Mother Countries and Sentinel Sons.

Patriotic Appeal: Zealandia never really caught on. If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

NEW ZEALANDERS once referred to Great Britain as the “Mother Country”. This was no mere declaration of kinship or affection, it was offered in recognition of Britain’s status as the entity responsible for giving birth to, nurturing, and protecting the young New Zealand state.

Until relatively recently, the notion that Māori might also have had a hand in the creation of New Zealand, or that the Treaty of Waitangi might be viewed as the nation’s birth certificate, would have been dismissed out-of-hand. Obviously, Māori had a past, but beyond the military and legal efforts required to silence those benighted natives demanding a future separate and distinct from that of the Pakeha, it could have no bearing on the colony’s development.

New Zealand was a child of the British Empire. Of that its settlers were as certain as they were proud. The fact that Queen Victoria, titular ruler of an empire greater than any the world had hitherto encountered, was a woman, only reinforced the motherly metaphor.

But if most agreed that Great Britain was the Motherland, did New Zealand’s settler society feel the same way about the nation it was building? If pressed to provide an answer, would the settlers have stuck with the matrilinear option, or would they have opted instead to dub the entity that was rapidly emerging from the overwhelmingly masculine milieu of early colonial New Zealand, the “Fatherland”?

If the statue erected by the people of the little North Otago town of Palmerston in 1903 is any guide, the answer must be an emphatic “No.” This marble personification of the nation, arm uplifted to greet the new twentieth century, was Zealandia – and she was all woman.

Auckland and Christchurch boasted their own versions of Zealandia, and she even makes an appearance in the publicity material produced for the centennial of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1940. (Which, given the fact that she’s a lightly-clothed Pakeha, is ever-so-slightly, um, racist, and sexist, at least by today’s standards!)

Zealandia 1940

Does that settle the matter? Have Pakeha New Zealanders, guided perhaps by Papatuanuku, the Māori earth mother, always looked upon the nation as female? Or were our colonial forefathers merely aping their European betters? Most obviously Britain’s Britannia, but also France’s Marianne, the USA’s Columbia, and Germany’s Germania: all of them loosely-clad, somewhat stern young women, spoiling for a fight.

Except Zealandia never really caught on, did she? If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

Which is not something one could say about the scores of soldiers keeping watch over the dead of this country’s foreign wars in small towns and large cities all across New Zealand. Statues they may be, some carved out of marble, some cast in bronze, but for the families and friends of the fallen, whose names are often carved on the sides of the monuments they stand atop, these sentinels have kept the collective memory of sacrifice and loss alive for more than a century.

Memorial to the fallen of the Boer War, Oamaru, North Otago.

The first of these structures were raised in commemoration of the New Zealanders who fell “For the Empire” in the Boer War. Their statues strike heroic poses, as befitted their brutal imperial mission. Those of the Great War of 1914-18 embody less belligerent impulses. A soldier stands, rifle thrust forward, protecting his fallen comrade. As much a tribute to Anzac mateship, as martial valor.

New Zealand’s wartime Prime Minister Peter Fraser, believing the country had too many monoliths, to too many dead, opted instead to erect memorial halls to the fallen of World War II. Most still stand, places of community warmth and fellowship, rather than sad piles of cold marble and unflinching bronze.

No. New Zealanders will never refer to their nation as the Fatherland. The term sounds ridiculous – as inappropriate in 2025 as Mother Country. New Zealand is a nation built by daughters and sons. Like settler societies everywhere, it pushes the past behind it, and strides towards the future.

Māori, who have lived here longer, are waiting for us to turn around.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 25 April 2025.

Zealandia's Lost Boys.

Appealing To The Past: Action Zealandia, like so many of the organisations springing up on the far-Right, across what they call the “Anglosphere”, is born out of the profound confusion over what a man is supposed to be in the twenty-first century and, more importantly, what he is supposed to do.

THE STATUE OF ZEALANDIA, her upraised hand blessing the good people of Palmerston, North Otago, has always fascinated me. As far as I know she is the only one of her kind in the whole country. Like the UK’s “Britannia” and the USA’s “Columbia”, Zealandia is the personification of New Zealand. Not Aotearoa, of course, Maoridom would require a very different sort of representative: one quite unlikely to be got up in Zealandia’s Ancient Greek chiton for a start! The classical outfit is, however, entirely appropriate for someone intended to represent Pakeha New Zealand’s firm attachment to the iconography of European culture.

Zealandia never really caught on – at least not in the way Britannia and Columbia caught on. The First Labour Government conscripted her to serve in the Dominion’s centennial celebrations. In the Government’s poster of 1939-40 she’s sporting fewer draperies than Palmerston’s Zealandia, but there’s no disputing the fact that it’s the same girl.

About the only place you’re likely to encounter Zealandia these days is standing opposite the Maori warrior on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. According to legend, the National Party Cabinet Minister, “Gentleman Jack” Marshall, instructed the Department of Internal Affairs to model the 1950s update of New Zealand personified on the American actress, Grace Kelly. (What that says about us, I’m not entirely sure, but it sure says something!)

Something is also being said by the anonymous band of young Pakeha males who have appropriated both the name and the iconography of Zealandia for the purposes of promoting a radical and far from respectable variant of New Zealand nationalism. “Action Zealandia” has been branded “white supremacist” by alarmed and aggrieved university students, after posters and stickers promoting the extreme nationalist “movement” began appearing on walls and notice-boards around the University of Auckland. That alarm turned to outrage when the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, citing the Bill of Rights Act, refused to declare Action Zealandia persona non grata on campus.

Putting to one side the debate over whether Action Zealandia should be accorded the right to freedom of expression, “banning” the organisation from campus would constitute a regrettable lost opportunity to bring some academic scrutiny to bear on the organisation and its allegedly growing membership.

One of the many peculiarities of Action Zealandia is its determination to foster “strong men” who are “physically fit independent thinkers”. Fair enough, the cult of masculine physical fitness has long been a staple of the far-Right’s ideological diet. If, however, women are to be excluded from the membership of Action Zealandia (what would the lady in the chiton say!) its antagonism towards “sexual deviancy” strikes me as a little counter-intuitive. After all, restricting the organisation’s membership to physically fit young men, seems a rather testing strategy for combatting the “vice” of homosexuality and other “negative influences”.

As Hannibal Lecter so astutely observes in The Silence of the Lambs:

“[H]ow do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? … . . No, we begin by coveting what we see every day.”

Action Zealandia, like so many of the organisations springing up on the far-Right, across what they call the “Anglosphere”, is born out of the profound confusion over what a man is supposed to be in the twenty-first century and, more importantly, what he is supposed to do.

In the nineteenth century, when Zealandia was born, it was so much easier. Everywhere a “white” man looked he saw reflected the institutional manifestations of his unchallenged power. In the family; in business; in the arts and sciences; in the church; in the state – men were the masters. Masculinity was the measure of all the things that mattered. To be anything other than a “strong man” was unacceptable. To be weak; to be vulnerable; to question in any way the unchanging verities of Caucasian manhood; made you something less. It made you female; it made you black; it made you queer; it took you out of the running. And if you were a white, heterosexual male – that was just fine.

But it isn’t fine any more. There are many more figures in our reflections now. Masculinity is no longer the measure of all things. Truth is, it never was. Even in the days of empire, the Goddess was always served.

Even when men called her Zealandia.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 October 2019.