The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume Five, 1941–1960, General Editor Claudia Orange, Auckland University Press / Department of Internal Affairs, Auckland/Wellington, 2000. 679 pp. $130. ISBN 1-86940-224-3.
Reviewed by Melanie Nolan
Like 431 others, I was a writer for the fifth volume of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB)—a contributor to a project over which I had little control. In this review I do not wish to survey or assess the 608 essays, about which I might understandably wax eloquent. The first four volumes of the DNZB are deservedly popular, and the fifth will be no exception. Rather, I wish to consider wider issues raised by this publication. I will discuss the current status of biographical writing before reflecting on the balance and typicality of our collective production.
The New Zealand historical community has greeted the fifth volume of the DNZB just as favourably as its predecessors; [1] indeed, it is hard to find a harsh word in any of the reviews. The strongest criticism has been that some individuals appear in the 'wrong' volume. It is sometimes unclear why someone is included in Volume Five (that is, is considered to have first 'flourished' between 1941 and 1960), rather than Volume Four (1921 to 1940). Claudia Orange, the General Editor, acknowledges this difficulty in her introduction (p. xi). Most reviewers have simply looked forward to the DNZB going online and becoming a dynamic reference work that can be continually updated, as it now has. [Online DNZB site]
The latest volume is the culmination of a massive seventeen-year project to write volumes of biographies of New Zealanders who lived between 1769 and 1960. Its popularity cannot be separated from that of the wider project, or from the current enthusiasm for biography. Biography is popular with historians and ordinary readers for different reasons. Many historians see it as a tool; as part of a process of developing collective history. It is a stepping stone, a crucial accumulation of data and example which those 'higher up' in the history industry will use as raw material in writing general history. Before the DNZB it was customary for historians to compile potted biographies of those who were in their historical sights. Barry Gustafson provided a very useful 'Biographical Appendix' in Labour's Path to Political Independence. [2] Combined with Bert Roth's amazing compendium of biographies, this meant that labour historians came across few personalities about whom they could find no information. [3] Similarly, Nan Taylor's official history of the home front during the Second World War is doubly useful as a reference book because it is both comprehensive and includes summary life details in footnotes. [4]
The sinking of a large proportion of our collective historical resources into the DNZB project could be defended as a contribution to a future general history of New Zealand women or a social history of Maori in the twentieth century. Indeed, the General Editor seems to be making this point in regard to the potential of Volume Five to assist future historians of national identity:
This publication is, then, a celebration of the many lives that have created New Zealand's unique national character. To dip into the volume or to feast on its individual stories stirs in us the possibilities of how our national identity might grow. It is an exciting expedition into the country's rich history and heritage. (p. vii)
The DNZB is indispensable for everyone working in the history industry. Indeed, anyone interested in twentieth-century New Zealand history will find this volume to be an essential companion. Yet, as the General Editor states in her introduction, 'Although a group of biographies does not constitute a history, a brief analysis … raises some interesting questions' (p. ix). The DNZB encourages the view that the history of twentieth-century New Zealand is based on biographical 'building blocks'. Not everyone will share this accretionist perspective.
Some see more than raw material in dictionaries of biography, and have posited a recent 'biographical turn' in social methodology to explain why academics are doing it. The 'biographical turn' is associated with a rise in 'individualization', [5] which is grounded in either the 'cultural' and 'subjective' turn from the 1970s in the wake of poststructuralism, [6] or in political events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall that have encouraged a growing interest in agency rather than collectivities. [7] Before these events, most social scientists had abandoned biography. Biographies are anecdotal, unrepeatable, uncontrolled, unrepresentative, subjectively interpreted single examples. Because randomly-selected research dealing with large populations restricts the set of variables and at least tries to eliminate bias, social scientists concentrated on statistically stronger social and mass explanations. But they are once again considering biography as a social science methodology which focuses on individual agency rather than long-term and large-scale structures. The biographical turn is more noticeable in sociology and anthropology, since biography never went out of fashion amongst historians. Indeed, many historians remain uneasy about describing themselves as social scientists!
Nonetheless, several groups of historians have come to prefer small-scale studies. The Italian microhistoria (microhistory) school reacted against the quantitative methodologies espoused by the French Annales school from the 1960s. Microhistorians hold that quantitative history dehumanizes the past and reduces individual experiences to countable characteristics. Microhistory is concerned with the partial, and gives a fuller picture of individuals' experiences and choices. Microhistory at least supplements traditional macrohistorical explanations, although most microhistorians have not succeeded in showing how the few are indicative of the many. This is a point to which I will return; but if you thought biography was important because you were influenced by microhistory or the biographical turn, you would probably not want to read most of the biographies in the volume under review. You would be interested in group biographies, and want more biographies of 'nonentities'. The German Alltagsgeschichte (history of 'everyday life'), a parallel development to microhistory, has a similar biographical focus.
Historians writing history from below are now more likely to use approaches which concentrate on biographies. Rather than an interest in the potential collective power of biography, they emphasize agency in order to show that because of '[t]heir diverse, detailed results … developments such as industrialization and bureaucratization should be rethought as contingent and uneven'. [8] Small concrete serendipitous examples and 'empirical multiplicity' are more useful than 'large-scale iron-law governed processes'. [9] Through the study of ordinary individuals, the dynamics of human interaction and the points of historical change, rather than distant 'abstractions', are revealed. The General Editor's suggestion that the DNZB puts a 'human face' on New Zealand history alludes to this wider scholarly debate over scale and methods (p. XI).
One can easily justify the writing of biography for historians, but the bottom line is that biography is what general readers want. Biography, including the DNZB, the Book of New Zealand Women [10] and the like, is popular because general readers are interested in human faces, and in history without explicit theory. We like stories, and biographies are stories at least as much as they are data. In this regard, history is 'manageable' and accessible through biography. We may not be able to reach definitive conclusions on so many of the big issues, but a biography has a clear beginning and end, and generally promises to answer questions that arise in between these two points. Many people interested in history have a psychological need for it to be grounded in an individual's experience. Some also seek to understand their own lives; their interest is as much autobiographical as biographical. [11]
In a landmark New Zealand publication on biography in 1988, Colin Davis quoted Albert Camus: looking from the outside at the life of another, it is possible to see a whole. Looking at our own lives from the inside, we see only 'bits and pieces'. [12] In a small country like New Zealand, many will have known those who flourished between 1941 and 1960; indeed, a high proportion of the authors are relatives or were friends of their subjects. The nature of the biographical stories we read has changed over time, often in response to scholarly debates over method. There is a little flirting with psychoanalysis in some of the Volume Five essays: discussions of motivations and the impact of alcoholic or puritanical parents on the developing psyches of their yet-to-be famous children. No such speculations appeared in Scholefield's 1940 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. [13]
So biography is popular. But surely none of the DNZB volumes would have been so popular were they not technically excellent? Some hold up the DNZB team's meticulous checking and thorough editing as a paradigm of best historical practice. Certainly there are fewer errors than in the Australian Dictionary of Biography volumes, for which the publishers have regularly released pamphlets of corrigenda. On the other hand, ADB essays often include surprisingly useful probate data. Neither national dictionary has a 'common or garden' index. There are five indexes in the latest DNZB volume (occupational category, region, tribal/hapu affiliation and personal name for Volume Five, plus a cumulative index of the biographies in all five volumes). All are very useful, but there is no alphabetical subject index. One is struck, for instance, by the number of entries which note the importance of the National Centennial Historical Committee and/or the War History programme: they include J. C. Beaglehole, Dan Davin, Joseph Heenan, Howard Kippenberger, Joseph Mackay, Eric McCormick, Alister McIntosh, Ruth Ross, and Fred Wood. But in the absence of a subject index you have to read all the entries to make this kind of connection. While Volume Five is technically excellent, it is not technically perfect.
Its selections are also neither balanced nor representative. As the General Editor makes clear in her six-page introduction, the DNZB makes no claim to such balance. It is about people who have led extraordinary or controversial lives; people who were leading figures in the public sphere. Traditionally, women have not tended to live these sorts of lives. And any volume which involves a war is going to be masculine-inclined. The General Editor mounts a lengthy defence of the Dictionary's performance in terms of sex and race balance. Thirteen per cent of the essays have Maori subjects, more than the Maori proportion of the population; no one has complained about this. However, only 169 of the 613 subjects (28 per cent) are women. Of course, many of the essays about men include much detail about their wives and partners: Bill Renwick on Beatrice Beeby and David McKenzie on Helen Field are exemplary in this regard. (It is not clear why Maria Wodzicka gets a separate entry, Lily Huggan and her husband get a combined essay, and Beatrice Beeby is merely discussed in the essay on Clarence.) Still, the DNZB is hardly representative of the female New Zealand population. Suggestions that women are under-represented are usually met with the defence that New Zealand's ratios are better than those of any other national dictionary! This is sobering. For all the feminist history that has been written, this volume indicates that women simply weren't as publicly important as men up to 1960. Perhaps this would change in a DNZB for 1981–2000? Perhaps it is enough to have a preliminary disclaimer explaining the hidebound pattern of sexual difference and noting the limitations children place on their mothers' ambitions and successes (p. ix)? Perhaps one could do no more without distorting history? [14]
There are two responses to these sorts of questions. One is to insist that women have been publicly prominent, but in certain rather specific niches. The other is to recognize women's collective rather than individual contribution through the device of collective biography. Charlotte Macdonald and Shelagh Cox, for instance, suggested that the way to get around women living private lives without public recognition (or documentation) is to write collective history. [15] Collectively, women are not obscure and undistinguished. This volume of the DNZB does well in relation to the first response, but has not pursued the second. Women haven't been stuck in the domestic sphere. They have been in the public sphere, albeit in different parts of it than men. They are publicly visible for their domestic skills in the Home Science education movement, maternal experience in the Plunket movement, and so on.
Let us consider the example of childcare, which was central to women's domestic experience in the mid-twentieth century. The playcentre movement was part of a public challenge to mass authoritarian systems for socialising young children, such as Plunket regimes. Our first woman Prime Minister attributed her organisational skills to her involvement in this movement. The DNZB covers the leading women involved in Plunket (such as Muriel Deem) and in the establishment of playcentres (including Gwen Somerset, Joan Wood and Beatrice Beeby, as well as a mention of Inge Smithells). But Beatrice Beeby simply wasn't as important as her husband Clarence, whose achievements included the development of the common core curriculum which was significant in women's education and fundamental to the emergence of a Women's Liberation Movement in New Zealand. Every approach in history has its strengths and weaknesses, and national dictionaries compiled on the basis of 'local or national prominence in various areas of public endeavour' (p. ix) are not going to be gender-balanced for this period. This reveals the extent to which biography is still well and truly connected to its roots. It might not be only about Great Men or Heroes, but it's still about singular and publicly important people. [16]
This leads to my point about typicality. Of course 613 lives in a population of two million are unlikely to 'typify' the general population. Again, the General Editor makes it clear that the DNZB's 'portrait' of New Zealanders is flawed. Orange draws our attention to the recurring themes in the essays, which include war, sport, music, politics, state patronage of literature and the arts, educational development, and women of national significance. She notes that many factors went into determining which subjects were essayed, particularly given the limitations of space. That is not the problem. More than anything, this volume cannot achieve typicality because its subjects had to be dead. Sportspeople include Peter Mulgrew but not Edmund Hillary, who, however significant and representative, is still alive. The 1951 waterfront dispute is a key political event, but Jock Barnes didn't die in time to make it into this volume, unlike his less fortunate wife Freda. Sex education, consumer rights and equal pay for women were among the key issues debated in this period, but the annoyingly durable Elsie Locke and Margaret Long cannot be included. We only read about Lyell Creswell because he composed 'an elegiac Con anima' for a memorial concert for Owen Jensen in May 1997. One is not left with qualms that a group of 613 individuals aren't 'typical', or even that they are 'normal exceptions'. Rather, this volume was compiled far too soon. We shall need an updated version in a couple of decades, whereas the previous volumes will better stand the test of time. The DNZB team knew this, and it is to their credit that they were brave enough to attempt Volume Five anyway. Does it really matter that Hillary is not in this volume? I think not, because the biographies of the exceptional can never be typical.
Melanie Nolan is a Senior Lecturer in history at Victoria University of Wellington. A labour historian, she is currently writing a collective biography of a New Zealand working-class family between the 1860s and the 1950s.
[1] See, for example, Linda Bryder's review in New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 35, no. 1, April 2001, pp. 111–12.
[2] Barry Gustafson, Labour's Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party 1900–19, Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1980, pp. 153–69.
[3] H. O. Roth Papers, c.1872–1994, MS-Group-0314, Alexander Turnbull Library.
[4] Nancy Taylor, The New Zealand People at War: The Home Front, 2 vols, Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1986.
[5] Michael Rustin, 'Reflections on the Biographical Turn in Social Science', in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp. 33–52.
[6] Daniel Bertaux (ed.), Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences,Sage, London, 1981.
[7] Brad S. Gregory, 'Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life', History and Theory, vol. 38, no. 1, 1999, pp. 100–10.
[8] ibid., p. 101.
[9] Alf Ludtke, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, translated by William Templer, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, pp. 121–5.
[10] Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams (eds), The Book of New Zealand Women/Ko Kui Ma te Kaupapa, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1991.
[11] Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Chapel Hill, 1999, p. 326.
[12] J. C. Davis, 'Clio's Lost Sheep', in Jock Phillips (ed.), Biography in New Zealand, Allen and Unwin, Wellington, 1985, p. 15.
[13] G. H. Scholefield (ed.), A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1940.
[14] Janet Malcolm, 'Annals of Biography: The Silent Woman', New Yorker, 23 August 1993, p. 84.
[15] Shelagh Cox and Charlotte Macdonald, 'New Ways of Seeing?', in Phillips (ed.), Biography in New Zealand, p. 60.
[16] Eric Homberger and John Charmley noted that biography 'has scarcely begun to deal with ordinary life' in Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds), The Troubled Face of Biography, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988, Introduction, p. ix.
