Keith Jackson and Alan McRobie, Eds. - Historical Directory of New Zealand

Keith Jackson and Alan McRobie, Eds.

Historical Directory of New Zealand: Second Edition

Historical Directories of Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, No. 56

Lanham (Maryland), Toronto and Oxford, the Scarecrow Press Inc., 2005, pp. lxxx + 451, ISBN 0-8180-5306-X

“Hastings, Battle of, 1066. Normans [qv] won.” Historical dictionaries notoriously either state the obvious or disinter the arcane: context and causation are not their strong points. In this case, a note bizarrely buried in the cataloguing data demonstrates that the challenge is even greater. “Readers should note that the New Zealand flag differs from the Australian flag”, it begins, before sketching the differences in pointed stars. Readers are evidently not assumed to be New Zealanders.

But this revised edition of a 1996 publication welcomed in these columns is far from a textbook for a Kiwi trivia quiz. There are maps, and a chronology which emphasises events of the past decade. An essay provides a concise overview of the country’s history, highlighting the Maori renaissance (there is also a short glossary of Maori words) and recent changes to the political system, which the editors, both distinguished political scientists, are highly qualified to handle. Appendices provide basic statistics and list ministries. (The government raised almost $20 million by selling off the national vehicle testing service.) I was disappointed that the hefty section on bibliography omitted the British Review of New Zealand Studies from its list of useful journals, but there is compensation in two pages of key web-sites.

The core of the dictionary remains the 353 pages of short factual entries, generally impressive in their cogency and cross-referencing. Grumbles are minor. “Glasgow, David Boyle” conflates a title with a surname, while cricketer Greg Chappell becomes “Chapple”: serves them right for being a Lord and an Aussie. According to its web-site (and web-sites surely cannot lie) Auckland University of Technology gained university status in 2000, not 1996 as stated. It is not clear why there are entries for four of the original six provinces, with Nelson and Taranaki omitted. The dates for the short-lived secession of Southland are included under “Provinces” and supplied on a map inset. I tracked down the 1968 sinking of the inter-Island ferry, the Wahine, under “Disasters”. The middling cities of Hamilton and Dunedin rate entries, but not Invercargill (fair enough, what would you say?) and Napier  or indeed, its twin town, another Hastings. Then there is Lyttelton, which is not marked on the maps. Readers puzzled by the New Zealand flag are unlikely to know that it is the port of Christchurch.  I would have welcomed entries about the writer Robin Hyde and the historians J.C. Beaglehole and Keith Sinclair  not least because expatriates such as Frances Hodgkins and Ernest Rutherford win places. An entry on New Zealand’s Scandinavian pioneers would have been appropriate, but as neither the Scots nor the Irish rate specific mention, this may be too much. The general heading of “Religion”, with specific cross references to Jews, Ratana and Ringatu, seems piously correct: some whisper that Catholicism and Protestantism contributed (not always helpfully) to the country’s development. But we all have our preferences, and librarians will welcome this new edition.