In tracing the interconnections of place and people in James Cowan's writing, this article argues that his widely-disseminated body of work complicates current orthodoxies and warrants more consideration in the study of settlement than it has had to date. Analyses of newspaper features and short non-fiction narratives, and of book chapters which centre on the prototype for Cowan’s cultural landscapes, Ōrākau, provide the basis for an argument that even in an era when the picturesque appeared to have wrought a division between scenic and inhabited landscapes, Cowan’s writing refused that distinction. The landscapes he wrote were peopled, valued for their beauty but given meaning by the traditions and the histories attached to them. I argue here that a consideration of Cowan as “nō Ōrākau”—haunted by a place to whose long historical resonances he responded over the work of a lifetime—introduces a more nuanced account of a settler imaginary which can allow not only of subjects who were “seeing men” seeking to possess what they surveyed, but also of those who lived in a complex and discomforted relationship to the indigenous past of place.
When the first Taranaki War ended in 1861, a young settler and engineer called George Robinson celebrated the apparent end of interracial hostilities by venturing out with his fellow volunteers to rediscover a peach orchard that war had made inaccessible. Appetites satisfied, he and his friends were exploring further into the lately contested territory, when they met a 'lad' they knew from one of the resistant Maori settlements. The boy invited them home where his people wer enow living: after some hesitation, they accompanied him.
The 1998 documentary series The New Zealand Wars, based on James Belich’s revisionist monograph on New Zealand’s colonial wars, recalled these conflicts to Pākehā as well as Māori collective memory, and thereby confronted contemporary Pākehā identities. Alon Confino asks: ‘Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail?’ This article seeks to explain the unexpected success of the past which the series set forth by analysing its televisual strategies of engagement with Pākehā viewers. It discusses three elements of the series’ mode of address: Belich’s persona as historian-presenter; the series’ appellation of Pākehā viewers in relation to their historical ‘Others’; and its imaging of landscape. The New Zealand Wars was a televisual commemoration deeply enmeshed in contemporary cultural change, and in its claims on the emotions and affiliations of viewers it helped to resituate the New Zealand Wars in the domain of New Zealand nationhood.
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