Auckland’s centrepiece: unsettled identities, unstable monuments. Leonard Bell
Leonard Bell. “Auckland’s centrepiece: unsettled identities, unstable monuments.” Rethinking settler colonialism: History and memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, edited by Annie E. Coombe, Mancheaster University Press, 2006, pp. 100-120.
This chapter starts off by describing John Logan Campbell who was Scottish born and a pioneer European settler. Called “father of Auckland ” 100.
1901 gifted a 230 acre site to be made into a public park, (on the slope of 1 tree hill), which had been a Maori pa (fortified settlement) for 300 years until the 1790s. 100
He constructed a “larger than life” 100 statue of himself at the entrance of the then called Cornwell park in 1906. 100
“At its unvieling Campbell proposed that a monument, a ‘towering obelisk dedicated to the get Maori race’, be set on the summit of the adjacent One Tree Hill, also also a public domain, where Campbell was to be buried and which was regarded as wahi tapu (sacred) by former Maori occupents” 100. The monument is a “bronze statue of a full standing Maori ‘warrior chief’” 100 unveiled in 1948 by the Maori king Koroki.
“the park and monument complex, initiated during the period in which new Zealand shifted from a mature colony to independent domination (1907) in the British Empire, constitutes an aesthetic shaping that can be related to notions about putative national(ist) and regional(ist) settler colonial identity, though not straightforward or settled ways.” 100-101
My current thoughts: I live in Auckland and this is why I am so interested in how an migrated person can become the ‘father of auckland’
The bronze statue reminds me of Michael Parikowhai’s bronze bulls - I should look into that and see if the material likeness is connected or a coincidence.
It is interesting that he made a statue of himself before the monument to the Maori.
It is interesting that he could buy (did he buy it?) and ‘gift’ land that was once a Maori settlement and that he could be buried on Maori sacred land (was he buried there?)
I think I should go visit one reel hill and take some photos and witness the monuments in person.
Cabell is described as a “celebrity, an iconic figure, in his society” 101. Very interesting that it is described as HIS society.
“Campbell's self staging and it's afterlife can be considered, though, not simply as afterlife validation or embodiment of stereotypical characterizations of settler colonial identity, but as a cultural phenomenon close examination of which reveals that settler colonial identifications have been much more complicated and unresolved than the standard picture in New Zealand has generally allowed.” 101
“the park and monument complex constructed in his name has been a problematical combination of elements that have no co-existed comfortably. The complex has been subject to conflicting evaluations and responses, a condition that may have its source in the ambivalences and splits withing both Campbell himself and with the society who's members identified so strongly with his personal persona” 101
“ the standard picture of settler-colonial identity in New Zealand has had a confidently asserted distinctiveness and a spirit of independence emerging clearly amount European New Zealanders in the 1890s and early 1900s, even while attachment to Britain and things British remained strong.”101
The reading then goes on to say that this element of ‘british’ created a difference from the ‘old world’.
“At the level of culture (popular fine arts, musical, literary and design) this was frequently articulated in the cooption or appropriation of Maori myths, legends, landscapes and artifacts, motifs artifacts subjects generally, which were held to be unique to New Zealand and thus umbilical markers of New Zealandness. This characterisation of identity now appears simplistic pariah, even clichéd. Particularly wanting has been the implication that this sense of district identity was unified and unproblematically subscribed to by the European New Zealand (Pakeha) population - in artifacts settled condition.” 101
Current thoughts: Moana and tiki souvenirs, what does Pakeha mean in a direct translation; I heard it means white pig so want to further explore that because I don't like it.
“Her has been a general tendency amount historians of late colonial New Zealand to treat the culture as if it simply reflected extant conditions and states of consciousness, as if it were peripheral to the main show.” 101
“There has been little recognition of the cultural as constitutive, that cultural activities and do products - images and nuns objects, music, plays, monuments, museums, parks, the use of food, for example - can be fun dementia to the making or negotiation of social identities.” 101 -102
I just had an idea… what if Campbell made the statue of himself and placed in in a physical space because he was trying trying to find his place/identity in the cultural aspects of the new world they were in?
“Yet settler colonials themselves could be well attuned to how visual representations and objects can play primary roles in shaping senses of the past and the relationship of people to a place; in attempted constructions of the shared memories and narratives that societies, in particular new societies, need.” 102
“cultural products can, irrespective irrespective of their makers’ intentions, manifest in their material forms and the responses they generate, and, in the changing circumstances of their ongoing use, the complexities of purported identities and relations. They are not just static things, fixed in their functions, but are mutable, offering and interplay of elements that can take on new ND conflicting roles and meanings according to the relationships of those with interests in them.” 102
“A cultural artifact’s identity, the sets of values and meanings with which it is endowed, can be as contradictory as those of both its maker and it's viewers” 102
Reminding me of semiotics - the study of signs, how this can differ from the signifies and the signified depending on the viewers previous knowledge bases.
The chapter goes on to say that all Campbell's contraction in and around one tree hill was an attempt to “shape a place in in a man’s image” 102 but is now “seen as a monument to the complexities of what the man represented and of Maori - Pakeha and Maori inter-tribal relationships through to the present.” 102
Base knowledge: treaty of Waitangi (1840) “foundational agreement between the indigenous people, Maori, and the Crown” 102. Maori became a minority and lost their land through “post war land confiscations” 102. It says both governmental parties labour and national have been making ‘subtancial efforts’ to right the historical wrongs. Some issues include the translation of the treaty.
“The lands that became Auckland were sold by Maori, principally Ngati Whatua, even if the validity of some of those sales has been questioned recently. While the Auckland region had been densely populated by Maori in the seventeenth and no eighteenth centuries, from the early 1800s to the late 1830s it was largely abandoned (...) Ngati Whatua invited Governor Hobson, the first governor of the colony, to make Auckland his capital for a complex of reasons - their own security and greater ease of access to the European technology and economic - social and vantage amazing them.” 103
“the first European settlers in the 1840s-50s needed Maori support and goodwill - for provisions, for labour, and vantage small a market for its merchants in a period when the European population was small. The balance quickly changed: from the mid nineteen century settler numbers grew rapidly, so that by 1900 Maori had become a small and relatively powerless minority in the city” 103
“With major migration of rural Maori to the cities beginning after the Second World War, the demographics of Auckland have radio ally altered: it is now the largest Polynesian city in the world, with Maori again an assertive Andre vital presence.” 103
BUT there was a line to be drawn in regards to the statue/monument of Campbell. It was favored for the park to be renamed ‘One Tree Hill Mount Campbell’ or ‘Campbell Park’ but but it was “opposed as disrespectful of the Duke of Cornwell and derogatory to the Maori. “ 106
“Nevertheless, the shaping of the park and the summit, in which Campbell had a controlling hand even ate his death, became for many Pakeha a monument to him and the e origins of Auckland. It might also seem and monument to colonial domination with Campbell's burial on the summit, a sacred place for Maori, cementing that occupation in place.” 106-107
“Yet what the mountain meant for Maori and the nature of Campbell's relationship with Maori particularly as inflected in the later, posthumous summit development, and responses to it, complicate and problematic and you singular typified ton of the monument and nystagmus an emblem of colonial conquest and Ysidro confident settler-colonial self-assertion.” 107
Auckland was a good site because it was higher due to the volcanos so was valued.
The land a bond one in and Ysidro tribal war pretty colonial and then was sold to a days do Irish settler names Thomas Henry in 1845.
One tree hill refers to the one pohutukawa tree that used to stand there.
“As the first European settler in Auckland he (Campbell) ,a knowledge the need of Maori help in getting established, for which he was always grateful. Campbell had a deeply felt respect for Maori people and culture, and deplored the ignore nice and insensitivity with which they were teat ed by many later nineteenth-century European settlers in the city.” 107-109
“Auckland’s obelisk could have marked the arrival of the city and the colony, aknowledging Auckland as part of civilisation - a modern city,” 109
“the monument complex remains unsettled, it's changing cultural roles correlating with the shifting nature of the relationships between the various players in in the ‘historical drama’”. 113
October 1994, Maori activist Mike Smith cut down the lone pine tree with a chainsaw calling it a ‘shrine of our oppression’. 113 ‘a very potent symbol of the colonization of this country and how our (Maori) values have been replaced.’ 114
“There is still no consensus among Maori about the summit complex. Some Maori leaders continue to regard it as a ‘symbol of… unity between Maori and Pakeha.’” 114
The tree was thought of as a national identity,
Thought: maybe I should put my national identity into an object rather than me….
