Joanna Kidman suffers a new work by a Treaty provocateur, and reaches for her gin
As a sociologist more used to gentle morning teatime conversations about the class war, I’ve found university history departments the world over to be places where fiery disagreements between warring factions of historians occur regularly, as if by appointment, on any given weekday. The sites of these hostilities are lecture theatres, conference halls, scholarly journals, and behind office doors. There are dark mutterings over late afternoon gin and tonics in staff common rooms, and the archives really are rivers of blood. Nineteenth-century colonial history is not for the faint-hearted.
Cue to enter, New Zealander Bain Attwood, professor of colonial history at Monash University, with a new book, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, explaining how this plays out in Aotearoa.
Professor Attwood himself has carved out a reputation for being combative, querulous, scathing of ‘black armband’ historians and those who emote about, or are traumatised by colonial injustice and its brutal aftermath. He comes across as a kind of Captain Ahab figure, noteworthy for penning savage reviews and railing against others in his field. Intellectual historians, legal historians, public historians and seemingly anyone else with differing views on native title come in for a right old drubbing. That’s the nature of academic disputes in the "cloistered life of history", as Attwood refers to his discipline – some days, apparently, you need to wear a stab vest to the office. This new book, touted in the publicity material as a "provocative" meditation on the making of history, is presumably intended to add further fuel to those flames.
A Bloody Difficult Subject shows how changing understandings of New Zealand’s colonial past have placed te Tiriti o Waitangi at the heart of the nation’s foundational stories, resulting in decades of misunderstandings and unintended consequences. Those who carry much of responsibility, according to Attwood, are historians and legal experts involved with the Treaty claims process, who he contends, have sown discord and division in the process of radically re-defining contemporary understandings of te Tiriti o Waitangi. This is a book of hard smacks delivered to those he believes have over-played the role of the Treaty in the life of the nation, which in the end turns out to be pretty well everyone in the Treaty sector.
The book opens with a section on New Zealand historian Ruth Ross, whose work had a considerable impact on Treaty scholarship during the 1970s at a time when Māori resistance movements were gathering pace and people were beginning to question whether the colonisation of Aotearoa was as benign a process as they had been led to believe. Ross had studied at Victoria University College under the guidance of JC Beaglehole and other notable historians of the day. By 1941 she was working as an historian in the Centennial Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs.
Her fascination with the history of te Tiriti o Waitangi began in earnest within weeks of starting the job when she came across an archive tucked away in the Department of Lands and Survey containing historical documents relating to early Pākehā claims to Māori land. This was the catalyst for a life-long interest in the role of the Treaty as a historical document.
Ross argued that both the Māori and English texts of te Tiriti were drawn up with hasty incompetence and as a result the wording was ambiguous and contradictory. Neither version could be described as a sacred covenant as some believed because there was no mutually agreed understanding between the parties about what was being promised. She later described the Treaty in a letter as "a fraud and a hoax, a snare and a delusion – to both contracting parties." These ideas drew fire in the 1970s from some Māori who were pushing to have the Treaty ratified, while others, Ranginui Walker for example, welcomed her analysis.
Attwood argues that we need to find ways of engaging with difficult histories that leave Pākehā "with a belief that they have a legitimate right to live where they do"
Importantly, Ross also maintained that the Māori text (not the English one) was the Treaty and it was clear from that version that Māori had never ceded sovereignty. Elements of this argument would later be picked up by the Waitangi Tribunal and have endured to this day. When this elevated level of official recognition was accorded to the Māori text, te Tiriti entered the national lexicon as a valid legal agreement and began to acquire the status of a constitutional instrument, although Ross herself believed it would be a mistake to incorporate such a poorly framed document into law.
In later sections, Attwood explores how aspects of Ross’s argument have come to frame contemporary Treaty narratives in ways she would never have intended. He traces a range of hotly contested viewpoints about the historical account, all of which form an important part of the intellectual history of te Tiriti, but which are presented rather sketchily, as a set of heavily truncated descriptions about what various historians and legal scholars have argued in the years since the Waitangi Tribunal was established. Attwood does not go into any real detail about their work and a degree of nuance is lost in the process, although he does put quite a bit of effort into explaining why they got it wrong.
Attwood’s main argument is that by the 1970s, a national history of te Tiriti was needed that would meet people’s need for inspiration and moral example. He claims it had to be a ‘monumental history’ that would re-cast the story of the Treaty as a noble agreement that was and always has been important in the nation’s history. In many respects, this is exactly what happened. Te Tiriti was rehabilitated to an extent and in a very short period the 1970s catchcry that the Treaty was a fraud shifted towards a call for the Māori text to be honoured.
According to Attwood, monumental history has become a ‘noxious weed’ in telling the histories of the Treaty. He considers that legal and Treaty historians have too often lost objectivity and distance from the historical account, instead acting as political advocates for a point of view that identifies too strongly with only one or two subject positions, in most cases, situating Māori as victims of colonisation.
That’s a step too far for Attwood who makes a plea for Pākehā to reclaim their agency in telling stories about the past. He suggests this might be achieved if the English and Māori texts of te Tiriti were to be considered as equally important and that the "meanings attributed to one should not be privileged to those attributed to the other". As well, he argues that we need to find ways of engaging with difficult histories that leave Pākehā "with a modicum of self-respect and pride and a belief that they have a legitimate right to live where they do".
Rather than trying to bind opposing views of the past into a unitary narrative, an exercise which Attwood argues is doomed to fail, he brings into play an approach based on work done by the Reconciliation Council in Australia, known as ‘sharing histories’. This involves creating a forum whereby groups with conflicting accounts of painful historical events can recount their stories and have them heard respectfully.
‘Sharing histories’ is an idea favoured by a number of New Zealand historians. It is certainly a compelling idea that offers a way of coming to terms with the past that doesn’t call on people to agree on how they understand the injustices that took place nor join a chorus of socially engineered consensus. Instead, there is a mutual acknowledgement that the violence at the heart of colonisation affected people in different ways. It’s a willingness to agree to disagree in order to find ways of living together in peace.
You’ve got it all wrong, you poor fools, Attwood seems to say. All that colonisation and land alienation, all your latter-day hymns to the Treaty – in the end, the colonisation of New Zealand was just a bunch of people who behaved imperfectly
This is a positive view of how we might come to terms with the difficult past and variations on this process are familiar in tribal settings after a period of conflict when previously battling groups seek to restore mana as part of the peace-making process. But outside these contexts, it can also be a bit pollyanna-ish. Sharing histories where former combatants continue to be unevenly matched is no panacea for deep-seated and ongoing injustice. Unless those agree-to-disagree moments are accompanied by a clear commitment to structural change, sharing stories about unresolved past violence can be little more than an arcane intellectual exercise. This is especially the case for those living with the economic and political realities of intergenerational land alienation and dispossession. At worst, sharing histories can be treated as a game with no consequences; a bromide offered in passing as the historians stroll off down the road with their hands in their pockets, back to their cloisters and archives. The tides of history wash over and off them.
But the real problem at the core of the book is the way these volleys of sharp slaps are delivered. Disagreement is fine, it oils the wheels of academic debate and many of us thrive on the cut and thrust of it all. But it can be overdone. You’ve got it all wrong, you poor fools, Attwood seems to say. All that colonisation and land alienation, all your latter-day hymns to the Treaty – in the end, the colonisation of New Zealand was just a bunch of people who behaved imperfectly, then the gun-boats arrived along with the troops, the settler militias and the eviction notices - and oops… somehow shit got real.
The historian Ned Fletcher comes in for a pasting as does Claudia Orange, whom Attwood accuses of apparently wilful forgetfulness about her early debt to Ross’s ideas. Indeed, in one of his more vitriolic critiques of Orange’s work (and there are several throughout the book), Attwood sees this as amounting to a murderous form of scholarship. "Patricide and matricide are common amongst scholars", he writes scathingly, referencing those who reject or move beyond the works of those who preceded them. Ouch!
Attwood also points to Māori advocacy as ushering in this revisionist history of te Tiriti. Sir Eddie Durie, Chief Judge of the Māori Land Court and Chair of the Waitangi Tribunal along with Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu, Professor Sir Hirini Moko Mead and Sir Graham Latimer are identified as playing a decisive role in rewriting the nation’s story, presumably in the backrooms of the Waitangi Tribunal.
It reads as a love letter to all the grumpy gladiators holding office in the academic branches of the History Wars
There was a point at which I lost patience because the arguments seem to descend into a flurry of intellectual posturing. Let me be clear - as academics we all do that to an extent, it’s practically a KPI. That’s academia for you. It’s still-life with pitchforks but you’ve got to read the room. Too many smacks and it looks like it’s being done for sport and in this respect, it’s not clear who the book is written for. One suspects it’s not intended to convince the doubters of Attwood’s arguments, nor introduce a wider reading public to Ruth Ross’s work but rather a search and destroy mission aimed at engaging a small coterie of like-minded historians. It reads as a love letter, or perhaps a dog whistle, to all the grumpy gladiators holding office in the academic branches of the History Wars.
Settler-driven histories count for much. We need these stories of the past. But they do rather take over the field. There are woefully small numbers of Indigenous historians in university history departments both in New Zealand and Australia where Attwood lives and works. Many university-based 19th Century historians seem to have limited intellectual dealings with Indigenous scholars who bring knowledge and expertise beyond the written archive.
This is not the case everywhere in Aotearoa. In the Treaty sector for example, tribal historians are recognised, and public historians work alongside or at the invitation of iwi. Ross herself engaged directly with social and tribal worlds beyond academia and that added great depth to her work. University-based historians, on the other hand, are usually the primary producers of knowledge in their fields. This is how many academic disciplines are organised, especially in the humanities. Most are lone wolf scholars, and while they sometimes join packs, they usually hunt alone.
Universities are bunkers of a sort – somewhere to go for a cup of tea while the world burns around us
All this is reflected in Attwood’s book which reads as if his engagement with Māori Tiriti scholars is less a focus for him than a cerebral interaction with a range of secondary sources that occasionally reference Māori points of view. Nor does Attwood show much awareness of the decades of argument and discussion in Māori tribal society about the real-world applications of te Tiriti outside the formal channels of the Court and the Tribunal. Perhaps spending time on Marae or attending hui, tribal field trips, wānanga, tangi, kura, Trust Board meetings, or hapū gatherings would offer deeper insight into the way these matters are debated outside academic and judicial realms.
Of course, Attwood is not responsible for the way his discipline is structured. After all, his approach is baked into the DNA of the field. Certain voices are privileged, others are on permanent mute. But for a wider New Zealand readership, the book affords only a partial view of a complex, multi-faceted, endlessly fascinating world. We don’t necessarily see ourselves or our own significant others, except in passing as a ghostly reflection of what academic historians have to say about us, or indeed, on behalf of, or instead of us.
Universities are bunkers of a sort – somewhere to go for a cup of tea while the world burns around us. There are many days when I don’t feel like taking up the cudgels on behalf of my own discipline or sallying forth to challenge the views of those who I think are simply wrong but I admire those who do, so I have no quarrel with academics in the settler history domain who seem to do it all the time. On the contrary, their internecine battles are intriguing, and it takes a certain bravado too. Anyone who sticks their head above the parapet can expect to see the muskets, yet we are all the richer for a range of views that call the status quo to account. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is certainly ‘a bloody difficult subject’ but reading this book felt like listening in to a private conversation taking place in a windowless academic cloister. I came away thinking, tetchily, that if this is historiography, give me sociology. And gin.
‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History by Bain Attwood (Auckland University Press, $59.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
