Tom Brooking

Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire

This article discusses the role of grasslands and their products in the development of empire between 1850 and 1930. It explores the paradox that, despite the significance of introduced grasslands in terms of environmental transformation and imperial trade, most contemporary observers ignored this or took it for granted as, generally, have todays historians of empire. The article charts relations between grassland development, improvement and empire building, and examines how retrieval of this neglected story might encourage reconceptualisation of empire relationships, focusing particularly on those between New Zealand and Britain.

A Model Colony: Texts and the Teaching of Scottish History in New Zealand Schools, 1907–1945

This article argues that Scotland was presented to two or more generations of New Zealand schoolchildren, from the late nineteenth century down to the 1960s, as a kind of model colony because it had joined willingly with England in union in 1707 and lived peacefully within the British world/empire thereafter. Such a view may have played fast and loose with history, but it held out obvious messages to both Maori children and the children of white settlers. A sanitised version of Scottish history, as promulgated in the New Zealand School Journal to primary schoolchildren, and in Our Nations Story to secondary schoolchildren, highlighted the advantages of peaceful cooperation within empire. Awkward matters such as sectarian conflict and the Highland Clearances were expunged from the telling. Resistance, independence and subversion were thereby discouraged so long as New Zealand continued to reap benefits from its formal membership of the greatest trading bloc the world had ever seen. There is, though, a twist in this apparently familiar tale of imperial collaboration, appropriation and co-option in terms of developments in both countries in the early twentieth century as more nationalistic identities emerged in an apparently post-colonial world.