We moved house last weekend - hence the blog silence (‘woohoo’ go the distant cheers!)
It’s a fun job at the best of times, but this time round it was even more fun with a toddler to wrangle, as well as boxes to pack and houses to clean. Luckily, we were able to call on the kindness of friends to mind the baby while we got to work. Our new house - which is still stacked up with boxes yet to be unpacked - is, for the first time, actually ‘ours’. After renting for too many years - and way too many landlords - we have finally bought a house. An unearthed old piece of law suggests we own this house to the centre of the earth (or at least my husband does; Blackstone only refers to ‘a man’ in his Commentaries ).
Or do we?
Having a background in both postcolonial criticism, and Treaty history and settlement work, an uneasiness - an unhomeliness, if you like - reminds me that this little bit of land we now ‘own’ is part of a larger bit of land with which people have a connection that predates the settlement of New Zealand by Europeans. The area in which we now live was not extensively occupied at the time of settlement, but it lies very close to the central city, which certainly was. Shonky purchases, promises of reserves that were not properly met, forced clearances, and political marginalisation soon followed the arrival of settlers from Britain (as the Waitangi Tribunal described in its Wellington report). These early settlers, some of whose names still mark the streets, were given sight-unseen plots of land to ‘own’ in a lottery held in London before they even set foot on a ship, let alone a new land. When they eventually disembarked, making their new home meant taking someone else’s. We owe our newly minted certificate of title to that process, whether it directly occurred on this patch of land or not. It gives the term ‘owner-occupier’ a whole different meaning.
Creating homes on the land was not the only way New Zealand settlers began to stamp their power and authority on the new colony. Once women settlers started arriving in great numbers, the race to populate the nation with white babies was on. And woe betide a settler woman who did not do her racial duty (and, for real, this was how it was described). The story of the control of women’s fertility in New Zealand - Pakeha women, at least - is part of the story of colonisation.
In Mum’s the Word, journalist Sue Kedgley traces how the birthrate fell dramatically between 1880 and 1901, as women tried to limit the children they bore by drawing on their imported knowledge of contraception, contraceptive devices and abortions (5):
Colonial officials and politicians were worried that the falling birthrate and shrinking size of the European family, from six to three children within a generation, was threatening the future of the colony. They wanted women to continue to produce large families to build up New Zealand’s white population as fast as possible, and make it as productive as possible. (38)
The 1904 Royal Commission set up to inquire into the falling birthrate blamed - of course - women’s ‘selfishness’ both in limiting their families and sharing with each other the knowledge about how to do so.
Naturally, when both patriarchy and white privilege feel threatened they fight back. Cue male experts who started campaigning to keep (white) women at home, out of the workplace, and committed to their one true vocation: motherhood. And guess who was one of these ardent battlers? Take a bow, Dr Truby King, founder of Plunket, who apparently believed that the status of motherhood needed to be raised to a ‘national calling for the salvation of the white race’, and motherhood itself transformed into a ‘science‘ or craft that could be taught to all women (41).
Flash forward to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and we hear similar hand-wringing about falling birth-rates and mothers wanting to work outside the home. This time, however, we don’t hear - explicitly, at least - about saving the white race. Instead, we get the flipside: strident voices - usually male - dictating who shouldn’t be breeding. And guess who they are? The ‘underclass’, ‘child abusers’, ‘beneficiaries’, ‘drug addicts’, ‘gangs’ and ‘criminals’ ... all of which is usually code for Maori and Pacific Islanders.
The effects and after-effects of colonisation might seem a long way from moving house. But, as we unpack our things into a house that has changed hands now about ten times, and start thinking about making it into a home, I can’t help thinking about my wider home, and the way in which it came to be, the way it is now, and how I might play a role in - I hope - changing it for the better. It is now not only my home, but also that of my husband - a recent immigrant - and my daughter.
I’ve spent many years living overseas, partly because I didn’t ever quite feel at home in my home country. I’ve been back home now for over half a decade, and while that unhomely feeling sometimes persists, and there are things about it that drive me nuts, there is, as Dorothy might say, ‘no place like home.’
Click, click.
