Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

Does foreign policy represent the views of the public? Assessing public and elite opinion on New Zealand's foreign policy

This article1 1. We would like to thank Philip Nel, Robert Patman, Steve Hoadley and Chris Rudd for their advice and overall contribution to this research project. We would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. View all notes investigates public opinion on New Zealand's foreign policy, drawing on the findings of a comprehensive poll of general public and elite opinion conducted in 2008. It analyses what New Zealanders think about a range of foreign policy issues and whether public opinion matches actual foreign policy. It argues that the majority of the public support the broad parameters of official policy, but that there are significant differences of opinion in some specific areas, particularly trade agreements and defence. These differences correspond in particular to political orientation and age, gender and income level. The article also outlines the key differences between public opinion and the opinion of the positional elite. Overall, it is argued that the New Zealand public does have clear opinions on foreign policy issues and that these are generally consistent. The article proposes more frequent polling and more public debate over foreign policy.     

The Influence of ‘Benthamite’ Philosophies on British Colonial Policy on New Zealand in the Era of the Treaty of Waitangi

Most of the recent historiography on the British presence in the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century rightly reflects the dichotomy of private commercial enthusiasm for imperial expansion set against a backdrop of official hesitance and vacillation over any possible enlargement of the empire—a stance manifested in Britain's stance on New Zealand prior to 1840. However, such analyses, which emphasise the reactive, unplanned and incremental extension of British interests and involvement in New Zealand, tend to bypass consideration of the particular philosophical influences that helped to shape British colonial policy during this time. This article surveys those social philosophies formulated by Jeremy Bentham—and advanced by his followers—which prescribed a distinct form of colonial intervention and government. It focuses specifically on Bentham's utilitarianism, and his notions of colonial trusteeship, and explores how these ideas insinuated their way into British colonial policy relating to New Zealand in the 1830s, culminating in the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).     

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.     

Moody and Sankey Down Under: A Case Study in “Trans‐Atlantic” Revivalism in Nineteenth‐Century New Zealand*

This article examines the reception of revivalism inspired by the work of Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey in the Wanganui‐Manawatu region of New Zealand in the 1870s and 1880s. The success of Moody and Sankey's 1873–75 British campaign inspired interest in revivalism, and led to rapid and widespread adoption of their distinctive methods. Though it aroused opposition in some quarters, Moody and Sankey style revivalism became established as a significant feature of New Zealand religiosity at that time. Some aspects continued to appeal well into the twentieth century. This article traces the rise and growth in influence of this form of revivalism, and considers reasons for its appeal in late nineteenth‐century New Zealand.     

The Construction and Use of National Identity in Contemporary New Zealand Political Discourse

New Zealand's Labour-led coalition governments in power from 1999 to 2008 committed themselves to defending and promoting a unique and confident sense of national identity. While Labour officially defined the nation in terms of openness, diversity and tolerance, this article argues that in practice they tended to stress a narrower set of identity markers: those, such as creativity, flexibility and innovation, consistent with its reading of global economic necessity. The article demonstrates how the construction of a supposedly unique and confident New Zealand identity remained strongly structured by global norms. It also shows how an insistence on a shared national vision and a common identity can lend itself to a reductive address of citizens as role-performers and, therefore, to a problematic marginalisation of divergent interests and identities.     

‘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.     

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.     

Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand's ‘Grace Darling’, Huria Matenga

Focusing on the heroine of an 1863 New Zealand sea rescue, this article is concerned with gender, race and the colonial encounter. The rescue became an example of harmonious race relations, advocating Maori service as part of settler society governance. The article analyses Huria Matenga's place in the rescue as white settlers endorsed, rewarded and constructed her in relation to the imperial reference point of British heroine Grace Darling. It is argued that the gendered imperial narrative of Grace Darling combined with transcultural representations of women and the sea to accord Huria Matenga a central place in the rescue. While in the early twentieth century Grace Darling's memory was more entrenched in mainstream New Zealand society than Huria Matenga's, by the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Grace Darling as imperial signifier had disappeared, and the legend of Huria Matenga existed alone in a state of postcolonial irony. The article demonstrates that mythologies of and commemoration for heroines are constantly recast and operate across a complex network of local, national and transnational levels.     

Degrading and Managing Risk: Assessing Australia's Counter-Terrorist Strategy

Given the occasionally vexatious nature of academic discussion in Australia on the subject of terrorism, it is surprising that so little has been written regarding Australia's approach to countering terrorism. This gap in the literature stands in marked contrast to the highly charged debate over the direction of terrorism studies in this country. In seeking to fill this lacuna, the article critically examines the three essential pillars of Australia's counter-terrorism strategy that have evolved since 2001: domestic legislation, intelligence, and regional assistance and engagement. I argue that Australia's counter-terrorist strategy exhibits greater cohesion than many of the critics have been willing to acknowledge. However, I also argue that there remain significant flaws in the Howard government's approach, particularly as it relates to a lack of transparency in justifying new anti-terrorism legislation and Australia's unswerving support for a US global counter-terrorism strategy that has lost its way since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.     

The Sinclairs of Pigeon Bay and the Romantic 'Prehistory' of the Robinsons of Ni'ihau

Francis and Elizabeth Sinclair and their six children migrated from Scotland to New Zealand in 1840. Francis died there in 1846 and in 1863 Elizabeth resettled her, by then expanded, family in Hawai'i. There they bought the island of Ni'ihau and prospered as ranchers and planters, especially after the 1880s under the family name of Robinson. The early history of the family, up to the 1860s, has been often told, but never completely and often inaccurately, and is contained in two distinct historiographic traditions. This essay attempts to set the record straight by providing an extensive body of detailed, accurate information about the Sinclairs, and to discuss these two traditions. The older and more reliable New Zealand one presents the Sinclairs as hard-working pioneer settlers. The Hawai'ian tradition, in contrast, deriving from an oral record passed on by Francis and Elizabeth's daughter Anne, was dominated by elements of 'family romance'. It presented Francis as an heroic naval captain in the Napoleonic campaigns, making him a mythical ancestor befitting a family that had risen in the world. A more matter-of-fact treatment, though, has prevailed since 1988.     

Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt,Temperance and Greater Britain

The English-born New Zealand temperance activist, the Rev. Leonard M. Isitt, undertook a number of temperance ‘missions’ in Britain between 1895 and 1905, offering historians a deeper insight into the lived reality of the ‘British world’ and ‘Greater British’ identity. Addressing several areas of imperial historiography, the article uses newspapers from both New Zealand and Britain to acquire a truly ‘Greater British’ perspective of an imperially mobile individual, from which can be drawn lessons about imperial identities and ‘networks’. Isitt's participation in a self-consciously imperial temperance movement highlights the development of a New Zealand identity that depended upon both contrast and commonality with Britain, but it also points to a politics of imperial peregrination, with the temperance reformer's visits to the ‘Mother Country’ factoring in the highly divisive drink question in both New Zealand and Britain. The article concludes with reflections on the nature and limitations of a ‘Greater British’ politics.     

The Varying Role of Vertebrae in Pacific Fishbone Analysis: Comparing Tropical Versus Temperate Midden Assemblages

Archaeologists working in the tropical Pacific have demonstrated the feasibility and value of including fish vertebrae in midden analyses, and recent New Zealand studies draw similar conclusions. This work provides an illustrated guide to the identification of vertebrae from key New Zealand fish taxa and shows the effects of including vertebrae on a large fishbone assemblage from southern New Zealand. We note major differences between New Zealand and tropical Pacific assemblages resulting from the inclusion of vertebrae. Unlike the Indo‐Pacific taxa of the tropical Pacific, no New Zealand species have been shown to be sensitive to the inclusion of vertebrae. In both places, including vertebrae results in changes in relative abundance and rank order; but in New Zealand, this is a function of processing practices, not fishing behaviours. This work serves to highlight changes in the Polynesian fishing adaption following the colonisation of New Zealand. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Differing approaches to congressional outreach: comparing Australia and New Zealand

Both Australia and New Zealand, in addition to engaging with the US executive branch, also protect and advance their bilateral relationship by engaging with the US Congress. Since 1987, Australia has pursued congressional outreach, or diplomatic lobbying, to protect and advance its security and trade interests. As a result, Australia has won both security and trade benefits. New Zealand's congressional outreach, on the other hand, has had a more challenging task of improving bilateral relations due, in part, to US objections to New Zealand's anti-nuclear policy. This article extends existing research on Australian and New Zealand congressional outreach, develops a framework for examining embassy-based congressional outreach and, through comparative analysis of Australian and New Zealand congressional outreach, gives greater insight into the nature and character of their efforts on Capitol Hill.     

Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire

This article discusses the role of grasslands and their products in the development of empire between 1850 and 1930. It explores the paradox that, despite the significance of introduced grasslands in terms of environmental transformation and imperial trade, most contemporary observers ignored this or took it for granted as, generally, have today's historians of empire. The article charts relations between grassland development, improvement and empire building, and examines how retrieval of this neglected story might encourage reconceptualisation of empire relationships, focusing particularly on those between New Zealand and Britain.     

A Devonian fish fauna from subsurface sediments in the eastern Officer Basin,South Australia

This paper reports the discovery of three of the most iconic New Caledonian endemic genera, Amphorogyne, Paracryphia and Phelline, as dispersed leaf cuticle fossils in the early Miocene of New Zealand. New Caledonia's endemic angiosperm families have given it a reputation as one of the most interesting botanical regions in the world, but unfortunately it has no known pre-Pleistocene Cenozoic plant fossil record. A once more widespread distribution of its key plants in the context of a cooling and drying Neogene world suggests the current vegetation of New Caledonia is the result of contraction, or even a migration, from more southerly landmasses. Thus, New Zealand may have been a source of at least some of New Caledonia's plants.     

Ano te mahara e reka,how sweet the memory: The changing remembrance of Bishop Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier in the Twentieth Century*

In 2001, Catholic pilgrims, led by Māori priest Henare Tate, travelled to France to exhume the remains of Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier (1821–1872), the first Catholic Bishop of Aotearoa New Zealand. Placed in a lead-lined coffin, the remains were taken back to New Zealand and laid to rest in Motuti, Hokianga. The interment — 131 years after Pompallier's death — marked the end of an extraordinary renovation of the Bishop as a historical figure, shaped by the tides of Māori and non-Māori Catholic life, and fulfilling, it seemed, a sentiment expressed in this memorial song which Pompallier himself had composed as a parting gift to his Katorika (Catholic) faithful: “Ano te mahara e reka/a ki nga motu o Nuitireni i/sweet is the memory I hold/for the islands of New Zealand.” This article explores the shifting remembrance of Pompallier that underpinned the repatriation and its legacy for New Zealand Catholic communities, especially Hokianga Māori. Three interrelated themes emerge: locally, Hokianga as a foundational place of Māori Catholicism, and the institutional remembrance of Pompallier as the apostolic Bishop of Auckland; and, globally, the reshaping of collective memories in the theological and social changes of the Catholic Church.     

The ‘Other’ on the Other Side of the Ditch? The Conception of New Zealand's Disassociation from Australia

A growing body of work has explored the shared qualities of Australian/New Zealand history and trans-Tasman association. Without denying these links, this article considers New Zealand's simultaneous history of disassociation from Australia and investigates the contours and cultural content of disassociation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Rise and Fall of the Brotherhood of St Andrew in the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin: Charting the American Influence in New Zealand's Religious History

In recent years, scholars have begun to highlight American influences upon New Zealand's religious history. They have demonstrated that even at the height of the British Empire, many non-episcopal churches maintained close ties to their coreligionists in the United States. This article contributes to this field of research by analysing American influences within the Anglican Church of New Zealand, usually portrayed as a thoroughly English institution before the Second World War. It takes as a case study the activities of the American Brotherhood of St Andrew in the Diocese of Dunedin from 1906 to 1915. The article demonstrates that Bishop Samuel Tarratt Nevill invited the Brotherhood because he had great admiration for the Episcopal Church, and that many of his flock accepted the Brotherhood for the same reason. Eventually, the Brotherhood was eclipsed by an English rival, the Church of England Men's Society. But this transition took place not because local Anglicans lost interest in America, but because the Edwardian Era witnessed a surge in imperial loyalty and because the local leader of the CEMS, Canon William Curzon-Siggers, deliberately sought to undermine the influence of the Brotherhood.