Digging in the Compost Heap

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 38, 1 January 2005, Page 43

Frances Porter

Digging in the Compost Heap

Ihe past is dense, disarrayed, disputable—a deep compost heap, seething and fructifying. So where, one might ask, does history fit in? In her 1987 Booker prize novel, Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively has written: And when you and I talk about history, we don't mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books ... History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled. 1

The books historians write from their particular dig seek to impose order and sequence, make sense of what is unravelled, and create narrative. In the to and fro of this relationship between historian and the raw stuff of the past where, one might also ask, is truth? Truth is notoriously multi-faceted, and in the post-modern condition when all the master narratives have broken down there is 'no single truth any more', quoting the Cambridge theologian, Don Cupitt, who continues: 'Our understanding of an issue actually needs to be enhanced by careful consideration of conflicting angles upon it—without any right answer or final truth ever being reached. All we have and all we will ever have is a conflict of perspectives or viewpoints'. 2 So, to pick up the metaphor again, does digging in the compost simply leave the historian struggling in a morass? There are, as it were, two stepping stones. The first is the

process of selection. Historians do not dig at random; the questions asked of the past change. I would not go so far as to say that history is simply fashionable, but historians are fashioned by the times, attitudes, and mores of the society in which they live. The questions asked, or the skew of the research, become as important as the conclusions reached. And here is the second stepping stone—or it can just as easily be a stumbling block. Although affected by the attitudes and priorities of the surrounding society, and although the questions posed will come, on the whole from that contemporary society, an historian must desire to understand the people, ideas or events researched within their own lifetime. In other words an historian must think historically. In his introduction to Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, J. W. Allen wrote what I consider to be essential advice for writing good history, and the words have remained graven on my mind. Allen was writing in 1928 so his historian is male. 'His questioning must be creaseless, his scepticism untiring whatever his private faith. He needs above all that pure desire to understand which is the only defence against bewildering bias.' Allen warns of the danger of reading a favourite hypothesis into primary sources. Sometimes, you see, historians are impeded by their own convictions. I'm going to illustrate this process of selecting and interpreting as I've observed it in the writing of New Zealand history within my own lifetime.

My father was born in the small north Otago community of Kakanui; but Kakanui, although a birthplace, was never home. Home, and it remained so for many of his generation, was 'the old country'; a trip 'home' was the frequently expressed wish of many of my parents' friends and relatives. I remember, as a tenyear old, proudly telling a Welsh visitor that when I as twenty-one my parents would be taking me home. "But you are at home", he told me. I still remember the sudden shock, as though the kaleidoscope had slipped. He was right; our house in Waihi Rd, Hawera, South Taranaki, was my home. Yet all the books I read were set in the British Isles, as were the songs I sang, the poetry I recited, and most of the history I was taught. The primary school history text book was Our Nation's Story, and for many of my generation Our Nation's Story was the only grounding in history we ever had. Yet in that text book there wasn't very much about our nation at all. There were a few pages about notorious Kororareka depicted as full of drunken sealers, whalers and runaway convicts; standards of decency were maintained across the Bay of Islands only by the efforts of the missionaries under the sterling leadership of Samuel Marsden. The Treaty of Waitangi was highlighted as a sort of magna carta but what it actually did and meant was never really explained. There were a few pages about 'good' Governor Grey and a few pages about the 'Maori wars'. But apart from these episodes, about which the information was mostly incorrect and from which doubtful conclusions were drawn, our country was treated as part of the British Empire, our nationality was inextricably interwoven with that of the 'Mother Country', and our future progress lay in continuing as a not unimportant member of

that empire on which, as we all knew, the sun never set. New Zealand was one of the satisfactory red blobs on my school atlas. And yet, in Hawera, the compost heap was full of the seeds of another history into which few were probing.

From my bedroom window I looked out across the Waimate Plains studded, in the 19305, with boxthorn hedges and neat, mostly leasehold farms. Those fertile plains had been confiscated in 1863, returned in part to Maori ownership in the West Coast Settlement Reserves Act of 1881, but through the Public Trust leases were granted to settlers and not to the titular Maori owners. In 1866 British and Colonial forces had pushed through the bush from Patea to New Plymouth establishing redoubts and blockhouses on the way. The early settlement of Hawera clustered round the blockhouse, the site of which was just across High St from the library where I soaked myself in books about another homeland. Two houses down from us on Waihi Rd lived granny Hunter who as a girl remembered being taken to the blockhouse in the face of an impending raid by the Ngati Ruahine leader Titokowaru. On summer afternoons we often went to Ohawe Beach and tried to swim among the crashing waves and boulders of that inhospitable beach. Further along was the mouth of the Waingongoro River, more placid and inviting. But in the 1870 s the Waingongoro marked the edge of relative safety. Few settlers ventured across it for fear of encountering the 'waeromene', or 'wild men', as the followers of Titokowaru were called. Once, when riding my pony on Hawera's back country roads, I noticed some neglected gravestones in a paddock. I went across and found that they marked the graves of the Armed Constabulary killed when Titokowaru attacked the redoubt at Turuturu Mokai. Often on Hawera's Wednesday market day I would notice Maori women sitting on the steps of one of the banks or along the edge of the pavements with moko on their chins and, what interested me more, white feathers in their hair. White feathers I knew had been given to men who were not in uniform during the first world war as a sign of cowardice. "Were these feathers similar?", I asked at school; nobody knew. Many years later I learnt that the feathers, the raukura, were adopted as a symbol protecting the mana of the Parihaka movement and its leader, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai. Opunake was a much better beach than Ohawe but we were not aware as we swam in the sea or raced along the sand, that a few miles inland was Parihaka, now revered as an iconic place in New Zealand's unique history.

The point I am making is that the raw material was thick upon the ground but our history books were largely British-oriented. We were still, it was believed, a young country. Our history was still to come. And this was also, apparently, the Australian experience. I have just finished reading Robert Dessaix's book Twilight of Love. Dessaix grew up in Sydney through the 19505. He writes: 'When I went to school in Sydney, my country was just "geography", a space. There was no such subject as Australian history. History meant the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the British kings and queens ... but it was not a concept that we applied to Australia.'

In April 1954, J. C. Beaglehole, one of New Zealand's formative historians, whom I was fortunate to have as a lecturer at Victoria University College, delivered the Margaret Condliffe Memorial Lecture at Canterbury University College. It was entitled 'The New Zealand Scholar'. Beaglehole began by quoting from an address given by Ralph Waldo Emerson to students at Harvard College in 1837, just sixty years after the revolution that gave the former American colonies their political independence. Emerson's American scholar was defined as 'that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds'.

Robert Dessaix more succinctly wrote, 'We were tired of living in a hand-me-down world'. Beaglehole described this process of intellectual growth, of mental change in a colonial community as 'this creeping on of self awareness'. He also quoted, mistakenly attributing them to Robin Hyde, words written about 1932 in a university college magazine: 'We are hungry for words that shall show us these islands and ourselves; that shall give us a home in thought'. 7

This 'creeping self awareness' was boosted in its progress by the 1940 New Zealand Centenary. Celebrations were somewhat muted by being overtaken by World War 11, but one of the offshoots was the National Centennial Historical Committee whose secretary was Eric McCormick. At the centre of the Historical Committee's plans was a landmark publishing programme which included a series of pictorial surveys and another series of longer essays to be published on aspects of New Zealand's history. Under the aegis of that remarkable public servant, Joe Heenan, this publishing and research programme was established as the Centennial Branch of Heenan's own department, Internal Affairs. It continued after 1940, and I suppose it could be called Joe Heenan's pet project, known as the Historical Branch.

It was on 15 January 1947 that I plunged, or rather was dropped, into New Zealand history. That was the day I joined the Historical Branch as a probationary assistant clerk. In the whole of the public service there was no lower category, yet I was wildly excited. I had escaped school teaching and had become a member of the 'Beaglehole kindergarten', which was the name Graham Bagnall, a former chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, gave to the bunch of (on the whole) young, Victoria College history graduates who made up the Historical Branch of which J. C. Beaglehole was adviser to government. I say 'dropped' into New Zealand's late eighteenth and early nineteenth century history because in a four-year history course at Victoria I had read, apart from a brief foray into the constitutional issues surrounding responsible government, no New Zealand history at all. Now confronted with New Zealand's early missionaries and pre-1840 European settlement, with, in addition, a thesis to write on nineteenth-century Chinese

immigration to this country, I was somewhat at a loss. There was another, even more significant, problem. The late Janet Paul has stated that in the mid 19405, Blackwood Paul (Paul's Book Arcade was a seminal bookshop in Hamilton and later in Auckland) showed Janet a two-shelf bookstand of modest dimensions which held the total of New Zealand books then in print—mostly published overseas.

I did a crash course through William Pember Reeve's Long White Cloud, J. B. Condliffe's New Zealand in the Making, and the New Zealand volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire, published in 1933. In the Historical Branch, however, there was quite a remarkable band of colleagues—teachers really—who took it for granted that the matter of New Zealand was worth looking into. It is not too much to say that the Historical Branch in the mid to late 1940 s acted as a fulcrum for the study of New Zealand history. It was not just the people I worked with who provided stimulus and encouragement; it was the people who burst through the door. Joe Heenan frequently came to morning tea to the chagrin of the more staid sections of Internal Affairs. I say 'burst' because it was often indignation and outrage that was the propellant—Ernst Plischke, furious with the insensibility of the Ministry of Works; Ruth Ross (who had just left the Branch), highly scornful of Professor Rutherford's footnotes. (At Victoria we had spent six weeks under Beaglehole's tuition learning how to write a footnote.) There were also returning New Zealanders—Keith Sinclair, Jim Davidson, John Pocock—wondering what the water here felt like; toe dipping you might say. And because the Branch was also concerned with publishing and the arts in general, there were people such as T. A. McCormack, Eric McCormick, Roger Duff, Mervyn Taylor, George Woods, Eric Lee Johnson, Bob Lowry, Alex Lyndsay, Janet (a former member of the Branch) and her husband, Blackwood Paul. On one memorable occasion Sir Apirana Ngata came to settle, in aristocratic and arbitrary fashion, the spelling of Maori place names.

I became absorbed with pre-1845 missionaries, basically because they—particularly those of the Church Missionary Society (CMS)—had been told before sailing: 'You will literally have the world to begin; and the very foundation both of religion and civilisation to lay'. And these ordinary men and women believed this and set out to accomplish it. Of course things didn't always work out as they expected, and of course civilisation, instead of providing a foundation, got in the way of evangelisation, and Maori became as skilful at adapting as adopting. So much was different from what had been expected, and as upsetting as it was challenging. Nevertheless these early missionaries persevered; acted as go-betweens and emerge now as a remarkable and significant people. But in spite of the emergence of New Zealand's history as a subject worth looking into, there was during the 1940 s and early 1950 s a paucity of primary sources. To return to the compost metaphor, fat juicy worms had emigrated. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century visitors to New Zealand, as well as settlers, missionaries,

military officers, and governors, wrote copiously and sent ‘home’ letters, journals, diaries, and reports. And that was where they mostly still were.

Alexander Turnbull had endowed the library named after him with his valuable collections but too often we in the Branch had to turn to less reliable secondary sources, such as, for example, J. R. Elder's The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden and Marsden's Lieutenants, published in 1932 and 1934 respectively. Elder's view of Marsden was completely uncritical—he was 'the great Apostle of New Zealand'. Keith Sinclair, on a visit to the Branch after his return from the United Kingdom, reported that a room in the London headquarters of the CMS was stacked from floor to ceiling with New Zealand letter books covered in dust. When, thanks largely to government initiative, these papers were returned to New Zealand on microfilm and likewise, the Mitchell Library's papers of the New South Wales CMS Corresponding Committee, Marsden emerged as a selfseeking taskmaster, more akin to the man known to New South Wales' governors Macquarie and Brisbane, to their emancipist appointees, and to the members of the CMS Corresponding Committee.

Even so, Elder’s interpretation of his selected primary documents, reinforced by Marsden’s nineteenth-century English biographers, is still a public perception held in this country, although not endorsed across the Tasman. I remember writing a pleading letter to the Marist headquarters in Lyon for microfilm of their New Zealand missionary letters, and these, plus those from the Wesleyan Missionary Society, are now in the major research libraries here. Family letters and journals have increasingly over the years been acquired from their overseas owners, either by purchase or donation. When Jane Maria Richmond sailed for New Plymouth she told her bosom friend, Margaret Taylor, ‘My letters from Taranaki will be very interesting’. 9 And so they were, and are. Fortunately Margaret Taylor lived most of her life in a castle in Bavaria in which, as Maria’s brother, William, related, were “twenty eight wardrobes and escritoires”, so there was no need for boxes under the bed. In her old age Margaret wrote, when sending these letters back to New Zealand, ‘lt is altogether a life by itself that is made of all my NZ letters. It is very like fairy tales where people go into the caves of the earth’. 10

The Richmond-Atkinson papers, added to over the years by other members, are one of the larger family collections of the Turnbull Library.

Newspapers form another rich deposit in the compost heap. The newspaper collection now housed in the Turnbull owes its inception to Dr Guy Scholefield, and it is his outstanding bequest to New Zealand’s history. Papers published on the very day of the ‘news’ give a hands-on, happening feel to the past. But newsprint, like other ephemera, is not designed to be kept. When I was working on my Chinese immigration thesis I was able to handle the actual early Nelson, West Coast and Otago newspapers which were then stacked in the basement shelves of the General Assembly Library. Unfortunately it was almost impossible to turn a page without

making a small tear. Now, preserved on microfilm in the Turnbull, they are safe, although microfilm readers are exceedingly tiring to view for any length of time. An important hidden-away primary source of Maori history in the 1940 s was contained in the files of the 'Native Land Courts'. Old land claim files not only were useful for whakapapa but also gave written testimony of the very earliest European settlement. Another 'unfortunately'. Unfortunately old land claim files, like other early government records, were never safe from destruction by fire. Beaglehole in his 1954 lecture spoke of our "holocausts" of government records: 'Till we convert our scattered rat-ravaged disregarded records into a proper system of archives, our claim to civilisation is so much the more slender. ... We have burnt our history with the same blind stupidity as we have burnt our forests'.

Beaglehole's ire about the destruction of government records had been raised by the Hope Gibbons Building fire which occurred in 1952. Records of the Public Works Department prior to 1913, of Lands and Survey 1854 to 1894, of the Marine Department prior to 1913, of Labour and Employment, along with files of some other minor departments, were all stored on the fifth floor of this quite unsuitable building. Beneath that floor were two factories making highly inflammable electrical parts. After the fire senior government officials decided unanimously that these scores of thousands of invaluable old files must be accounted a complete loss. At this point we abandon the metaphor and follow two intrepid archivists into the very compost heap itself. One of them, Pamela Cocks, now Pamela Hall, described the chaos. 'The records had fallen from the fifth to the third and fourth floors, and were sunk amid burnt flooring, broken shelving stacks, charred beams, twisted girders, and a mass of entangled pipes. Odd sheets of paper fluttered amongst the ,12 ruins.

After a few weeks Pamela Cocks and fellow archivist, Betty O'Dowd, obtained permission to enter the building and salvage the records which were seen to be tightly wedged together and, although sodden and charred round the edges, were on the whole perfectly legible. Donning their oldest clothes and thick gloves they went to work. All around them labourers shovelled and picked amid the mess of twisted steel, wire and glass. Bricks and great pieces of flooring came crashing down about them. 'Amiable lunatics', the men called them. 'They couldn't possibly imagine why we wanted to do it. They couldn't see whatever importance or value these sodden lumps of paper could be. One said—" Why worry—everything is insured anyway".' After a fortnight the men revised their opinion of the two archivists: 'Fancy working amid this mess and just for the love of it. No dirt money, no danger money'.

Sorting, drying, and cleaning the salvaged files was a long, arduous, and smelly job involving the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the drying kiln of the Evans Bay Timber Company, the Dominion Museum, and the Winter Show Buildings. Historians will forever be in debt to these two archivists. At the time the

Internal Affairs Department saw fit to present Pamela Cocks and Betty O’Dowd with a bonus of £lO each for their work.

Even the original Treaty of Waitangi, which is now carefully preserved and occupies pride of place in Archives New Zealand, was, so I am told, found in the 1940 s covered in rat dirt in a basement of the old wooden government buildings. To return to the imaginary compost heap. I said at the beginning that the historian does not dig at random but selects, arranges, and interprets; that the questions asked are as important as the conclusions drawn, and that, to quote Professor Allen again, he or she must have a pure desire to understand the past within the mindset of the past. In thinking about New Zealand's nineteenth-century history it is important to think of people within their own time frame. For example, I think one needs to be cautious about using the term 'colonial imperialism' as a blanket and pejorative term to cover the colonisation of New Zealand as if, at the time, there had been no debate about whether or how this was to be accomplished. We now see the inherent menace to an indigenous people contained in colonisation, but there were groups of people within Britain and New Zealand during the nineteenth century who also saw it as menacing. Formidable antagonists to colonisation in Britain were leaders of the Anglican and Wesley an missionary societies and the Aborigines' Protection Society, offshoot of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Dandeson Coates, lay secretary of the CMS, was not averse to Great Britain taking New Zealand under its 'protection', but he had no wish to impose, by increasing the number of settlers, what he called the 'curse of colonisation'. Missionaries within New Zealand looked askance at the growth of European settlement during the 1840 s, and in particular were shocked at the despatch of December 1846 issued by Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies, which instructed that all land in New Zealand not actually occupied 'ought to be considered the property of the Crown in its capacity as Trustee for the whole community'. A petition with 410 signatures, largely organised from Bishop's Auckland, queried this concept of 'waste land', and stated that 'every acre of land in this country whether occupied or not, is claimed by the Aborigines, each tribe and family having its respective boundaries known and ... acknowledged by all; consequently there is properly speaking no waste land in this colony'.

Missionaries had come here with an impassioned desire to save 'poor, benighted heathen'. Again one now sees the limitations of this militant piety which declared that, in order to be 'saved', cultural and social habits had to be changed. But in the process Maori also worked on the missionary message, and the changes wrought by Christianity upon Maori were not more remarkable than the adaptations Maori made to Christianity. Missionaries had not, prior to 1850, envisaged the speed and extent of European occupation, nor had they intentionally colluded with it; yet we can now see that one effect of missionary endeavour was to make that occupation easier. When William and Leonard Williams attended the Waiapu synod of 1865

they encountered a most unusual degree of suspicion. A Maori member of the synod repeated to them this proverbial saying: 'The party in front is clearing the way; the party behind is dragging along the newly-shaped canoe'. After the outbreak of war in Taranaki in 1860, Caroline Abraham wrote from Bishop's House, Wellington:

So short-sighted is the policy of the grasping and covetous settlers who would not rest without the addition of Waitara to their settlement. What one chiefly mourns is the thought of doing wrong to this people and then supporting it by force and so beginning what may be a long chain of wrong and misery to both races. 'Grasping and covetous settlers'—let us look at them and interpret within their own mindset. Settlers came from the late 1840 s, 1850 s, and 1860 s, not so much to a land already inhabited—they no longer felt, as did early traders, that they were entering a Maori world—but to Queen Victoria's furthest colony. While the North Island Maori population steadily decreased through introduced diseases throughout the 1840 s and 1850 s, the settler population increased markedly. Many came, without malice aforethought, as colonists; they approved the term. 'We feel ourselves to be members of an infant state which will every day become more important', wrote Maria Richmond. 1

One of the entrenched ideas colonists brought with them was that land was property to be individually owned and fenced. To them it seemed that New Zealand held thousands upon thousands of acres of 'waste' land simply awaiting the industrious use of the axe and plough. One can still warm to the delight and enthusiasm with which Maria Richmond responded to the opportunities inherent in her extended family's settlement in Taranaki: Everything you can see is your very own, the absolute possession of land gives a sort of certainty that with common industry and care, you are in what may be your home till death. The feeling of coming home as it were to a country wanting you, asking for people to enjoy and use it, with a climate to suit you, a beauty to satisfy and delight, and with capabilities and possibilities for the future is enough to make the most sluggish nature feel spirited. 1

And one can respond equally well to the sentiments expressed by Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake about the possibility of government purchase of the fruitful land of Waitara, the apple of the settler eye: This is the determination of our people. Waitara shall not be given up. Friend Governor, do you not love your land—England—the land of your fathers? as we also love our land at Waitara. Friend let your

thoughts be good to us. We desire not to strive with the Europeans, but, at the same time we do not wish to have our land settled by them; rather let them be returned to the places which have been paid for by them lest a root of quarrel remains between us and the Europeans. 20

Both voices are part of our heritage; we cannot with integrity choose to listen to one and ignore the other. Over the past fifty years there has been a sea change in historians' selection from the compost heap. In 1960 the Government Printer published in two volumes The Richmond-Atkinson Papers, edited by Dr Guy Scholefield. In reading these in preparation for my own biography of Jane Maria Atkinson, published as Born to New Zealand, and checking them against the large Richmond-Atkinson manuscript collection held by the Turnbull Library, it was as illuminating to find out what he had left out as put in. Scholefield had made his selection according to the then conventional interpretation—history was to do with males and was largely political and economic. 'Mere gossipy letters', he wrote in his introduction, had been omitted. I looked carefully at Scholefield's 'Discards', as he labelled them, and found them to be almost exclusively women's words. His assumption was that men talked and wrote and carried history in their knapsacks, as it were, whereas women, inconsequentially gossiping and chattering, were pulled along in their baggage train.

Until late last century women were largely absent from history books, unless they were queens or the wives of famous men, or the mistresses of famous men. But 'in the hands of men', as Virginia Woolf spoke in that famous address to the young women of Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge, in 1928, 'She pervades poetry from cover to cover ... Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she would hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband'.

Dr Scholefield made another arbitrary decision in editing this collection, which is interesting because it also reflects an attitude of his time. He marked up the primary material, as he would once have marked up the Wairarapa Age, by using indelible crayon. In a most revealing comment he explained that, with the publication of his volumes, students 'will not have to come to Wellington and grub through the original letters'. 22 But university-trained history students were now expected to 'grub' in original documents, and his unintentional vandalism was exposed. In New Zealand's more recent history women have come over the hill, not quite in the numbers of the 'Monstrous Regiment' that John Knox fulminated against, not even in battalion size but rather as platoons of skirmishers. Society has now come to recognise the importance of women's issues and women's studies. This in itself, however, presents a problem. It is always tempting, as Professor Allen warned, to define past behaviour and attitudes in present-day terms. For example I had to watch in Born to New Zealand that I didn't endow Maria Atkinson with a feminism

she would have found repugnant, nor see in her nieces’ desire to sleep together, when adult, some incestuous relationship. Close bonding between women was part of the ambience of their age.

In his introduction to volume one of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, published in 1990, Bill Oliver, the editor of that volume, set out his criteria for selection. Well-known people are there, but other and ‘equally legitimate expectations are met: those of readers looking for an insight into the scope of nineteenth century New Zealand society, not merely for an introduction to its elites’. ‘The disadvantaged’, he continued, ‘have claims upon the past as well as upon the present’, and it was decided to cast the net widely, ‘to draw in common soldiers as well as their officers; community leaders as well as politicians; matriarchs as well as patriarchs; followers as well as leaders; entertainers as well as painters; bullock drivers as well as engineers; missionary wives as well as their husbands’. 23

Twenty per cent of the entries in that volume are of women; 30% of Maori. Often it was difficult to find primary material about wives, mothers, and housekeepers, but there those 20% are and there they were not, except in rare cases, in the 1940 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, edited by Dr Scholefield. The proportion of women has increased in the later volumes of the current series as more women entered the professions and took a more active and noted role in society.

What Charlotte Macdonald and I dug for in the compost heap, published in 1995 as My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates: the unsettled lives of women in nineteenth-century New Zealand, was what we called the ‘private and immediate circumstances of women’s lives as revealed in their diaries, letters and other documents’. We were not trying to produce a comprehensive picture of everything relating to all women—the chaos of everything everywhere that Penelope Lively instanced—but instead to concentrate on ‘the ordinary train of human events’ which was Sir Walter Scott’s definition of the domain of the nineteenth-century novel.

Expressions of feeling addressed to family and friends were what we dug for rather than the occasions when women's words were addressed to a wider audience in support of women's property rights, women's suffrage, reform of the liquor law and other such public causes. Our over-arching theme was unsettlement—the disruptions of life and culture experienced by the settler women who came and the disruptions of life and culture experienced by those already living here round the shores and up the valleys. Maori women shared unsettlement. To Helen Hursthouse setting out in 1842 from England to live in the infant New Plymouth settlement, emigration was an 'awful step'. She wrote to her elder sister: 'As it is fixed that we are to go, I have quite made up my mind to look at the plan in the brightest possible light I can, but you can imagine how intensely anxious I feel'. It was Helen's husband who was keen to emigrate, and Helen,

with prescience, thought he was being 'too sanguine'. She signed herself at the end of her letter, 'your affectionate but sorrowful sister'. A younger sister wrote of her departure: 'Our darling lost Helen sailed on the Ist.1 st . Blanche and baby were both poorly. She had engaged a servant and was tolerably pleased with her ... but horrid to relate, the ship, tho beautiful was discovered to be swarming with bugs. She left in tolerable spirits.' That word 'tolerable' carried many unsettled nineteenth-century women through domestic drudgery, through pregnancy and infant mortality, and through many changes of fortune over which they had little control. Fortitude and resilience shine through it, but the word also expresses a diminution of spirit and a resignation to the vicissitudes of womanhood. Grace Hirst, more successfully settled in New Plymouth, summarised her life as 'nothing better than a mild sort of transportation'.

We included Maori as well as Pakeha women's letters, selecting the former from public research libraries and archives, and publishing them, as written, in Maori with an English translation by Angela Ballara. By 1840 most Maori were literate in their own language. However the trail left by Maori women is much slighter than that left by Pakeha. Maori lived close to their whanau and iwi; there was not the same need to write 'home' to maintain touch with distant relatives. A larger body of letters comes from Maori women seeking redress from government for land confiscated during and following the nineteenth-century wars. After the wars, although there was a more stable environment for Pakeha women, Maori expressed mounting frustration over acts of parliament that further eroded tikanga Maori.

The majority of the settler women who wrote were obviously literate to some degree, and they mostly belonged to, or aspired to belong to, the middle class. We wanted to dig deeper. We brought into the book 'documents which were not created freely by women writing of their own accord, but in which women's voices, words and experiences appear'. From the records of government—magistrates', coroners', and bankruptcy courts—emerge a body of women, mostly working class. Wives battered by drunken husbands who try to keep their families going by applying for maintenance or separation orders; women stricken with 'childbed madness', as post-natal depression was then called, who often found themselves in a lunatic asylum where they were used as free labour. These women are among the unseen faces and theirs are the untold stories of nineteenth-century society. In 1883 Janet Donovan of Wellington sought a married woman's property protection order from the magistrates court. Timothy Donovan denied the charge. Janet gave evidence to the effect:

That she has been married to the defendant for four years, during which period he had given her five black eyes. Whenever he got intoxicated he ill-treated her and the two children, and several times she had been compelled to seek a neighbour’s protection. The other morning, about

2 o'clock he came home in company with a friend and threw a jug of water over her and the children as they lay in bed, and told her to clear out of the house as he had another woman to take her place. The defendant emphatically denied the charge ... The Bench said they did not see their way clear to grant an order, and advised the couple to make up their differences. Susannah Wainwright worked 'up country' as a housekeeper and gave birth to twins in her employer's stables—possibly he was the father, although he denied responsibility. She had intended to go to Invercargill for the confinement but her 'illness' came on suddenly. She handed in her notice, wrapped her twins in a shawl and set out to walk to Balclutha where she had a friend. At night it came on to rain; she sheltered the babies as best she could but in the morning they were dead. She put them in her carpet bag and kept on walking. She appears briefly in the records of the magistrates' court and then she walks out of history.

The following verse is from a longer poem, The Betrayed, by Brian Patten. It could be an epitaph for Susannah, and for the men and women who did not strut on any stage: There was so much I ought to have recorded, So many lives that have vanished— Families, neighbours; people whose pockets Were worn thin by hope. They were The loose change history spent without caring. Now they have become the air I breathe, Not to have marked their passing seems such a betrayal.

To return, in conclusion, to that fructifying, seething compost heap, and this time to give it a respectable cladding of reinforced concrete and a home, be it the Alexander Turnbull Library, or Archives New Zealand, or the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, or the Hocken Library at Dunedin. The jumble of people now digging, now seeking relationships with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have surprised those early arbiters of our history like Professor Elder, Dr Scholefield, and the anonymous authors of Our Nation's Story. It is very often hitherto unseen faces, unheard stories that are being disclosed. Women's history is now one of the most prolific areas of research. Genealogists crowd the Turnbull to the extent that special shelving, microfilm readers, and a specialist librarian are assigned for their use. Maori students using Turnbull resources have increased dramatically, sometimes working by themselves, sometimes with their whanau. The revitalised Historical Branch is, one might say, negotiating nineteenth- and twentieth-century history on a cost-recovery basis. Historians—lay, professional, and academic—continue revisioning, disputing, and publishing. But for all their digging, the compost heap will never be exhausted.

Turnbull Library Record 38 (2005), 43-56

References This article was first given as a talk to the Ohariu branch of the University of the Third Age, Wellington, 16 August 2005. 1 Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (London: Deutsch, 1984), p. 6. 2 Don Cupitt, What is a Story (London: SCM Press, 1991), pp. 86-87. 3 J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen/University Paperbacks, 1960), p. xix. 4 Robert Dessaix, Twilight of Love (Sydney: Pan/Macmillan, 2004), p. 131. 5 Quoted in John Cawte Beaglehole, 'The New Zealand Scholar', in The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, edited by Peter Munz (Wellington: A. H. & A. W Reed, 1969), p. 238. 6 Dessaix, pp. 133-34. 7 Eric Cook, Canta [student magazine of Canterbury University College], 9 May 1932. See article by W. L. Renwick in New Zealand Journal of History, 21, no. 2 (October 1987), p. 199. 8 Proceedings of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East, m (London, 1810-12), Appendix 2, p. 106. 9 Frances Porter, Born to New Zealand: a Biography of Jane Maria Atkinson (Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1989), p. 48.

10 Idem. 11 Beaglehole, in The Feel of Truth, p. 251. 12 Pamela Hall, 'The Hope Gibbons Fire' (part 2), New Zealand Archivist, Vol. xm, no. 3 (Spring/ September 2002), p. 1. 13 Hall, p. 2. 14 Earl Grey to Gov. Grey, No. 23, 23 December 1846, G 1/17, Archives New Zealand, quoted in Frances Porter, The Turanga Journals 1840-1850 (Wellington: Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1974), p. 465. 15 Petition enclosed in Gov. Grey to Earl Grey, No. 7, 9 March 1848, G 30/14, Archives New Zealand. Quoted in Porter, The Turanga Journals, p. 466. 16 William Leonard Williams, East Coast (N.Z.) Historical Records (Gisborne: Herald Office, 1932), p. 34. 17 Caroline Abraham, 24 April 1860, in Extracts of Letters from New Zealand on the War Question (London [privately printed], 1861). 18 Quoted in Porter, Born to New Zealand, p. 64. 19 Porter, Born to New Zealand, p. 56. 20 Idem. 21 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1977), p. 43. 22 New Zealand Listener, 28 July 1961, p. 46.

23 The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume 1,1769-1869, edited by W. H. Oliver, pp. vii, viii. 24 My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates: The unsettled lives of women in nineteenth-century New Zealand as revealed to sisters, family and friends, edited by Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald, with Tui Macdonald (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Bridget Williams Books, 1996). 25 Porter and Macdonald, op. cit., p. 62. 26 Porter, Born to New Zealand, p. 12. 27 Porter and Macdonald, p. 6. 28 Porter and Macdonald, p. 17. 29 Porter and Macdonald, pp. 321-22. 30 Quoted in Lucia Graves, A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life (London: Virago, 1999), Introductory page.