Rachel Morris reviews Michael Belgrave's new book Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand for New Zealand Geographic:
‘Any attempt to explain the history of a nation usually reveals as much about the times in which it was written as the events it describes. That’s certainly true of Becoming Aotearoa, the first general history of New Zealand to be published in 20 years. Its author, Michael Belgrave, writes that the book is a “response to crisis”, emerging from the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.
“They are us,” then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared of the Muslim community targeted by the gunman. Those three words came to define the tragedy, but they were also an attempt to define New Zealand as a fundamentally inclusive country. The counterargument came quickly, from those who argued that the killer’s racist ideology could be directly connected to our colonial past. That dissonance prompted Belgrave to ask, “Is there an ‘us’?”—and while he was working towards an answer, the question became a lot more fraught.
During those years, a team of five million came together and then fractured. The cracks widened in the 2023 election, which was marked by arguments over racial resentments. And this year, the Act Party took a bill to Select Committee seeking a referendum on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, exposing our deepest fault lines.
One reason this debate is already so divisive is that many New Zealanders know little about our past. Unlike in the USA, where the nation’s founding and Constitution are considered essential subjects, Kiwis in their forties and older typically got little to no grounding on the Treaty in school. A recent Human Rights Commission survey found that only 10 per cent of New Zealanders feel “very well informed” about it.
Becoming Aotearoa, then, couldn’t be more timely. While Belgrave (a professor of history at Massey University and former research manager at the Waitangi Tribunal) references scholarly debates and weighs a multitude of sources, this isn’t an academic text. With its concision and interest in linking past and present, it’s more accessible than its most recent predecessor, Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand. Anyone who hasn’t had the chance to go beyond the basics of our history may find a lot here that surprises them.’
Read the rest of the review here.
