SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES / SCHOOL OF ENGLISH & MEDIA STUDIES STAFF SEMINAR SERIES DATE: MONDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2015 TIME: 12.30 PM VENUE: MANAWATU, GLB 1.14; ALBANY, AT4; WELLINGTON, 5C17 THIS SEMINAR IS HOSTED BY THE W.H. OLIVER HUMANITIES RESEARCH ACADEMY Associate Professor Meg Tasker Humanities, Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University, Australia Seminar: Remembering Radical Visions of New Zealand, ‘The Fortunate Isles’ They are married, and gone to New Zealand. Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures, Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand. There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit; There he built him a home; there Elspie bare him his children, David and Bella; perhaps ere this too an Elspie or Adam; There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields; And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich. In 1848, New Zealand figured at the end of Clough’s verse-novel The Bothie as the location for a rejuvenated (democratic) version of British society, a new Eden of agrarian self-sufficiency. (Notions of invasion clearly did not figure in this utopian fantasy). Fifty years later, the first full-length history of New Zealand was written and published in London by William Pember Reeves, a Christchurch-born member of the radical Ballance government in the early 1890s, by then working in London as Agent-General for New Zealand. This talk is a discussion of William and Maud Pember Reeves as Anglo-Australians in London, and the image they presented of New Zealand as a progressive liberal democracy, a ‘State Experiment in Socialism’ and the first western democracy to introduce female suffrage. Meg Tasker is Associate Professor in Humanities at Federation University Australia, and editor of the AVSA journal, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies. Her early work on Arthur Hugh Clough and her subsequent critical biography of Francis W.L. Adams (Struggle and Storm, MUP 2001) explored the dialogic voices and loyalties of intellectual radicals. An ARC Discovery Grant 2003 has produced a long-term collaboration with Lucy Sussex and many papers on the careers of Australasian writers and journalists in London in the 1890s, focusing on questions of cultural identity and transnational networks of influence and ideas..