Dr Susan Wild arrived from England with her family as a child and describes coming to New Zealand as a strange experience. “I felt like Alice through the looking glass.”
Although she found some aspects of Kiwi life similar to what she was used to in England, others seemed odd and unfamiliar.
“Most houses were wooden instead of brick and the seasons were reversed—with Christmas in summer. The meaning of some words was different and often things were done a different way.
“New immigrants from England were regarded as unwelcome outsiders—we had to learn how to fit in.”
As an adult Susan returned to England, but it no longer felt like home.
It was a natural progression for her PhD research to focus on the settlement of Pākehā New Zealanders and their sense of identity, which was different from that of the Māori population, the tangata whenua.
She read anthologies of New Zealand writing, which often were concerned with the idea of “New Zealandness” and became interested in what that term meant.
“New Zealandness was a concern of much New Zealand literature. I found it was actively constructed and shaped by influential writers and others—it didn’t simply develop naturally.
“The country’s history is fundamental to how it sees itself. Its colonial origins are a continuing problem for constructing a sense of national identity. New Zealand’s story of itself is a narrative of forgetting aspects of the past as much as remembering it.”
Susan focused on the national anthologies from 1906 to the end of the twentieth century, where she gained a sense from the writers that New Zealand was defined mostly by what it was not, rather than what it was.
"It was important for New Zealand to consider itself different from other countries, but those differences are not really defined, or if they are, they’re often contradictory.
“For example, New Zealand often presents itself as egalitarian, but at the same time there is a feeling that New Zealanders are an elite group of people. It’s often expressed that New Zealanders are much better than Australians—including as recently as the 2015 Rugby World Cup.”
Susan says it has always been important for New Zealand to feel accepted by the rest of the world, despite its distance and smallness as a nation. “It’s ideas like this that have shaped how New Zealanders feel about themselves.”
Although there is an accepted narrative that New Zealand has left its colonial past behind, there is a remaining sense of insecurity regarding its national identity and underlying concerns and anxieties, says Susan.
“This experience is common for nations with a history of settler colonialism, but some aspects are particular to New Zealand.”
“While some things have changed, we still experience a need to define New Zealandness both to ourselves and to overseas countries—suggestions of changing the current New Zealand flag are the most recent example of this.”