General copyright and disclaimer - ResearchSpace@Auckland ...

positives and potentials, both real and imagined. 26 The result was a vision centred around the
themes of ‘progress’, ‘paradise’ and ‘Britishness’. 27 In order for this ‘progressive British
paradise’ to be realised, it had to be written in advance by the propagandist literature of Edward
Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company, which was to all intents and purposes the official
authority on land sales and colonisation during the late 1830s and 1840s. 28 This ‘paradise’ motif
can be divided into the two basic images of ‘Utopia’ and ‘Arcadia’:
Utopia emphasised collective action, civilised refinement and the godly city or benign state. In
élitist versions, its ideal inhabitants were virtuous community leaders, Platonic Guardians; in more
egalitarian versions they were public-spirited good citizens. Arcadia emphasised natural
abundance, individual virtue and the rural life. Its ideal inhabitant was the sturdy yeoman, living
self-sufficiently and independently with his family on his own farm. 29
What New Zealand promised in its literature was a British ‘Arcadia’, an archetypal society based
on the idealised vision of rural England, which drew on the inverse of contemporary societal and
philosophical issues from the Old World and followed the conventions of the centuries-old
imagined representations of the New World and the ‘earthly Pacific paradise’. 30 It is this
conventional image of Arcadia which formed the basis of the rhetoric for the colonisation of New
Zealand in the nineteenth century, as the prevailing image fostered by Wakefield’s scheme of
‘systematic colonisation’ essentially continued as a self-perpetuating phenomenon right through
the end of the colonising era in the 1880s 31 after the influential tenure of the colonial politician
Julius Vogel. 32
26 Even letters and pictures sent to loved ones from recent New Zealand immigrants during the pioneering era were
often selective in their content and ‘touched up’ respectively to present by and large only positive images of their
experiences (Jeanine Graham, “The Pioneers (1840-70)”, in: The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand. 2 nd Ed.
Ed. Keith Sinclair. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1996, 49-74; cf. Judith A. Johnston, “Information and
Emigration: The Image Making Process”, in: New Zealand Geographer 33:2 Oct (1977): 60-67).
27 Belich, Making Peoples, 287.
28 See Patricia Burns, Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. Ed. Henry Richardson. Auckland:
Reed, 1989; Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002;
Miles Fairburn, “Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 1796 – 1862: Political theorist, colonial promoter, politician”, in: DNZB
1, 572-75.
29 Belich, Making Peoples, 293.
30 See, for example, Howe, Nature, Culture, and History, 6-14; Küchler Williams, Erotische Paradiese, 81-89; J. C.
Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981, 12-40, esp. 22-26.
31 See, for example, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Ward, The British Colonization of New Zealand; being an
account of the principles, objects, and plans of the New Zealand Association; together with particulars concerning
the position, extent, soil and climate, natural productions, and native inhabitants of New Zealand [1837]. Facsim. Ed.
Christchurch: Kiwi Publishers, 2000, 43-51, 75-79, 302-37; John Ward, Information Relative to New-Zealand,
Compiled for the Use of Colonists [2 nd Ed. 1840]. Facsim. Ed. Christchurch: Capper, 1975, 1-60; Edward Jerningham
Wakefield, The Hand-Book for New Zealand: Consisting of the most recent information, compiled for the use of
intending colonists by a late magistrate of the colony, who resided there during four years [1848]. Facsim. Ed.
16