The magazine for alumni and friends of Massey University.
Issue 14, April 2002

looking for the phoenix:
Excerpts from Emeritus Professor Bill Oliver’s autobiography.

Historian Professor Bill Oliver spent more than 20 years with Massey University before becoming General Editor of the acclaimed Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Here, with the kind permission of the author and publisher, MASSEY publishes extracts from Oliver’s autobiography, Looking for the Phoenix, published this year by Bridget Williams Books. RRP $39.95

Going to Massey at that time was a matter of contingency and chance, good luck and good timing. I was one of that numerous body of academics of the post-war generation who were able to climb the ladder more quickly than had been possible before or has been since. My good luck had held, and not just because I was able to make my run to the top in a sellers’ market; I could not have ended up in a better place for what I was discovering I wanted to do. At first I did not see it that way; I had never been in a job for more than five years and I expected that pattern to continue. Though I tried twice to leave before the 1960s were out, I was to stay at Massey for nearly 20 years. Literally, I grew old in the job.

Massey was a down-to-earth place, intimately involved in the economic and social life of New Zealand – some would say, as I did at the outset, too much involved for its own good. [Vice-Chancellor] Alan Stewart’s question –‘What is the use of it [history]?’ – was one I was never able to ignore in my Massey years. Nor was it one I was able to answer in any but an unconvincing way; in the end I realised that the value of the question lies in the absence of any final answer. There are many things we regularly do which we cannot account for in those terms; attempts at utilitarian answers only lead to the same question all over again. Massey, an institution dedicated to making two blades of grass grow where one grew before, was a splendid place in which to learn that history (and a host of things we cannot do without) has nothing at all to do with growing grass. The better question is ‘Why do we do history, in spite of its lack of utility?’ The only answer I have ever found is a bit circular – something like ‘Because people want to.’

The notion that universities should earn their keep by being useful was not altogether foreign to me. I could see, when I worked there, that engineering at Canterbury and law and commerce at Victoria were ways in which those institutions had set out to serve their communities. But many in the arts, all through the New Zealand university system, felt a certain disdain for such considerations. I remember the lofty contempt with which some of us at Canterbury greeted George Jobberns’s remark that his geography department existed as a service to school teachers. And, at Victoria, some of us rejoiced in the remark ascribed to Tommy Hunter, that it would be a sad day when the college was not at odds with the business community (the city worthies had been offended by some obscenity in a student Extravaganza). I am still inclined to question Jobberns and to applaud Hunter (if indeed he ever said it), but at Massey I learned that such an above-the-battle attitude was neither politically useful nor – of greater importance – socially responsible.

Inevitably, a university institution founded to bring science to agriculture, which took pride in its achievements in pasture management, dairy science and animal husbandry, which honoured William Riddett, Percy McMeekan and F. W. Dry, was one in which practical questions were always in the air. The two faculties with which I was associated, Humanities and Social Sciences, came into existence at the same time as the Veterinary School; not long before that Agriculture had given birth to Food Science and Biotechnology. The new Science Faculty gave pride of place to the biological sciences. On the fringes, the university paid attention to such items as wool, leather, poultry and pigs. Maybe it could be argued that the world was too much with us; but it could not be said that history and the arts did not feel a need to have their feet upon the ground. And though I was among those who, at first, did not care to admit it, that ground was the situation of students who were unable to attend a university.

Whatever we might have thought about the ultimate value of all those things we held closest to our hearts – the study of poetry, of Renaissance politics, of British colonial policy, of logical positivism, or of religious certainty – we had to accept the fact that our function was to look after extramural students. There would have been no arts teaching had not students who were exempted from lectures been handed over, first to Palmerston North University College, the short-lived branch of Victoria University, and thence to Massey. The needs of school teachers for further qualifications, of housewives in suburbs and small towns for some exercise of the mind, and of people all over the country for a new start, provided a sufficient justification for our existence. Meeting their needs might not have been a complete answer to the question of utility, but that, really, was their affair. If they found our courses valuable, it was our job to teach them. This was the beginning, too, of my own awareness that the study of history, for one reason or another, was seriously pursued by a great number of people out there in the cities, the suburbs, the small centres and the countryside.

Odd as it must seem, now that a small army of tertiary providers has joined in the scramble for distance education, extramural study was then viewed with suspicion. When in the 1960s and 1970s I visited other universities, I met an attitude of amused contempt and tolerant compassion because of my involvement in such a low form of education. Things have indeed changed; the need to get out there and bring in business is now acknowledged by most universities and a host of other agencies; Massey was simply first. But I saw little of this at the time; I was among the many who argued that ‘true’ university teaching was face to face (even if several hundred learning faces confronted one teaching face) and that the diluting effect of postal tuition should never be allowed to spread across an entire degree. I adhered to these principles in history teaching until near the end of my time at Massey; in spite of the later opening of the floodgates – maybe just because of that – I still believe that there is something to be said for caution in these matters.

In my first year, I was given an opportunity to fly my conservative flag. The Catholic chaplain, Fr Godfrey, sought to make the Catholic presence felt by holding an academic ‘red mass’ in St Patrick’s church, with elaborate ceremony and an archbishop. A sizeable number of university staff turned out in their regalia and, after the archbishop had dismayed his audience by preaching for the best part of an hour, repaired to the church hall for a fine supper. There, as if the audience had not been sufficiently exercised, I was to give an address. I enlarged upon the dangers of extramural study and urged Massey not to imperil university education and its own reputation by going overboard. The Vice-Chancellor was not pleased; I was summoned to his office and asked (politely and yet a little ominously) if I proposed to give the same speech to a Rotary Club I was addressing that week. I said that I was not – which was true. No more was said; I was left reflecting that at least you knew where you were with Alan Stewart, and that where I should be was not a position likely to jeopardise the development of history at Massey.

It was not easy to persist with the view that extramural teaching was bound to be second-rate. Vacation courses at Massey, I soon found, were among the most satisfying teaching experiences I had ever had. These students, no longer young and usually with family and community responsibilities, were not in a mood to waste time or money. I finished one long weekend packed with lectures and tutorials, sitting exhausted on a high stool after the closing session, shaking hands with the departing students; they thanked me and I felt I should be thanking them. One elderly woman enrolled to support her daughter who was seriously lacking in self-confidence. The daughter managed a pass, but her mother turned out to be a straight A student. When she finished her BA, I urged her to enrol in the honours course. No, she said, she would not do that; she wanted to catch up on the many books in her undergraduate courses that she had not had time to read. Not at all second-best and very far from second-rate.

We ran classes in other centres, usually in university premises. At the University of Waikato (which had decided not to cater for part-time students in its early years), we drew more local students than there were in the university’s equivalent courses. Once in Auckland, looking down at Wynyard Street from the balcony of the history department building, I watched a stream of well-to-do-women turn up for my class in expensive cars. No, they told me, they would not prefer to be internal students; the library was useless and one lecture took three hours, what with driving and looking for a park, if you were lucky enough to find one. They were good students, mature and self-motivated, influential in their neighbourhoods and a PR asset to any university which gave them an honest dollar’s worth. After a few years the other universities, with shaky enrolments and enfeebled finances, began to court them. Eventually, when I visited other universities, I found myself discussing their plans for distance education.

At Massey the numbers of internal and external students steadily increased and with them staff numbers; in these liberally financed years more students meant more staff. The history department became large enough to teach a reasonably wide curriculum. It was designed around the twin themes of environment and inheritance. Students could concentrate on either European (including English) history or New Zealand and the Pacific; because there was no ‘canon’ and no restriction on choice, they could (and many did) opt for a mix of the two streams. We were looking for an area of specialisation which would give the department a distinctive character, and found it in the history of the Pacific Islands. No New Zealand university was offering more than an isolated paper in that field – a curious gap, considering how closely the country had been related to these islands since the nineteenth century. We recruited staff from Jim Davidson’s Pacific history school at the Australian National University and developed a sequence of papers which extended from the first year to postgraduate level.

By the early 1970s there were enough students to justify an honours degree. Research for the degree was, for the most part, steered towards relatively neglected aspects of New Zealand history, especially the period which had come to fascinate me, the Liberal era. There was some groundbreaking research in labour, agriculture, welfare and women’s history (by students who are today senior academics, Peter Gibbons, Tom Brooking, Charlotte Macdonald and Margaret Tennant among them) and some useful studies in the history of Woodville, Pahiatua, Feilding, Palmerston North and Hawke’s Bay. Students were encouraged to follow their own interests. One was a keen rugby player, who often turned up for Monday classes patched with sticking plaster; his eyes brightened at the suggestion that he might like to investigate the social structure of rugby in the Manawatu. Another, a huge and slightly forbidding man commonly dressed in singlet, torn-off jeans and jandals, found his research into social stratification in Feilding impeded by the refusal of the Rangitikei Club even to let him in the door, let alone use their records. How, I enquired, was he dressed when he showed up at the club? His next request was more successful.

When in 1969 the University of Otago invited me to deliver the Hocken Lecture (published two years later as Towards a New History?), I used the occasion to argue for an historical perspective which went beyond the ‘four main centres’ to take in the country’s regions and localities. It would, I said, lead to a ‘new’ New Zealand history. I am glad that I added a query to the title, for the continuing growth of regional and local histories has not led to any such revision. New Zealand regions have not differed all that widely from each other and the distinctive characteristics of their initial European settlement have diminished over time. The inclusion of the regions in a general story is a matter of simple historical justice – in some respects like giving a rightful place to the histories of Mäori, women, ethnic minorities and children. In some respects, but not all – for a fuller investigation of the past as experienced by both Mäori and women alters the nature of the wider history. It was for such reasons that I put into place a broad programme for selection (and research) in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, to the alarm of some elitists.

A proposal from the rather grandly entitled East Coast Development Research Association soon gave me the chance to practise what I preached. I accepted their invitation to write a history of the region for the bicentenary of Cook’s arrival in Poverty Bay in 1769. I was not so innocent that I neglected to insert in the agreement a provision which required me only to consider, and not necessarily to heed, any representations the association might make about the text of the book. This turned out to be a wise, though not quite an adequate, precaution; I learned that authors of sponsored books should never relax their vigilance.

The association was intent upon promoting the region in every possible way, political, economic and ideological. The history was to serve this purpose by establishing the East Coast as a place with a distinctive character and history. I had no problem with that part of my brief. The association had already sponsored a land use survey – a substantial publication which described the current character and use of land in order to provide a basis for improving efficiency in the future. This was part of a campaign to convert to exotic forestry all the back country inland what became the notorious ‘blue line’ – notorious because a good deal of that land was in Mäori ownership and the association was not much inclined to consultation. Another ill-founded plan was to set up a factory to produce cigarette filters from maize; the local MP, Esme Tombleson, was especially enamoured of this proposal. No one, as far as I can recall, thought of grapes, the one crop that flourished as all the others fell away.

This background helps to identify the context in which sponsored history may and usually does go on, even if in less obvious ways. The mayor of Feilding later on approached me to discuss a history of that town: we have, he said, nothing to give visitors except a teaspoon. Boosterism was endemic in colonial towns and remains one of the most persistent colonial survivals. In the course of my East Coast researches I came across a newspaper report in which the writer, surveying the handful of masts in Gisborne’s perpetually troublesome harbour, reflected on a future in which it should have become the Liverpool of the Pacific. But there was also a good deal of redeeming humour – the story of a horse-drawn coach which disappeared into a pothole on the road south and did not emerge for several days – and some strong doses of backblocks realism. I found myself on the side of the realists and this, in the end, did not make me many friends in the region.

I set about writing a history of settlement and race relations, as we then called it, and one which excluded the centuries before colonisation. I have not yet quite abandoned the attitude I then effortlessly assumed, that prehistory is all very well in its way but real history begins with documents. This may be because my own prehistory is on the other side of the world; I had certainly scrambled around ancient remains in Cornwall with a strong feeling of belonging. There was, however, plenty of taha Mäori in the book. Through the excellent research of my assistant, Jane Thomson, the story of Mäori enterprise and initiative emerged as a central theme in the early part of the history, a pattern I was able to recognise more fully when Ann Parsonson wrote her chapter ‘The Pursuit of Mana’ for the Oxford History of New Zealand. And it was soon borne in upon me that if the East Coast had produced one great man in the settlement period, it was either Te Kooti Arikirangi or Rapata Wahawaha. Today I would not be sure which to choose, but then I was on the side of Te Kooti.

This enthusiasm served me well years later when I addressed the New Zealand Mäori Council on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. How, one suspicious questioner asked me, would I deal with such a figure as Te Kooti? I was able to reply that I had already had a shot and was glad when another council member said ‘And a good one too.’ But the Pakeha mandarins of the East Coast were another matter. I had realised that they did not have much to do with Mäori after my requests to meet Henry Ngata came to nothing. In the end I walked into his Gisborne office, introduced myself and was politely received. We had a useful discussion, as I did with the Ngati Porou historian, Rongo Halbert, on his sickbed but full of authority and presence.

None of this prepared me for a party at which I was plied with whisky (for which my tolerance had by that time become considerable) and told: ‘We must set you right, Bill, on Mäori land.’ What my hosts meant was that Mäori land had been left to go to rack and ruin and should be taken away for forestry. Ironically, the association’s own land use survey enabled me to compare a map of land ownership with one of land utilisation. The conclusion was clear – both Mäori and Pakeha land had deteriorated under unfavourable conditions of terrain and location. When I received proofs of the book from the Gisborne Herald I found that a sentence saying that Mäori land and deteriorated land did not coincide had been transformed by the deletion of the word ‘not’. I put it back; it stayed there.

After three years at Massey I decided that I had to get away from the daily round of teaching, committees and agenda papers. In 1967 1 took a few months’ leave in Oxford, and left my family behind; Dorothy was pregnant and understandably resentful. (I did return in time for the birth of Elizabeth Mary, but with little to spare.) I had a research topic ready to go; in the 1950s I had been intrigued by Robert Owen’s references to his mission as a kind of Second Coming and by the mood of millennialist expectancy in the trade unions and co-operatives. I proposed to look at the occurrence of such quasi-theological ways of thought in political and social movements that we would normally regard as secular. But Gisborne and New Zealand were still close to hand; I kept being reminded that Te Kooti and the Mäori prophetic movements would have been recognisable, perhaps with some bemusement, by the English millennialists of the early nineteenth century.

By the mid 1960s Vietnam had become a burning issue in New Zealand as the country drifted into a commitment to join the United States in supporting the South Vietnam regime. My participation was limited to a ‘mobilisation’ demonstration on the streets of Palmerston North (in a manner typical of the inhabitants of a provincial city we told each other that, per capita, it was the largest in the country) and to speaking at ‘teach-ins’ at Auckland and Victoria universities, with Keith Sinclair and Robert Chapman. These were exhilarating occasions; the government sent Leslie Monro to one and Keith Holyoake to the other, and the opposition the venerable Walter Nash to both (he was greeted with standing ovations). I did not get along too well with the more obsessed protesters; I recall that veteran, Don Swan, reacting with great hostility to my opinion that Keith Holyoake was not actually an evil man. The very sight of Holyoake, he said, made him physically sick. I turned my teach-in speech into an essay for Landfall on ‘Moralism and Foreign Policy’. Foreign policy should be an expression of national interest, I argued; Americans were not pursuing their interests but rather undertaking a pernicious moralistic crusade; we were defeating our own interests by joining it. Walter Nash told me that he agreed with this analysis, and (inconsistently?) that he had always been a moralist himself.

Being in a university and in a position to make a few things happen was an exhilarating experience. There was money for growth and so the satisfaction of planning for growth. New staff were regularly appointed to the history department from England, America, Canada and Australia as well as New Zealand. Some stayed, some did not: this was still a sellers’ market. But the successes were many – Alison Hanham in medieval history, Barrie Macdonald

and Kerry Howe in Pacific history, Basil Poff in Indian history, Robin Gwynn in early modern history, Peter Lineham in modern English history, Margaret Tennant in New Zealand history – all added to the original foundation so capably laid down by John Owens and Warwick Tyler. I looked up and down the country and knew that as long as I was in a New Zealand university there was nowhere I would sooner be.

Massey University was still in the process of coming together. But whatever the problems as the old and the new, the sciences and the arts, the apparently pure and the patently applied settled down, research was an activity through which people could meet in mutual respect. The history department established itself in research and publication, and earned the respect of the university itself and of other history departments. Books, journal articles, conference papers and theses came in a steady flow. Massey was closer to the Wellington libraries and archives than any university other than Victoria; we cleared, as much as we could, Friday afternoons and Monday mornings to allow long weekends in the capital.

My part in this was small, limited to a handful of essays and papers in social welfare history. Even with delegation, an unavoidable number of administrative chores were in my care. They were onerous but, in an age in which staff assessment and student evaluation were hardly known, in which staff promotion was a reasonable expectation, in which a decent economy in the use of resources was sufficient accountability and, in a word, in which victories of the managerial ethos were in the future and administrators were still led by academics, their burden was bearable. Moreover, such duties could be believed in as a truly academic activity.

I count the administrative effort I made in these years to have been as valid as teaching, research and publication. Would senior university staff so cheerfully say that today? In the event, I left university work in 1983; I think I got out just in time, before the Indian summer ended.