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E-book People and Place : The West Coast of New Zealand's South Island in history and literature

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Penilaian

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The interaction between people and place is the basic ingredient of human history. The historians who interpret this complex and ever-changing relationship are inevitably bit players in the processes they seek to unravel. In settler societies the terms of the relationship are re-negotiated and the heightened awareness of the new and the different reshapes expectations and communal attitudes. Shunted off from the handful of disparate settlements that owed their existence to mid-nineteenth-century British colonial expansion, the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island stands at the edge of this experience. Its European history can be briefly put: home to M?ori attracted by the presence of pounamu (greenstone), it remained little known until the discovery of gold produced a veritable human invasion that compressed and distorted the process of settlement and left in its wake a region in search of a future. In the century that followed, neither coal nor timber was able to overcome the twin tyrannies of remoteness and harshness. Historians who traversed this tale of brief, brilliant flowering giving way to a pervasive uncertainty born of reliance upon wasting natural assets inevitably cast their narratives within this framework—a framework that would seem introspective and limiting.Yet, neither the tale itself nor the historians who tell it may be described adequately in such crudely environmentally determined terms. This discussion of a small slice of New Zealand’s history examines how three writers—two historians and a novelist/social commentator—have interpreted the place of their birth and provided a foundation for a distinctive regional historical identity. Philip May, Patrick O’Farrell and Bill Pearson emerged as a talented trio of university-trained writers in the 1960s. They were products of an age when imperial ways of thinking about our past were giving way to more explicitly nationalist ones. These stirrings were visible in the upsurge of provincial celebration that marked the passing of the first 100 years of European settlement. Within the historical profession the standard bearer of the new mood was Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand (1959), a nationalist account that emphasised the radical and innovatory and stressed New Zealand’s Pacific environment.1 It became the defining, if not uncontested, perspective for a generation of historians. Indeed, within a year, Bill Oliver produced an elegant counterpoint, The Story of New Zealand (1960).2 As its author has subsequently written, it was ‘determinedly provincial’3 and presented the national experience as a conservative one played out within boundaries set by the ‘foundational inheritance.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

994 RIC p

Penerbit

Australia : ANU Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

216 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781760463458

Klasifikasi

994

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

History of Australia

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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