Tony Ballantyne reviews Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave for New Zealand Journal of History:
‘RESPONDING TO WHAT HE DESCRIBES as the ‘atomisation’ of New Zealand history – its division into Māori and Pākehā histories, the intellectual fragmentation produced by specialist studies of ‘the stories of women, of localities, of different communities’, and the loss of an integrative political narrative – Michael Belgrave reassembles a national story (p.12). Drawing upon a professional lifetime of research, teaching, and supervision, Belgrave has succeeded in delivering a rich, thoughtful, and politically engaged assessment of New Zealand’s development as a national community. Belgrave recounts these processes with detail and care: Becoming Aotearoa does not pack the linguistic punch that James Belich’s two-volume history offered, with its host of new analytical concepts, and Belgrave’s work is more cautious on national identity than the often-celebratory tone of Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand. This is a serious book, for fractious times.
If Belgrave the historian is reacting against what he believes to be the ‘unfashionable’ status of national history, Belgrave the New Zealander is also responding to cultural and political bifurcation. The book’s preface explains that it was written in response to the mass killings at the Al Noor Mosque and, just minutes later, at the Linwood Islamic Centre in March 2019. In assessing the ways in which responses to these heinous acts were shaped by longer traditions of thought, Belgrave identifies powerful traditions of New Zealand exceptionalism. These have been popularly expressed in various forms, from platitudes about the superiority of New Zealand’s ‘race relations’, to the liberal optimism of Michael King’s insistence on the ‘good hearted’ nature of New Zealanders, or to Jacinda Ardern’s commitment to cast out the perpetrator of the Christchurch attacks, which, in Belgrave’s view, was the foundation of her redemptive vision of an inclusive and compassionate nation. Belgrave notes that such optimistic readings of the nation were swiftly challenged by Dame Anne Salmond, who argued that the white supremacy espoused by the killer was not an aberration but rather an expression of ways of thinking that now have deep roots in these islands. He also highlights the intervention of Moana Jackson, who framed the attack as a manifestation of the racist logics that underwrote colonization.
For Belgrave, these exchanges are an apt place to start a contemporary history of New Zealand, because they pose troubling questions about the ‘us’ that is integral to the project of nation-building and national history. Those questions, Belgrave suggests, only deepened through the Covid-19 pandemic. While initially there was strong support for the Labour government’s approach, the effects of New Zealand’s border closures, which he suggests made New Zealand a ‘quarantined ark’, and the later lockdowns, produced a sea change in sentiment (p.10). Disinformation proliferated; the Prime Minister was vilified; and a ‘coalition of disaffection’ appeared, venting its venom in the occupation of the grounds of Parliament in 2022 (p.10). With Ardern gone and Labour voted out, a new coalition took up power, intent on pursuing ‘policies that exploited white anxieties about the place of Māori in New Zealand’s present and future’ (pp.10–11). In this context, history is key battleground over the meaning of ‘us’, with Belgrave suggesting that an existing ‘consensus over the country’s past’, underpinned by the operation of the Waitangi Tribunal, is now imperilled (p.11).
In grappling with who we are as a nation, Belgrave rejects the idea that white supremacy is the defining thread in New Zealand history, and he also challenges exceptionalist characterizations of the national community. The past, he rightly argues, ‘is always more complicated than the politics of the present would allow’, an argument and approach that has not been well received by at least one political commentator (p.11).
It is a substantial and substantive history. With a preface, an introduction, 35 chapters, and an epilogue, the main text runs to well over 500 pages. There are 59 pages of endnotes. The annotation is more extensive than in most general histories, providing good signposting to sources and reading, as well as some further explanation or qualification of key points. The notes and text together also underscore the range of Belgrave’s reading and his effective deployment of recent research. And, not surprisingly, given Belgrave’s long engagement with the Waitangi Tribunal, he also makes very effective use of the research literature and reports produced as part of the claims process.
Given Belgrave’s expertise, there is no surprise that particular strengths in the volume are his treatment of the signing of Te Tiriti and its subsequent histories, the evolution of government policy, and the histories of health and medicine. Belgrave’s work has long exhibited an interest in the state and the final sections here offer a powerful narrative of what he frames as a revolutionary transformation of the state in New Zealand from the mid-1980s, a period that stands in stark contrast to the stability and security that are front and centre in his account of the 1950s and 1960s. The 1984 election, he observes, remains a potent reminder that ‘politics matter’ (p.460). He demonstrates how long-standing understandings about the state’s responsibilities to, and relationships with, its citizens were rapidly cast aside by the ideas of Roger Douglas and a small group of his cabinet colleagues, who worked closely with a Treasury that had been frustrated by the Muldoon years. Pursuing the liberalization of the markets and the radical downsizing of the state, these ‘radicals’ ensured that New Zealand was transformed, becoming a new society in significant ways, one that was marked by a fragmented and reduced state and greater inequality, creating social challenges that remain persistent.
The final chapter, ‘Becoming Aotearoa’, offers Belgrave’s summative reflections. He emphasizes the enduring stability of New Zealand’s political system but suggests that ‘beneath’ that ‘New Zealand has been undergoing a dramatic cultural and social transformation’ (p.506). The turn away from restrictive immigration policies has produced a nation that is both demographically diverse and globally connected, especially in Auckland. International connections no longer focus on Britain; they are truly global but are anchored in the Pacific. Māori are pivotal in contemporary New Zealand and, Belgrave argues, are central in debates over the shape of the nation’s future. Māori political and cultural aspirations have been central in transforming the nation, in it ‘organically becoming Aotearoa’ (p.506). For Belgrave, these are processes that are mark the distinctive shape of a longer arc of progress, underpinned by constitutional gradualism, albeit uneven and contested. Belgrave undoubtedly sees the transformation of New Zealand into Aotearoa as positive but worries about the lasting effects of the neoliberal revolution and the character of contemporary political culture. Innovation in policy has faded away and successive governments have proved unable to grapple effectively with intergenerational economic and social problems: his portrait of our immediate moment and the near future is more anxious and uncertain.
This is a good national history; well-written, accessible, and carefully anchored in the existing New Zealand scholarship. Its treatment of much of the nineteenth century tends to abstract New Zealand from its imperial connections and contexts or underplays their significance. A more sustained engagement with these would have also enriched Belgrave’s assessment of New Zealand’s more recent global connections; in some key cases, these are at least partially reactivations of much older routes and connections.
Becoming Aotearoa poses important questions about historians, their audiences, and the work of historical interpretation. Do invocations of complexity and the importance of gradual and uneven change work in our current cultural and political moment, shaped by polarization and impatience, marked by political performativity, and structured by the limited attention spans produced by social media? How does complexity counteract atomization? These are not just questions about Becoming Aotearoa, but for any historian who takes archival work seriously and who wants to represent the work of other of other scholars with care. Belgrave’s book poses these questions with particular force, because it is addressed to an ‘us’, a national community, that is full of difference, and where there is an ongoing struggle between engagement and disregard, debate, and disinterest. With our moment being energized by such volatile political and cultural currents, do nuance and complexity cut through?’
