Erik Olssen

Settler-Indigenous relations and exchanges in Australasia

This is an impressive and singular monograph that constantly escapes the limits of its genre. Not since Nicholas Thomas’s Possessions (1999), which used art history to explore settler-Indigenous relations and exchanges in Australia and New Zealand, have we had a book that traverses issues of identity with comparable sensitivity and skill. Where Thomas was at pains to emphasise the limits of his approach, Gentry’s book has grown out of his PhD and is based on exhaustive research and mastery of the relevant English-language sources. Both works confront cultural creolisation, although Gentry’s focus is more clearly on European New Zealanders’ uses and misuses of M aori in constructing a new identity for themselves. History, Heritage, and Colonialism starts with ‘Entangled Objects’, focusing on Pakeha uses of M aori to promote tourism from the 1870s onwards (not least by exhibiting M aori material culture in museums). Whereas material objects were often deployed to illustrate man’s evolution from stone-age savagery to progressive civilisation, M aori themselves sometimes had voice and even influence; with tourism, by contrast, in certain popular destinations, especially Te Arawa’s thermal region, M aori always had voice and occasionally an effective veto. The chapter traverses much more than the title suggests, however, including scenery preservation, Pakeha recognition of rock art’s value, and early attempts to protect and preserve historic landscapes and sites. Chapter 2 looks more closely at the preservation and neglect of M aori material culture in Pakeha efforts to invent a new identity for themselves. Here more attention is paid to design and iconography, the influence of the Department of Tourism (created in 1901) and the Dominion Museum, and the influence of such figures as Elsdon Best and the less well-known James Allen Thompson. The theme remains the same: while Pakeha political and economic systems determined what was saved and how it was exhibited, tourism and a growing interest in ethnology ensured that M aori and Maoritanga became ‘at the centre of the country’s identity...’ (52). Given that Thomas reached a similar conclusion, I was slightly surprised that Possessions was not cited, let alone used. No matter. Despite an occasional curtsy to postcolonial pieties, the analysis was both interesting and impressive, constantly attending to the complexity of the M aori–Pakeha relationship. The next three chapters shift the focus to historiography and heritage in relation to the role of historical consciousness in shaping a new sense of identity. In Chapter 3, ‘The Art

Problematising New Zealand’s imperial past

This important collection of essays ought to be published in New Zealand as well as Britain. Frequent clarion calls to move beyond the nation state have here been answered, but New Zealanders are not going to benefit quickly. Perhaps, of course, New Zealanders are less concerned than historians to problematise the nation, although the results of the recent flag referendum (2015-2016) suggest that a comfortable majority still feel quite happy to think of themselves as erstwhile children of the British Empire. For that matter, so too do the Cook Islanders, Niueans, Fijians and Hawai’ians! The book has been conceptualised in four parts: ‘Empire at Home’, ‘Imperial Mobility’, ‘New Zealand’s Pacific Empire’ and a somewhat peculiar ‘Inside and Outside Empire’. One of the book’s great strengths is the interweaving of other-disciplinary perspectives with more traditional historical analyses, especially those from art history. Mark Stocker’s sensitive and fascinating account of ‘An Imperial Icon Indigenised: The Queen Victoria Memorial at Ohinemutu’, and Molly Duggin’s on fern albums and fern fever are a particular delight. That pleasure, however, only intensified my disappointment that no literary or art historian had been invited to deal with those who explored the meaning of empire in literature and art. For instance, Edith Lyttleton, who lived in different parts of the empire at different points in her life, and used so much of that empire as the canvas for her fiction, deserved attention. I was even more disappointed that authors who took the Pacific for their canvas, as did Somerset Maugham and Olaf Ruhen (as well as Lyttleton), had been omitted. Although Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation and empire as ‘imagined communities’ still gets cited frequently, perhaps a sign that little has been happening in this broad field for many years, it is a pity that the role of the literary or artistic imagination in creating and negotiating the several identities that imperial citizens inevitably possess has been overlooked. The absence does not detract from the overall worth of the collection, however. I found the essays of Part I, ‘Empire at Home’, especially rewarding. While Kenton Storey’s study of ‘Te Karere Maori and the Defence of Empire’ is weakened because he does not read te reo Maori, and has to assume that the English language text faithfully translates the Maori text, it does make Maori understandings central. The next two essays, Stocker’s lovely piece and Conal McCarthy’s essay on ‘“Two Branches of the Brown Polynesians” ... and the “Dance of Agency”’, not only elaborate Storey’s argument but more skilfully disrupt and subvert the once fashionable post-colonial belief in a hegemonic

Book Reviews : FOUNDATIONS OF ARBITRATION: THE ORIGINS AND EFFECTS OF STATE COMPULSORY ARBITRATION 1890-1914 Edited by Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, xi + 385 pp.,

. in Labour Relations and results from ’a project which began with the organisation of a conference’ in 1987 on the foundations of arbitration in Australia. The book is organized into four parts-Origins, Agency, Effects, and Theoretical Reflections. By and large the editors have done an excellent job in pulling the chapters together and in identifying new areas that require further investigation. As they note, however, some issues have been ignored, including any systematic comparison with New Zealand. Although some issues have been ignored, the essays here both refine traditional interpretations and explore or raise long-neglected issues. The essays on the origins of compulsory arbitration, and especially Richard Mitchell’s analysis of ’The Legal Origins of the Australasian Model’ throw further light on one intellectual tradition in which the founders worked. Further light might be shed by further analysis of the development of C. C. Kingston’s ideasfor Mitchell and Esther Stern argue persuasively that he is the real progenitor of the Australasian model. Yet quite clearly, as Michael Quinlan points out, the State’s involvement in labour relations had a long history in the colonies, in part because colonists were anxious not to let such events as strikes upset potential British investors. In the section on agency Ray Markey usefully qualifies the view-inherited from McCarthy and Rickard-that labour wanted the Act; David Plowman makes it completely clear that employers strongly opposed the Australasian model but opposed it so vigorously that they alienated themselves from political power; and Stuart Macintyre argues that only confusion can result from trying to understand compulsory arbitration as the outcome merely of a dispute between capital and labour. Although stimulating and often original, the analyses of the system’s origins and the essays on agency tend to ignore differences between the various colonies and assume that a broadly similar process occurred everywhere. Many of the authors were conscious of this problem, but it does need to be addressed sooner or later.