TANGLED TREATY

When, 40 years ago, Bain Attwood left New Zealand in his mid-twenties for Melbourne, it was with a melancholy familiar to many who seek a life beyond.

Born and mostly raised in Hamilton, he studied history at Waikato and Auckland universities, ending up with a master’s degree, a librarian’s job he loathed and a disquieting sense of being hidebound.

The origins of his disenchantment might include the doors that shut on a foreign service career and a dearth of encouragement to pursue the PhD that he suspected was within him, and which was later realised in Australia, along with several prize-winning books.

“It seemed that a small number of people get taken up and encouraged and get lots of airplay. And the rest of us, well, most of us, don’t get encouraged,” recalls Attwood, 64, of his final, thin years in New Zealand, which ended in 1981, the year Robert Muldoon cleaved the country by allowing South Africa’s rugby team to tour.

Yet, it would be wrong to think of him as alienated from his homeland. He embodies the long-ago forecast of expatriate scholar, writer and soldier John Mulgan, that those