Mark Francis

Review Essay: Settler Historiography in New Zealand: Politics and Biography in the Early Colonial Period

The beginning of a new millennium is a good time to review the past. It is timely to examine what has been seen as the foundation of New Zealand society, and to rescue its colonial origins from a recurring attempt to mythologise the past and create demons and heroes. Such fictional characters are useful in drama but it is unseemly to use colourful and grotesque fragments of the past merely to create theatrical effects. In contrast to fictional accounts, history has a commonplace quality. It is not that prosaic accounts are admirable for their comparative impersonality and dullness, it is that they are constructed by scholars whose primary concern is with the truthfulness of historical narratives.

The Hero in Upper Canada: Sir John Colborne

Historians have frequently written about Colborne, but have never progressed beyond the line from Mrs Ellice’s diary, ‘He is a little like the Duke of Wellington in face—’.1 Jane Ellice had said it all: here was a Waterloo veteran whose imperturbable manner during the rebellion saved Lower Canada for the British. Colborne was one of the band of fine professional soldiers of which Britain had a seemingly endless supply in Georgian and early Victorian times. Not only did he resemble Wellington in face, the underlying qualities must be the same as well. Colborne was obviously a Tory who carried out conservative policies in the colonies he was sent to govern. While the French Canadians had presumably over-reacted when they dubbed him ‘Old Firebrand’ and changed his title from Baron Seaton to Baron Satan2, there was no doubt that he was an enemy of progress and a figure of darkness.

Naturalism and William Paley

MARK FRANCIS? I This article is an attempt to establish William Paley’s work as the source of higher political wisdom in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Paley’s works were texts at Cambridge University for more than half a century, and he was an author who was required reading at universities in the British ‘outback’ when they were established-Durham University and Sydney University until the middle of the nineteenth century and at the University of Manitoba even in the century’s closing decades. Paley is an English political thinker who needs to be retrieved from the flood of secondary literature on Scottish philosophers and economists. Why late eighteenthand nineteenthcentury English political theorists such as Paley have been ignored while comparatively unimportant Scottish ones have been commemorated is of interest in the same way that Byron thought English bards and Scotch reviewers were of interest. We have been too easily enticed by the strictures of the Edinburgh Review which was so seemingly modern and so open to continental influences. In addition, England in the early nineteenth century was chiefly known for its economics, and following the well-known dramatic dictum of not crowding the centre stage, English political theory was pushed out of it.’ William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was the most widely used text-book on morals and political philosophy in England from 1785 until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is now one of the least understood historical texts. This obscurity is partly due to the twin foci of modern English historiography upon political philosophy as a debate engaging sixteenthand seventeenth-century minds and upon moral sense philosophy as occupying eighteenth-century ones. In comparison, the nineteenth century, especially the early part of it, is regarded as a non-reflective historical period filled with reform activities of a practical kind and with the spread of methodism and evangelical thought.2 In addition to this quite indefensible periodisation, writers who do not fall into century-long divisions, or whose thought bridges such divisions, are neglected. Paley, like the poets Cowper and Crabbe, is regarded as falling into a void between the eighteenth century and Victorian England. What critical literature there is on Paley usually reflects on the fact that he did not fit a large historical patterning. First, though he taught from Locke, he was uninterested in applying the great seventeenth-century devices of rights, social

A Prolegomenon for the History of British Political Thought During the Nineteenth Century

They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy and science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths of his mind and confines himself to one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labour, and logic; but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of the Archimedes–a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics like that of Hooker and Milton and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

The use and abuse of paradigms in the history of political thought

Abstract A paradigm is a methodological device which historians of political thought borrow from the history of science. The initial part of this article examines the views of three distinguished historians of political thought—Sheldon Wolin, Alan Ryan and John Pocock—who have borrowed paradigms. Wolin and Ryan are shown to have confused paradigms with weltanschauungen in such a way as to make the former less useful as methodological devices. Pocock, on the other hand, has been successful in his use of paradigms, though he does not sufficiently recognise their methodological limits. He also raises a conceptual problem. The latter part of this article examines the recent history of science in an attempt to clarify the use of paradigms and their limits.

Public Ideas and Private Virtues in the Governorship of Sir George Gipps

To understand Sir George Gipps as a colonial governor, it is more important to survey his own views and attitudes towards governance than it is to discuss his impact upon Australia. As Ruth Knight noted, Gipps’s views on colonial government crystallized while he was in Canada as one of the Gosford Commissioners.2 The beliefs and attitudes with which he governed New South Wales for eight years had solidified into hard crystalline structures before his arrival in that colony. These were all the more impervious to change because his austere and distant style of governing protected him from coming in close contact with Australian politicians who held views which were contrary to his own. There was a novelty to his policy and his behaviour which marked the end of the old style of personal governorship in which the governor was seen as the political and social leader of the community. Gipps’s role vis-a-vis the community was complex; he was driven to abandon personal leadership both because he saw himself as an official who was attempting to impose self-government upon eastern Australia, and because he had discarded the older view that the governor was the centre of the ritual and social life of the colony. An official with a policy to implement was not the ritual centre in a community. In any case, Gipps, with his bias in favour of selfgovernment, was reluctant to assume the mantle of traditional authority with its echoes of public munificence and divine attributes. He was an essentially modern figure who saw his entertainments largely as private rather than public affairs.

Darling and Bourke

One of the few jeux d’esprit to be published upon the subject of colonial governors is A.G.L. Shaw’s Heroes and Villains in History, Darling and Bourke in New South Wales. This undertakes to demonstrate that ‘the much maligned’ Darling was similar both in policy and practice to the widely-admired Bourke. Though Shaw’s intention is to provoke a reaction from liberal-minded historians who see Bourke’s governorship as a step on the path to modern civil liberties, he is also challenging the public opinion of New South Wales during the 1830s. The great bulk of the inhabitants of that colony detested Darling while they admired Bourke, and Shaw, with the courage of retrospective certainty, is telling them they were wrong to make such a distinction. However, distinguish between the governors they did, and one important historical task is to suggest reasons why this was the case, and, in passing, to indicate what is wrong with Shaw’s procedure. First, he almost completely excludes matters such as how the public perceived governors; and, second, he puts a totally modern construction upon any nineteenth-century evidence which intimates that the structure of authority was not analogous to a twentieth-century political one. At the only point when Shaw raises a matter which could have shed some light upon Bourke’s popularity, he completely misconstrues it. He remarks that it seems to have been only Bourke’s rather curious idea of his dignity that prevented him admitting the public to [Legislative Council] sittings, an idea which lay behind his equally curious insistence, despite thrice-repeated specific instructions from London, on keeping up his bodyguard of mounted orderlies.1

Brisbane and the Ideal of Personal Government

Much discussion of Sir Thomas Brisbane’s governance in New South Wales is embedded in general descriptions of the growth of Australian institutions. Brisbane is given credit for the introduction of trial by jury and an uncensored press. Further, since a Legislative Council was introduced during his governorship of New South Wales, he is associated with the growth of constitutional government in eastern Australia. This development is sometimes referred to in emotive terms as a watershed between the era of the governor as autocrat and the beginnings of a liberal and populist form of government.1 Finally, Brisbane was governor when the Supreme Court was established, and this event moved one historian to exclaim, ‘the year 1824 may fairly be regarded as an annus mirabilis in the legal and constitutional history of New South Wales’.2 These pieces of information about Brisbane and his government are usually retold in company with some pejorative or defensive judgements about his lack of administrative ability. The resultant picture is of a modern or progressive figure whose attempt to drag Australia out of the shackles of a convict society was foiled by inattention to detail and by political enemies. Brisbane’s recall, after attempting reform, is summarised as the fate of a man who was before his time. The historian can offer him posthumous consolation by saying that, with his broad and liberal views, he would have made an ideal constitutional governor.3 That is, it is suggested that if he had come to office after the introduction of responsible government in the 1850s he would not have been recalled.

Metcalfe and Images of Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada

Metcalfe’s reputation as Governor-General of Canada has been a historiographical football ever since 1847 when the words of his friend Macaulay were inscribed on a marble tablet at the parish church of Winkfieldl to mark Metcalfe’s last resting place.

A Triptych of New Zealand Governors: Fitzroy, Grey and Browne

In the period between 1840 and 1860, New Zealand was a tiny, impoverished settler colony which possessed a rudimentary government scarcely able to protect itself, and whose writ did not run beyond the boundaries of a few scattered settlements. It lacked most of the state-like features of colonies such as the Canadas or New South Wales. Government in New Zealand was not so much an institution which carried out policy, but a collection of officials, some of whom had very little function, led by a governor whose chief task was to prevent the settlers from excessively irritating the Maori inhabitants, and thus bringing about their own destruction. Since government was more of an ideal than a reality, basic theoretical issues were more prominent in New Zealand than in other colonies. In addition, the settler population and many of the Maori saw the governor as the possessor of personal authority who would protect them from each other. He was expected to be a ruler rather than a mere symbol of the monarchy, the role of most British colonial governors by the 1840s. As a ruler the New Zealand governor was seen as the repository of personal virtues and vices in the same way as governors in more developed colonies had been during the 1820s and 1830s.