Author(s): Judith Binney (ed.)

NZ Non Fiction

The writing of new history will only flourish if there is a vehicle for its publication: with this vision, Sir Keith Sinclair founded The New Zealand Journal of History in 1967. For the next 30 years the writing of New Zealand history flowed over many intellectual landscapes, recorded here in a remarkable selection of essays by some of the country's leading historians.

Recent decades have focused on the position of Maori in New Zealand, and here Tipene O'Regan, R.M.Ross, Alan Ward and Vincent O'Malley explore the construction of history within a political purpose: the changing impact of the Treaty of Waitangi. Judith Binney looks at Maori oral narratives, and Angela Ballara at Maori language sources. The role of evidence forms a part of these essays, alongside an assessment of purpose. Essays by Claudia Orange and J.G.A. Pocock reveal yet other aspects of 'encountering Maori histories'.

The 1970s, a time of social upheaval, led to many questions about the role of women (explored by Raewyn Daiziel, Barbara Brookes and Dean Wilson) and the nature of New Zealand society. Miles Fairburn's iconoclastic analysis of nineteenth-century New Zealand is challenged by writers such as Caroline Daley and Duncan Mackay. These essays argue their case, but tell a good story as well. Alongside Mackay's portrait of the lives of the kauri bushmen is R.C.J. Stone's eloquent essay on Auckland lawyers of the nineteenth century. Essays by Tom Brooking, James Holt, PS. O'Connor and Ann Trotter review political management and international relations.

In conclusion, Eric Olssen, Jock Phillips and James Belich pose questions about the missing pieces of history, as well as the myths we have constructed.

These challenges uphold Keith Sinclair's founding insight: that, without the research, without asking the questions, without the ability to sift evidence and to find the out-of-the-way sources, there would be no shifting of perceptions, no new understandings, only a perception of the commonplace and a recycling of 'received' versions.

The New Zealand Journal of History exists to enable historical writers to break old moulds - a path traced vigorously in The Shaping of History.