Book review: Drone technology offers us an intriguing view of the world. Never before have we been treated to such clear and compelling images of what lies beneath an airborne camera. Most of all, it is the drone’s ability to provide equally sharp imagery from down low as up high that enthrals. We can enjoy the sensation of gliding silently over a wide expanse of countryside, or we can get down in the weeds, below the treetops, and discover what is really going on.
The best historians use their skills in the same manner as an accomplished drone pilot. As well as being equipped to show us the big picture, and familiarise us with the key features of the historical landscape, they are also able to take us lower, down into the weeds of history, bringing us up close and personal with the men and women who made it.
Would that Michael Belgrave possessed the skills of an accomplished drone pilot. His Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand may be “another damned thick, square book” (as King George III is said to have remarked on being presented with Edward Gibbon’s first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) but, with few exceptions, Massey University’s emeritus professor of history keeps his drone out of the weeds. Certainly, he covers a great deal of ground, but from a very lofty vantage point.
Which is as surprising as it was disappointing. As a former research manager for the Waitangi Tribunal, Belgrave was surely provided with a view of New Zealand history obtained from a position very deep among the weeds. The revelatory details of even a handful of the many oral histories presented to the tribunal over the years would have enlivened the professor’s high-flying tome considerably.
Such down-in-the-weeds historiography would also have helped to elucidate the direct challenge of the book’s title. If the trajectory of this country’s history is, as Belgrave suggests, bearing us relentlessly away from “New Zealand” and towards “Aotearoa”, then he needed to demonstrate with much more thoroughness the mana of te iwi Māori which is, supposedly, transforming New Zealanders into Aotearoans.
But, perhaps, it is not the resilience of the tangata whenua that is driving Belgrave, but the perfidy of the Pākehā. Asked what inspired him to write yet another general history of New Zealand, Belgrave responded: “I felt that there was a need for historians to provide a better context for understanding white supremacy in New Zealand’s history …” That need, he advised, was exposed by the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019.
The tendentious character of Belgrave’s explanation is troubling – smacking as it does of ideologically driven historical exercises of the sort made notorious by “The 1619 Project”, a revisionist take on US history.
Certainly, Belgrave’s treatment of Don Brash’s leadership of the National Party, and of the 2005 general election, owes more to the style and values of advocacy journalism than it does to respectable history-writing. Dividing one’s cast of characters into “goodies” and “baddies” may work for Hollywood screenwriters, but it is not a habit that has, until now, been encouraged in professors by university presses.
Presented with a nation whose indigenous people, alongside the colonists who displaced them, have developed a modus vivendi characterised by, in Belgrave’s own words, “negotiation and settlement”, a cynical observer might well conclude that the good fortune of the “goodies” in encountering “baddies” who were, by the standards of their own era, not so very bad is difficult to overstate. Historically, persistent white supremacists are generally made of sterner stuff.
Where Belgrave does opt to get down among the weeds is at Waitangi during the first week of February 1840. These are the most interesting pages of Becoming Aotearoa, upon which the author unfolds in rich detail the complex and confusing interactions that produced Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Given the quantity of the nation’s stock that has been invested in this document by subsequent generations, the thoroughness with which Belgrave interrogates New Zealand’s foundational event is impressive. His summation of the reactions at Waitangi even more so: “Even before [the text of the treaty] was placed in front of them, most rangatira had already decided whether they wanted Hobson to stay or go, the reasons for their decision, and what they were going to tell him. The text had no intrinsic meaning in itself, in English or te reo. Each of those hearing it read understood it according to their own pre-existing ideas.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
But if the pages describing the drafting, debating and signing of te tiriti provide the best reading in Belgrave’s book, its final chapters offer the worst. How their author reconciles his personal enthusiasm for a decolonised future with his easy professorial tolerance of New Zealand’s manifestly unjust economic and social present is anybody’s guess.
The most impactful post-war writers of New Zealand history – Keith Sinclair, James Belich and Michael King – all contributed to their country’s growing confidence and sense of selfhood. What’s more, they did so in a way that drew the two peoples at the heart of the New Zealand story – Māori and Pākehā – together. Such unity may have been more aspirational than historical, but we should not construe that to mean it was without effect.
Reading Becoming Aotearoa, it is difficult to escape the notion that its author, far from seeking to extend the achievements of his nation, is preparing the reader for their dissolution. Perhaps that is why he dismisses the single most traumatic national experience of the past 40 years – the dismantling of New Zealand’s social democratic welfare state and the brutal erection of its neoliberal replacement – as a necessary and unavoidable transformation. Not even the fact that Māori remain neoliberalism’s principal victims seems enough to give Belgrave pause.
Upon reflection, perhaps that’s the supreme skill of the drone-piloting historian: to reveal not only the weedy landscapes of their nation’s past, but to lift their readers high enough to glimpse the distant contours of its future.
Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand, by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press, $65), is out now.
