Philippa Mein Smith: A concise history of New Zealand

As I began reading A Concise History of New Zealand, my mind was accosted by the image of yet another post mortem by social pathologists of New Zealand's body historic.

Philippa Mein Smith, associate professor of history at the University of Canterbury, stepped up to the slab for this particular dismemberment.

How does she cut us up? Very deftly, it seems to me, at pace and with no-nonsense professionalism and not a little daring and charm. For one thing, she coins a word, "beachcrossers", never before seen in public and with a meaning not fully shaped. (I'll come back to that.)

To retreat from that morgue metaphor let us consider a list of national histories published over just the last decade: James Belich's two volumes, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged; Raewyn Dalziel's revision and update of Keith Sinclair's 40-year-old History of New Zealand; Michael King's mega-seller (186,000 copies so far, more by several factors than all the others put together); my own breathless, 50,000-word Short History; Matthew Wright's Illustrated History; and a book to come later this year in association with the hours-long television national history, Frontier of Dreams.

That list doesn't include the dozens of works that examine regions and special periods, such as Ann Salmond's massive and meticulous books on our rediscovery, Between Two Worlds and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog.

How much history can the market stand? No one knows - yet.

In the meantime, Mein Smith's 80,000 words are a welcome addition to the shelf. Her book belongs to a Cambridge series of concise national histories with 16 countries so far and other titles in preparation. It is designed for the educational market which has resulted in poorly tagged notes at the back under "Sources of Quotations", an irritation which could have been avoided with the use of footnotes.

This is a shame because the text generally flows and is otherwise accessible to general readers. Hers is a fine job of concision - very little missed and very much compressed into a readable package.

What she does exceptionally well is put our story in the context of Australasia. New Zealanders understand the cultural ties we have always shared with Australia but few appreciate how closely each country followed similar social and economic tradition and how frequently one country learned from the other.

An example? I often wondered why gold miners in the South Island, most of whom came from Australia, behaved so much more responsibly and lawfully here.

Mein Smith writes: "From Victoria the miners brought the concept of the miner's right and their hard-won democratic traditions, and New Zealand adopted the Victorian system of goldfields administration. In direct response to the Eureka uprising at Ballarat, the New Zealand Government extended the vote to miners, most of whom would otherwise have been excluded because they did not meet the property qualification. By 1865 the diggers' presence led to 15 new electorates."

I didn't know that and find it instructive. This transtasman theme continues usefully through the book.

But for an historian who writes so well, it is disconcerting to find her just occasionally using words badly out of place.

Modern academic jargon such as "narratives" and "world view" pop up from time to time to blunt the points she is making, and worse are "global" and "globalisation".

She writes of events last century and usually means "British". In fact one sentence gives the game away: "Stock and station agencies became business leaders as capital and ideas traders between local farmers and the global - British - export market."

She uses the words in a manner that will confuse readers by turning Australia, Britain, and perhaps North America into the world. "Globalisation" has a modern connotation that means its use in this way obscures rather than enlightens.

Occasional, badly expressed passages seem to hide inaccuracies.

"Key agents in the extinction of indigenous fauna," she writes, "were 12 species of predator foreign to New Zealand's ecosystem, and the humans who brought them, across a time span of 2000 years. First came the Pacific rat from the Cook Islands and Society Islands, and second Polynesia settlers, with their dogs 1000 years later".

If this means, as it appears to, that the first humans arrived 2000 years ago, because the Pacific rat could only have come with people, then the story of human settlement here needs to be rewritten.

What I think she refers to is research at the University of Auckland in which DNA and carbon-dating pointed to remains here of the Western Polynesian rat from 2000 years ago. But the carbon-dating was not considered reliable.

In another place she writes of the 1951 industrial unrest: "A more recent view argues that Cold War rhetoric had nothing to do with the real underlying causes, which were structural and embedded in the labour process. A history of low wages, insecure employment and dangerous work practices bred hostility and covert resistance, strategies used to effect against the employers when the economy improved.

"Management refused to recognise legitimate grievances, and governments were obliged to defer to the shipping lines' market dominance ... "

That background may have had some bearing on intransigence of older watersiders but by 1951 the union was very much in control.

Its members were highly paid and the union executive decided who worked on the wharves. Because the money and conditions were so good there was a long waiting-list for union membership even at a time of full employment. A communist influence did exist within the union and an even more ideological anti-communist alliance motivated the Government and those unionists led by Fintan Patrick Walsh.

The shipping companies craftily took advantage of the Cold War stand-off for their own ends but that is not to deny that a Cold War stand-off was the fundamental issue.

But disagreement with these and other nuances is inevitable with anything as complex and subjective as a national history, and overall this is an excellent book.

Back to "beachcrossers", a nifty neologism if ever I heard one. No mention of it in the OED and the word-wonks at Victoria University's national dictionary centre have never heard of it.

The first clue comes in a chapter headed "Beachcrossers 1769-1839": "Unlike Tasman, James Cook actually crossed New Zealand beaches, literally and metaphorically."

So can we say a beachcrosser is someone who daringly blazes a trail in an exploratory way across new beaches? Well, no. Later she writes: "The first Maori to visit Australia were Tuki, a priest, and Huru, a warrior, from the Bay of Islands, in 1793. Having adventurously boarded a supply ship, the two young beachcrossers found themselves transported to Norfolk Island", etc.

I like the sound of it, though. Perhaps it will evolve into a word with a firmer meaning and stay in the language.

* Cambridge University Press