THE CHANGING LAND

Te Ao Hou, June 1961, Page 53

THE CHANGING LAND A short history of New Zealand for children. Michael Turnbull. Longmans. English price, 8s. Reviewed by W. H. Oliver. Mr Turnbull, with the experience behind him of research and university teaching, and of work in the School Publications Branch, should have been the ideal person to write a textbook on New Zealand history for children—and indeed for two-thirds of its length, The Changing Land is far and away the best thing of its kind. His chapters are seldom longer than about fifteen pages (and a good deal of space is taken up with Jill McDonald's admirable illustrations and less than admirable maps); each chapter is divided into sections often less than a page and seldom more than two pages long. Often these sections incorporate graphic incidents which illustrate a general truth about the course of New Zealand history—e.g. the story on pp. 23–5 of Wiremu Tamihana's conversion to Christianity, of his fear when faced by the tohunga and the whistling voice of the spirit, and of his renewed conversion. Mr Turnbull has a sharp eye for the striking concrete detail which is likely to stick in the mind of the reader; he notes that wounds in classical Maori warfare quickly healed while musket balls stayed lodged in the victim's flesh, that Te Puni went visiting in Wellington in tophat and tails but took off his trousers to walk home to the Hutt, that during the floods Weld simply paddled his canoe through the window of his hut. Contemporary accounts are drawn upon with great skill: Manning's Old New Zealand, Studholme's Te Waimate, Lady Barker's books, Helen Wilson's My First Eighty Years, and a host of lesser known works. This is social history, but it is not (like so much social history) humdrum and dreary. Maori society, archaic and classical; the whalers, the missionaries, the sheepmen and the diggers; settler, soldier and tribesman in the 1860s—there is plenty that is both rich and strange emerging from their story. In the earlier chapters, roughly covering the period to about 1880, the episodes and illuminating details are woven into a firmly moving narrative. Thereafter the author is much less at home with his material. The four chapters ostensibly running from about 1880 to the present day are almost entirely devoid of narrative. They are a random collection of episodes, many of them dealing with farming, many of them with the fate of the Maoris. The reason is not far to seek. In the later 19th century and the 20th, the central theme in New Zealand history is politics; before then the economic historian can afford to ignore politics just as much as contemporaries did: digging the soil and shearing the sheep were more important than voting, and didn't depend all that much on voting. But, beginning with Vogel, reinforced by the depression of the 1880s, and institutionalised by the Liberals after 1890, a change occurred by which digging and shearing, and all other economic operations, came to depend very much on voting and all the other aspects of politics. The fact that Mr Turnbull ignores politics as resolutely in his later sections as he did in his earlier means a loss of coherence. We are told that the Liberals helped the small-scale farmer to get established, but not who the Liberals were. Much is made of McKenzie, but nothing is said of Seddon and Reeves until the very close of the book; Ward, more important than McKenzie, is not even mentioned. Ngata's land policies are mentioned at length, but not the Reform government