Lydia Wevers: Travel writing and New Zealand 1809-1900

By YVONNE van DONGEN

It's fair to say this is not the usual Christmas offering of armchair travel writing to be idly consumed under a pohutukawa tree while lying in the sun on one's own holiday.

Lydia Wevers is an academic - a literary historian and director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. She has edited numerous books and two years ago published an anthology of travel writing, Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology, a selection of excerpts from more than 700 published books, which could more properly be described as Christmas reading.

So what is Country of Writing? In a sense it is the academic's companion volume to Travelling to New Zealand. Country of Writing examines and analyses the woven fabric of 19th-century writing about New Zealand, seeking to unravel the principal interests at work in travel writing and the print culture generated by travel.

Wevers translates or interprets the text for us, recognising that while travel writing also attempts to interpret one culture to another, such interpretations are culturally biased.

In fact the literary theorists would argue that what the traveller describes in Africa/India/New Zealand is mainly Britain.

No great revelations there, you might say. Analysing travel books with post-colonial, Marxist, feminist deconstructionist or psychoanalytic eyes can often be like shooting fish in a barrel. It's no earth-shattering epiphany to discover that the Victorian travel dispatches from New Zealand, looked at with 21st-century hindsight, are imperialist or racist.

It is also interesting to see with 21st-century hindsight how New Zealand was portrayed to an eager audience "back home", be it as entertainment, as opportunist information on its geography and people for the would-be entrepreneur, or as a way of reinforcing the assumptions and power of the imperial community.

Wevers acknowledges the opaqueness of travel writing but argues the story it has to tell repays careful examination.

She selects the attack by Maori on a merchant ship, the Boyd, in 1809 as the incident which marks the beginning of the colonisation of New Zealand in texts. She follows the way the story was portrayed over almost 200 years, accumulating detail, shifting in emphasis and gathering momentum as it spread throughout the empire.

Given that more than 400 publications about New Zealand had appeared before 1860, Country of Writing has plenty of material and a wide range of views to draw on.

My favourite comes from Charles Wentworth Dilke, whose travels through New Zealand and North America in the late 19th century led him to the conclusion that a soft climate makes for an idle population, with the banana cast as a prime suspect. To Dilke, the banana represented a "climatological sign of lapsarian luxury and racial decline".

I suspect they were laughing even then.

Auckland University Press

$39.95

* Yvonne van Dongen is an Auckland travel writer.