drawing on critical analyses of sexual citizenship, the article provides a discursive analysis of the debate over civil union in the New Zealand mainstream press during 2004–2005. It argues that this mediated debate represented an historical moment where the routine deictic flagging of the nation, and the correlated flagging of the ‘banal citizen’, fundamentally broke down, thereby allowing this unmarked and ‘ordinary’ process to be systematically examined. Four major discourses are identified in press coverage: ‘Homosexual’ subjects as abnormal and disordered, tolerance, equality and human rights, the sanctity of marriage and the preservation of the family (and the social order). Although the passing of the Civil Union Act does mark a (faltering) step forward in sexual equality, we argue that the presence of these discourses suggests that forms of both ontological and cultural heterosexism persist in New Zealand society. Despite the Act conferring new legal rights, ultimately we conclude that the four discourses act to restrict the extent to which ‘homosexual’ subjects are considered ‘valid’ and ‘legitimate’ citizens. In continuing to structure the public politics of sexual citizenship in New Zealand, these discourses have influenced recent debates over legislative moves towards ‘marriage equality’ in ways that raise concerns over the continuation of heterosexist norms, as well as exclusionary forms of homo-nationalism. More generally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of Billig's work as a valuable and productive analytic lens to explicate concerns over the exclusionary nature of citizenship itself.