AT HOME WITH NEW ZEALAND IN THE 1960S Richard Thomson A thesis submitted to Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Victoria University of Wellington 2014 London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relationships a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. — E M Forster, Howard’s End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 272–3. The journey was one that would now no doubt be made by motor- car, with a view to making it more agreeable. We shall see that, accomplished in such a way, it would even be in a sense more real, since one would be following more closely, in a more intimate contiguity, the various gradations by which the surface of the earth is diversified. — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), vol 1, 693. everything in the world exists to end up as a book. — Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Book as Spritual Instrument’, Divigations (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press, 2007), 226. iii Contents Abstract. .vii Acknowledgements . .ix List of abbreviations. xi Introduction . 1 Chapter 1 The Problem of Reproduction: The Origins of the Colour Pictorial . 11. Introduction . .11 He plunged into the Bush . .15 Fragments. .19 For the relief of distress . 20 Humble and submissive handmaids to the text. 22 The Photobook. .25 The unkempt negligee of an over-heavily retouched photograph . .30 Chapter 2 Participating in Modernity: Leisure, Mobility, and Consumption . .35 . Introduction . .35 The moral tourist. 38 Between science and art. 43 Realism above that noticed even at the actual scene. 48 Christmas in the sun. .50 At home on every roaded mile of New Zealand. .58 Domesticated pioneers. 60 v Chapter 3 Movement Inward: The Gift of the Colour Pictorial . 63 . Introduction . .63 Coffee, table, book. 65 Gifts. .72 Dreams of home. 80 Like other folk . 87 Conclusion . 93. Bibliography . 99 Primary sources . 99 Secondary literature . 104 Abstract Published by A H & A W Reed to immediate success late in 1961, New Zealand in Colour was the first of many large-format books of colour photographs of New Zealand. While they belonged to a tradition of scenic reproduction as old as Eu- ropean settlement, technological changes and the social and economic disruptions of the Second World War intensified the importance of the image in print culture. Drawing on recent historiographic approaches that seek to decentre New Zea- land across transnational and city-hinterland relationships, this thesis argues that reproduction, through photography but also as a cultural practice, was intrinsic to a Pakeha conception of place. Looking at scenery was an activity thought to be peculiarly suited to New Zealand, but it was also a prime form of tourist con- sumption and was therefore essential to New Zealanders’ successful participation in modernity, which required ‘seeing ourselves’ but also awareness of recognition from other moderns. During the decades after the Second World War, modernity took on a more international character with greater mobility of people and goods and a strengthening consumer culture. The complex kinds of looking involved in being modern were increasingly expressed as a tension between modern and anti-modern impulses. The colour pictorial displayed New Zealand as a cultural landscape of cameras, cars, and holidays, but also as a refuge from modernity. The ‘coffee table book’ was a luxury consumer object of advanced technology, but the gift was the preferred method for its circulation. To be at home with this New Zealand may require a move to the suburbs, but it offers a view of nation and nationalism in which mobility, leisure, and consumption have become the chief explanatory tools. vii Acknowledgements Thanks are due to my supervisor Charlotte Macdonald, fellow students in the History programme at Victoria University, the staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, Te Papa, and the Hocken Library, John Baxter, Martyn Jolly, Gavin McLean, Ray Richards, and Kirstie Ross, and to my family for giving me this opportunity. It has been a delight. ix List of abbreviations AJHR Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives ANZ Archives New Zealand ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington AWMML Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Hocken Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin MCH Ministry of Culture and Heritage NZJH New Zealand Journal of History xi Introduction One evening in March 1961, the government steamer TSS Earnslaw left the wharf in Queenstown’s sheltered bay and pushed out onto the open water of Lake Wakatipu. You may wish to picture the setting sun colouring the autumn leaves of the poplars that fringed the lake, and picking out the crags of The Remarkables high above. Lake, mountain, and tree cohered to form one of the country’s archetypal scenic views. Aboard for a ‘social and dance’ were New Zealand’s booksellers, gathered in Queenstown for their annual conference. Also present was Clif Reed, managing director of the publishing firm A H & A W Reed. Perhaps it was just such a view that Reed held in his hands as he took a few of the booksellers aside to present a sample of his company’s latest project. He had only two plates to show off, but they were large – 12 inches by 10 inches – and printed in Japan with rich colour inks on thick, full-gloss paper using advanced offset technology.1 Back in Wellington, Reed reported to his fellow directors that those who saw the sample plates ‘manifested the proper degree of enthusiasm’. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘the people who saw it will talk about it.’2 He was right. Colour books immediately came to the fore of a surge in local publishing. Six years later, the ‘books contain- ing full-colour reproductions of photographs and paintings that have achieved a world-wide sale as well as almost fantastic success in New Zealand’ introduced Reed’s summary of the company’s fortunes over the previous decade.3 By August 1964, Reeds had printed 68,000 copies of its first colour pictorial, New Zealand in Colour. Three years later nearly 100,000 had been sold, and it remained in print until the late 1970s. These figures, Gavin McLean notes in his history of Reeds, are ‘extraordinary’ by twenty-first century standards.4 The most popular colour books were those about and titled New Zealand: the thesis suggests that a specific idea of nation was constituted in the space between Reed’s ‘world-wide sale’ and ‘almost fantastic’ local success. This space took on an increasingly privatised quality, in keeping with the changes wrought by postwar modernisation. As Clif Reed displayed his images at the booksellers’ social, the Earnslaw was embarked on a journey from essential state-funded infrastructure to 1 Kenneth Bigwood and James K Baxter, New Zealand in Colour (Wellington: A H & A W Reed, 1961), pl 44, and Kenneth Bigwood and John Pascoe, New Zealand in Colour, Volume Two (Wellington: A H & A W Reed, 1962), pl 44, show variations on exactly this scene. This study follows Gavin McLean, (Whare Raupo: The Reed Books Story (Auckland: Reed, 2007)) in referring to A W Reed as Clif Reed (but uses A W in footnotes). See A W Reed, report, ‘Executive Notes, 1961,’ 119, Reed Publishing, further papers, MSX-8104, ATL. 2 A W Reed, ‘Executive Notes, 1961’, 119. 3 A W Reed, The House of Reed, 1957–1967 (Wellington: A H & A W Reed, 1968), 11. 4 McLean, Whare Raupo, 114. privately-owned ‘staged authenticity’, only hastened when the road was opened in November 1962 to Glenorchy, at the northern head of the lake.5 Pakeha were moving to the suburbs, coming to terms with affluence and disposable income, and embracing mobility by car and jet aeroplane, but they still dreamed of holiday- ing with their family on an empty beach. Despite their success, the colour books have received little critical attention. Three reasons for this can be identified. First, because they emphasised illustration rather than text, some questioned their status as books. Secondly, they came to be regarded merely as products for the tourist market. Thirdly, they were coffee table books, a ‘form of showing-off [that] is common to all countries in circles where spurious values encourage a reverence for status symbols’.6 That books have mean- ings beyond their status as texts, and that books do not only form communities of readers, are ideas that form an important strand of work on print culture.7 This study takes the three disparaging judgements just mentioned as launching points to explore the colour pictorials’ success in the broader context of New Zealand’s cultural history. What can the non-book tell us about the role of print culture in New Zealand’s changing relationship with London in the early 1960s? How should the success of “tourist” books be reconciled with Pakeha suspicions of tourism and what does this say about their relationship to modernity? What did it mean to display New Zealand on the coffee table? In 1963, booksellers reported ‘something unprecedented in their experience . never before have bookshops sold so many New Zealand published books so quickly’.8 But the local publishing boom in part reflected international develop- ments. After 1945, global book publishing expanded rapidly. In 1965, UNESCO re- ported that from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s advances in printing, publishing, and distribution had ‘made it feasible to produce low-priced good-quality books on a vast scale’.