Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 by Jane Stafford, Mark Williams (review)

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91 REVIEWS (BOOKS) number of passengers and crew, while Samuel Plimsoll’s campaign to stop overloading was only secured in the Merchant ShippingAct of 1875, the same year as the Cospatrick story made the new year headlines. Clark’s research has left no stone unturned, much detail being presented in six full appendices — which makes the absence of a bibliography and rather idiosyncratic referencing more to be regretted. The two authors negate each other in key areas of their arguments. Where Clark is happy to confirm the contemporary condemnation of the Cospatrick (and all of ‘Vogel’) migrants as ‘mere off-scourings of the towns’ (p.56), Hastings accepts the revised view that these were skilled and quality people. But he accounts for the Cospatrick’s fire in the old orthodoxy (the contemporary inquiry); terms Clark rejects. In both books the richness of contemporary illustration, story, verse, song, sketch, drama and engraving testifies to the impressive hold the sea voyage had over contemporary individual and collective imaginations. Cabin passenger Mary Dobie’s sketches made on the May Queen in 1877, included in Mountains of the Sea, are splendid. The sea voyage in all its diversions and tribulations is clearly a topic ripe for further exploration in late Victorian culture as they remain solely in the realm of the illustrative here. A view from the sea is always valuable to an island history and both these books tell a good story, one worthy of ‘old’ and ‘new’ salts. CHARLOTTE MACDONALD Victoria University of Wellington Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914. By Jane Stafford and Mark Williams. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2006. 350 pp. NZ price: 39.95. ISBN 0-86473522 -7. NEW ZEALAND LITERARY CRITICS HAVE LONG LABOURED under the weight of the masculinist tradition of cultural nationalism instigated by the ‘reality gang’composed of A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Monte Holcroft, Keith Sinclair et al. It is a weight which even feminist and postmodern critics have failed to truly shift, despite a range of strategies. Too many commentators are still comfortable with the suggestion that New Zealand literature only really began during the economic depression of the 1930s, when our (mostly male) writers began to suffer enough to produce art worthy of comparison with the outside world. Here, it is suggested, our literature finally developed to a stage broadly comparable with our rugby. In Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914, Jane Stafford and Mark Williams present what must surely be one of the most stimulating and intellectually satisfying contributions to our literary history in the past two decades precisely because they succeed in undermining this myth of origins, using a brand of writing that makes the work as useful for cultural historians as it undoubtedly will be for literary critics. While it is difficult to tell whether the displacement of the cultural nationalist narrative of our literary history was the ultimate raison d’être of the book (it is clear that the authors are motivated by a variety of purposes), there should be no doubt that Stafford and Williams have hit on its most fundamental weakness: an insufficiently historical attention to the writing of late colonial New Zealand which has led to anachronistic judgements based on personal antipathy and, in some cases, outright prejudice. On more than one occasion the authors point to an inability of literary critics to move beyond simplistic denunciations of Maoriland writing, the convincing implication being that they have found the way — through a blend of cultural criticism and historicism — around this literary–historical impasse. The book signals a recognition that the Victorian era in New Zealand literature demands serious attention and that we need to start viewing the poems 92 and stories of this era as ‘literary artefacts’rather than evidence of a literary pre-history. The effect of this attitude is laudatory to anyone raised on the myth of cultural nationalist origins. By focussing on the various historical contexts of the texts (biographical, cultural, imperial) the authors reinstall late colonial writing to a respectable position within our literary canon, and simultaneously offer it as both the beginning of a local literary tradition and a rich store of evidence for the first stirrings...