Anna Green and Megan Hutching (editors)
Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2024, NZ$45 (£20.49), paperback.
As a small country, for many years Aotearoa New Zealand has punched above its weight in oral history. Since 1986 its National Oral History Association (NOHANZ) has supported a flourishing community of oral historians, aided by a 1990 sesquicentennial gift of one million dollars from the Australian government that funds several oral history projects every year. In this anthology of new writing from New Zealand, co-editor Anna Green describes ‘five principal streams in contemporary New Zealand oral history’ (p15): Māori oral history, community oral history, commissioned oral history, activist oral history and academic oral history. The anthology includes representative work from each stream, written by established and emerging oral historians. It highlights how oral histories contribute to historical understanding in three main ways: illuminating aspects of the past that are harder to reach through written sources; challenging or reframing prevalent historical perspectives; and revealing ‘the continuing connections between past and present in human thought and practice’ (p8).
For the Indigenous Māori, and indeed for the large population of Pacific Islanders who have migrated to New Zealand, oral history has long been a foundational element of family and community life. As Megan Pōtiki explains in an introductory essay about ‘What is oral history?’, ‘through lived experience, I understand that Māori oral history is the simple transmission of experience and knowledge from one generation to another’ (p10), passed on through story, song, art, dance and genealogical recitation. Perhaps because of the significance of Māori in New Zealand cultural and political life, national guides to recording oral history have an inclusive definition of oral history that comprises interviews with people talking about their own personal experience and ‘ngā kōrero tuku iho – stories passed down by the ancestors’ (https://nzhistory.govt.nz/hands/a-guide-to-recording-oral-history). Pōtiki describes the vital importance of oral transmission of culture within her own Otago Peninsula Māori community, her respect for the authority of kaumātua with a deep knowledge of language culture and history, but also the importance of a ‘critical eye’ and not simply taking ‘a story of narrative as the truth’ (p13) – whether the narrator is talking about their own life or transmitting stories from earlier generations. The Indigenous emphasise on the importance of oral histories transmitted across generations has perhaps influenced a significant strand of interest in New Zealand Pākehā family memory, represented in this anthology by Anna Green’s thoughtful reflections on her oral history project about settler descendants and their family memories.
Two other chapters highlight the use and significance of oral history in contemporary Indigenous Aotearoa New Zealand. Margaret Kawharu explains how her own North Island iwi (tribe or kinship group) contributed both individual and collective oral histories to a Waitangi Tribunal claim for recognition and reparation for dispossession and injustice caused by Pākehā (non- Māori) settlers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Importantly, the Tribunal held hearings at the marae (communal sacred places), respected iwi protocols and, at least in part, set oral histories alongside written records in the determination of a legal settlement. For Margaret’s iwi, the claim process was arduous but also cathartic, and it produced new social memories that she hopes might be transformative for both Māori and Pākehā. In a chapter about the 1970s forced removal of Pacific Islanders who over-stayed visas, and about the Polynesian Panthers that resisted ‘Dawn Raids’ by government officials, Helena Cook shows how activists in the 1970s, and oral histories fifty years later, challenge oppressive government policy and combat the shame internalised by so-called ‘illegal’ migrants.
Several chapters highlight the value of recorded life stories for the history of domestic life and family relations, especially for people who have not recorded family life in writing, whose writing steers clear of family difficulties or the humdrum experiences of everyday life, or for whom official records tell a partial story. Natalie Looyer shows how memories of the home of a much-loved woman academic, and of the domestic objects she collected and created, triggered stories about the occupants and their personalities, relationships and behaviour. Dean Broughton draws on a rich interview with Susan, who was adopted in 1961 and describes how as an adult she found her biological parents and the complicated feelings aroused for them and in herself. Like several of the authors in this anthology Broughton explains that ‘oral history interviews bring a subjective reality that is sometimes absent from written sources’ (p159). That may be so in some types of written sources, such as the conventional family memoir, but neglects the rich subjective experience often recounted in letters and diaries. Rather than simply arguing that oral histories are a better source for histories of subjectivity, it’s more helpful to recognise the distinctive opportunities and challenges offered by different types of life story sources, whether oral or written. In one of my favourite chapters, Helen Frizzell and Pip Oldham compare written sources such as memoirs, obituaries and elegies – that emphasise public life and men’s work – with an oral history interview in which an elderly country woman – supported by a curious and respectful interviewer – illuminates domestic life and family relations. The interview, and Frizzell and Oldham’s analysis, ‘is a working example of social expectations around gender roles and, usefully, a vivid insight into the emotional life of a woman fulfilling a gendered role in a rural setting in the 1950s’ (p138).
A common feature of many of the chapters in this anthology is the argument that oral history interviews reveal ‘hidden histories’ that are unavailable in other sources and missing from national histories. Robyn Andrews’ interviews capture the life stories of Anglo-Indian migrants and show the shift in New Zealand cultural norms from stigmatisation of ethnic and racial difference to celebration of multicultural diversity. Cheryl Ware uses examples from her interviews with sex workers to examine how ideas and practices about sexual consent have changed in recent years. Elizabeth Ward’s oral histories with former residents of children’s care institutions illuminate aspects of their experience which are glossed over in official records, such as the child’s sensory experience of the institution, relationships between children and corporal punishment. Deborah Dunsford uses oral histories about the early-twentieth century origins of a settler farming community near Auckland to illuminate ‘the reality of orchard life behind the company’s marketing puff’ (p176): hard work by all the family; difficult decision-making in hard times; successful local leadership; stress and nervous breakdown (there is, however, nothing in the chapter to acknowledge earlier Māori landowners, or the destruction of the existing landscape, which is recalled as bare, wet land with ‘scrubby stuff’ (p175) that needs to be cleared for orchards).
More than simply offering up ‘hidden histories’, several of the most insightful chapters explain how oral history can be used to challenge historical assumptions and social memory. Jane Moodie’s analysis of interviews with elderly members of her own New Zealand Pākehā rural gentry family challenges the country’s egalitarian mythology by detailing how economic, cultural and social capital made for very different and unequal historical experience, and by illustrating the complex entanglement of class and race. Megan Hutching explores how an interview with New Zealand World War II veteran Bill Flint, who was captured and imprisoned by, and escaped from, the German army in Greece – complicates celebratory public war memory. Bill’s account details the ordinary, humdrum elements of military service, but also how he lived with the stigma of surrender and made a positive sense of his wartime imprisonment through storytelling about escape. Hutching draws insightfully from narrative theory to explain the ’picaresque pattern’ of Bill’s narrative, in which the ‘rogue hero’ encounters a hostile world and becomes ‘a master of his destiny’. As Hutching concludes, oral history is not just a source of information about the past but can also illuminate how people make sense of past events, negotiate public narratives and create a story they can live with.
