The Kete Questionnaire: Bain Attwood
Author:
Bain Attwood
Publisher:
Auckland University Press
ISBN:
9781869409821
Date published:
11 May 2023
Pages:
320
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$59.99
All books bought via this link help us to review more books from Aotearoa — thank you for supporting local books and authors
Bain Attwood, a professor of history at Melbourne’s Monash University, has recently published A Bloody Difficult Subject: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History. It brings to light research by historian Ruth Ross and considers how and why the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand law, politics, society and culture has been transformed in the last seven decades.
Here, Attwood answers questions about the process of researching and writing A Bloody Difficult Subject.
In your recent Sinclair lecture, you posed the question who was Ruth Ross and why is her name barely known in New Zealand? So, let’s start there – who was Ruth Ross and why haven’t we heard more about her?
Ruth Ross was a historian who was born in 1920 and who passed away, aged only 62, in 1982. Few now remember her, probably because she was something unusual — as a woman and a scholar who worked outside of any major institution such as a university — and she didn’t like to blow her own trumpet.
How did you first come across Ruth Ross – and what lead you to think she, and her work, was a subject worth studying and then writing about?
Many years ago I read a journal article she published in the New Zealand Journal of History, which came to have enormous influence on the way in which New Zealanders, both Māori and Pākehā, now understand te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Treaty of Waitangi. I was puzzled why this was the case and with the 50th anniversary of the publication coming up I thought it would be an appropriate moment to look at her article. I was alerted to the papers she left by another historian, Rachael Bell.
Tell me about the process of writing A Bloody Difficult Subject. Was it always going to be a book or did you start out, perhaps, with a journal article in mind before discovering there was a (whole lot) more to it?
In the first instance I was just thinking about writing a journal article but after looking at some of Ruth’s wonderfully rich papers and thinking more about her work on te Tiriti I realised there was a book in it and that I wanted to write it. I was drawn by several things, not the least of which was the fact that she was a woman of my mother’s generation — they were born six years apart.
What research did you have to do?
There was an enormous amount of research to do, partly because the book I eventually decided to write had several components to it, partly because Ross’s own papers are voluminous. And since I only decided to write a book after the COVID-19 pandemic had started and so was unable to travel from Australia to New Zealand, I was unable to do most of the research required myself. Fortunately, my brother came to the rescue.
You’ve lived and worked in Australia for a number of decades, how do you think this has impacted on your view of race relations in New Zealand and, more specifically, te Tiriti o Waitangi?
At the very least, the fact that I have lived and worked in Australia and elsewhere since 1981 means two things: I think I bring a somewhat more distanced and objective view to te Tiriti than most of the scholars who have researched and written about it in recent decades; and I adopt a comparative approach which I think enables me to provide a rather different perspective on te Tiriti, its importance and the cause and consequences of that for New Zealand.
The other part of the title of your book is, of course, the making of history which also ties in with this quote:
‘Bain Attwood’s provocative study of three “bloody difficult subjects” — Ruth Ross, te Tiriti, and history — deftly weaves biography with intellectual and political history. Emphasising the importance of women’s intellectual life in historical inquiry in New Zealand, Attwood offers critical insights on the private, emotional forces shaping history-writing as well as synthesising key debates about the meaning and effects of the Treaty. This book is essential reading for students of New Zealand history and for those who want to understand the origins of today’s debates about governance and the shape of the state.’ — Miranda Johnson, University of Otago
I’ve highlighted the words critical insights on the private, emotional forces shaping history-writing because, I wonder, whether you believe the private, emotional forces shaping history writing are something that gets neglected?
For a long time now I have had an interest in psychoanalysis and I have come to the view that a historian cannot really make sense of the past unless they consider the emotional forces that shape what human beings do. Many historians are either reluctant to acknowledge the role of these forces, do not have the intellectual tools to make sense of them or lack the historical sources that shed light on them.
Bain Attwood
In what ways, then, is your book a study into the discipline of history – and do we pay enough attention to the ‘how, why, when and in what circumstances’ it is written?
My book is very much about the way history is written, and not only in the cloistered world of the university but outside of it. It’s also about the conflicts and controversies that occur when history is written by various kinds of people and in different ways and forms.
You also mention the amount of time Ross spent in the archives, going back to source documents. What was unusual about that?
For her generation of historians, the amount of research she did in the archives wasn’t that unusual. But the fact that she was interested in the Māori language version or text of the Treaty — te Tiriti — and that she approached the Treaty in this way was unusual, and what was even more unusual was the fact that she did this in the early to mid-1950s.
Why do you think her findings were, initially, so summarily dismissed – and what does it tell us about the writing of New Zealand history in terms of the impact of things like, for example, sexism?
I am not altogether sure why her work was dismissed in the mid-1950s but I think three things were probably at work: she was challenging the conventional view of the Treaty as New Zealand’s Magna Carta and so this was unsettling; she was focusing on its texts more than the context in which it was made, and on the Māori text more than the English text, and both approaches were unusual; and she was working outside the university. But she was also very outspoken and as she was a woman this seems to have made many, not only men, uncomfortable.
Why has historical knowledge about te Tiriti / the Treaty changed so dramatically in New Zealand in the last 50 or more years?
There are probably many answers to that question but I think the main ones are these: as the present changes, so too does the way we understand the past and our need for particular kinds of stories about it; more especially, there has been a rise or return of Māori power and authority and the law has become the dominant idiom or discourse in interpreting te Tiriti/the Treaty.
Lastly, what do you think Ruth Ross would make of it all so many years on?
I think she would be astounded that her 1972 journal article has had so much influence and that it has been read in ways that she could never have anticipated as they have been contrary to her intentions and conscious purpose in writing it.
She would be delighted to see Māori perspectives of the Treaty and New Zealand history more generally coming to the fore.
She would have been puzzled by changes in the legal interpretation of the te Tiriti/the Treaty and even more by the influence they have had, especially among historians.
She would probably have been ambivalent about the attention my book gives to her and her work, but she would endorse my view that the Treaty is ‘a bloody difficult subject’ as she once said.
