In 1958, while she was employed to write history materials for schools, New Zealand historian Ruth Ross (1920–1982) made a close study of the development and text of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s two-language founding agreement between Māori chiefs and the Pākehā (Europeans). Her first essay about her findings, which she unsuccessfully submitted to Northland Magazine, made two claims that would transform scholarly and eventually public understanding when they were published in 1972.
Ross found, first, that many of the 540 signatures to the treaty were added after the stated date of signing (6 February 1840), and even after the treaty’s proclamation (21 May 1840), by William Hobson, the British lieutenant-governor. And, second, she found that not one but two proclamations were made on that day, the second correcting the first by adding the South Island and Stewart Island to the North Island, though not because of the chiefs’ cession but because of the British “discovery” of these territories. Privately, Ross said that her research showed Britain to have been “both very well-meaning and very cynical.”
The treaty — especially approached in Ross’s painstaking manner — was seen as too esoteric for Northland Magazine’s general readership. Friends encouraged her to persist in examining the treaty documents and their context, but a new job with the New Zealand Historic Places Trust pulled her in other directions.
Māori were meanwhile asserting their collective rights in terms that confronted the official policy of assimilation. By the time Victoria University invited Ross to speak at a public forum in 1971, her views had more resonance. She argued that the Māori text of the treaty, not the English text, should be the focus of legal and political debate because most of the chiefs’ signatures applied to a Māori translation whose English original had been signed by relatively few chiefs at Waikato Heads on 6 February 1840.
Importantly, Ross was critical of the Māori translation, and particularly the question of whether it had adequately rendered the English term “sovereignty.” Where the missionary coinage kawanatanga had been used to refer to what Māori were being asked to cede to Queen Victoria, might the Māori concept mana have better conveyed the full significance of “sovereignty”?
The purpose of historian Bain Attwood’s latest book, “A Bloody Difficult Subject”: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, is not only to celebrate the scholarship and character of Ross (widow, wife and mother in a milieu of male professional privilege), though he surely does that, making full use of her papers. Attwood’s larger points are that the significance of historical truths is highly dependent on the context of their reception, and that any “truth” that has public utility (as knowledge of the treaty surely has in New Zealand) may “assume the form of myth.”
Myth need not mean falsehood. Rather, Attwood means that the treaty has become a kind of blank screen on which “moral, political and legal norms” have been projected. Settler colonial nations need foundation stories, and the treaty is central to New Zealand’s. It can have a “mythic history” because stories about it “have a genuine link to a genuine past” and “at least a partial relationship to past reality and what is regarded as historically truthful.” But what the treaty does, as myth, is serve needs now.
Ross finally got her treaty research published, fourteen years after her first attempt, in the New Zealand Journal of History. According to Attwood, her overriding argument was that it is hard for us to know the intentions of those drawing up and signing the treaty. In her debunking words, the treaty was “hastily and inexpertly drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution. To persist in postulating that this was a ‘sacred compact’ is sheer hypocrisy.”
Revealing the treaty to be unfit to serve as a “moral compact, let alone a legal contract” (Attwood’s words), Ross saw her truth as demystifying. But changes in Pākehā/Māori relations meant this was not an argument readers became aware of and valued.
In response to Māori self-assertion, the government established the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, making the treaty a central “constitutional” document (in a nation without a written constitution). It was not the purpose of Ross’s research to establish how the treaty could work as a morally and politically central two-language text, but this was her research’s fate. Indeed, there is irony in her most iconoclastic assertion — “the Treaty of Waitangi says whatever we want it to say” — because, by the 1970s, Pākehā and Māori were wanting the treaty to say a lot.
In fact, the treaty’s protean character was not the undoing but the making of the treaty as a focus of national life. A non-debunking reading of Ross’s scholarship — a reading that found, in Attwood’s words, “that there were substantive differences between the Māori text and the English texts, that the Māori text constituted the treaty, and that any consideration of its meanings and implications should proceed on that basis” — proved unstoppable.
The jurisprudence of the new tribunal was soon shaped by Māori judge Eddie Durie, its chair from 1980 to 2004, who saw the Māori text as fundamental. The centrality of the treaty to New Zealanders’ conceptions of themselves as a socially just people has ensured the text remains in focus as the nation debates the terms of Māori–Pākehā coexistence and the mutual honouring of their sovereignties.
Attwood conveys the disconnect between Ross’s own understanding of her paper’s primary point and others’ later understandings. Her paper is open to being read for both its major argument (a treaty botched, a nation’s veneration of it misconceived) and for its minor argument (the Māori text as the treaty). In other words, as Attwood says, “Ross’s approach to an account of the treaty resembles the treaty itself” by being available to more than one purposeful reading. The minor argument has become canonical because the nation needs it.
In his book’s final two-thirds Attwood reviews the writings of treaty scholars including Paul McHugh, Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, James Belich, Michael Belgrave, John Pocock, Andrew Sharp, Keith Sorrenson, W.H. Oliver, Lyndsay Head, D.F. McKenzie and Mark Hickford. These (Pākehā) names will be well known to anyone reading New Zealand history. Their conversation has used or generated a number of terms — Whig history, common law history, juridical history, and Māori history — that Attwood has found useful in previous publications (for example, in his critique of the “juridical” alignment of Henry Reynolds’s scholarship with the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision).
Attwood brought these terms (apart from Whig history) from New Zealand, and he now uses them to take the reader through the New Zealanders’ work, showing us the rich soil from which he grew as a historian. The debates in New Zealand are highly relevant for Australian historians who wish to respond to the Uluru Statement’s demand for truth-telling. By making this careful exposition, he has done the discipline of history everywhere a great service.
In his final chapter Attwood returns to a theme he canvassed in Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005). There, he remarked that the democratisation of the production of knowledge — accelerated by “contemporary forms of technology” — “has made it difficult to agree on what historical truth comprises.” He then presented academic history as somewhat embattled by having been drawn into the public sphere to perform political and legal service.
Since then, Attwood has read Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), with its typology of histories: monumental, antiquarian and critical. He endorses Nietzsche’s view that each has advantages for living and each needs the tempering presence of the other two. This seems to have had the effect of weakening his strictures on “juridical history,” though the category remains important to him.
Thus Attwood now distances himself from those who privilege the “critical.” In their practice of what he calls historicism, its NZ practitioners concede too little public value to what people have made the treaty mean according to the political dynamics and moral sensibilities of their times. “Many of the matters at stake in regard to the treaty concern justice and ethics and so are legal and philosophical in nature rather than historical.”
Here Attwood enters a global discussion that has featured two formidable contemporary Australian theorists of history, Ian Hunter (University of Queensland) and Anne Orford (University of Melbourne), debating how we should and should not historicise international law. (Their debate is the subject of a perceptive commentary by another Australian, Natasha Wheatley, in a 2021 issue of History and Theory.)
By the final pages of Attwood’s very fine book, the reader will be acutely aware that New Zealand has been a ground for exploring a question that Australians can’t avoid: how does historical scholarship serve a democratic reckoning with a settler colonial past? The idea that he seems to find most promising is John Pocock’s proposed “treaty between histories” (that is, mutual respect between Pākehā and Māori ways of doing history that cannot be blended). We have much to learn from what they have been talking about on the other side of the ditch. •
“A Bloody Difficult Subject”: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History
By Bain Attwood | Auckland University Press | $59.95 | 320 pages
