Belich debunks paradise myth

Historian James Belich fearlessly traverses into the slithery areas of our nation's life in his sequel to Making Peoples, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

Philosophies, said Karl Marx disdainfully, interpret the world in various ways, but the point is to change it.

He of all people should have appreciated the simple power of a good idea, and when it comes to history, well, it's not all behind us. The way we see our past selves can change the way we behave now or in the future. That's what historian James Belich believes. He has completed almost 10 years of hard mental graft - reading, thinking, theorising, writing - to produce the largest interpretive, single-author history of New Zealand yet written.

The 600-page Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000 (Viking, $59.95) is the just-published sequel to Making Peoples, which burst upon us in 1996, establishing Belich as one of our foremost historians. Certainly, he is the most recognisable: the frontperson for the 1999 television documentary The New Zealand Wars (an adaptation of his earlier book), he is virtually the Jamie Oliver of New Zealand history, rummaging around in the cupboards of our past, discovering tasty ingredients where we thought we had none, and cooking up a dish that we all might partake of.

What he's offering in the new volume is typically fresh and often surprising - what he describes "as a complete reappraisal of New Zealand society. At few points do I accept the existing orthodoxy." Some old-style historians may spin in their graves, but Belich has not hesitated at the more usual boundaries of hard-core history as politics and the economy. Instead, he traverses fearlessly into the slithery areas of our nation's life, such as child-rearing, sex, homosexuality, popular culture, sport, the arts - even, goodness me, masturbation.

Anything that can usefully kick the ball towards his goal of discovering who we New Zealanders are and what has shaped us. "I take social history very seriously," he says.

While on one level Paradise Reforged is a wild, rollercoaster ride through the peaks and pits of our daily lives, both personal and political, it is nevertheless a terrifically important academic work which sits squarely on Belich's major themes of recolonisation and decolonisation.

According to this, the period of "progressive colonisation" was replaced from the 1880s by a phenomenon he calls "recolonisation". That is, up to the 1880s New Zealand imported people, goods and money at "rates that were gargantuan in proportion to the numbers already here". After that, a new, more sustainable system emerged and the links between the colony and the "metropolis" (Britain) were renewed and reshaped. It was both an economic system - where we functioned as the town supply district of London, pumping in half a million tons of meat, cheese and butter every year - and a state of mind where we considered London the cultural capital of New Zealand.

And it lasted right up to the 1960s.

Through these periods, we paradoxically continued to see ourselves as Better Britons, while still feeling the cultural cringe. We were great in battle, sport and mountain-climbing, but when it came to making decisions about what was good New Zealand art, we deferred to the cultural capital.

At the same time, a "Great Tightening" occurred in New Zealand's moral and social framework - the famous puritanism that led to the 6 o'clock closing laws, pretended sexual desire didn't exist, and exerted an extraordinary pressure on people to be the same as each other.

"What will the neighbours say?" is a good motto for that period. Those of us living in the relative permissiveness of the new millennium might look back in embarrassment at the narrowness of our world then, but that feeling is no different, Belich says, to the feeling you get at your 21st-birthday party when your parents drag out the snapshots of you doing undignified things at younger ages.

"These are the snapshots we could do without," Belich says, "but we've got to look at that album and understand why people thought the way they did."

While under recolonisation we feared difference and sought the security of sameness (to the extent that we laundered history to cover up our differences), we are now, Belich says, confronting the need to be comfortable with difference - "and that is a symbol of decolonisation".

Books such as Belich's are part of decolonisation, of our growing up as a people. And yes, he does think we're all the better for a bit of history: that the world, or at least our perception of it, can change with the requisite dose of retrospection.

History can help us enormously in this era of globalism, for instance.

"A benign legacy of that recolonial system was that it was fundamentally transnational. We were not a nation alone. New Zealand did not have an economy; it had part of an economy, so New Zealanders developed quite deep skills in terms of hybridity, in terms of being in two places at once and being two things at once. So we have 100 years' experience of being proud New Zealanders and committed members of a transnational community. We have far more experience than most other countries in this.

"These potentialities can be utilised to give us real advantage in a genuinely international world.

"A clearer understanding of the nature of our history should provide us with some advantages for the future. And in another sense it's also important that New Zealanders realise that history happens here, too. The assumption that real history only happens overseas is a legacy of recolonisation."

As well as containing surprises in his reassessments of events and phenomena in our past - his belief that the industrial conflict of 1912-13 was far closer to class war than most historians allow, for instance, or his "debunking" of the significance of the political upheavals of 1984 (1973, he believes, is a much better symbol for the changes we were embarking on) - there are some truly shocking things in Paradise Reforged, some more snapshots that New Zealanders may wish to shy away from.

Racial ideology, for instance, has played "a major and underestimated role in New Zealand history", with Aryanism being "pretty strong in New Zealand in various ways" in the early decades of the 20th century.

There was even the myth of the Aryan Maori, whereby Maori were deemed to be of the same Aryan stock as northern Europeans, and therefore "better Blacks" or even "honorary Whites" - a nifty repainting which enabled New Zealand to tout itself as 98.5 per cent British and a paradise of racial harmony. While Maori could sometimes turn such theories to their advantage, the Aryan Maori myth was a product of the strength of New Zealand racism, not its weakness, and was part of the way that ethnic difference was "minimised through increasingly tight control of the immigration gates; reduced, through culturally enforced conformism; concealed, through the pretended or partial assimilation of ethnic minorities; and denied, through a mix of myth, misunderstanding, statistical tricks and bare-faced lies".

Belich is himself a historical phenomenon: a researcher and theorist of New Zealand history just at the point where New Zealanders are keen to investigate their own past as a nation.

"Had I been born 10 years earlier I would probably have been put off doing New Zealand history," he says.

It was only through a series of accidents that he moved away from 19th-century British history into the realm he now inhabits, which in those days was considered a second-class subject.

Nowadays, it's very much a happening thing, and it and Belich have done well for each other.

His two-volume History of the New Zealanders represents the pinnacle of his career - so far, he says quickly. At just 45 years of age he has a way to go, but Paradise Reforged closes the stage of his career that, in publishing terms, began with The New Zealand Wars and which, in academic terms, has seen him become at an unusually young age a professor of history at the University of Auckland, collecting academic accolades and book awards along the way.

Now it's time to move on, or at least to go off on a tangent.

The next project keeps hold of the hypotheses he developed in Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged, but applies them to the "other neo-Britains: Australia, Canada, the United States".

It's time to take New Zealand history to the world.