New Zealand in the Twentieth Century

PREFACE

What was New Zealand like in the twentieth century? It’s the sort of question that can be responded to in a variety of ways. One is by producing a conventional history, cataloguing all the major events and stringing them out with an attendant list of dates — the sort of thing that history students used to do when preparing for an examination, and that can sometimes turn people away from the subject. This book, by contrast, is an attempt to offer an answer to the question in a more idiosyncratic manner. It is as much a portrait of the nation in this period as a conventional history, inviting the reader to survey the historical contours of the country and thereby acquire an impression of its evolving nature over the century. However, not every episode explored in the following pages is the biggest, the best, the most disastrous, or the most profound to affect the country. Often, small vignettes of everyday life can speak more about the atmosphere of a place or period than the more visible peaks of the historical landscape.

Inevitably, though, much more is excluded than included in an account of any period, and the coherent shapes of the past that end up being depicted in histories are typically formed from great quantities of disparate pieces of material.¹ In this work, three types of events or episodes vie for attention: those that were significant at the time of their occurrence; those that in hindsight were influential in steering the country in the direction that it ended up taking; and those that might otherwise seem trivial, yet convey some insight into New Zealanders, their lives, and their environment at a given time. By choosing to focus on fewer episodes — as I have in this volume — the opportunity exists to prod and probe them in more detail, rather than just graze the surface before quickly moving on to the next field.

But back to the question of what New Zealand was like in the twentieth century. The shape of the answer is bound to change as more research is conducted, and as the sense of perspective inevitably brought about by distance from the period becomes clearer. Even during the century, there were great shifts in how the country was seen. Early in the 1900s, historians portrayed New Zealand as having settled into that overlooked paradox: a modern agricultural nation. Pastoral land had expanded by millions of acres in the previous decades as the frontiers of native forest were burnt back, delivering to the fortunate farmer and his family the sort of (profitable) bucolic paradise that had been overrun back ‘home’ in Britain by the clanking, choking, crowding advances of industrialization. The New Zealand farm was described in 1902 as being ‘endowed by its nature with a fertile soil and a humid climate; it is free from severe extremes of heat or cold; and it is exempt alike from parching droughts or disastrous floods …. [T]he farmer has a much larger proportion of fine working-days in the year; he is at less expense in housing his stock or supplying his winter feed …. He is nowhere far from the seaboard, and the opening up of the country by roads and railways gives him yearly increasing facilities for the cheap carriage of his produce to the shipping ports. Men with slender means can easily make homes for themselves and their families if they are willing to work hard and live frugally for a few years; and it is probably fair to claim that New Zealand is not surpassed by any British possession as a country for yeomen.’²

The imagery of rural New Zealand had become increasingly enticing, to the point where, by 1903, William Pember Reeves observed a tinge of envy in the country’s urban population at the ‘cult’ of farming life: ‘So fashionable has the agrarian cult been’, he wrote, ‘that, at times, to be a townsman has almost been to wear a badge of inferiority, and large towns have been denounced as blots on the colonial landscape. Manufactures have been classed as artificialities, professional men as parasites, and artisans roundly termed a race of loafers. Even to-day numbers of intelligent colonists look upon the growth of their cities with mixed feelings — healthy, wealthy, and orderly as those cities are.’³ This was more than just a general characterization of the nation at the beginning of the century. It was in equal measure the prescription for its future. The Malthusian calculus of the planet’s exponential population growth seemed to secure New Zealand’s future as a provider of food — with an unceasing procession of refrigerated ships exporting lamb and beef carcasses (and increasingly butter and cheese) to the world, and flushing the colony’s coffers with foreign exchange in the process.

By the middle of the century, however, historians were more interested in contemplating the rise of the nation’s increasingly independent foreign policy, and the consequent presence the country was imposing on the international stage. In William Morrell and David Hall’s A History of New Zealand Life, which appeared in 1957, the authors noted how New Zealand governments had deplored the lack of effective action taken by the international community to end the Spanish Civil War, how they had refused to recognize Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, and how they had advocated collective aid to China when it had been invaded by Japan. ‘A small and remote country like New Zealand’, they concluded, ‘cannot count for much because of its actual power: but the proceedings of the United Nations, which New Zealand has always firmly supported, do offer a field for widening moral influence and helping to mould world public opinion.’⁴

By the closing decades of the century, some historians had shifted the focus of inquiry, and were engaging in an anxious hunt to locate and classify the New Zealand identity — their anxiety perhaps stemming from the fear that they might return empty-handed. And while this was often a determined pursuit, capturing what a ‘New Zealander’ was proved to be frustratingly elusive. Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand concluded with an epilogue entitled ‘The Search for National Identity’,⁵ in which he toyed with some abstractions about what made New Zealand and its people distinct. However, he demurred from handing down any definitive conclusions, preferring instead to let readers deliberate for themselves on his general suggestions. Michael King’s Being Pakeha Now was, in some senses, the polar opposite. It was an intimate, autobiographical approach to the issue of what constituted a New Zealander, at the nucleus of which was the issue of ‘belonging and not belonging’.⁶ King’s slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to himself as a ‘white native’ highlighted the ambiguity of the country’s national identity, but towards the end of the volume he was more explicit about at least one aspect of this matter: ‘People who live in New Zealand by choice as distinct from an accident of birth, and who are committed to this land and its people and steeped in their knowledge of both, are no less indigenous than Maori.’⁷ This was a controversial argument, but the very fact of that controversy showed that the discussion about this issue was like an exposed national nerve that twitched every time it was touched.

James Belich’s Paradise Reforged, written during the final years of the century,⁸ concluded with a sophisticated examination of some of the perspectives that can bear down on how New Zealanders see themselves, and exposed the homogenizing ‘we’re all New Zealanders’ argument in all its superficiality: ‘[W]e are other things as well’, he pointed out. ‘You are allowed more than one collective identity, although ideally the set should be mutually compatible, telescoping into each other. The same person can be an Irish New Zealander, a Pakeha and a New Zealander. Multiple identities can enrich and strengthen New Zealandness, and not necessarily weaken it, just as separate but intertwining strands strengthen a rope.’⁹

In this book, I have avoided making any overarching claims about the nature of New Zealand and New Zealanders in the twentieth century, and have similarly exercised reluctance when exploring themes relating to the country’s social and cultural identity during this period. Many previous writers have delved into this area, but none has come up with a definitive version on which everyone else can agree. National identity and the notion of New Zealandness are very much in the eye of the beholder, and that is where they belong. Some themes might be evident over a brief duration, but any effort at trying to braid them into a uniform representation applying to the entire century is inevitably doomed. Instead, history offers at best an intuitive perception of a nation’s identity, determined by the junction of events and the interaction of individuals over a given period. It is through such contrasts that the cultural and social relief of the country is revealed. But as in nature, the idea of contrasts, colour, distance, and perspective can sometimes be pure illusion.¹⁰ What gives them meaning is the manner in which the spectator comprehends what they see, rather than rigidly defining them ‘as they are known to be defined’.¹¹ This volume is therefore not just another recounting of the past — a well-worn exercise in historical excavation. Rather, it is an attempt to build up an impression of New Zealand over this period; and if a few shoots of insight sprout from its contents, then it will have achieved its purpose.

CHAPTER 1

The 1900s

Past Imperfect

It is hard to realise that we shall no more write the two figures ‘18’ in dating our letters …. [T]he sensation of oddness comes to us but once in a hundred years — that is why it is an odd sensation. It is also one which very few of us undergo a second time — and probably one which fewer of us still desire to repeat. We are still in the Nineteenth Century, or rather, in the nothingness on the verge of the Twentieth.¹

Nelson Evening Mail, 2 January 1900

New Zealanders seemed to have been much less wrapped up in nostalgia at the end of the nineteenth century than they were a hundred years later. Maybe it was because their immediate past was a fairly grim scene to survey at that time. The preceding few decades had been discoloured by economic depression, an overseas war, strikes, declining export prices, growing government indebtedness, high emigration (outstripping immigration from 1887 to 1890), and, if you were Maori, nothing less than the prospect that your people were on the brink of disappearing altogether. By 1899, many New Zealanders had been shunted from one miserable set of circumstances to another in recent years.

When historians have looked on this period, they have often done so with a tendency to see the confluence of this series of ordeals as a bleak aberration in a much longer narrative about the progress of the country. New Zealand was maturing — maybe too quickly at times — into a modern nation-state, so there would inevitably be some growing pains along the way. This bird’s-10 eye view of history is useful for conjuring up a panoramic perspective of the past, but for those living in this period such telescopic views of the country’s evolution were unavailable, and would have offered little solace even if they had been.

Given these hard times, all that could be done — if the popular press is anything to go by — was to hope that things would improve. ‘The year 1900 opens with a pitiful outlook to thousands of our fellow-creatures’, concluded the editor of the Manawatu Herald in its last edition of 1899, ‘but as commencing a new year is somewhat similar to opening a new book we have hopes the ending may be one of very much brighter character than its commencement.’² Another newspaper editorial was similarly guarded about the future: ‘Nothing remains to forbid the inspiring of all with hope to enter confidently and with courage upon the concerns of the year that is coming. The best of promises await the intentions of everyone, and if the new era to be inaugurated on Monday is not found to contain the fulfilment of the brightest hopes, the fault must be laid upon the lack or insufficiency of individual effort.’³

There was certainly no hankering for any golden age in New Zealand’s past. Even that most enthusiastic advocate for British settlement in the colony during the nineteenth century, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had later conceded that many of the towns that had been established in the country since 1840 had suffered from low profits, high unemployment, and the financial ruin of many settler families, and in some cases had ended up being abandoned altogether. Where once a small settlement had stood, all that might remain would be ‘a hillock of broken glass, the debris of bottles of porter, ale, and wine imported from England’.⁴

Even some of the improvements that had occurred in recent years, particularly in the field of technology, were not embraced with universal endorsement. One writer bemoaned that as ‘the tendency of modern life is to crowd as many engagements into a day as possible, so does it appear that the very years as they roll by succeed in getting crowded within their all too brief a limit an ever increasing number of events of importance. The fastest steamers of a few years back are now regarded as slow coaches, and the desire is that every train should be an express; the telegraph and the telephone are put up with because we have nothing faster; but let there be a short delay in the transmission of messages and there is an outcry for additional lines, even though the distance be half way round the globe and the cost enormous. Such is the spirit of the age in which we live.’⁵ There was no alternative for the colony’s residents, though, other than to soldier on. The ‘New Zealand project’ was already too far advanced to be demolished and started all over again. And despite the inventory of gloomy economic statistics that bore down on the populace, 1900 was ushered in with a measured degree of celebration and expectation.

In Nelson, New Year’s Eve was celebrated on Saturday, 30 December. (Sunday evening was devoted to ‘night-watch’ services at various churches.) The first day of 1900, however, was ruined by the weather. A strong, gusty, and hot southwesterly wind blew for most of the day, ‘raising clouds of dust everywhere’, with the result that ‘those who were out for the day found that the best thing to do was to seek some spot sequestered from the sun, wind, and dust, and pant out the hours until evening’.⁶

Further south, in Timaru, locals gathered at the main wharf just before midnight, where ships’ bells tolled the passing of the old year, and where a small fireworks display took place (in which some rockets were ‘capitally sent up whilst others were bungled’).⁷ The Protestant Band then played a selection of hymns and popular tunes, concluding with the national anthem — ‘God Save the Queen’ — and by 12.30 in the morning most of the residents had returned to their homes.

In Palmerston North, Lyttelton, and Wellington, there were various sports events held on New Year’s Day, and rail, road, and sea excursions were well patronized. On the preceding Saturday, the streets were ‘filled with people completing their shopping arrangements or mingling with the general throng for the sake of being in it’. In Wellington, the ‘stream of humanity which circulated along the city’s main arteries was well-dressed and orderly beyond anything to be found in a like occasion in the metropolis of the sister colonies’.⁸

But away from the cricket matches, the bands playing in rotundas in parks, the picnics, the gathering of friendly societies, and the drills of the Lads’ Brigades, there was an element of distinctly antisocial activity that accompanied the turning of the century in New Zealand. In Petone, for example, there were those who ‘thought it the correct thing to make night hideous with noises and play silly pranks. Vehicles were removed from their usual places and planted in obscure rights-of-way; a section of fencing was broken down, and horses wanted yesterday were let loose; while one party took forcible possession of a refreshment room, obtaining access by scaling a lean-to at the back.’⁹

One of the more popular misdeeds ‘indulged in by some certain stupid youths on New Year’s Eve’ was the removal of gates in residential areas ‘to the consequent annoyance of respectable householders’.¹⁰ There were also more serious offences that were reported. In Marton, there were concerns about ‘larrikinism’, in which ‘the usual gang paraded the streets after midnight, and, not being satisfied with making hideous noises, stone-throwing was indulged in’. One stone was thrown through the window of a local shop, causing £2 worth of damage, while at another store the ‘outside blinds were cut off the hooks, taken away, and burnt’.¹¹ There was the expected indignation at these forms of New Year’s Day celebration, but most people’s outrage was spared for the more threatening crimes. A fire in a Waimea office building, apparently lit by some local boys, almost consumed a neighbouring boarding house on the morning of 1 January, while a few hours earlier in Dunedin, sixty-one-year-old Thomas Galloway was hit by his wife with an iron bar she had grabbed from the fireplace. He responded by lunging for his tomahawk and attacking her with it, soon killing her. The police report noted that ‘the woman has no wounds on her body, but her head was shockingly knocked about’.¹² It seemed that as the size of New Zealand’s population surged, so too did some of the common social creaks and groans of the period feature more prominently in the life of the colony.

On 4 June 1900, Professor Hugh Segar of Auckland University College presented a paper to the New Zealand Institute on the subject of the population of the country.¹³ Amid the charts, lists, and tables, was a selection of statistics that reveal much of the distinctiveness of New Zealand’s social make-up at the turn of the century. Chief among these was the high proportion of young people in the nation. This was a hallmark of many of the so-called ‘white’ colonies at the time, but the imprint of this feature was especially pronounced in New Zealand. According to Segar’s calculations, half of New Zealand’s population at the turn of the century was aged twenty or under. And to give this figure some perspective, Segar observed that France in the same period had less than 35 per cent of its population in this age group.¹⁴ One of the consequences of this very high proportion of young people in the colony was the prospect of a boom in births in the following few decades. A corresponding statistic was the death rate, which Segar described as ‘exceptionally small … due to our climate and the conditions of life of our people’. Death rates for males and females in their first year of life in New Zealand were 102 in 1,000. This dropped to 21 in 1,000 in their second year, while deaths among three-year-olds were as few as 7.5 in 1,000 — all lower than averages in England.¹⁵

Of particular interest to demographers of the era was the number of aged people in the country. Just two years before Segar presented his report, the government had passed the New Zealand Old Age Pensions Act 1898, which advanced the premise in its preamble that ‘it is equitable that deserving persons who during their prime of life have helped to bear the public burdens of the colony by the payment of taxes, and to open up the resources by their labour and skills, should receive from the colony a pension in their old age’.¹⁶ The universal nature of this benefit — a radical initiative for the time — meant that budgeting for the elderly was now serious business, because the state, rather than their families, would be taking on much of the financial responsibility for their support. One of the concerns expressed about such provisions was the possibility that the cost to the taxpayer would rise over time. Segar cautioned that ‘for many years to come, the number of old people will increase at a rate greatly in excess of any likely rate of increase of the population as a whole’, and concluded with the anxious prediction that ‘the total number of people of age sixty-five and over may be expected by the year 1961 to reach a total of about 115,000’.¹⁷

Of course, all this churning of figures ignored one key group: Maori. The reason for this oversight was the ‘fact’ that the Maori race — as far as many contemporary observers could see — was on the point of disappearing. In 1881, the doctor, businessman, and part-time ethnologist Alfred Newman wrote a paper on ‘the Causes Leading to the Extinction of the Maori’, and concluded with a chilling lack of sentiment that, ‘taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They [Maori] are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.’¹⁸ Three years later, the New Zealand Journal of Science contained an article by the lawyer Walter Buller, in which he argued with conviction that it was a ‘fact that the Maori race was dying out very rapidly; that, in all probability, five and twenty years hence there would be only a remnant left’, and then ended with the pessimistic refrain that the duty of ‘compassionate’ European New Zealanders in general, and the government in particular, was to ‘smooth down their [the Maori] pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with.’¹⁹

One of the more serious, and (only slightly) less melodramatic, studies into the Maori population in this period was the educationalist Henry Hill’s 1902 paper ‘The Maoris To-day and To-morrow’.²⁰ Hill surveyed a range of contemporary reports on the Maori population and deduced that ‘the interest in the native race to-day is mainly centred in the question of their probable continuance as a people and a nation …. [T]he question has more than once been discussed as to whether the Maori race is doomed to disappear before the advancing strides of civilised Saxondom.’²¹ And even though the 1901 census figures had shown the first flickers of a recovery in the Maori population (from 39,854 in 1896 to 43,101 in 1901), this was interpreted more as an aberration, or attributed to poor data collection, than a sign that the low point had been passed and that a resurgence in numbers had started.

The premise that the race was dying was maintained by a majority of those concerned with population issues, and at the turn of the century the finger was being pointed at Maori women for their alleged role in this demise. With a rich strain of colonial arrogance, one government official reported: ‘Unfortunately, the [Maori] women, not being trained to a satisfactory condition of domestic economy, gradually tire of the restraint of keeping a home clean, neat, and in pakeha style, and eventually find it so irksome as to warrant falling back into the free-and-easy style of living pursued by their forefathers.’²² Hill was inclined to concur with this view: ‘There is hardly a more pitiful sight’, he wrote, ‘than the Maori woman, ambitionless, homeless though not houseless, indifferent to opinion, to responsibility, to home. To gossip, to smoke, and while away the time in frivolous conversation … and apparently without the ambition to have her surroundings improved.’²³ In 1907, the Anglican cleric Philip Walsh waded into this acrid pool and spoke of how ‘the Maori has lost heart and abandoned hope’. His prognosis was that the Maori race was ‘sick unto death, and is already potentially dead’, and made references to how Maori purportedly anticipated ‘with a fatal resignation … the final extinction of their race’.²⁴ But whatever the cause — and there was any number of ‘experts’ happy to proffer their theory for consideration — the fact of this approaching end of the Maori population was generally agreed on. And if Maori were to die out, at least the colony’s European residents would be certain where the responsibility lay — a generation of academics and officials had seen to that.

Not that this sort of chauvinistic analysis was the result of New Zealand’s relative intellectual isolation. On the contrary, the stances of men like Segar, Newman, Hill, Walsh, and others were in keeping with contemporary international thinking on population in colonized countries. One of the most influential publications on this topic was Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast, which was released in 1893, and which received endorsement from the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and William Gladstone.²⁵ By the turn of the century, Pearson’s blithely racist analysis of the fate of peoples throughout the world had become the received wisdom for anyone who concerned themselves with global demographics. According to Pearson, ‘the higher races of men, or those which are held to have attained the highest forms of civilisation, are everywhere triumphing over the lower’. This was not to say that there was no room for other ethnic groups. ‘No-one, of course, assumes’, he continued, ‘that the Aryan race — to use a convenient term — can stamp out or starve out all their rivals on the face of the earth’, but he did concede that ‘certain weak races’, among which he included Maori, ‘seem to wither away at mere contact with European’.²⁶

Pearson’s conclusions were the latest word on population developments in places like New Zealand, and served as a lens through which demographic statistics could be viewed and interpreted. But putting aside the issues relating to the perceptions of the country’s indigenous population, when the first census of the century was undertaken in March 1901, the total population of New Zealand (excluding around 2,500 troops serving overseas) had grown eightfold over the previous sixty years, to 815,853. One thing that the designers of the census had ensured was recorded was the distinction between rural and urban categories. Their findings showed that 54 per cent of New Zealanders lived in rural areas, slightly over 45 per cent were urban dwellers, and the remainder — half a per cent — were classed as ‘migratory’.²⁷ New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the developed world in this period with such a high proportion of rural residents — something that would unavoidably have a bearing on the character of its subsequent economic, social, and cultural evolution over the century.

Held in His Arms

New Zealand’s increasing population meant more than just a rise in the number of people living in the nation. With more immigrants arriving, the pressure to house them intensified, while among the recent settlers were architects whose skills transformed the type of accommodation that was being constructed in the colony. The result was that whereas just fifty years before, even in some of the larger settlements, people were housed in little more than crude shacks, by 1900 the streets of most urban areas around the country were lined with elegant villas, and particularly at this time, the bay villa. The bay villa was the most popular trend in architectural fashion at the opening of the twentieth century, and was the apogee of this form of house design, which had its roots in the Gothic Revival from the middle of the previous century.

The timber industry around the main cities boomed as the demand for wood increased following a fairly flat period of construction in the 1880s. In Auckland, for example, by the end of the nineteenth century there were timber felling and milling operations at Whatipu, Anawhata, Karekare, and Piha — with the Piha mill and associated tramway remaining in use until 1921.²⁸ The preferred wood for villa construction was kauri — which was still in good supply at this time — and a huge industry grew around timber dressing and transportation.

In the preceding decades, as New Zealand began to display more pretentions to being a ‘cultivated’ society, the formula that seemed to be applied to villa design was one of more frill equating to more taste. The problem with this unspoken aphorism, however, was that only so much frill could be tolerated. The architectural historian Terence Hodgson has recorded how, given this inclination to overstated decoration, villas ended up lending themselves:

to any amount of performance from the subtle through to the almost unnervingly riotous. Verandahs graduated from the solid to the delicate. They became the verandahs for sitting out on rather than something akin to sturdy windbreaks. Rooflines now sported complicated folds and from the air they must have looked like an orderly geology of valleys, ridges, and intersections. Bargeboards delineating the lines of dormer windows and gables became brave with decoration which at its most delicate looked like architectural lace. Gardens with all manner of imported shrubs, creepers and flowers came right up to the house in a genteel and scented manner quite different to the sweeping lawns of the plainer colonial examples. Symmetry as well as syncopation of appearance were employed unabashedly, as was the use of complex floor plans which resulted in bays, angles, courtyards and wings spouting in diverse directions.²⁹

These developments were not to everyone’s liking. During a brief visit to New Zealand at the turn of the century, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary that the country’s population was too British-looking (‘women especially … with their swinging gait and general dowdiness of appearance’), and that the nation’s suburbs were ‘mostly of wooden houses: architecture early Victorian, extremely ugly and mean, painted wood and galvanised iron, making up into hideous streets’, while the residences she visited tended to have ‘thick common carpets, hideous chromos, typical of the ordinary lower-middle-class English household’.³⁰ In defence of the roofs, at least, regulations had forced replacement of the former style of shingled roofs with iron in order to reduce the risk of fires starting from sparking chimneys. And with urban villas of the 1900s often crammed cheek by jowl, fire was the great fear for these newly formed suburbs. By modern standards, though, the interiors of villas were gloomy, particularly in their dark-floored, window-starved corridors. The presence of the new innovation — the bay window — offered a vivid luminary counterpoint to the dimmer recesses of a villa, but even these were not enough to sway Webb’s judgement.

Probably at no other time in the nation’s history did a unitary form of house design (in this case, the villa) appear to be working in such close collusion with the social ambitions of a large portion of its population. Locations such as Ponsonby in Auckland, Miramar in Wellington, and Sydenham in Christchurch were transformed from paddocks into suburbs, purpose-built with better roads and local shops to accommodate the needs of the country’s first ‘baby-boomers’ — that generation born in the 1870s — who by the 1900s were ready to show off their new-found (and usually self-anointed) respectability by means of the type of house in which they lived. The presence of a bay in a villa extended in importance beyond outside appearance: the room which had a bay window was typically considered the best one in the house. It was the room with the finest curtains, and where the occupants would put on display their proudest pieces of Victorian bric-a-brac, from china cabinets and chesterfields to ornate mirrors, pot plants, figurines, and books.³¹

And just in case you were unsure how to furnish this most cherished space in the house, there were brochures available that prescribed what was deemed to be the best in fashion and taste for interior decoration. Firms such as Guthrie & Larnach’s Dunedin Iron and Woodware Company (which had agents as far away as Auckland)³² would be able to provide house plans as well as supply all the finicky detailing — the elaborate fretwork, the patterned window with leadlight glass, elaborately shaped bargeboards, and even the most fashionable colours for the house to be painted in. There was also a range of accessories — including ‘lead, oils, turps, scrim, tape, tacks, and varnish’ — which were bought by home handymen (very seldom did women engage in maintenance at this time) to keep up the appearances of their homes.³³

Ironically, though, just as this synthesis between architectural style and social status seemed to have been reached, the process of any new developments in villa design ground to a halt. There was almost nothing more that could be done — no more bays, no more filigree, and no more angles — to enhance the form of these buildings. The early years of the 1900s therefore represented simultaneously the most ornate flourish of the villa in the colony and its finale as a preferred type of housing for New Zealanders.

While it is true that in the 1880s and 1890s some suburban New Zealand streets had a more pronounced presence on maps than on location, generally, the first decade of the twentieth century saw the greater standardization of the width and design of roads, as well as substantial enhancements in surface quality.³⁴ These improvements worked hand in hand with the rapid expansion of electricity into the suburbs. Wellington became the first city in the southern hemisphere to introduce electric street lighting, with the initial batch of 500 lights being installed in the Lambton Quay area,³⁵ and by 1909 the capital had 2,400 telephone numbers listed (up from just thirty-six subscribers in 1883).³⁶

However, while electricity was spreading throughout the cities and towns, and while machine presses and steam-powered lathes enabled the components of villas to be manufactured on an industrial scale, what really enabled New Zealand cities to radiate out at the beginning of the twentieth century was the arrival of electric trams. In October 1900, Dunedin became the first location in the country to operate an electric tram service. Built for the Roslyn Tramway Company, it ran between Roslyn and Maori Hill. In the preceding months, teams of men with picks and shovels had prepared the roads for the network of rails and overhead electric lines,³⁷ and when the inaugural electric tram trip took place Dunedin residents thronged to the spectacle. Auckland’s first electric tram service — from the city to Ponsonby via Karangahape Road — opened on 24 November 1902, and very quickly led to the geographical expansion of the city. Within thirteen years, the tram service had carved out a ‘new arc of suburban development’ along Great North Road, New North Road, Sandringham Road, Dominion Road, Mt Eden Road, Manukau Road, and Remuera Road.³⁸

Because of the relatively small population of the colony’s main areas of settlement at this time, though, most New Zealand cities quickly developed suburbs which tended to be less dense than some of their European counterparts. Being within walking distance of the centre of the city was no longer as important, and, with the mobility that electric trams offered, employment opportunities, such as those offered by factories, did not have to be centrally based either. Thus, the shape of New Zealand cities in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared to be acquiring the early traits of urban sprawl, and with wider streets being built, electricity and telephone services available, the cost of public transport relatively low, and well-proportioned section sizes, New Zealand looked as though it might bypass some of the worst excesses of the sort of overcrowding and cramped living conditions that were features of so many other cities in the world.³⁹

Yet, New Zealand’s suburbia was not quite the bucolic paradise at this time that a glance at these developments might suggest, and that is sometimes intimated in the way in which the past is represented. In the Auckland War Memorial Museum, there is a display called Centennial Street, which is a mock-up of a Victorian New Zealand street, replete with several scaled-down buildings, including a pub, a drapery, and a home. The ‘businesses’ in this ‘street’ all did once exist in Auckland, but the display is very much a chocolate-box-lid image of how New Zealand cities used to look: cute, quaint, cosy, and, with a bit of imagination, even comfortable. But rampant expansion, unchecked by adequate public health measures, resulted in some of the streets, alleys, and spaces between villas turning into rancid arteries, capable of afflicting the neighbouring residents with all manner of diseases. In the period before antibiotics, when options for the treatment of most bacterial infections were severely limited, a report on certain residential areas in Dunedin at the turn of the century contained a worrying description of how bad the situation had become: ‘In a right-of-way off Filleul Street a terrace of half a dozen two storey brick buildings is erected parallel with a brick wall at the back of which six feet of space separates the buildings and in this sunless alley six privies connected directly with the sewer, untrapped, emit a pestilential odour. The apology for a back-yard is paved with bricks. These however, are subsiding, into what I did not care to investigate.’ Residents of the country’s largest city were in no position to turn up their noses at Dunedin’s filth, however. In May 1900, the author of one report noted: ‘The sanitation of Auckland is sadly neglected. Its drainage must be systematised, the unsanitary dwellings pointed out by the Premier and others must be improved out of existence. The city refuse must be burnt instead of collecting in festering heaps. The citizens must be provided with pure and copious water for their household needs.’⁴⁰ Central Auckland’s congested housing, in which around 35,000 people lived in an area of just 16 square kilometres,⁴¹ presented an ideal setting for disease to cultivate and spread. If these reported circumstances are anything to go by, the lustre of late-Victorian villa-packed suburbs — given an almost golden glow by the nostalgia of subsequent generations — must have been tarnished for those residents who had no choice but to put up with the stench of accumulated rubbish, leaking sewage, putrefying waste, and the inevitable rodent infestations that thrived in these environments.

It is little wonder that typhoid, polio, diphtheria, and a host of other diseases took people’s lives in unusually high numbers in the colony’s major settlements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just how badly the situation had deteriorated was made apparent when the most notorious of all infections paid a mercifully brief visit to New Zealand. In 1900, one Aucklander was killed by the plague — a bacillus that inflicted a gruesome death on its victims. Two years later, a further three residents in the capital succumbed to the disease. Shockingly for the colony’s population, a medieval affliction had suddenly broken out in a twentieth-century colony at the other end of the world from Europe. This was more than enough to force the government not only to finally notice this problem, but to take action to curb what might turn out to be a health catastrophe for the country’s cities and towns. And because the hygiene issue that was affecting some suburb dwellers was such a wildly popular concern at the time, it was fitting that by far the most popular politician in the country — the Premier, Richard John Seddon — addressed it.

The legend of Seddon, unlike most other New Zealand leaders before or since, has acquired an extra patina of polished accomplishment at every retelling. When a bronze statue of him⁴² was erected outside Parliament Buildings in 1915 (one of only two New Zealand leaders to be afforded such a distinction), his reputation thereafter as the nation’s great parliamentarian, a man of the people, and even a national redeemer who helped shift New Zealand from a fawning colony to liberated nationhood seemed to be cast. Much of this was myth, but it stuck in the national consciousness, encouraged at every step by Seddon’s ability to ‘subsume the ideas and prejudices of those he claimed to represent’, thus leading the majority in the direction they already wished to go.⁴³ When Sidney Webb, the famous English socialist, reformer, and Fabian, met Seddon in London in 1897, he was quick to diagnose the reason for the Premier’s considerable popular appeal in New Zealand: ‘The common people throughout the colony’, he observed, ‘feel that he [Seddon] is working for them — that he is their servant, labouring with zeal, intense industry, indomitable pluck, and just the sort of capacity which they can appreciate. Against him, in the official Opposition, the people see only a clique of squatters and lawyers.’⁴⁴

Seddon’s formal education ended at the age of twelve — a fact that would have almost certainly precluded him from high political office in his native England — but, after short stints of work in the antipodes in the railways, gold prospecting, and running a pub, Seddon acquired lessons in life that amply qualified him to become the leader of a country where the majority of voters were similarly poorly educated, but familiar with the rough-and-tumble nature of colonial existence.⁴⁵ Add to this a razor-sharp political instinct, a (some would say notorious) gift for political rhetoric, and a granite-like face and robust physical presence (he was six feet tall, and by 1900 weighed over 120 kilograms), and Seddon easily assumed the mantle of the archetypal colonial ruler — a tough man for tough times. This was an image which, although not entirely fabricated, he consciously cultivated.

All these aspects of Seddon’s rule (his premiership lasted from 1893 to 1906), combined with a stated preference for a more presidential style of reign,⁴⁶ also made him one of the country’s most autocratic leaders of the twentieth century — not that such a boast was viewed with much disapproval by most of the population. Indeed, it was almost part of his political charm — a motif that Seddon regularly paraded to reassure the electorate that no matter how dire the country’s circumstances, they could depend on their leader to weather these difficulties. That look of stern determination that he projected in countless images (many carefully staged) was probably all the assurance some New Zealanders needed. In living memory, perhaps only Sir George Grey had come close to Seddon as a dominant presence in the country’s political sphere. There is a photograph of the two taken during Seddon’s visit to London in 1897. Grey, in his eighty-sixth year, frail and close to death, was looked on in New Zealand with affection as the country’s elder statesman, but it was Seddon who was its leviathan.⁴⁷ And although his intention was purely compassionate, there was nonetheless great symbolism in the fact that at the conclusion of their meeting Seddon lifted up Grey in his stout arms and carried him down the stairs of the Hotel Cecil where he was staying.⁴⁸ Seddon now held New Zealand’s destiny in his hands, but as the new century approached there was to be almost more to grapple with than he could manage.

Seddon was dealing with a particular sort of New Zealand, however. It was working class (with pretensions to eventually moving a few rungs up the social ladder), in the middle- to low-income bracket, susceptible to the Premier’s rhetoric, and, most importantly of all, white. Just how far the politics of New Zealand at the opening of the twentieth century were still fractured along lines of race can be seen in the example of housing. While Seddon was prepared personally to address the issue of poor sanitary conditions in pockets of housing among urban Europeans, he was far less concerned with the state in which Maori were living during the same period.

‘Through Darkest Maoriland’

Maori housing was one of the most lamentable features of New Zealand society at this time, and it was not as though this scourge was something that was unknown to Europeans. For years, there had been reports of the atrocious standards of accommodation that many Maori inhabited. A doctor in Rotorua who decided to find out for himself how bad the situation was, entered a wharepuni (sleeping house) early one morning and discovered in an area of roughly 16 square metres, ‘twenty individuals of both sexes and all ages’ crammed into the space, giving each occupant as much airspace ‘as would be afforded by a comfortable full-sized coffin’.⁴⁹ Some Maori communities also had the habit of sinking shallow wells close to houses and latrines, and areas where animals roamed and where waste was freely deposited. The inevitable result was that the drinking and cleaning water drawn from these wells was, as one doctor described it, ‘nothing more than an imperfectly filtered disease-producing liquid’.⁵⁰

In 1903, a measles outbreak in Northland killed numerous children (exactly how many is unknown), including all those enrolled at Paparore Native School. The next year, the measles returned, taking twenty children at Mohaka.⁵¹ In 1906, Peter Buck, one of the country’s first Maori doctors, and at the time a government medical officer, described a visit to the village of Mokau, which he found to be damp, sunless, and made all the more unpleasant by rainwater running off the adjacent hills and turning the dirt floors into sticky, smelly mires.⁵² However, in Mangonui, the resident magistrate had complained that it was ‘impossible’ to convince local Maori that poor housing was in any way connected with diseases.⁵³ Admittedly, there was a growing faith in European medicines in most Maori communities at the turn of the century, but evidently the idea of preventative measures was yet to be fully appreciated.

The construction of ‘traditional’ Maori housing at this time — or, at least, the sort of housing that dominated Maori settlements — was based on pre-European techniques, but in many cases had absorbed imported materials and methods in the design. There was no single form or size of Maori house in this period, but what most had in common was a wooden frame, with the walls and roofs clad in totara bark, or thatched with raupo or wiwi (both rushes). In some instances, walls were clad in ponga logs, and in most examples, in order to keep out the wind (and to a lesser extent, the rain), the floors were sunken. By the first decade of the twentieth century, chimneys, weatherboards, and windows were beginning to feature more frequently in Maori houses, and until the First World War this type of hybrid house dominated many Maori communities. The problem with these, according to one observer, was that they exacerbated the plight of Maori who lived in them, rather than bringing about an improvement:

It might appear at first sight that a dwelling built in European style — well lighted, floored, and properly ventilated — would be more conducive to health than the dark, smoky whare — hermetically sealed when the door was shut — in which the inmates slept on mats spread on the ground around a smouldering fire …. The converse is really the case …. It is a bare shell of weatherboard or split paling, often unlined and without paper or scrim. There is, perhaps, a chimney of slabs or galvanized iron; but no body of heat can be maintained, and the only effect of the fire is to draw in the cold air from the hills or the malaria from the marshy ground. Moreover, the Maori generally lives from hand to mouth, and has barely sufficient for present necessities. On a cold night, when a crowd of visitors come to put up with him — and his native hospitality forbids him turning any away — he has to share his scanty supply of bedding among them as far as it will go; and when he comes in out of the wet he rarely troubles to change his clothes, if, indeed, he [has] another suit to change into, but simply takes off his coat and boots, wraps himself in a blanket, and steams until he is dry. What wonder, therefore, that even when a Maori is possessed of a European house he often lives in it as little as possible, and prefers to squat by a fire in an open shed?⁵⁴

In the late summer of 1904, the Governor, Lord Ranfurly, went on an expedition ‘through darkest Maoriland’ as one satirist put it,⁵⁵ as part of his farewell tour of New Zealand. The area so depreciatively described was the Urewera region, and the accompanying photographer (Malcolm Ross of the Christchurch Press) managed to capture images of Maori housing in a part of the country where the European influence had been at its most slender. At Ruatahuna, there were signs of buildings having been constructed with weatherboard, as well as more traditional rush-lined huts.⁵⁶ However, one photograph, of women engaged in a poi dance at Ruatoki, has as the background a shed-type building also made of weatherboard, but looking extremely dilapidated, and with evidence of traditional Maori and contemporary European framing techniques patched together.⁵⁷

James Carroll, the Minister of Native Affairs, who was accompanying Ranfurly as a translator as well as a representative of the government, surveyed the progress of house construction in the region and berated the local residents for having ‘abandoned the work half finished’.⁵⁸ One image in particular bears out Carroll’s complaint. It is of a rickety frame (made of thin, undressed logs) propping up a roof of roughly thatched reeds. The whole construction looks so frail that it might collapse in a strong wind, and there is little evidence of sufficient materials prepared in the vicinity for the building to be completed.⁵⁹ Even by the rough standards of the day, this construction was inadequate. However, what it and others like it demonstrate is that the transition from traditional to modern housing was an uneven process, and that along the way there would inevitably be mistakes made, and hardship endured by some communities as a result.

Running alongside the generally inadequate state of Maori domestic accommodation around the country, though, was another current of indigenous architecture that was perceived by Europeans at the time in a very favourable light. Maori meeting houses and Maori churches — utilizing European building techniques, materials, and proportions — had begun to emerge all over the colony. Drawing strongly on Gothic or Tudor styles, and often financed in part by the Anglican or Catholic churches, these buildings were the ‘acceptable’ face of Maori design. The traditional interior decorations became more numerous and more pronounced⁶⁰ — almost to the point of Baroque overbearing. In the early twentieth century, the praise of these heavily modified buildings sometimes came from European ‘connoisseurs’, who deemed them to be models of ‘good taste’, in the fashionable Arts and Crafts tradition⁶¹ of handmade construction which harked back to (often glorified and stylized) pre-Industrial Revolution forms.

When viewed through the eyes of New Zealand’s late-Victorian European populace, this form of Maori architecture had the effect of dispelling any guilt that might have come about as a result of the atrocious living conditions of so many Maori. Although it was true that tens of millions of acres of Maori land had shifted to Crown and private European ownership in the preceding six decades, this tended to be interpreted as a utilitarian process — bringing about the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Any consequent suffering Maori endured was more easily seen as a problem of their own creation. White New Zealand could hold up the two archetypes of Maori construction — the ornate meeting houses and the slum — and come to the comfortable conclusion that Maori were capable of producing something fine, yet in recent years had somehow slipped into a moral stupor. And it was Maori who were held responsible for that. ‘The partial adoption of European customs and modes of living’, Archdeacon Walsh announced to a gathering of the Auckland Institute in June 1907, ‘largely contributed to the decay of the Maori, and that which under other conditions might have been a blessing has only proved a curse. This is nowhere more apparent than in the case of their housing …. [T]he Maori’s attempt to live like the pakeha is generally a failure.’⁶²

This was a misleading representation, however. The slum was as much a creation of European policy and prejudice as of Maori helplessness, and the ornate meeting houses beginning to appear in certain locations were not really genuine Maori designs at all — at least, not when considered in their totality. They were fundamentally European, but with stylized Maori elements grafted onto them to give the impression of indigenous authenticity and antiquity. Architecturally, these buildings were little more than cultural corpses. Their designers were deliberately rejecting some elements of modernity, and instead focused their energies on reproducing a picturesque fantasy for European consumption. If any Maori found these edifices attractive, then that would be an added bonus, but direct appeal to the indigenous population was not a prerequisite — how could it be? After all, Maori were hardly in a position to be arbiters of good taste, or so the Europeans who presided over the design of these buildings believed. And there was one other far more compelling reason for Europeans to have a say in the form of Maori constructions in certain areas: the onset of tourism.

‘The Tourist Crop’

As more (but still not the majority) of New Zealanders were becoming city or town dwellers, within a lifetime the European perception of New Zealand’s physical environment had gone from it being a harsh terrain that had to be conquered and tamed, to a landscape that still maintained a mysterious quality about it, but was now ready for exploration. With the extension of roads and railway services at the turn of the century, formerly inaccessible parts of the country were being opened up to growing numbers of New Zealanders who were prepared to take uncomfortable journeys in buses, coaches, or trains, followed often by even more arduous periods of walking (which could be exhausting in the height of summer and forbidding in winter) in order to ‘see the sights’. The habitual traveller Constance Barnicoat wrote in 1903, when hiking across part of Westland, of ‘the extreme roughness of which it is very difficult, almost impossible to give an idea to anyone unacquainted with trackless virgin country’.⁶³ But at the end of a day’s traipsing around some scenic site, the more well-heeled tourists could retire to hotels, which in the first decade of the century boasted features such as ‘the latest fire escapes’, ‘iron balconies’, telegram services and ‘telephonic communication’, ‘livery and bait stables’, and ‘every room electrically lighted’.⁶⁴

Travelling within New Zealand, though, was more than merely a holiday or a chance to sample some modern conveniences; it was part of what the historian Simon Schama has termed a revival of national spirit,⁶⁵ a lesson in what it meant to be a New Zealander. And to empathize with the landscape — something that another woman tramper and alpinist, Freda du Faur, described as a feeling ‘which wells up from within and will not be denied’⁶⁶ — was one of the priorities for many of the tourists travelling from the towns and cities into the countryside and the ‘real’ New Zealand.

It was ironic, then, that so much of the romance of discovering a supposedly authentic New Zealand depended on such a calcified view of Maori society. The remnants of the indigenous culture, including its people, were sometimes portrayed as a vast museum exhibit for the benefit of European visitors — to the point where some tourists even criticized more traditional forms of Maori carving, for example, for their ‘lack of beauty and failure to achieve realism of representation’.⁶⁷ Carvings may have told the story of an ancestor or commemorated an event, but such purposes were separate from the aesthetic qualities of these works; and after a while many people arrived at the view that Maori carvings were (excessively) decorated items of design and little more, with the famous contemporary ethnologist Elsdon Best coming to the conclusion that ‘we have no proof as to any hidden meanings in the Maori carved design’.⁶⁸

Much worse than Best waving a dismissive hand at traditional Maori carving was the crusade to kick away the props that had supported this art form for centuries. Since the early 1800s, the godly in New Zealand had condemned what they saw as the paganism and idolatry of Maori carvings, and tended to avert their gaze at some of the exaggerated sexual images that featured in many of these works. This moral opprobrium often had the result of blinding some European observers to the other features of Maori wood-art. Towards the end of his life, the Rotorua missionary Frederick Spencer,⁶⁹ who had preached in the area during the 1900s, wrote that ‘the Maori carved hideous and contorted images of the human form and had some crude ceremonies connected with them’.⁷⁰ For people inclined to think along similar lines, Maori carving was decorative, mildly offensive, and could never be considered as ‘true’ art.

The fact that Maori carving did not represent as faithfully as it might the human form was not attributed at this time to the symbolism and mythology that imbued the art, but to supposed deficiencies in the tools and skill levels of Maori carvers. The ethnologist and museum director Augustus Hamilton, who wrote what was, for the time, the definitive book on the subject — The Art and Workmanship of the Maori Race in New Zealand⁷¹ — confirmed for the New Zealand public in 1905 that the purported shortcomings in Maori carving stemmed from the creators of these works:

The Maori loved to exercise his skill in carving, and no doubt in the majority of his ornamentations the main intention in the first instance was to represent the human figure as nearly as his skill would allow him to do so; but lack of skill may of itself tend to alter the character of such designs. Imperfect realism readily degenerates into the grotesque, and this may partially account for the great prevalence of fanciful and grotesque representations of objects in the art of primitive races.⁷²

In Hamilton’s opinion, the problem of so-called ‘imperfect realism’ in Maori carving demanded a solution. His answer came in the form of a proposal that a centre for carving be set up so that ‘a certain number of natives could be trained under expert guidance in the production of articles of use ornamented with native patterns’. The sort of items he envisaged were glove boxes, jewellery boxes, and other such curios, which would ‘repay most of the cost, if judicially managed’.⁷³

The marriage between this largely fabricated Maori culture and affected European tastes was never quite so complete, or quite so contrived, as in Rotorua. From the very beginning of the century, this region of heightened geothermal activity near the centre of the North Island was the focal point of the country’s fledgling tourism industry — packaged as a pageant of sulphur, boiling mud, and Maori in their ‘traditional’ settings. Driving much of this growth was the prospect of profit from a source that was relatively new for the country: foreign tourists. The Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, was one of those who had great expectations of future wealth flowing from this sector, and in 1906 spoke in defence of the industry before Parliament: ‘Visitors to the colony are large users of our railways and our post telegraphs. They eat the produce of settlers and thus provide employment. They spend their money with the shopkeepers, hotel keepers and traders and yet some honourable members in their short-sightedness declaim against this important branch of the business of our country.’⁷⁴

In 1901, the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts had been established to