Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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retelling the story of The Navigator”. 818 Ward is convinced that, in terms of a New
Zealand national identity, all Pakeha New Zealanders
have as much claim to the medieval as the English do, or the French or anyone
else. In terms of the majority of Pakehas living in this country, our relationship
is as direct as is an Englishman’s. We may not have the same buildings here,
but we are directly descended. And so therefore we have as much claim on that
culture, which is inherent in our culture anyway, as anybody else does […].
There is no such thing as pure culture. And New Zealand is just the same […].
Some people assume that Pakeha culture is not a rich thing. This simply isn’t
true. Although colonial cultures have similarities, each one brought different
things with them. They’re fed from different roots which they combine with the
fresh influences of their new country and its people. 819
This is a sophisticated sense of culture, different from a nationalist rejection of Englishness
or a post-colonial suspicion of settler culture. Part of the idea of the film was “to
take our distant ancestors and have them discover their descendants, to question what
they would make of us, not knowing where they had arrived”. 820 This conception has a
strong resonance for Pakeha New Zealanders at a time when Maori critics see their
culture as lacking in richness in comparison with that of the tangata whenua. A
reviewer in The Bulletin, the Australian weekly, made the perceptive comment:
Not even the bundle of honours which the film carried off at the AFI awards can
disguise its essentially New Zealand character. Ward comes from a family
which has been farming in New Zealand for four generations and it shows. His
feeling for bleak snowy landscapes, his choice of a theme bound up in medieval
British history and a sensibility which sets out to unite the visual and the literary
combine to give The Navigator a very un-Australian texture. 821
If one were wanting to stress the “New Zealand character” of the film – complex but
full of familiar associations - one might also relate it to the curious strain in Pakeha art
that has seen New Zealand’s pioneer situation as medieval, so that artists such as Colin
818
Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 84.
819
Ward quoted in Campbell and Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the
Navigator," 11.
820
Campbell and Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the Navigator," 10.
821
Quoted in Zwartz, "Vincent: The Odyssey," 13.