Reading Pakeha?: fiction and identity in Aotearoa New Zealand

256 Pages·2009·2.892 MB·English

by  Stachurski, Christina

Reading Pakeha?
C ro ss
Readings in the Post / Colonial
ultures
Literatures in English
109
Series Editors
Gordon Collier †Hena Maes–Jelinek Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
Reading Pakeha?
Fiction and Identity
in Aotearoa New Zealand
Christina Stachurski
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Cover image: Margaret Dawson, “Victor’s Delusion”
(1987; colour photograph)
Courtesy of Jonathan Smart Gallery
(Christchurch, New Zealand) and the artist.
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2644-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2645-2
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009
Printed in The Netherlands
To Patrick Evans and Howard McNaughton, scholars and gents

Contents

Introduction ix
A white settler society? xi
Myths of identity xvii
My approach xx
Relevant literary critical discourse so far xxx
Why focus on Man Alone, the bone people
and Once Were Warriors? xl
Literary masculinity xli
Feminist novels xlv
Maori writing in English xlv

Man Alone 1
The explorer model 2
Landscape as sign 12
Masculinity 17
Nature, culture, and ethnicity 30
Conclusion 34

the bone people 37
Social and cultural context 39
Alienation from Maoritanga 48
Tiaki 52
The three protagonists 53
Sex as metaphor 55
Transformation of nature 59
Kerewin 61
Joe 80
The sanitization of Irishness 86
Conclusion 94

Once Were Warriors 97
Warriorhood 98
Social and cultural context 115
Reviewers’ responses 127
Colonization 131
Libertarianism 138
Alan Duff 142
The female reader 145
The film 150
Conclusion 168

Conclusion 173

Works Consulted 177
Index 199
Introduction

I am theirs and of them and for them speak.
My hands have gone over the roofs and gullies
of their names.
These hills I live under are their doing.
I have been given what they got.
I am what they became.1

“I’m Polish.”
“I’m half English and half Irish.”
“I’m Scottish.”
A
T PRIMARY SCHOOL, this sort of conversation came up often.
There, in the playground in the 1960s, no-one thought to say
“I’m a New Zealander” or “I’m Pakeha.” We knew about New
Zealand from the native birds and creatures on Weetbix cards and coins,
and the coloured pictures of scenic wonders inset along our standard-issue
wooden rulers. Every year, the class (including its Maori members) studied
“The Maoris” as history and made the same models of traditional meeting
houses out of ice-block sticks. This shallow knowledge of my country paled
beside the settings of books I read growing up, series after series by the
English Enid Blyton, the American Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, and
L.M. Montgomery’s Canadian Anne and Emily books. There were no New
Zealand children’s books in our small local library and it seemed that New

1 Michael Jackson, “Pioneers,” in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English,
ed. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford UP, 1997):
120 (ll. 20–25).