Annabel Cooper

Point Chev boys and the landscapes of suburban memory: autobiographies of Auckland childhoods

This article uses a comparative analysis of two autobiographical texts to consider the ways in which the emotions and the imagination inform a sense of place. These autobiographies recount boyhoods in Point Chevalier, an Auckland suburb which embodies much that is emblematic of the mythology of early- to mid-twentieth-century childhoods in New Zealand. Both a modern suburb in a fast-growing city, and a richly particular coastal environment, it makes itself available as the setting for a childhood of the national imaginary. But as each of these narratives crosses the suburban terrain it produces a different understanding of what it meant to grow up as a male then, and there: in Halfway Round the Harbour Keith Sinclair never questions the fit between boy and place, or the certainty of his belonging and his identity; Peter Wells in Long Loop Home recalls a tumultuous boyhood increasingly marked by the threat of exclusion and intense family conflict. Between the two opposing trajectories of these texts, other possibilities are glimpsed. Place is created here by gender, sexuality and class; and masculinity is shaped and positioned differently for each of these boyhoods and the men who reflect on them. The affect of place marks the difference between these two Point Chevs.

Poor Men in the Land of Promises: Settler Masculinity and the Male Breadwinner Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Abstract Married men and breadwinning were mutually implicit in Pakeha narratives of masculinity in nineteenth-century New Zealand. This article explores the idea that an implicit but important promise held out to immigrants from the mid-century was the promise of sole male breadwinning, and that this promise was so central to gender relations in the colonial economy that when it was defaulted on at the centurys end, many mens failure to maintain sole breadwinning was understood to mark their failure as men. The economic and cultural organisation of masculinity around breadwinning had important implications for the lives of failing men and their families in the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century, and these implications can be traced in the records of failure: welfare records, court records, and suicide inquests.

Poverty in the New World Dream: Families and Gender in Southern Dunedin, New Zealand, 1890-1920

This article considers how poverty was distributed among the different inhabitants of the southern suburbs of a New Zealand city, in the context particularly of motherhood, fatherhood, dependence and independence, childhood, home, and old age. It addresses the demographic patterns and economic practices that meant that women and men, and the single and the married, encountered poverty differently; and it assesses the relationship between family life cycle and poverty in terms of gender. Finally, it considers the significance of the male-breadwinner wage norm and the way that this practice resulted in an uneven distribution of poverty not only across a society but also within families.

Poverty, Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.

Televisual memory and the New Zealand Wars: Bicultural identities, masculinity and landscape

The 1998 documentary series The New Zealand Wars, based on James Belich’s revisionist monograph on New Zealand’s colonial wars, recalled these conflicts to Pākehā as well as Māori collective memory, and thereby confronted contemporary Pākehā identities. Alon Confino asks: ‘Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail?’ This article seeks to explain the unexpected success of the past which the series set forth by analysing its televisual strategies of engagement with Pākehā viewers. It discusses three elements of the series’ mode of address: Belich’s persona as historian-presenter; the series’ appellation of Pākehā viewers in relation to their historical ‘Others’; and its imaging of landscape. The New Zealand Wars was a televisual commemoration deeply enmeshed in contemporary cultural change, and in its claims on the emotions and affiliations of viewers it helped to resituate the New Zealand Wars in the domain of New Zealand nationhood.