Going Native: How the New Zealand Settler Became Indigenous

In his 1989 work, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures? Terry Goldie describes the dilemma of the Canadian setder:The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?2How the setder solves this conundrum, Goldie argues, is by replacing the Indian-or Aborigine, or Maori-and becoming himself indigenous by the appropriation of die characteristics of the indigene. Goldie writes,Through the indigene the white character gains soul and the potential to become of the land. A quite appropriate pun is that it is only by going native that the European arrivant can become native.3This process involves two mechanisms: firstly, the incorporation of indigenous subject-matter-mythology, history, custom, literary forms-in settler narratives. The indigene is fashioned as a subject for artistic expression at the very moment when he is being separated off from the modern and excluded from the modern nation, relegated to what Anne McClintock calls 'anachronistic space'4. The settler owns the stories of the indigene, because the indigene is figured as no longer present to contest ownership. Secondly, settler narratives depict the settler, in the now empty and available landscape, as taking on the characteristics of the (now absent) indigene. These characteristics constitute a validation of settler possession and indigenous dispossession.In this paper I want to read, and to an extent modify, this theoretical model against the 1910 New Zealand novel The Heart of the Bush by Edith Searle Grossmann.The Heart of the Bush is a romance, that most conservative genre, the favorite genre of colonial writers, in the way it allows the difficulties of settlement to be examined and resolved. Unlike earlier inter-racial romances-sturdy British immigrant meets beautiful Maori Princess-the two lovers in The Heart of the Bush are both Pakeha (European), but are both native in the sense that they are born in New Zealand. The difference between themand the difficulties between them-depends, I want to argue, on the degree and manner in which they have become indigenous.Adelaide, the heroine of The Heart of the Bush, has been educated with her relations in England. Dennis, her suitor, has remained on her father's New Zealand farm as its manager. Dennis's rough charms and ease within the landscape are compared to the smooth metropolitan glamour of his rival for Adelaide's affections, the Englishman Horace Brandon:Judged by every civilized standard, Horace Brandon was incomparably the finer man of the two, but he would have been incongruous amongst the mountains and the clouds where Dennis was quite at home.5Despite some anxiety that the sophisticated Horace might possess Svengali-like powers and mesmerise her into submission 'by some psychic means' (72), Adelaide's choice, early on in the novel, is easily made, and involves a rejection of Englishness and convention:'I will be a wild girl, untamed, un-English, without taste or principles, a social outcast, a moral reprobate, anything but Horace Brandon's wife' she cried inwardly. (73)The descriptions of her possession by Dennis stress his primitive nature and his place in the uncivilised:He looked around on the river and the untrodden mountains, then took her completely to himself-her heart beat in ecstasy-every nerve thrilled with self consciousness. Her bridegroom was such a barbarian sometimes, and she felt as if he was literally bearing her straight out of her civilised sphere into his kingdom. (163)The cliched language of romance is given an odd edge in this colonial setting where words like barbarian' or 'savage' hint at actual rather than metaphorical referents. Dennis has 'the eyes of the bush, of shadow and sunlight', and Adelaide feels she is 'simply to be claimed as brides are claimed by savages' (91). …

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