The Lion and the Kiwi

To sell a nation, or rather the idea of a nation. To increase the flow of people and capital from the Motherland. This was the intent of Progressive New Zealand, a book commissioned by the Dominion Advisory Council to Christchurch publisher Andrews, Baty and Co. ahead of the Empire Exhibition held in London in 1924.

Call it imperial modernism: a faith in the capacity to engineer progress not solely via the rational application of the soundest principles of government and enterprise – which alone would be insufficient – but also by virtue of the nation’s belonging to the most advanced civilization on Earth. New Zealand becomes therefore the mirror of the Motherland, that ‘Brighter Britain of the South’ onto which the prospective colonist and the imperial administrator could project ideas of renewal both personal and collective.

By analogy with later state-sponsored efforts we have encountered before, the book – and this post – could have been entitled This Is New Zealand, British Empire Edition, since, like the Asian Edition and the American Edition produced six decades later by Sheffield House, Progressive New Zealand is a national text tailored to a foreign audience, speaking to, pleading to an Other against which the national character is to be defined. But what is unique to this earlier text is that the majority of the New Zealand population at the time was in fact of British descent, including a large proportion of first generation immigrants. Here the branding of New Zealand for the benefit and as a function of the intended British audience doubles therefore as the strengthening and deepening of the roots of the colonisers.

What the exercise requires first of all is that the very notion of indigeneity be suppressed, and so Progressive New Zealand – all 244 pages of it – makes almost no mention of Māori. A single two-page section is devoted specifically to the nation’s first inhabitants, but with the chief purpose of dismissing the existence of a native problem.

New Zealand is, perhaps, the only country in the world where settlement has been achieved by Europeans on land previously held by non-European people without the making of a racial problem as a perpetual worry for the new regime.

In this section the authors inform us that the ultimate outcome of colonisation was ‘not to make life harder for the Maoris [sic] but much easier,’ and practically in the same breath that the indigenous population had dwindled at the time of print to a mere 55,000 souls, ‘including half-castes’.

Those, at any rate, aren’t who we are, for the continuing purpose of colonisation is to promote ‘growth in the white population of New Zealand’, more specifically the sturdy mix of Britons who in the space of a mere eight decades forged the new nation after the likeness of the old. And this is where New Zealand stands in 1924, at a sort of bucolic colonial crossroads: pristine, vastly under-developed yet rich with opportunities for the prospective settler, predominantly in the area of farming. A country that had yet to be wholly parcelled out, whose vast unoccupied territories and seemingly unlimited prospects of urban growth were offered as the opportunity to draw Britain from scratch, a chance of a do-over. Thus the contradiction in the book between a tentative outline of the traits and states of mind of what would later go by the name of Pākehā culture, on the one hand, and the never quite suppressed desire to outdo the British at being British, on the other. After all, the authors remind us, didn’t Edward Prince of Wales, upon visiting the nation in 1921, have this to say:

New Zealand is one of the greatest monuments of British civilization in the world, and I have felt from end to end of the Dominion that there is nowhere a British people more set in British traditions, or more true to British form.

The political and economic proposition to the Motherland, put simply, was as follows: greater economic investment in the country – in the form of loans and mutual commercial undertakings – would enable the Dominion to continue to absorb new settlers and provide a relief valve for British unemployment. Visually, the relationship looked something like this:

The curious alliance of the lion and the kiwi, as captured in the full-page advertisement for shipping firm H.D. Robertson & Polson. The lion is powerful, assured. The kiwi ruffled but rugged, as befits the contemporary military iconography from which the metonymical association with the country and its inhabitants derives. The martial connotations aren’t casual, for one of the points of national pride most assiduously remarked in the book are the feats of the New Zealand military in defence of the empire, the precursor to the responsible global citizen role that is reprised to this day. Then as much as now, this was parlayed directly into international loans and trade agreements around the negotiating tables. It’s what cemented the country’s role within a strategic alliance whose economic and military objectives were tightly aligned.

Once you had sold the idea of the nation, you had to sell the nation, and New Zealand at this time marketed itself as an exporter of primary products and importer of the nearly all raw materials and manufactured goods not directly connected with agriculture. A country that couldn’t quite afford to mine its own coal and found it cheaper to buy it overseas. A country that, most of all, sought to import people. ‘To every man of intelligence who is blessed with health and is energetic, success should be certain,’ read the message to the publisher of the Minister of Labour. Women domestics (so long as they undertook not to get married for at least one year) and young labourers were also in demand. Another key attraction and selling point, to the entrepreneur and the investor alike, came in the form of ‘liberal provisions for industrial peace’, meaning the strike-preventing measures included in the Conciliation and Arbitration Act. This is 1924, remember: fears of workers thinking revolutionary thoughts were decidedly more than academic. And perhaps it is symptomatic that the section on industrial relations is illustrated by the photograph of a luncheon and social room without any workers in it.

This was New Zealand at the threshold of progress: a nation ruled by land-owners and farmers, with a subaltern and disciplined manufacturing sector. It chose therefore to imagine a road to modernity that didn’t depend on the acceleration of industry, but rather on becoming an even bigger and more efficient farm, on being an even larger exporter of butter, cheese, frozen lamb, wool (‘the clothing of civilisation’), as if this prosperity would then translate back into progress of its own accord, obeying an unwritten and frictionless law of capital. The liberal use of statistics throughout the book – a hallmark of the genre – conceals in this instance the missing design so often lamented by WB Sutch: the inability to think of present New Zealand and future New Zealand as something other than the Empire’s farm; the unwillingness to change that economic proposition, therefore to imagine what progress might look like, other than ‘more of this’.

Nearly a century on, there isn’t much of a discursive space left in which to even form the phrase ‘progressive New Zealand’ anymore and so the book becomes also the catalogue of a lost vocabulary. ‘New Zealand’s flourishing gelatine industry is a very good example of the modern process of winning wealth from waste,’ say the authors, and you catch a glimpse of what it must have felt like to conceive of the land in those terms, as a source of unlimited and self-renewing bounty. Other wonderful details in the text – such as the fact that out of the first New Zealand shipment of eggs to Britain, in 1923, only two out of 547,680 turned out to be broken – sound improbably, comically hopeful, because the mastery of logistical problems is no longer something to be greatly impressed by or to build a sense of collective pride around.

I’m not suggesting we should feel any great longing for those simpler times, merely noting again how books of this kind expose our own myths of nationhood and narratives of aspiration and achievement, as well as horizons that are in several respects just as narrow as they were back then. The challenge, as always, is to write a new book.

L.S. Fanning (ed.). Progressive New Zealand: an authentic, comprehensive illustrated work of reference on all aspects of national life of New Zealand. Prepared and produced by arrangement with the Dominion Advisory Council for British Empire Exhibition, London, 1924. Christchurch: Andrews, Baty & Co., 1924.

Big, big thanks to Sam F for sending me a copy of the book. Also, it occurs to me that regular early-in-the-week visitors may not be aware of Harvest Bird’s recent resumption of service. Allow me to rectify.

Finally, the piece on the internet as a technology of surveillance I wrote for The New Inquiry Magazine’s Spies issue is now up on the site. You should still subscribe to the magazine though.

This Is New Zealand - American Edition

Who is the bloke in the dark suit sitting opposite Bobby Muldoon?

The two leaders eye each other. They smile wryly, but do not speak. A large china vase could fall on their heads at any moment.

There is no caption, but the photograph must have been taken in June of 1981, when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon visited the United States, six months into Reagan’s presidency. Muldoon himself was to be re-elected later that year and receive the mandate to further his ‘Think Big’ response to the international energy crisis just as the price of oil reached an all time high. New Zealand needed American technology and capital for its infrastructure investments, and this is likely to have featured in the talks.

The photograph itself is less straightforward to read. The exchange of smiles is more guarded than it is cordial, and one is drawn to the differences: of physical stance, sartorial, of demeanour. Muldoon, ten years Reagan’s junior, looks the elder statesman; Reagan, the brasher one. But there is no mistaking which leader and whose country is the more powerful.

In 1982, the image was featured in the introduction of a book that documented and promoted the economic ties between the two nations. This one.

I’ve covered books like this one before – including one in this very series – but it bears repeating that you generally cannot buy them, but only receive them as gifts, typically in the context of a business trip or a trade fair. When as in this case they promote national interests, as opposed to a single company or industry sector, they never fail to establish an interesting and often telling ideological background. Making the case for why it is a good idea to trade with your country always requires that its national character be described first, along with the country’s principal attractions. So the promotional book ends up resembling an odd kind of tourist guide or history book, whose overarching message is: we can do business together.

And so the country’s social and historical backgrounder may include mention not only of its political stability, but also of the fact that it has never defaulted on a loan. Social conflict will be downplayed and unionism left unmentioned, while anything that suggests ideological commonality without prejudice to the business environment will likely be emphasised. Hence for instance the extensive section on the army museum at Waiouru, where we learn amongst other things that

probably no other nation has been so remote [as New Zealand] from world events, yet so involved in international wars and warfare.

Diorama with New Zealand soldiers in Korea at the Amy Museum in Waiouru

At Waiouru, where ‘war is not glorified’, but rather presented as ‘accurate record’, experientially, the museum is kept nonetheless ‘at an even 19° Celsius and the humidity at 50%’. This is ostensibly to preserve the artefacts, but the idea of the air-conditioned battlefield fits within the sanitisation of society and the economy operated by this book for the purpose of packaging New Zealand for foreign consumption. Thus for instance the contribution of the Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Meat Company begins as follows:

The word slaughterhouse conjures up a rather gruesome image, but step into the processing department of a New Zealand meatworks and you'll be surprised at what you see.

In spite of the chains of carcasses being processed and readied for export, the pervasive atmosphere is a clinical whiteness: white caps, white washable aprons, white rubber overboots, white butchers' uniforms, tiles around the walls and flex stainless steel hand basins, stainless steel sterilisers for washing knives at 80°Centigrade after each processing operation.

In a country that exports meat to EEC and American markets, and whose inhabitants are among the most enthusiastic meat consumers in the world, hygiene is to be a number one priority. The whiteness and gleaming stainless steel ensure that the highest standards are maintained — standards that will satisfy countries who buy New Zealand meat.

What counts here is the image as much as the substance: the function of the whiteness and the gleaming stainless steel is as much to produce the correct perception amongst consumers as to ensure actual hygiene.

This clean, white image is a subtext to many of the books’ contributions, in which industry produces prosperity without any adverse effects on the wider society or the environment. With hindsight we may recoil especially at the entry paid for by Union Carbide, boasting the company’s pervasive yet understated presence in almost every sector of the New Zealand economy, including of course pest control in agriculture. But long before its own mother of all disasters, the Gulf oil spill, another company was at the forefront of this kind of obfuscation.

After all, what could possibly go wrong?

The contribution by the New Zealand subsidiary of BP is the one that best articulates the view of globalisation espoused by the book, of capital flows in the service of industry and industry in the service of society, of transnational corporations whose local presence is always sensitive to the indigenous culture and its needs, whose interests are always consonant with if not secondary to those of the host nation. ‘A company that would employ New Zealanders to the maximum extent and generally identify itself with the country it serves’ – this was BP New Zealand, a corporation ostensibly not in the business of selling oil but of promoting alternative energies and conservation.

Between 1978 and 1980, BP New Zealand sponsored a conservation award, a public relations idea so inspired that it was turned into a global affair by its British HQ. The artwork on the award itself, inspired by Māori mythology and motifs, offers an exemplary image of the oil company that goes beyond petroleum and harnesses the sun itself,

while BP executive David Kendall, unique amongst the book’s contributors, appears in a family picture that is the epitome of clean and white.

In reality BP New Zealand’s business is an example of the puzzling diversification that characterises the mega-conglomerates of late stage capitalism, and includes a foray in ‘the promising field of salmon farming’. However outside of BP, Pfizer and Union Carbide, the roll of contributors/advertisers to the American Edition comprises companies that are decidedly less eclectic – such as Amalgamated Marketing Limited, exporters of beef, orange roughy and bull semen – or stick to a single knitting: growers, manufacturers, traders or insurers of things, companies that our grandmothers would recognise.

Compared to the Asian Edition – which was produced by the same publisher four years later, in the thick of the first round of neoliberal reforms under Roger Douglas – the domestic economy and its nexus of international trade as depicted by the American Edition appear therefore almost quaint, with finance and informatics playing a conspicuously subdued role. This, in spite of my copy of the book coming with the compliments of NCR (NZ), the local division of an American company that was poised to benefit from the taking over of banking and investment functions by digital networks, but that at this point could not even visualise the coming revolution except by slapping a circuit board onto a night time cityscape.

Nowhere else does this book appear more outdated than in that single image. But on a personal level this is also the New Zealand before my time, of my childhood lived elsewhere, a country that I cannot experience except through books and in conversation. Only I’ve found that people don’t talk about it very much, and when they do it is often to recall its drabness, its lack of sophistication and choice.

I regret to say that the American Edition does little to refute this image. It begins by enticing the reader to tour the country on a flaming beige Honda.

And proceeds through a series of dubious fashion statements and alarming portents of the prevailing food culture.

The recipe for toasted chicken requires that blue eye shadow be worn at all times.

Whether or not this apparent lack of style, this all too easily stereotyped Eastern Bloc-like patina (I swear there is an actual paragraph in praise of Ladas) was implicated in contemporary ideas about one’s proper place in society, and conversely whether the reforms that rewrote the social contract in the latter part of the eighties also propelled the country forward in terms of its taste for fashion, cuisine and the arts, as well as making it more tolerant of difference generally, is an interesting question, and on this count too people’s answers tend to vary. In the American Edition it all comes together, rather fittingly, in the section on the then recently inaugurated new seat of Government, the Beehive. This, unlike its Australian counterpart, is located in the centre of the capital, to be close to the people, and its interiors are designed to suit by order of the very ministry that was the guarantor of full employment.

New Zealand is an egalitarian society and the Beehive's decor reflects this. With the single exception of the ministerial area, the different dining rooms are furnished almost identically, conveying an atmosphere of equality deliberately aimed at by the design team from the Ministry of Works and Development.

Within this brief, what counts as sophistication is the three, count them, three shades of brown used in the carpeting (‘the coordinated colour scheme creates a restful, earthy effect reminiscent of the land on which the economy of this essentially farming nation rests’), or the fact that in the occasion of state banquets – when Canterbury lamb invariably ends up on the menu – the chef at Bellamy’s will ‘let his imagination run riot’ by serving it with something other than mint sauce.

I am rather incongruously fond of this New Zealand I never got to know, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, and remain very much interested in the question of how we can reclaim its egalitarian ethos and some of its attendant social policy goals without also restoring the conservatism that marked the Muldoon years, or the lack of vegetarian options and good coffee. But wholesale nostalgia is obviously misplaced, and the American Edition reminds us why when it gestures at those egalitarian aspirations to mask the lack of social and political imagination that preluded to the neoliberal turn.

There is one final thing to note: the American Edition may be the only illustrated book about New Zealand in history not to include the image of a rugby field. It’s not even that sports are wholly absent – lawn bowls, mountaineering and sailing are amongst those featured. Perhaps it’s that to speak of rugby in 1982 without mentioning the Springbok Tour of ‘81 would have been awkward, and the authors wanted to avoid the association. I can only speculate. Be that as it may, what makes books of this sort valuable documents of their time are also the omissions, wilful or otherwise. It’s not the history is wholly absent, it’s that it’s selectively recalled. It’s history in the service of industry and commerce. And that’s far from the least interesting kind.

This Is New Zealand - American Edition. Sheffield House: Wellington, 1982.

Also in this series:
This Is New Zealand - Asian Edition
Reshaping the Invisible

This is New Zealand - Asian Edition

I’ll come right out and confess that one of my favourite literary genres is the promotional book. It might have something to do with my dear godmother, who for a number of Christmases in a row gave me books that her husband picked up at trade fairs, including a monumental - and in so many ways, absolutely delightful - History of Methane, a relic of a not-so-distant time when the word emissions had almost exclusively scatological meanings.

Of special and more recent interest to me is the subset of this genre that promotes whole countries and their ways of life. I talked briefly a little while ago about this particular gem


but neglected to make the dutiful point that nationalistic propaganda sprouting from a rich compost of lies and embellishments is hardly the sole domain of totalitarian governments. Everybody does it. You’ll find as much self-criticism in this type of offering as you do in the average national anthem. Nonetheless, these books generally make very interesting reading, precisely in fact because of their specific lies and obfuscations, as well as the occasional truths that seep through the promotional message.

There are some reassuring constants: the people of all nations, we are told, are uncommonly resourceful and ingenious, hard working and interested in pursuing a variety of interests. Sports and the arts play important roles in their lives, as does family. I am looking forward to a book professing that the citizens of, say, Latvia, are a slothful and tedious bunch who loathe children and are really letting themselves go in the fitness department, but it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming (at least not from the Latvians themselves). Also, most countries whose literature I have come across are 'a country of contrasts', which apparently is a good thing.

Predictable niceties are also written about each nation’s great artistic beauty and its rich and colourful traditions. But these aren't ordinary guidebooks, and a reminder of their mercantile aims, often on a very large scale, is never far behind. Here is a page from G. Selmer Fougner's A Good Living Tour of Italy (1955):

The advertisment goes on to say, in case you were wondering, that 'graving and floating docks can handle supertankers'. And who didn't tour Italy with his or her supertanker, in those days?

Another point of difference is that these kinds of books invariably project an uncritical and cohesive image of the country's political structures and policies. Look in particular for the ideological statements that underpin the sections on government, welfare and society, if you're into the comparative literature of propaganda. Case in point: the About New Zealand booklet published by the Ministry of Foreign affairs and Trade in 1999 - at the tail end of nine year of National Party rule - which reads as a manual on the virtues of neoliberalism. We learn for instance that

[s]uccessive [New Zealand] governments have shaped an environment for a leaner, more productive economy by championing reform, deregulation and sound financial policies at home, while pursuing open and liberalised trade and investment policies abroad. (p. 27)

We all know that ‘leaner’ means ‘employing fewer people’, but whatever repercussions this transition might have had on the securing of welfare provisions is left unsaid. In fact, the myth of the smooth, harmonious operation of the state machinery invariably espoused by these books can complicate things a bit when it comes to boasting a nation's historical achievements. About New Zealand needs for instance to accommodate both the pride in the pioneering role played by the country in the areas of labour relations and welfare entitlements, and the idea that getting rid of such entitlements was a good thing. Here's what the book has to say about health services:

In the 1930s, New Zealand made history by being the first nation to establish a comprehensive welfare system. The aim was to provide people with security ‘from the cradle to the grave’ through assistance for the sick, the unemployed and for families. A wide range of medical care was also provided free of charge. Almost 70 years later, the cost of providing social welfare has grown. Welfare benefits are now more tightly targeted at those most in need. Today the emphasis of the social welfare system is on providing income support to ensure those facing difficulties can be helped back to self-reliance and well-being. (p. 34)

Deftly, neatly, this paragraph bridges together a far poorer, less advanced New Zealand which yet believed that it should care for its citizens as a matter of duty, to the contemporary, far richer and more advanced New Zealand, where ensuring the people's well-being is just too darn expensive. And naturally none of this is allowed to interfere with the notion that by crossing this particular bridge the country has experienced anything but progress.

As it happens, some time last year I became the fortuitous but nonetheless proud owner of a precursor written in 1986, at the very time when this significant change of ideological course was being charted. I say fortuitous because there was never a time when you could buy or pick up this very lavishly produced book, which was intended as a gift for Chinese businessmen and government officers.


This puts the fantastically entitled This is New Zealand - Asian Edition in a particular sub-category of nation-promoting books, those specifically aimed at encouraging foreign investment and trade. This is a tricky and elaborate exercise that requires a certain amount of grovelling to go along with the requisite pride in the display of the nation's treasures to the chosen bidder. Hence the seemingly peculiar decision - given the overall politics of the book's authors and sponsors - to open with an appeal to the ambassadorship of Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who dedicated his life to the cause of Chinese communism. But do not be fooled: as the contribution of stockbroking firm Renouf Partners makes clear, the book is firmly aligned with the Douglas manifesto and its 'major restructuring of the economy'. In an especially welcome development, we are informed,

a growing financial sector is blossoming, helped by rapid and bold moves to free the economy from a mass of regulations and controls that had developed over the years. It has been said that the "New" is being put back into "Zealand". (p. 113)

(I couldn't find a lot of information about Renouf Partners, by the way, other than in this document by Chris Lee, that lists it among a number of firms that went belly up under Douglas' tenure as a result of having been 'perhaps honestly, but incompetently run'. It sounds like they might have put the "usual" back into "bankruptcy".)

For all the talk of restructuring and radical innovation, the book still boxes New Zealand in its traditional role of primary producer, declaring it from the outset 'a well stocked farm in the Pacific' (p. 17), capable of such feats as - in what is possibly my all-time favourite caption - 'integrating forestry and farming':


The image below of a refrigerated container full of fresh produce opening onto a pristine landscape encapsulates the idea of New Zealand that is being sold to the reader by a list of more or less predictable suspects: the Meat Board, Owens investments, National Bloodstock, Feltex, Wattie Industries, Tasman Forestry, the State Coal Mines and a number of companies servicing the primary sector - even the lone representative of the electronics industry, AWA, turns out to be involved in the production of fruit grading machinery.


One contributor stands out and may at first seem a little puzzling: the Justice Department. It appears that the export envisaged here is expertise on how to deliver a Western-style justice system, should China ever be interested. In the relevant section the reader is helpfully informed that

[o]ne of the dilemmas in any democracy is the tension between the desire to strengthen and extend government powers to provide and effective government, and the need to uphold and protect the rights and freedoms of the individual. (p. 125)

For all the condescension in this particular snippet, the book is deferential towards China and studiously avoids topics that may offend or complicate the picture of what the country has to offer. Therefore it skips directly from the 'ancient times' of Maori settlement to 'today's lifestyle', without so much as a mention of the arrival of the Europeans or the Treaty of Waitangi. It name checks the presence of Chinese immigrants from the second half of the eighteenth century, but glosses over the sorry race relations record that accompanied it. It even contributes to the time-honoured tradition of using Asian as a substitute for Chinese (no other nationality is mentioned). Its Maori content, including some stunning artwork, sets a picturesque scene, but is never placed within the easily domesticated concept of the Maori renaissance, let alone the harsher realities of persistent socio-economic differentials. Moreover, none of the businesses promoted through the book have an explicit Maori dimension, making the customary exploitation of iconography and lore that much more grating.

None of this, however, is altogether untypical. As I suggested above, these kinds of books are often more significant for what they leave out than for what they include. Lacking as they are in critical perspective, they cannot be regarded as documents of a nation's changing modes of self-examination, but rather of the ways in which myths and fictions of nationhood are constructed. Also, they generally have very pretty pictures.






This is New Zealand - Asian Edition. Wellington: Sheffield House, 1986.