Philip Matthews reviews Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave for Newsroom’s book of the week:
‘Was the Christchurch terrorist one of us? We know he wasn’t literally, of course. He came from Australia, was radicalised online and in Europe, before he moved to New Zealand, which he found to be a laid-back and convenient place from which to stage attacks on two, potentially three mosques, despite his ‘great replacement’ rhetoric having no real meaning in this country. He was an import, and so were his ideas, but was he also one of us?
What the contradictory question really means is this: was the appearance of the terrorist (let’s maintain the convention of not naming him) somehow an inevitable byproduct of a culture of both casual and systemic racism or white supremacy in New Zealand? Was it especially obvious that this attack should have happened in Christchurch, a city that had its own much-publicised history of white-supremacist activism and lasting racial divisions? The answer is no. People outside Christchurch liked to say that if the mosque attack happened anywhere in New Zealand it had to be there, but the terrorist was based in Dunedin and according to the Royal Commission, he initially planned to target that city’s mosque. If he had, would people have identified it as a very Dunedin crime? Probably not.
Anyway, Michael Belgrave, professor emeritus of history at Massey University, was one of many people who were thinking about the greater meaning of the horror of March 15, 2019. He originally planned to respond with “a short and quickly produced history that explored ideas of inclusion and exclusion in New Zealand’s past”. But here we are five years later with Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand, a 600-page monster that covers roughly 800 years from the first Polynesian settlement to the 2023 election. It is a book that will be taken as a successor to or update of Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, or as the back cover blurb announces, it is “the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published in 20 years”. Comparisons with King’s best-seller are not just unavoidable, therefore, they are invited. But we all know that King left big shoes behind.
Belgrave begins where King ended. King closed the Penguin History with a paean to the decent, ordinary New Zealander. Most New Zealanders, “whatever their cultural background, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant”, King wrote. Those good-bloke qualities have saved us “from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism seen in other parts of the world”. That was in 2003. But was that mild, humble, tolerant Kiwi still ‘us’ in 2019? Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern thought so when she said New Zealand can be a place that is diverse, welcoming, kind and compassionate. We can be a nation that is the exception, not the rule. Remember the grand aspirations behind “They are us”? But others weren’t convinced, as Belgrave points out. Moana Jackson said the Christchurch terror attack was a manifestation of a founding view that “so-called white people were inherently superior to everyone else”, and the killer drew on “shared ideas and history that still lurk in the shadows of every country that has been colonised”. Anne Salmond believed the promise of the Treaty of Waitangi was “utterly smashed by the incoming settler government, which proclaimed and practised white supremacy”. Film director Taika Waititi was more succinct a year earlier when he famously said New Zealand is “racist as fuck”, although Belgrave points out in a footnote that Waititi then added “New Zealand is the best place on the planet”.
Racist as fuck or exceptional, that is still the question. Ultimately Belgrave sides with exceptional. Going full circle from the preface to the epilogue, he concludes that while there have been echoes of white supremacist language and thinking in New Zealand, we have been better than other comparable societies. He agrees that this puts him squarely in the tradition of historian Keith Sinclair’s 1968 paper, ‘Why are Race Relations in New Zealand Better Than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?’ There was “no apartheid, no social colour bar, no segregation in public transport or in living areas” in New Zealand, Sinclair said. That was the kind of opinion you often heard in the old New Zealand, when people (usually Pākehā) said at least we treated the natives better than other countries did. But even if Sinclair overstated the level of equality and the absence of racism in post-World War II New Zealand, “the premise remains true”, Belgrave says. That is a pretty unfashionable view to hold in 2024. That doesn’t make it wrong. It’s just unexpected.’
Read the rest of the review here.
