Stephen Levine - New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well

Antoine de Saint-Exupry, The Little Prince

W e all hope to find the unexpected, hidden beneath the landscape of the ordinary and the everyday. Beneath the surface of New Zealand's history and, in fact, part of it are possibilities: opportunities overlooked, neglected and now forgotten. There is a fascination about them, and rediscovering them intellectual oases, sources of refreshment offering the prospect of something else, something new, something perhaps a bit startling provides enjoyment and even aesthetic appreciation.

Counterfactuals a rearrangement of incidents and events, also known as alternative history are now a worldwide phenomenon. A Google search in June 2010 found 165,000 results for counterfactuals. Counterfactual history produced 82,000 hits; counterfactual analysis, 345,000; counterfactual thinking, 132,000; and counterfactual reasoning, 349,000. The results for alternative history were even greater: 145 million, with nearly 16 million for the words alternative history fiction.

The Amazon book site also points towards an increasingly crowded field. In June 2010 counterfactuals produced 799 book results; counterfactual history, 38; and counterfactual thinking, 86. Searching on alternate history gave 671 results, with alternative history fiction producing 178. There is, furthermore, on both Google and Amazon, evidence of an alternative history community, with thousands of people promoting large numbers of lists, guides and other products, while maintaining discussion groups of one kind or another.

This second book of New Zealand counterfactuals (New Zealand as it might have been, with 15 scenarios, was published in 2006) takes on an array of topics, each, in a sense, an enigma, a puzzle waiting to be solved. In one way or another there are two historical puzzles at issue: why did an event that could well have happened fail to do so? And what would the consequences have been what would it have meant had it in fact taken place?

At any moment every event in the life of a nation, or a person, has a range of possible paths that can be taken. Counterfactual speculation, responding to that reality, considers what actually happened by looking at what could have happened, the inquiry akin to the movements of a kaleidoscope, each turn opening up new patterns, new relationships, among its interconnected pieces.

This book of counterfactual chapters does not provide a continuous narrative, a single thread of altered New Zealand history in which each restructured event leads inexorably on to the next. Quite the contrary: each chapter stands on its own. Indeed, some events, such as the opening chapter's vision of a New Zealand transformed by German occupation as a result of an altered outcome of the First World War, would preclude some of the other circumstances conceived of in this book including, for instance, Gallipoli (in chapter 2) and the Second World War (chapters 3 and 4) from ever taking place.

So this is a book to be read as a series of surprises, each encounter with a new New Zealand altogether separate from the one preceding and the next one just up ahead. And this is also a book about possibilities: some realised, some not. In that respect, through a mingling of the real and the imagined of what was and what might have been it resembles life as it is, full of plans, some fulfilled, some not: as in the Jewish proverb, People plan, God laughs (mentsch tract, Gott lacht).

Just as the bright colours of a painting can fade with the passage of time made dull by dust, and grit, and too many layers of varnish so too events can lose their glow, becoming lost to memory. Any work of history, counterfactual or otherwise, strives to rescue from neglect forgotten incidents, personalities obscured by indifference and inattention. In this sense historical writing can be likened to art restoration, bringing life and lustre back to a canvas filled with possibility and promise.