K.R. Howe - Singer in a Songless Land: A Life of Edward Tregear, 1846-1931

Singer in a Songless Land

By the same author:

The Loyalty Islands: a history of culture contacts 18401900

Race relations Australia and New Zealand: a comparative survey 1770s-1970s

Where the waves fall: a new South Sea islands history from first settlement to colonial rule

The verse of Edward Tregear (editor)

A LIFE OF EDWARD TREGEAR 18461931

K.R. HOWE

First published 1991
This ebook edition 2013

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019
Auckland 1142
www.press.auckland.ac.nz

Kerry Howe 1991

This book is copyright.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of Auckland University Press.

eISBN 978 1 86940 662 2

Typeset by Typocrafters Ltd

Printed in Hong Kong

Distributed outside New Zealand

by Oxford University Press

This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs.

This study could never have been undertaken without the enthusiastic co-operation of Tregears two surviving grandchildren, Vera Maclean and Herbert Robinson (Auckland), and his great-nephew Ian Morrison (Wellington). They spent very many hours talking and writing to me about Tregear and they generously allowed me to consult their private papers.

As ever, staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library and National Archives (Wellington and Auckland) were unfailingly helpful. I also owe a particular debt to Herbert Roth, who so generously shared all his very many references to Tregear and who read the completed manuscript. W. H. Oliver also kindly read the manuscript.

Many other people throughout New Zealand helped me with this project. (Note: local bodies and government departments are listed by their names when I consulted them. Many now have different names as a result of government restructuring.) R. V. Eades, Wynyard Wilson Barristers and Solicitors, Auckland; Brad Patterson, Department of Lands and Survey, Wellington; Richard Hill and David Green, Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs; R. Schwass and K. W. Walsh, Department of Lands and Survey, Hamilton; D. R. Rinckes, Department of Lands and Survey, Wellington; Peter Harding, Department of Lands and Survey, New Plymouth; Robert Ellwood, Wellington; Jim Dakin, Victoria University; John Male, and Harry Bioletti, Mahurangi; Lucy Moore, Warkworth; I. Caird of Bell Gully Buddle Weir Solicitors, Wellington; M. L. Hurrey, Puhoi; J. A. McRae, University of Otago; R. P. Goodey, Hawera Star Printing and Publishing Company; Noel Johnston, Hawera District Council; G. L. Baker, Patea Historical Society; A. M. Bergen, Patea County Council; Nevil Matthews, Blenheim; W. K. Carnahan, Nelson; Mr and Mrs Dawkins, and Mr and Mrs Colin McKnight, Picton; Margaret Avery, University of Waikato.

People overseas also assisted me: Stephen Rabson, P&O, London; Kay Chapman, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; D. S. Porter, Bodleian Library, Oxford; S. D. Thomson, City Archivist, Southampton; Jean Chapman, Royal Historical Society; Annegret Ogden, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Robert Langdon, Canberra. I am particularly grateful to Michael Maher, Illinois.

I thank Robert C. Kiste, Brij Lal and Danny Kwok of the University of Hawaii where I spent a period on an Andrews Distinguished Fellowship. I am also grateful for a Fulbright Travel Grant. Similarly I thank Gavan Daws of the Australian National University where I was a Visiting Fellow.

I am grateful to Massey University for support from its Research Fund, and from its library staff. Photographs were kindly prepared by the universitys photographic unit. Alan Williams and William Broughton provided useful assistance. I owe a particular debt to my colleagues in the Department of History, in particular Alison Hanham, Basil Poff, Barrie Macdonald, and visiting Fulbright Fellow Francis Shor. Rama McGee patiently coped with my ASCII files from my computer (state-of-the-art when I commenced this project and now obsolete). Above all I am indebted to Colin Davis for his support, for his reading of the manuscript, and particularly for asking the hardest, but the very best, questions about Tregear.

Finally I thank my family yet again for their tolerance.

K. R. Howe December 1990

All still, all silent, tis a songless land

(Midnight, c. 1873)

At the beginning of this century Edward Tregear was one of New Zealands most prominent citizens and widely published intellectuals. He was an acclaimed international authority in Maori and Polynesian studies, and he was the controversial socialist who, as Secretary of the Department of Labour, administered for twenty years the worlds most advanced labour legislation during the Liberal era. Progressive reformers from all over the world came to study New Zealands labour laws in action. Tregear was also a key player in early attempts to form a united political labour movement. As well, he was a poet, novelist and social critic.

Tregear was in all these respects rather different from most people in New Zealand, and that in itself is deserving of a biography. Yet there is also much in his life that is quintessential to New Zealands (Pakeha) history, which is an additional justification for this study. Among the many obvious themes in this history that his experiences epitomise are the progression from a rough, lonely, isolated, bachelor life of soldiering and surveying in the wilderness to eventual settled family life in a city. There was an associated social progress through ability, as opposed to birth or wealth, from total obscurity to a position of some influence in New Zealand. And there was a further associated emotional and intellectual progression of a young, anguished, exiled Briton figuratively lost in an alien land to an older, wiser figure who has come to terms with and indeed glories in his new world. Tregear epitomises the development of New Zealand nationalism.

On a more academic level, Tregears life is an archetype of Miles Fairburns already indelible historical paradigm of the atomised and bondless colonial society, characterised by physical isolation and loneliness, and its eventual replacement, notably encouraged during the Liberal era, of a centralised, bureaucratic State community and mass culture. Fairburns The ideal society and its enemies: the foundations of modern New Zealand society 18501900 did not appear until this biography was all but complete. What struck me was the extent to which Tregears life and thought mirrored that more general experience Fairburn so graphically described. There is so much of Tregears socio-political analysis of New Zealand, especially in his socialistic essays for the American progressive audience, and even his terminology (such as when he raged against wayward tramps, calling them vagrant atoms of population) that locks him into the Fairburnian paradigm. Fairburns generalities (if not always particularities) seem sustainable, then, from two quite separate historical methodologies the study of individual experience, and the study of broad socio-community behaviour.

This biography is also very much concerned with the centrality, for both Tregear as an individual and for New Zealand society as a whole, of what Tregear called socialism. By that term he meant the development of a national culture based on the states assumption of ethical responsibility for and paternal control of all its citizens. What in practical terms this state socialism amounted to, generally under the Liberals, and particularly under Tregears guidance as Secretary of the Department of Labour from 1891 to 1910, was the evolution of highly centralised state agencies controlled by a self-styled moral, decent, caring intelligentsia (of whom Tregear was a major figure), boundless faith in the ability of voluminous and complex legislation to bring about socio-economic change, and a tradition of a massive administrative bureaucracy that reached into the most remote workplace and household in the country. Tregear was amongst the most passionate, and successful, of New Zealands reformers, with a particular, even obsessive, concern for the wellbeing of women and youths in commercial and industrial enterprise. But an account of these heroic activities is also replete with the more problematic implications of creating and administering state socialism, for example, the classic liberal dilemma of how to reconcile the goals of good order, discipline and efficiency with the equally pressing goals of compassion and caring (the state as policeman and nurse); how to assess the relative merits of the collective as opposed to the individual will; who should run the state and make such decisions; what role should capitalism play in the state administered society should it be abolished altogether or its potentially evil consequences merely mitigated by palliative action?