History, heritage, and colonialism: Historical consciousness, Britishness, and cultural identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940

By Kynan Gentry

History, heritage, and colonialism explores the politics of history-making and interest in preserving the material remnants of the past in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial society, looking at both indigenous pasts and those of European origin.

Focusing on New Zealand, but also covering the Australian and Canadian experiences, it explores how different groups and political interests have sought to harness historical narrative in support of competing visions of identity and memory. Considering this within the frames of the local and national as well as of empire, the book offers a valuable critique of the study of colonial identity-making and cultures of colonisation.

This book offers important insights for societies negotiating the legacy of a colonial past in a global present, and will be of particular value to all those concerned with museum, heritage, and tourism studies, as well as imperial history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784991937

Kynan Gentry

Kynan Gentry is a Lecturer in History at the Australian National University

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

English institutions have century upon century of the past, lying fold upon fold within them … Because we English have maintained the threads between past and present we do not, like some younger states, have to go hunting for our own personalities. We do not have to set about the deliberate manufacture of a national consciousness, or to strain ourselves … to create a ‘nationalism’ out of the broken fragments of tradition, out of the ruins of a tragic past … Our history is here and active, giving meaning to the present.

Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History, 1944

There are, throughout the country, dwellings and shops, cemeteries and headstones, whose grace, calm, and sometimes extravagant fancy should be the more highly valued – in a country prone both architecturally and intellectually to mediocrity. No cabinet minister was either born in them or buried under them; no embattled settlers prepared to fire upon the Maoris from them; no church, lodge or local body held its first meeting in them. People simply built them, and we are the richer for it.

W. H. Oliver, Landfall, 1957

History, place, and colonialism

Published in the same year he was appointed as the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Herbert Butterfield’s The Englishman and His History (1944) provided a remarkable illustration of the strength of a nationalist interpretation of history – Butterfield concluding that the richness of England’s past was both an all-pervasive influence on the present and a unique source of strength. Writing thirteen years later, the young New Zealand historian William Hosking Oliver’s description of the New Zealand past would seem to be as stark a contrast as one could image – highlighting the apparent lightness of history’s touch on the New Zealand landscape, but a landscape worthy of preservation none the less. Seventy-seven years earlier, however, the prominent New Zealand collector and bibliophile Thomas Hocken had taken a strikingly different position to Oliver, arguing in a lecture to the Otago Institute on the country’s early history that New Zealand’s youth made it luckier than many older countries. ‘The thin mists of two or three ages, or of a century,’ he began:

are quite sufficient, to my way of thinking, to invest the past with the desired halo. When thicker, they become more impenetrable, and it is then difficult to conjure through them visions of the dead, and of their deeds. When treading the steps that Captain Cook and Samuel Marsden and these old missionaries trod, I can readily see what they saw, hear what they said, and look upon the life that was around them. But the old abbey does not so readily recall to me the procession of cowl-clad monks whose solemn chants once filled its aisles.¹

While Hocken duly noted that ‘a prejudiced fondness for anything New Zealand may partly blind [him]’, both he and Oliver had an intimate knowledge of the English historical landscape – Oliver having completed his doctorate at Oxford in the early 1950s, while Hocken spent his youth in northern England and Dublin before departing for the Australasian colonies in 1860 at the age of twenty-four as a ship’s surgeon. Writing four years after his return to New Zealand, Oliver’s experience of the English historical landscape thus saw him plead for New Zealanders to see the material remnants of the country’s past on its own terms rather than by direct comparison to the depth and richness of Britain’s history and aesthetic and historical sensibilities. He recognised how much such sensibilities shaped the New Zealand cultural psyche. Yet as Hocken – noting the shallowness of New Zealand’s historical roots – concluded, ‘To my mind associations make antiquities, rather than great lapse of time’.²

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Hocken’s enthusiasm, his and Oliver’s perspectives raise some interesting questions about how colonial societies rationalised the conflicting perspectives of themselves as being socially and culturally rooted in Europe, while also having their own distinct pasts. James Belich touches on this question in his idea of ‘neo-Britains’, where he suggests that colonists did not simply seek to imitate the ‘mother country’, but to adapt and rework notions of Britishness to their own ends.³ Refining and expanding this idea, Pocock suggests that underlying this remaking of Britishness was a perceived need amongst colonial societies to rewrite British history ‘in order both to enhance their understanding of their own and to point out to the United Kingdom British that there is a history of common substance’.⁴ These colonial conceptions of self, most importantly, were culturally and politically pluralistic – Fedorowich and Bridges summing the situation up: ‘Just as in Britain one could be a Liverpudlian, Lancastrian, Englishman and Briton, so in New Zealand one might be an Aucklander, North Islander, New Zealander and Briton’.⁵ Binding these multiple identities together were shared institutional values, and a ‘web’ of personal, cultural, economic, political, and technological networks. The role of education, literature, tourism, and the wider production, consumption, and infusion of imperial ‘texts’ into the cultural life of the metropole and the periphery was especially important here, with stories of imperial adventure, racial ‘others’, and nationalising narratives dominated the English elementary school system from the 1880s. History, within this frame, was increasingly conceived, structured, and taught as a moral tale.⁶ The pedagogical significance of this to the wider empire was fundamental, with the perceived power of historical narrative to instil civic values and produce good imperial citizens being at the heart of primary and secondary education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Indeed, well into the first half of the twentieth century the majority of school readers in Australia and New Zealand, and many in Canada, were adaptations of British readers – Ernest Scott, for example, conceiving his textbook A Short History of Australia, which passed through six editions from 1916 to 1936, ‘to elucidate the way this country was discovered, why and how it was settled, the development of civilised society within it, its social and political progress, mode of government, and relations, historical and actual, with the Empire of which it forms a part’.⁷ The prevalence of British-trained historians in colonial university history-teaching posts similarly resulted in the entrenchment of the dominant view that the history of colonies needed to be contextualised within an imperial framework. Indeed, as the Scotsman and Professor of History at Otago University John Rawson Elder responded as late as 1936 to the suggestion that a chair in New Zealand history be established, to do so ‘would be to emphasise a narrow and parochial view of history, which New Zealand, in its essential isolation, should strive to avoid’.⁸ The connection between imperial ideals and pedagogy was promoted just as strongly outside of formal institutions, with women’s organisations such as the Victoria League, Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, and the Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire promoting educational reform and the establishment of memorials, commemorative sites, and museums.⁹

The museum, of course, has been a key point of colonial and postcolonial history’s focus in recent years, with an extensive body of work exploring the centrality of the museum to the promotion and consolidation of racial discourse; as a tool of colonial possession, ordering, and indigenous dispossession; and the museum’s and exhibition’s importance to the transfer of knowledge, power, and money both domestically and across the empire. Complementing this, the nuanced, interdisciplinary perspective of heritage and museum studies has challenged postcolonialism’s focus on hegemony by exploring themes of cross-cultural dialogue and hybridity, highlighting indigenous agency and counter-colonial resistance.¹⁰ Outside of the museum, meanwhile, work such as Thomas Richards’s Imperial Archive (1993) and Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain (2009) has cast new light on the cultural geographies of colonialism through their explorations of the colonial state’s epistemic power and self-representation.¹¹

History, Heritage, and Colonialism builds on this body of work, but also takes a much wider perspective on the place of ‘the past’ in colonial society. Focusing on New Zealand, but drawing on examples from a host of colonial contexts, it explores the circumstances in which colonists begin to recognise, identify with, produce, and ultimately use the past in their new homes, and how such narratives are rationalised within wider conceptions of their cultural heritage. In doing so it is centrally concerned with the idea that the preoccupation of historians of colonial history with ‘the nation’ has detached this history from its imperial contexts, homogenising identity and blurring regional boundaries. Certainly in the New Zealand instance ‘the local’ has since the end of the Second World War generally been seen to have had contributed little of historiographical significance, with the academy effectively taking the position that there was little ‘real’ history published until there were academic historians to write it. Indeed, as the historian Eric McCormick concluded in Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), prior to the 1930s New Zealand high culture was largely provincial, imitative and undistinguished, with the local historian’s obsession with collecting historical fragments and oral testimony seen as uncritically antiquarian, and even ‘promiscuous’.¹² In recent years this view has been challenged by a handful of revisionist scholars whose work has highlighted the place of both local and nation histories as colonising texts in which the efforts of amateur and academic historians alike were focused on peopling New Zealand’s Pakeha past with noble pioneers and their deeds; however, ‘the nation’ remains dominant.¹³

According to the champion of regional history Jim Gardner, behind the blinkered scholarly focus on the nation lies an assumption ‘that the only way to make sense of a small country’s history is to deal in the largest possible units and patterns’.¹⁴ It is tempting here to read Gardner’s rationale not as ‘a small country’s history’, but as ‘a country’s small history’ – New Zealand, after all, being a marginally larger geographical entity than the United Kingdom, but an entity that, as Butterfield’s opening quotation implies, has suffered under a historical inferiority complex.

The centrality of the past to identity has deep roots, with the connection between historical continuity and legitimacy laying at the heart of notions of kinship, heritage, belonging, and nationalism.¹⁵ Indeed, so important is the notion of ‘the past’ to ideas of national unity, state legitimacy, moral obligation, and political consensus, that the notion of a ‘national heritage’ – a body of folkways and political ideas – necessarily resides at heart of the expansionist imperative. In Nation and Commemoration – a comparative study of national centennial and bicentennial celebrations in Australia and the US – for example, Lyn Spillman concludes that:

Past, progress, and future were often important features of imagined national community in the centennials, symbolizing shared experience. When people in both countries imagined shared qualities which bound their communities, they also thought frequently of their political values and institutions, and prosperity or a close analog of prosperity: wealth, resources, productivity, or development.¹⁶

With this in mind imperial historians have begun to appreciate how Britishness as an identity often meant more in the colonies than it did in Britain itself, where there was a tendency to think more along the demarcations of the ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, and ‘Welsh’.¹⁷ While Smith explains such actions with the simple conclusion that ‘no nation-to-be can survive without a homeland or a myth of common origins and descent’, the geographer Doreen Massey offers a more nuanced explanation, suggesting that the establishment of the feeling of ‘home’ is dependent upon the notions ‘of recourse to a past, of a seamless coherence of character, of an apparently comforting bounded enclosure’. Most importantly, she concludes, as boundaried spaces, the identity of such places is established ‘through negative counterposition with the Other beyond the boundaries’.¹⁸ The frequent description of the empire in familial terms – of the ‘mother country’ and colonies being ‘under parental care’ – was thus useful for its highlighting that Britain and its colonies were naturally related to one another.¹⁹

Massey’s ideas – which are central to this book’s core arguments – plug into a growing body of scholarly work on space and place. Led by the work of historically minded scholars such as Henri Lefebvre, Paul Carter, Michel de Certeau, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, in recent decades the ‘spatial turn’ has had a wide-ranging influence on academic history. Lefebvre’s work has been particularly influential, with his The Production of Space (1974) having introduced a generation of historians to the idea that space is not simply natural geography but something that human beings produce over time. Space is itself historical, with spatial relations shifting and changing. Yet while historians have enthusiastically embraced the spatial – especially within postcolonialism, where notions of empire and imperialism are seen to have had uneven spatial and historical consequences – they have also been concerned more with the idea of ‘space’ than ‘place’, paying more attention to the language and practice of spatiality than to the spatial experience.

Having become one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography, however, ‘place’ has much to offer historical research. Yet it can be a complex idea. While the notion of ‘place attachment’, for example, which lies at the heart of Massey’s argument, posits that attachment is inextricably tied to proximity, physical and social proximity do not have to coincide. Individuals who live geographically close to a ‘place’ may have little or no attachment to it, while for others with little or no geographical connection, ‘imagined’ links may be pervasive.²⁰ Environmental psychologists, furthermore, have explored how children bond emotionally with places as they grow, and how memories of childhood places remain crucial anchors throughout life, while ‘sense of place’ has been shown to be reinforced by the social networks of adulthood – the argument being that the longer a person lives in a place, the more likely the environment is to become saturated with significant memories.²¹ As the historian Becky Taylor and the geographer Ben Rogaly’s recent study of identity, place, and belonging in the English council estate has also forcefully demonstrated, it is place as context that ultimately defines our attachment to them.²² Research has also been undertaken into the emotional consequences of person – place bonds being broken, such as the grieving for a lost home that occurs among exiles deprived of their familiar environment and memory sites, or with people who remain in situ while sacred and significant sites are destroyed or profaned.²³ Human geographers and sociologists meanwhile have explored issues to do with community development such as social capital, sense of community, and citizen participation.²⁴

A small number of historical schools have, to be fair, long been sensitive to notions of place beyond the simple locational; however, the bulk of these – such as Annales and Microstoria – have been outside of the Anglo-American traditions.²⁵ The key exception perhaps was the British Communist Party Historians’ Group, who in the early 1950s recognised the importance of place in shaping attachment, with Raphael Samuel subsequently making place a central thread of the early History Workshop movement.²⁶ Arguably the most influential historical intervention into place in recent decades, however, has been the seven-volume Les Lieux de Mémoire published between 1984 and 1993 under the direction of the Annales historian Pierre Nora.²⁷ At the heart of Nora’s work is a reformulation of Maurice Halbwachs’s distinction between memory and history – Halbwachs emphasising the separateness of memory and history, while Nora sees memory and history as ‘in many respects opposed’.²⁸ Nora, however, also seeks to highlight the changing relationship between the two arenas. Indeed his recognition that ‘sites’ of memory do not simply arise out of lived experience but instead have to be created, together with his emphasis on the plurality and fluidity of meaning and uses of memory sites, have been immensely influential, residing at the core of academic commentary on the history of heritage in western society that has emerged since the mid-1980s.

Nora’s ideas have also been hotly contested, with critics arguing that his concept of history is highly nostalgic; his approach to the idea of nation reverential; and his claims of the death of collective memory premature and misleading.²⁹ Particularly strong criticism has also been levelled at his focus on ‘official’ places of memory, with Raphael Samuel, David Lowenthal, Nancy Wood, Peter Carrier, and John Bodnar all arguing that the locus of heritage is much less about grand monuments and coercive national memory than it is about the vernacular and the typical, with Samuel rightly noting that the twentieth century in particular saw a ‘dissevering’ of the link between heritage and the idea of national or collective destiny.³⁰ Underlying this is the simple reality that people rarely conduct themselves in the manner that national histories and monuments suggest they should. All sorts of geographic considerations, social conflicts, and economic forces create a multiplicity of local issues which impact decisions. Indeed, echoing Samuel’s contention, Bodnar, Chris Healy, and Tom Griffiths have each suggested that, in relation to the formation of identity in Australia and the United States, local rather than national perceptions of place and history have provided the model of historical imagination through which people have made sense of their own time in places that were still new to them.³¹ The same can be argued of New Zealand, where, as one historian has recently observed, local communities were connected to a ‘national’ past through the rhetoric of public commemoration, while local and provincial identities remained dominant.³² With this in mind, the ‘obliteration of local and provincial jealousies’ was seen as one of the express aims of nationally oriented groups such as the New Zealand Natives Association, which was established in 1890 to create a feeling of patriotism and nationality among the New Zealand-born community.³³ Highlighting the pervasive power of the local, in the long run provincial identities remained strong while after a few years the Natives Association was gone. Eighty years later little had changed – Erik Olssen noting that in the process of writing his A History of Otago in the early 1980s ‘I quickly identified some 20 sub-regions [of Otago], most of them with different histories, which at best could be reduced to seven larger sub-regions … [each with] distinctive characters’.³⁴

As Samuel has suggested, herein lays the disturbing paradox – that because local history does not have to stretch over such diverse and wide-ranging collectives, it is in effect more nationalistic.³⁵ Because it is comprised of more personal histories, it implies the history of larger communities to a much greater extent than national history implies the local community. This is not to suggest that local and national history are mutually exclusive, but that as the Canadian historian Douglas Cole argued in the early 1970s a sharper distinction often needs to be made between ‘nationalism’ – which he saw as embodying an ethnic and cultural community – and the more localised ‘patriotism’, which he argued took the form of affection for a homeland, but was not ethnically exclusive.³⁶ Arguing that Canadian and Australian society had traditionally located their identities not in Britain itself but in the worldwide community of ‘Britannic nationalism’, Stuart Ward has recently similarly concluded that ‘What had often been mistaken for colonial nationalism … was really an expression of pride of place and community of interest’.³⁷ Irrespective of whether or not we are convinced by Cole’s argument, the issue of place that he, Samuel, and others tap into raises a fundamental question about the place of ‘the local’ and ‘translocal’ in shaping settler-British identities. Indeed, as Doreen Massey concluded in her contribution to the 1995 History Workshop Journal edition ‘Rethinking the idea of place’, locale is a ‘product of wider contacts; the local is always already a product in part of global forces’ or ‘the world beyond the place itself’.³⁸ Flipping this idea on its head, Jim Gardner argues that ‘[t]he normal ambit of the individual is regional and not national, and local rather than regional. Of course, the wider trends in events and in public opinion impinge on the individual’s daily sphere, but his [or her] reaction to them is usually expressed within or through the local framework’.³⁹ It is this conviction that gives the local value. Philippa Levine makes a similar case in her analysis of the popularity of local history in late nineteenth-century Britain, which she argues cannot be explained by nostalgia alone, but must be understood as a response to attachment to local identity that in many ways mirrored other expressions of civic pride, while also being a response to emergent social, cultural, and political threats.⁴⁰ Nineteenth-century Scottish nationalists similarly turned to the past as a defence against the cultural and political hegemony of England, as did the Southern and Western United States against the Eastern States.

Intricately linked to place attachment, place identity is bound up with the idea that people’s identity and values are informed by the places they attach to.⁴¹ As Tony Ballantyne concludes in his recent study of the New Zealand township of Gore, for example, ‘place’ had a profound impact on the development of colonial knowledge, the shaping of which he suggests is generated by everyday practices ‘deeply embedded in the structure of local life’.⁴² This is to suggest not that landscapes and places have ‘voices’, or that they are ‘charged’ with meaning or emotion but that the identities of places are bound up with the histories which are told of them, and the strengths and weaknesses of networks between communities.⁴³ With this in mind, the American urban historian Dolores Hayden suggests that both natural and man-made places can be seen as storehouses of social memories, framing the lives of many people and often transcending generations. It is the stabilising persistence of place that makes it such a powerful container for memory.⁴⁴ Indeed, among historians of historic preservation, the obliteration of collective memories that resulted from rapid post-1950 urban renewal is typically cited as a key factor behind the subsequent rise of the preservation movement – the suggestion being that the multi-sensory experience of place that comes with landscape, more than any other form in event memory, produces the sensation of bridging the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such ‘experience’, none the less seek to share the memory.⁴⁵ This was certainly the case for the New Zealand historian Michael King, who in describing his own childhood in Being Pakeha (1985) noted that there was a certain thrill when, as a ten-year-old, he discovered that James Cowan’s The New Zealand Wars (1922–1923) contained a detailed account of a battle between Maori and government troops that had taken place in his neighbour-hood 140 years earlier:

The book included maps, photographs and descriptions of combat that enabled me to pinpoint and stand on each site, and once standing there, to imagine that I was experiencing what had happened there … I lay in the earthworks behind the Anglican Church which had been built over Rangihaeata’s pa … climbed Battle Hill to find the Maori rifle pits, and the graves of Imperial troops killed fighting there. These experiences made history come alive for me. I felt the presence of people who had gone before. I saw them in a kind of Arthurian world that was not in Camelot but (literally) on my own doorstep.⁴⁶

Cowan himself had a similar childhood, having grown up near Rangiaowhia, close to the sites of the Waikato Wars. As a recent environmental psychology study has shown, such attachments to place can also have a significant influence on the desire to preserve the historic landscape.⁴⁷ Nor need there necessarily be a pre-existing relationship with a given place, as the antiquarian Thomas Hocken, for example, noted in a lecture on the country’s early mission stations to the Otago Institute in 1880:

I have visited many of these old stations, now deserted or desolate spots, or else converted to purposes of a far different character. Nothing brought back to me so vividly the bygone past of New Zealand as wandering though these ruined remains. The once pretty garden – record of the missionary’s taste and solace – choked with weeds and undergrowth; the fences and hedges destroyed; the quaint little church, with small overhanging belfry, locked, silent, and rapidly going to decay – the house silent, too, damp and mouldy, overrun and darkened with vines and creepers, now disorderly, once trim and well cared for as they clustered round the low verandah – the author and occupant of all this himself laying somewhere near, dear, and perhaps forgotten.⁴⁸

Recent scholarly emphasis on ideas of place, however, is not to suggest that as a concept it is new, with both western and non-western cultures having used place memory as mnemonic devices for millennia. For Maori, for example, the landscape and the people are believed to be inseparable, with landscape central to spiritual nourishment. Maori history and cultural identity are in fact inextricably infused into the land through waiata (song), whakapapa (genealogy), whaikorero (speech making), and narratives.⁴⁹ Within whakapapa, people’s connections are a reflection of who they are, where they come from, who they are related to, the mountain and river they associate with, and the lands they can stake claim to. Shared whakapapa can thus be seen as ‘all things are from the same origin and that the welfare of any part of the environment determines the welfare of people’.⁵⁰

Structure of this book

As an area of historical enquiry, the production of historical narrative and the ideas of historical and heritage consciousness offer a valuable critique of the dominant idea of ‘the nation’ and the emphasis placed on the production of so-called ‘high’ cultural forms such as art, literature, and poetry within nationalism. While this emphasis reflects the perception that such forms of cultural capital are themselves a necessary component of ‘healthy’ national identity, such approaches privilege the views of writers and artists who represent but a narrow, and often idealistic, group within the larger society. While similar accusations are commonly made of those involved in historical societies and early preservation movements, one of the arguments posed in this book is that, while such societies were indeed magnets for elites and arenas for the manipulation of historical narrative, this alone fails to explain the nature and diversity of historical consciousness and interest in collection and preservation that took place. It must equally be understood as a response to attachment to cultural identities that in many ways mirrored other expressions of civic pride. The intersection between history and civics was central to the definition and dissemination of imperial iconographies. Architecture was a central component of this, as owing to its visibility it was an especially effective device for communicating notions of imperial power – as were monuments, perhaps the most obvious sites for iconographic messages. The interconnectedness of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world enabled such iconographies to travel considerable distances, with resultant collages of fragments from unlikely contexts. More generally, the idea of a ‘national heritage’ has been a primary instrument in both the discovery and creation of political nationalism’s conception of a homeland and a homogeneous people – existing as a necessary consolidation of national identification, while neutralising the potential threat of competing heritages of groups or regions both domestically and transnationally.⁵¹ Indeed, the political power of such symbols was only too clearly demonstrated in the early 1990s when Serbian troops besieging cities in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina set about destroying important cultural sites, as well as museums, monuments, libraries, archives, mosques, and churches. Not content merely to conquer their enemies, the aim of Serbian hyper-nationalists was to remove material cultural claims that the Croat and Muslim populations had to the landscape. It was similarly difficult to find an intact historic synagogue in Germany in the aftermath of the pogrom that occurred throughout Nazi Germany during 9–10 November 1938, and resulted in the destruction of more than a thousand synagogues. More recently it has been argued that archaeological practice in Israel has been dominated by an overwhelming need to legitimise the national ethos, one result being the obliteration of the Palestinian cultural landscape.⁵² In New Zealand a similar rationale lay behind the destruction of Maori carved houses by government forces during the New Zealand Wars – the houses being recognised as both cultural anchors and monuments of counter-colonial resistance. Indeed destruction often accompanied imperial conquest, with the removal of old symbols of authority constituting a conscious effort to pacify local populations and undermine the potency of traditional cultural and political practices. As William Logan concludes of the French destruction of the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long in Hanoi in the 1890s, for example, the citadel posed no military threat to the French, but ‘seems to have been destroyed because it represented the wrong symbolism – old Vietnamese imperial regime’.⁵³

Indeed, heritage and politics are arguably inseparable, with heritage constituting a core arena for colloquy and debate between various social groups as they seek to harness the past in support of competing visions of identity and memory.⁵⁴ The moral origins of the British preservation movement (which are also seen as the progenitor of colonial historic preservation movements), for example, are generally seen to lie in the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris as a criticism of the standardising effects of mass production and the dehumanising effects of factory labour. The suggestion is that Ruskin and Morris loved, and sought to conserve, the architecture of the Middle Ages because it represented a golden age of high craftsmanship and social harmony. Here, Ruskin’s famous quotation that ‘We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us’ is read as a claim for the value of buildings as precious artefacts, and the ‘problem’ of restoration, which threatened to peel away the layers of history.⁵⁵ Such oversimplification, however, presents a fundamentally misleading image, and fails to acknowledge the inherently political basis of both men’s views of heritage as a means to encourage social and economic revolution. Behind Ruskin’s warnings of the dangers of restoration, for example, lay a moral pronouncement about the use of the past that was itself a comment on the political appropriation of the past then taking place within Britain. As Chris Miele has argued, Morris’s formation of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1877 similarly emerged not so much as a reaction to the aesthetics of restoration but as a political response to instructional reforms then taking place within the Church as it attempted to stem the erosion of its traditional privilege and power.⁵⁶ Influenced by the Cambridge Camden Society, the Church’s efforts here included the restoration of hundreds of medieval churches in England and Wales – the idea being that, from a perspective of power and influence, smartly restored structures that sought to recapture the piety and beauty of the Middle Ages were far more valuable than weathered originals. Playing on Ruskin’s idea of historic buildings ‘not being ours’, Morris thus sought to maintain ‘tradition’ for the masses rather than have it employed and controlled by elites.⁵⁷

In socio-political terms, early heritage preservation in the colonial and New World contexts unfolded in a similar – albeit more complex – way. In the United States (which also influenced early preservation practice in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia), the earliest concerted efforts to preserve the material remnants of the past emerged both as a part of broader efforts to assert national legitimacy and through the efforts of groups and communities looking to consolidate their own positions within a wider narrative of nationhood.⁵⁸ As the nineteenth century progressed, preservation was also increasingly deployed in class-based terms, with established families turning to genealogy and the preservation of historic sites in an attempt to restore their positions as assumed custodians of the American inheritance in the face of growing challenges from the ‘new moneyed’ classes. The traditional narrative behind the efforts of Ann Pamela Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association to preserve George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate as a national historic site, for example, is that they were driven by the belief that pilgrimages to Washington’s home and tomb might help to heal sectional animus and foster citizenship. However, comprising descendants of the prosperous antebellum planter class, the Ladies’ Association was also motivated by a nostalgic image of a golden time when their ancestors had been masters of the region.⁵⁹ It was also not just the upper classes employing the past, with the growth of interest in heritage at the beginning of the twentieth century equally tied to middle-class anxieties about the waves of new immigrants pouring into the country. Here monuments, historic sites, material culture more generally were valued for their transcendent more than their intrinsic worth, introducing and familiarising new arrivals to the nation’s collective past and its ideals, ensuring that new members identified with and attained the required social identity.⁶⁰ Such processes of mnemonic socialisation are an important – be it subtle – part of all groups’ general effort to incorporate new members.

Yet unlike in Old World nations, where the pursuit of national identities was typically grounded in attempts to harness pre-existing sub-and supra-state identities and connections to the land, this was not so straightforward in settler-colonial populations. Since they had – by the very processes of migration – left behind much of what gave their world meaning and stability, the construction of identity in settler societies initially focused instead on the employment of existing connections with ‘Home’ and the redefining of the landscape through the removal of elements of the ‘alien’ indigenous landscape, and the acclimatisation of familiar plants and animals; the transplanting of European names, tradition, institutions, architecture, and even the stylistic interpretation of the landscape through art.⁶¹ The incorporation of new traditions and attachments typically did not begin until indigenous threats were diminished and settlers began to feel more ‘at home’.

Despite such adoption and invention, however, the dominance of western perceptions of culture and historicism meant that most colonial societies laboured under historical inferiority complexes. Unable to boast the histories of Old World cities and countries, as civic tourism demonstrated, their novelty rested on their newness – with early colonial historians typically responding by narrating the success of transplanting European values and ruminating on future colonial greatness. Efforts to mark history in the landscape followed a similar course, with the earliest historic reserves in both Australia and New Zealand emphasising British ties – in both cases through the landing sites of Captain James Cook.⁶² Statuary was more common, with classically formed monuments to ‘great men’ and founding moments dually serving as patriotic instruction and beautification of the townscape. The idea of preserving the fabric of their own history, however, was seen to be fraught with contradiction. How, after all, could a nation ‘without a past’ have anything to preserve?⁶³ Even for those aware enough of the importance of history to a new nation, the perceived value of preserving the historical record typically lay in its use to future generations. As the English author Thomas Cholmondeley pondered in Ultima Thule (1854) – a narrative of his own experience of the young colony – about the form that a national history of New Zealand might take:

in the history of ‘beginnings’, especially, are minute accounts and descriptions valuable for instruction, and powerful to awaken passions. So dear are they to the nations, that, if wanting, their place must be supplied by legends and mythical stories, for society loves to provide itself with illustrations – of its childish adventures, of its early struggles, and of