MANUSCRIPT XLIV: Inaugural Lecture: History, Lies and Mythology – the Historian and the Community

ABSTRACT

Alan Ward (1935–2014) delivered his inaugural professorial address at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, on 23 March 1988. Following his 1987 promotion to Professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1996, the lecture marked a milestone in his career, which to that point had included not only his influential study, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (1974),¹ but also important work on land reform in Papua New Guinea, the New Hebrides/Vanuatu, and New Caledonia.² Some 35 years after its delivery and ten years after Ward’s death, the Journal of Pacific History now publishes the lecture (as retrieved from his papers and transcribed by his daughter, Ingrid Ward) in its entirety. This introduction highlights key themes from the lecture in the context of Ward’s career and subsequent publications that expanded on the issues raised in the speech.

Key words:

• History
• mythology
• cultural relativism
• Pacific Islands

Introduction: on ‘Good’ History and ‘Tough’ Problems

Inaugural professorial addresses provide an occasion for new professors to share research and reflect on their field or discipline before their academic peers and the public. The lecture, like other historical documents, reflects not only the immediate occasion but also the broader time and place. This is evident from its various points of reference including what were then the ongoing ‘events’ in New Caledonia and the previous year’s coups d’état in Fiji, as well as its engagement with two notable voices in Pacific and Australian history, Bernard Smith, and Greg Dening. Some other aspects of its timing perhaps need to be recalled. In Australia, 1988 was the year of the bicentenary celebrations for the arrival of the First Fleet, which brought debates over identity, multiculturalism, and historical interpretation to the fore. Just two months before the lecture, Australia Day (26 January) had been the focus for landmark demonstrations calling for Aboriginal land rights and drawing attention to Australia’s ongoing history of colonization. On the other side of the Tasman, Ward recently had begun his work with New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal – the permanent commission of inquiry established in 1975 to investigate breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, and which had been given a much expanded historical remit in 1985.

Seen in the above context, the lecture marks the beginning of Ward’s public reflections on historical interpretation, relativism, and the relationship between historians and community that would be refined through his work for the Waitangi Tribunal in the coming years. These reflections were also strongly informed by his experiences as a ‘participant historian’ in work relating to land reform in PNG and Vanuatu. Peter Hempenstall writes that he had been ‘stripped […] of any remaining romanticism about indigenous leaders’ and that his ‘liberal support of the ethnic state was dented’. His ‘experience of black colonialism made [him] determined to find and state in his writings an irreducible set of principles for living in the pluri-ethnic communities that make up the Australasian sphere of influence’.³

‘Good history’ and its enemies

Ward’s 1988 lecture delves into the concept of ‘good history’. He begins by addressing a tension between history conceived primarily as truth-telling about the past (and the critique of lies and myths), as expounded by Marc Bloch, and Bernard Smith, versus history conceived as understanding past societies in and on their own terms, an approach he links to the Geertzian-influenced ethnohistory of Greg Dening. The lecture’s core question, posed rhetorically with reference to a violent event that had occurred in New Caledonia five years earlier resulting in the deaths of two gendarmes, is whether ‘to know all is to forgive all? Is our task to understand and explain what makes the settlers and the Kanaks, the gendarmes and the secretary of state, think and act as they do, and then leave it at that? Make no value judgment about it?’ Ward’s concern and argument, supported by his reading of philosopher and conservative critic Allan Bloom, is that the ability to make such judgements is being eroded by the excesses of ‘cultural relativism’ and ‘openness’.⁴

Ward’s own call in the lecture is for historical interpretation and ‘informed evaluation’, combining the search for truth with an empathetic understanding of cultures and societies on their own terms. Historians must also, he tells his audience, be attentive to ‘the needs of the community beyond the profession’; there is, he insists, a ‘duty to rise above his or her personal view of the truth’. In concluding the lecture, Ward argues that ‘Historians … need to find their key points of reference not within their academic or artistic sub-cultures but within the wider community and its concerns’.

Ward’s later writings continued to address concerns about relativism in historical interpretation, including some of the specific examples used in the 1988 lecture. In a 1990 essay reflecting on his two years working for New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal and the challenges facing professional historians in the context of the tribunal and its processes, he baldly identifies the emergence and intensification of relativism in cultural studies as ‘the crisis of our times’.⁵ He writes:

In discussing bicultural and multicultural societies and what elements should constitute the moral order or the social order, we inevitably confront problems of choice about relative worth; although very often several preferences can co-exist among different groups in society, as matters of private morality, other matters affect the public at large, and the community, from time to time, is obliged to make decisions on what to do about them.

If we say, from an absolute relativist point of view, that all cultural perceptions and valuations are equally valid, that there is no one single truth claim, that there are as many truth claims as there are participants according to their different cultural backgrounds and perceptions, does this not mean that we are doomed to talk past each other in perpetuity?⁶

As well as calling on historians to deploy their professional skills, including the critical use of evidence, Ward draws from historian Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1988), and Novick’s reading of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra to call for interpretations that resist closure and which ask ‘all parties to accept scholarly criticism and self-reflection about the meaning of the events then, and the meaning of them subsequently’.⁷

In the 1990 essay, Ward describes himself as ‘increasingly at odds with the extreme cultural relativism which is part of modern reaction to imperialism of all kinds and which, for that reason, is often strongly supported by liberals of the majority culture’. He finds himself ‘accepting a moderate relativism, which places a considerable worth on the values and perceptions of as many cultures as there are in the community, but questions the claim to automatic recognition of all customs simply because some group wants them’.⁸ Such an approach involves ‘recognising the fallibility of all truth claims’ and acting ‘in accordance with the best current opinion of the existing community of enquirers’.⁹ In the New Zealand case, that community, he argues, ‘is the New Zealand people’ and the two main communities comprising it (Māori and Pākeha) that are ideally represented in the membership of the Waitangi Tribunal.¹⁰

In 1992, Ward returned to the theme of ‘The Crisis of Our Times’ in an article for the Journal of Pacific History.¹¹ With a particular focus on the ‘confrontation between French universalism and local particularism’ or ‘the clash between universal and particular concepts of Good and Right’ – as foregrounded by the emergence of ethnic nationalism in New Caledonia and Fiji – Ward drew on his late colleague Michael Spencer’s engagement with work by Alain Finkielkraut, and again his own reading of Bloom, to take issue with ‘recent versions of liberalism’ that uncritically endorsed ‘movements based on ethnic nationalism’.¹² One of his fears is that ‘ethnic resistance to imperialism easily degenerates into counter-racism’.¹³ Again, his expressed desire is ‘to equip people to make value-judgements, not to avoid them – to make inescapable and difficult choices based on wide and deep understanding of all points of view, but (hopefully) with regard to fundamental human rights’.¹⁴ He outlines what he sees as preconditions for ‘co-existence across racial and religious lines’ including the notion of ‘interdependent community’.¹⁵

Further traces of the thoughts that preoccupied Ward in 1988 also can be found in his 1996 review essay of two edited collections – Brij V. Lal’s Pacific Islands History; Journeys and Transformations (1992) and Donna Merwick’s Dangerous Liaisons. Essays in Honour of Greg Dening (1994) – in which he expands on his views of Dening as well as Pacific history more generally.¹⁶ This essay spells out autobiographically the reasons for his discomfort with ethnohistorians:

The third reason why I and ethnohistorians have sat uncomfortably with each other is that more than other Pacific scholars since Davidson, I have found a career in government or semi-government agencies in Pacific states becoming independent. I still do, in the Waitangi Tribunal, where scholarly research is the essence of the review of New Zealand’s colonial history and the partial reshaping of its outcomes. This practical involvement has often been a brutal experience, where one meets a disproportionate number of knaves and scoundrels, along with idealists and the many who simply want their fair share.¹⁷

While welcoming what he sees as Dening’s evolution towards a more pluralistic approach, and echoing Dening’s call for academic history to regain its ‘moral force’ and ‘theatricality’, Ward underscores the earlier lecture’s concern that Dening had ‘lost credibility’ in his defence of Margaret Mead in the Mead/Freeman debate ‘on the grounds that all is interpretation anyway’.¹⁸

Another 1996 essay – this one in honour of Peter Munz, one of Ward’s former mentors and professors at Victoria University of Wellington – addresses the popular polarization in New Zealand of Māori and Pākeha views of the past and the applicability of Western historical methods to the assessment of claims before the Waitangi Tribunal.¹⁹ Ward again mobilizes Marc Bloch and Bernard Smith in defence of historical truth, ‘good history’ and the ability to be critical of the myths of one’s own community,²⁰ as well as admiration of Manning Clark for the ability to engage a broad or universal frame of reference and reach a wide readership.²¹ He again warns of the ‘crisis of our times’ and ‘the dilemma of ethnic liberalism everywhere’.²² Notably, this essay is invigorated by Munz’s own 1991 essay on the ‘Limitations of EthnoHistory’ and his 1994 critique of work by Anne Salmond on early encounters between Māori and Europeans.²³ Ward welcomes the capacity of ‘sophisticated ethnographic history’ to provide an antidote to the ‘monolithic and rigid depictions of tradition which simplistic or politically driven ethnography is inclined to draw’. He calls for a closer relationship between anthropology and history in elucidating Māori experiences of colonization. But both have their challenges. While anthropology seems dogged by ‘uncertainty about how to deal with evidence of the contradictoriness of the past’ and with change, he calls out the failure of historians (especially Pākeha historians) to ‘show Maori that the historical exploration of their own past is a rich engagement with complex problems of choice, and a multiplicity of outcomes, not all of them tragic’.²⁴

Ward’s interventions on historical interpretation and on the work of historians in the Waitangi Tribunal by no means end here, but the 1996 essays appear to be the last to directly take up points from the 1988 lecture.

New Caledonia: a ‘tough situation’

While Ward’s writing in the wake of the lecture was increasingly directed at the issues of interpretation arising from the work of Waitangi Tribunal, the lecture itself foregrounds the situation in New Caledonia as one of its principal examples. Prior to beginning his work for the Tribunal, New Caledonia had been the focus of much of Ward’s energy over the previous seven years.²⁵ Two early expressions of that interest are Land and Politics in New Caledonia (1982), and a discussion paper for the Australian parliament’s Legislative Research Service, New Caledonia – The Immediate Prospects (1983–4).²⁶ Ward described them in 2012 as now ‘obscure publications’ that ‘reflect the intense politics of the time they were written, and my role as liaison between the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Labor Party and the Union Calédonienne [the largest of New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties] in Noumea’.²⁷

Written before the ‘events’ of 1984–8, but taking into account the escalation of violence between 1981 and 1983, these earlier works indicate Ward’s principal concerns for New Caledonia and endeavour to make the kinds of judgements and evaluations that he called for in the 1988 lecture. They were strongly informed by his observations on what he saw as the nationalist backlash against colonial exploitation in newly independent Vanuatu, leading to ethnically exclusivist provisions in citizenship and land legislation.

In these works, Ward outlined two key considerations. The first was the issue of ‘Double legitimacy: Kanak independence or multiracial independence?’. While recognizing the demographic grounds for ‘Melanesian primacy’, Ward defended the case for a ‘multiracial’ rather than ‘Kanak’ independence ‘on grounds of racial harmony within the region, as well as of social justice’.²⁸ French policy, he suggested, ‘should be respected’ in so far as it was working towards these goals. In relation to land reform, France’s reforms and policies seemed adequate, but he remained concerned about claims by independence leaders to ‘all the land in New Caledonia’ and called for greater clarity on their part in setting out ‘what the land rights of non-Melanesian “Kanaks” will be’ in any future state.²⁹

In relation to a second consideration, the choice between ‘Colonial law, customary law or revolutionary law?’, Ward used the case of the 1983 ‘Koindé shootings’ – the example he would again mobilize in the 1988 lecture – using statements made in its aftermath to illustrate the diverse stances of Kanak and French leaders. While acknowledging the shortcomings of metropolitan law, he expressed concern that revolutionary or people’s law, and custom, might not adequately protect people’s liberties after independence. Western law, he argues, provides stronger protections for person and property against potential ‘oppression by the new ruling elites’. He was hopeful that reforms begun under the socialist Mitterand government in 1981 would help ‘remedy historic injustice and despoliation’, including at Koindé.³⁰

In addressing the larger issue of independence and the role of France, Ward stressed the conditions required for the development of multicultural community. In Land and Politics (1982) he concluded with the paradox that while it would be dangerous for the French state to relinquish control precipitously, its ongoing presence prevents ‘the emergence of true community in New Caledonia’. Its resolution depended, he suggested, on the ‘certain and progressive withdrawal of the authority of Paris over a stated period of time and after it has instituted genuine structural reforms’.³¹ At the same time, he acknowledged the need for indépendantistes to define the future citizenship of an independent New Caledonia more inclusively. This, he observed,

would be normal healthy politics; and it would be entirely possible if the French state were to say, not ‘We are here for ten years during which we will prove Independence to be a futile goal’, but ‘We are going to be here for five or ten years at most, and during that time we will help you, Melanesians, French, Wallisians and others to work out the basic structures of your emergent Oceanic society with ultimate constitutional arrangements open to review’.³²

This analysis requiring the French state to ultimately step out and make space for the emergence of a New Caledonian community, and for independentists to more inclusively define the future citizenship of an independent New Caledonia remained largely unchanged over the following years notwithstanding the violence of the ‘events’ from 1984 to 1988. In his 1986 essay on post-war migration to New Caledonia, Ward underlined the concern that the independentist position on citizenship requiring one parent to be born in the territory was ‘too tightly drawn’. It would potentially exclude ‘those who, in the period 1945–60, came in good faith under the aegis of the most progressive influences of the day’.³³ He wrote later in 1988 that the independentist position appearing to require future citizens to have demonstrated their prior commitment to independence was ‘unrealistic’ and ‘back to front’. He argued for a more reassuring approach to address the insecurities of migrants.³⁴ In 1992, he reiterated that ‘there must come a time, if genuine community across ethnic lines is to be created in New Caledonia, that they [the French army and officials] must go home. The test of statecraft for the government in Paris is to know when to leave the stage’.³⁵

As of early 2024, the issues raised by Ward, particularly regarding the ongoing presence of the French state in New Caledonia and the conditions of local citizenship, continue to resonate. The French state seeks to affirm its ongoing presence in the wake of recent independence referenda, while local political formations grapple with finding agreement on the conditions of local citizenship. Ward’s call for the French state to gradually withdraw, allowing space for the emergence of a true community in New Caledonia, remains a pertinent consideration in current discussions.

Alan Ward’s inaugural professorial address in 1988 served as a foundational moment in his career, sparking reflections on historical interpretation, relativism, and the historian’s role in the community. His subsequent writings and engagements, in the context of New Zealand as well as New Caledonia, further enriched these themes. Ward’s commitment to multicultural community development, his advocacy for an interdependent society and ‘good history’, and his insights into the complexities of post-colonial transitions continue to offer valuable perspectives for contemporary discussions on historical interpretation and community dynamics.

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Inaugural Lecture: History, Lies and Mythology – The Historian and The Community

The great French historian and soldier, Marc Bloch, in the years of calm between combat in two world wars, before he was shot by the Nazis for his involvement in the Resistance, was asked by his son, ‘Papa, what is the use of history?’ Bloch replied that if good history is not written bad history will be. This, I believe, is incontrovertible. All humans locate themselves in time and place and interrogate the past or impart to the past, reasons for their good fortune or misfortune, things they value and those they deplore. Everybody has some historical sense and uses it.

Even Henry Ford, the self-styled king of the philistines, who said ‘History is bunk’ can soon be caught out. In his autobiography he says ‘What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress’.³⁶ That ‘only’ lets in all history. Ford is among the thousands who read the past to discern a practical guide to the future. But he also bears out Bloch’s warning; he writes very bad history, searching the past not to learn fresh insights, so much as to confirm his prejudices. To read Ford on ‘the Jew in America’ is to realise how he contributed to the climate of American anti-semitism which kept the US supine and compliant while the Nazi virus spread through Europe destroying Bloch among its myriad of victims.

But what are the hallmarks of good history? In 1985 the very distinguished Melbourne art historian, Professor Bernard Smith, made a passionate defence of history for its capacity for telling ‘the truth’ about the past. He was bitterly critical of trends in recent structuralist and semiotic theory which seemed to suggest that the historians’ claim to access to what has actually occurred is illusory. ‘Let me, at least, express my own personal moral repugnance’, he writes, ‘to the suggestion that the truth about the past cannot be told’.³⁷

The trends in social science to which he refers also have a noted Melbourne exponent, in the person of Greg Dening, Professor of History at Melbourne University. Dening has played a leading role in mediating to Australia the work of the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who has had a lot to say about the importance of myth in human life. Geertz says something like this: a fundamental characteristic of humans is to seek meaning in life. We need, quite fundamentally, to have systems of belief and value which interpret and explain day to day life and its periodic crises, and which provide a guide to action, a sense of purpose and direction. The culture one is born into and educated by, provides the system of belief and value, and often the culture conveys its messages in myths, or to use another term from Geertz and Dening’s discourse, in metaphors. Thus, for Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a complex and all-encompassing metaphor about the origins of life, the world of nature, the world of man, the world of spirits and their ongoing relationship with one another. The myths of the Rainbow Serpent and many others, give this concept greater specificity. But it is not just pre-industrial, or non­literate peoples who make myths or metaphors: all peoples do. The racial myth of Aryan supremacy mobilised millions of Germans trying to cope with defeat, inflation, depression and threat of revolution. The peoples of the non-Communist states largely accept the myth or metaphor of ‘The Free World’. In terms of that concept – now looking rather ragged – they have propped up or even gone to war to support some of the most vile dictatorships the world has ever seen. The people of the Soviet Union still largely accept the Bolsheviks’ metaphor of their revolution encircled and threatened by capitalist imperialism. And so it goes on.

Bernard Smith is hostile to myths. ‘Myth’, he says, ‘tells a story that both the myth-teller and audience assume to be true’. It ‘does not build into its construction the critical techniques that distinguish history as an art form’.³⁸ History, as he understands it, is a kind of criticism. Quoting his own earlier work of 1960 he says ‘The historian is to myth what the ferret is to the rabbit. The historian burrows down after myth, hunts it down and destroys it if he can. He is “Jack the myth-killer”’.³⁹ It is a bold statement, characteristic of an age, not so long ago, when positivist science was still confident and strong and social scientists were still seeking to emulate it, on the basis that there is an objective reality to be sought out, identified and pinned down. And insofar as history does expose the falsity, the lies, the deliberate manipulations of politicians and propagandists, who could deny the worth and validity of the enterprise.

But, of course, it is not as easy as that. Let us take an example. It is an example of a recent incident, one of countless violent incidents which have constantly emerged over the centuries in situations of racial antagonism, and probably always will. This one occurred in New Caledonia in 1983 and it emerged out of this kind of background⁴⁰ where angry and defensive settlers were confronting indigenous nationalists, and the French authorities were trying to control the situation, according to their perceptions of how it should be controlled.

The incident happened at the village of Koindé where for some 20 years the Melanesian villagers had been seeking to restrain a settler who had built a sawmill nearby.⁴¹ His operations made heavy inroads on the forest where they hunted and had polluted a stream where they fished and drew water. Despite their protests, nothing was done about this until the recent climate of political tension induced the authorities to propose a settlement – compensation, reforestation, restocking the fish, etc. At the last minute, when agreement appeared to have been reached, negotiations suddenly broke down and the villagers erected a road block on the road just beyond the village. After vainly demanding its removal, the French High Commissioner ordered the gendarmerie to go and clear it. Three truckloads of gendarmes went to the scene and as they passed through the village they were suddenly challenged by angry men who hurled abuse and stones and leapt on to the trucks to smash the windscreens. The gendarmes struggled on and cleared the road block. When they returned, the struggle resumed and this time there was tear gas, stun grenades and sudden volleys of gunfire. When the firing stopped, two young Frenchmen who had arrived at the territory only three days before from the beautiful city of Chartres lay dead in the beautiful forest of New Caledonia – both sides were counting their wounded.⁴²

Two questions were immediately asked by everyone who heard about the incident. What exactly happened? And what did it all mean? These are questions which professional historians too, must confront if they are to meet the minimal demands of a thinking, questioning community.

Let us first listen to some of the answers which the leaders of various interest groups in New Caledonia gave.⁴³ The leader of the Union Calédonienne, a Melanesian nationalist group which is based on the ideology of a return to custom, la coutume, said that the whole thing began from a constant disregard of custom by the sawmiller, by the officials in not observing customary rules in negotiation, by the gendarmes in barging through the village without notifying the chiefs in advance of their coming.⁴⁴ And after this provocation, the police also fired first, with their stun grenades; the villagers’ response with their hunting guns was one of panic and fear.

The leader of the Palika, a nationalist group based on Marxist ideology, said it was simply another classic case of capitalist exploitation, with government, as always, the willing lackey of capitalist property owners, using force against the indigenous workers and peasants, a pattern of capitalist imperialism from start to finish.⁴⁵ The leaders of the Christian nationalists said that force was no solution to anything and placed primary responsibility on the authorities for lack of willingness to negotiate.⁴⁶ The gendarmes said that in the raid that followed they found ample evidence of the villagers’ preparation of guns and ammunition, and crude grenades; that nationalist politicians who visited the area in the preceding weeks and not the French had caused the negotiations with the sawmiller to break down; and that far from the villagers having been taken by surprise, when the gendarmes arrived, the gendarmes had driven into a calculated well-laid trap. In Paris, the man with the power, secretary of state for colonies, M. Emmanuelli, said that notwithstanding all the talk about custom, and the alleged justification for the Koindé villagers’ use of arms, ‘French law derived from Roman law is the best guarantee of the liberty and dignity of the individual and it is French law that would be enforced’.⁴⁷ Enforced it was, and a number of Koindé villagers were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.⁴⁸ (The guillotine was abolished in New Caledonia in 1974.)

Now in all that mish-mash of statements there are some lies that can be exposed by inquiry, legal or historical. Either the Melanesians had deliberately prepared the arms and the ambush or they had not. And there is also evidently a lot of truth on both sides. The villagers had been afflicted without redress for 20 years. The politicians of both conservative and nationalist allegiance had got into the act and the gendarmes were caught in a cross-fire in more senses than one. But when all that has been sorted out it is apparent that the most potent factors operating in the situation are what the participants believed – how they fundamentally viewed the whole situation according to their preconceptions and over-arching value systems, their myths and their metaphors: la coutume, which affirmed a Melanesian supremacy, or French law and Roman law which affirmed the administration’s authority, or Marxist ideology which justified Melanesian resistance to exploitation. Because of their power and potency these cultural patterns must be understood in their own terms, regardless of their objective truth or falsehood. This is why culture history and semiotics have become so important and why people’s myths and metaphors have themselves become the artefacts and objects of historical inquiry. We all know the terrible force of the Nazi race myth. Regardless of its scientific falseness, we also know the fate of people whose myths and metaphors have collapsed in the face of a harsh reality they can no longer adequately explain: the anxiety, the loss of meaning and value – the defensive retreat into deliberately blotting out a confused and purposeless world, as in the sad alcoholism of the Aborigines and the drug-taking of affluent but purposeless western youth.

But does this mean that ‘to know all is to forgive all’? Is our task to understand and explain what makes the settlers and the Kanaks, the gendarmes and the Secretary of State, think and act as they do, and then leave it at that? Make no value judgment about it?

That is precisely what has gone wrong with the Humanities in Western universities according to an important new book by the retiring Professor of Philosophy at Chicago, Professor Allan Bloom. This book is called The Closing of the American Mind.⁴⁹ Bloom’s thesis is that education has aimed so much at developing openness to, and acceptance of, other cultures, and of all minorities, that it has bred students who are so open, so accepting that they are unable to evaluate, to make difficult choices and judgements. So, paradoxically, their minds have closed. Scientism, the objectification of everything, including other people’s value systems, has overtaken the arts; teachers and students apprehend other cultures and values as facts and avoid criticism. The triumphant creed is cultural relativism; anything goes as long as some culture system endorses it. Human sacrifice, suttee of widows, infanticide. Who are we to judge if that’s the way ‘they’ want to do things? Even within our own borders multi-culturalism has an ultra-tolerant fringe which says that if some non-Western immigrants for religious reasons, want to practice female circumcision, why not? After all male circumcision has been around for centuries and we can’t be sexually discriminatory can we? Our students are so frightened by the charge of imperialism, cultural or otherwise, that they become detached spectators, increasingly satiated by a kind of Humanities-led Cook’s tour of other cultures and other ages, increasingly bored, continually confusing liberty and licence and quite incapable of decision about tough situations like New Caledonia.

Professor Bloom’s plea can readily be misinterpreted. It can be read as a plea for the resumption of some kind of fundamentalism, of revelation religious or political, to use as guide, reason having been found capable of justifying anything. This is not, I believe, a correct reading of his argument. His argument is that there should be a return to the scholarly practices of the Greeks who did not make a sharp distinction between fact and value. He wants, like them, to keep to the fore the questions, ‘What is a good society? What makes for the good in terms of human potential, over and above the myriad of particular, competing goods?’⁵⁰ He wants people to wrestle with tough options, and steer between the nihilism of an all­embracing relativism, and mindless ‘commitment’ unsupported by reason.

I believe he is largely right. The liberals of West European democracies have been notoriously slow to apprehend and to confront brutal realities; they leave difficult choices until too late, or plump rather inexpertly for one side or another without much real understanding. The notorious dilettantism of Oxbridge youth in the ‘30s in the face of rising dictatorship, or the foolish quirky commitment of some to Stalinist communism and a lifetime of treachery, illustrate the two poles of Bloom’s concern.

Not that it is ever easy to apprehend the complex forces at work in any society. Of the many who involved themselves in the Spanish Civil War most were imposing their own vision, their own reading – anti-Fascist, anti-Communist – on that struggle, whereas it has been well said that it was Spain’s history that exploded in 1936.

It was, similarly, New Caledonia's particular history that exploded at Koindé, or Fiji’s in May 1987 and before judgment, let alone action, it is certainly needful to study these societies in depth, in their own terms.

Moreover, the very act of searching out all points of view adds to ‘the truth’ in Bernard Smith’s terms. History, he notes, ‘is often a criticism of silence, [a telling] of that story which has not been told and now must be told’.⁵¹ He is no doubt pleased at the recent breaking of a 100 year long silence in Australia’s historical profession about Aboriginal history – a silence derived from the fact that most Aborigines had become very remote or very dead and that the profession had, until recently, overwhelmingly been in the hands of comfortable urban, middle-class liberals who knew nothing about real rural people of either race and either said nothing about them or made rather romantic myths about mateship and the frontier.

The story now being told by younger historians of different social origin like Richard Broome is a story of horror anything but comforting to the white liberal imagination. To quote one example, very close to home, Broome cites the Reverend Threlkeld of Lake Macquarie mission who in 1825 wrote in his journal that he had been tormented ‘at night by the shrieks of [aboriginal] girls, about 8 and 9 years of age, taken by force by the vile men of Newcastle, and of a man who came with his head broken by the blow of a musket butt because he would not give up his wife’.⁵²

It was momentarily tempting, in the light of this, to call this lecture ‘The vile men of Newcastle’, to deliberately challenge the comfortable celebration of white progress in the Hunter Valley, but that would have been both cheap and unscholarly. Because, though an essential part, Threlkeld’s insight is but part of the whole complex equation of what happened in this valley and white people are entitled to establish their identity and sense of self-worth through the study of genealogy and local history.

Indeed the tendency of white liberals to launch into excesses of breastbeating and contempt for their whole tradition can be as facile as their former complacency. Because, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out in the 1930s in his novel of that name, there is ‘black mischief’ as well as white mischief as Fiji showed last year. Europeans too are entitled to search their past, as Professor Bloom wishes, for the values and institutions which promote liberty and dignity, though not, one would hope, as arrogantly as M. Emmanuelli.

The history of the Pacific region indeed faces us with some of those very large, ultimately philosophical issues that Professor Allan Bloom believes we are ill-equipped to deal with. The problem was well-expressed by a young Maori woman, another of the well-educated, highly-articulate members of elite families, leading radical protest in various parts of the region. At a conference at Auckland University, when the question came up of the civil rights of non-Melanesians born in New Caledonia, in a future Melanesian state of Kanaky, she said: ‘You can have a litter of kittens born in a banana box, but that doesn’t make them into bananas’. It was a nice metaphor but it was ultimately racist.⁵³ Only genetic origin, Melanesian parentage, in her view could convey full civil rights. Those of other parentage, even in the second or third generation, acquired lesser rights. This is in fact the legal situation in independent Vanuatu, though not in Papua New Guinea.

There are no noble savages in the Pacific, only human beings struggling to shape their societies amidst the forces of modernisation and international rivalry and they, like us, face difficult problems of choice. There are, fortunately, more moderate positions among Pacific island nationalists than the one quoted, but if history shows anything it shows that the sense of race is ineluctable and that the only alternative to tension and violence is that people of both sides, who know each other’s views and what shaped them, continue to talk to each other. Interestingly that is why in New Zealand, where the racial situation is increasingly tense, the few historians who have studied these matters have become increasingly in demand among many sections of the New Zealand community to explain and interpret the colonial past, which has shaped the present and which will largely determine the future.

The Pacific has long been the locus of a debate about two fundamentally different views of mankind: either there is but one species, homo sapiens, and all its members are, in principle, equal, or there are really several kinds of humanity – Europeans, Aborigines, Melanesians, Indians, Vietnamese and so on, shaped ultimately by genetics. On the latter view, each is entitled to its territory and to the control of power in that territory. The migrants from one territory to another must accept a subordinate position, unless they, as conquerors, can dispossess and subordinate the former inhabitants. That is how Europeans organised things in this country, legitimising their supremacy by racist ideology; many Pacific peoples, in revenge, would reverse the order of supremacy, but on the same basis. It would undoubtedly be progress from their point of view, but in any larger perspective it is a limited view of progress. That is why New Caledonia is such an intractable problem – particularly for some idealistic, socialist French, the heirs of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, committed fundamentally to the concept of a common humanity, who, while they deplore colonisation, cannot accept the present Kanak formulations about civil rights for non-Melanesians.

All rather remote you might think, in comfortable white-dominated US­protected Australia. Not so remote in the view of the Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, Libyan and Chinese governments who take a very active interest in the struggles of the Pacific races and micro-states and are constantly making their inputs, at the very least diplomatic, commercial and financial, to the strategic balance in this area.

But let us return to our historians and Bernard Smith’s defence of history as telling the truth about the past. There is another difficulty that we have noted in passing. Aboriginal-settler relations. For many decades a rather laundered view of Aboriginal-settler relations appeared in the works of professional historians – a view which minimised white violence and put most blame for the apparent Aboriginal demise on the Aborigines’ ineptitude. Aborigines reading those accounts would say that they were all lies that the truth was something like a settler-inspired genocide. Napoleon reflecting gloomily on how the history of the Empire would be written after Waterloo is credited with the statement that History is the ‘lies written by the victors’, and here is a reputable school of thought which stresses the relationship of historical writing to the dominant power culture.

This is part of Professor Dening’s point too: that not only is history mainly about people’s perceptions, their myths and metaphors, rather than facts, but that historians themselves and their writings are greatly shaped by their culture and by their times. Bernard Smith is deeply upset by this suggestion. That ‘Jack the myth-killer produces new myths in the very act of destroying the old ones’.⁵⁴ What is the point if that is all historians do?

Partly of course, the learned Professor is tilting at windmills because, as I have tried to show, myth does not necessarily equal falsehood. Myth or Metaphor embodies the point of view of some of the actors in the drama of life and to understand the whole play we need to see it from different angles as in Kurosawa’s famous film, Rashomon. Each account conveys a portion of the truth.

Moreover time adds essential new perspectives. All of us, all the time, act with only partial awareness of the wider forces, the deeper currents, affecting a given situation. Like Shakespeare’s tragic heroes we grope blindly, with sudden moments of clarity and sudden bursts of conviction, often misapplied. As Smith himself acknowledges, only the passage of time can show whether we were right or wrong, in tune with the larger forces or fundamentally out of harmony. The people’s instinct for ‘the judgment of history’ not of historians, is a sound one, though historians play an essential role in the constant process of interpretation and reinterpretation. I doubt that Bernard Smith himself would want to claim that the last word has ever been said about anything.

Yet he challenges us still. The historian, he says, has a duty to rise above his or her personal view of the truth. ‘The historical truth is crafted both about and for others. To aim at less, isn't that, in a sense, to join the party of those who murdered Marc Bloch?' he asks.⁵⁵

Professional scholars argue that we lift our work above the merely personal because of our respect for the canons of our profession – its strict methodologies, the open and international nature of the discourse. Indeed, when these are observed, they are a fundamental safeguard against the dangers to which Smith alludes. But professional discourse can easily become in-bred, clubbish, self-serving. Thus, Margaret Mead, one of the greatest mythologisers who ever bestraddled the Pacific, whose research on Samoa was shoddy and her findings bogus, was writing as a reputation­seeking disciple of her mentor Franz Boas in the context of a peculiarly American debate about nature and nurture and desperately needing to find evidence of primitive harmony and innocence. How often in history has the Pacific been raided by Europeans for that purpose. And when Dening supports her because of her commitment to that academic debate against the claims to greater objectivity of Professor Freeman who at least speaks Samoan and spends years not weeks in Samoa, then I am inclined to a agree with Smith that something has gone very wrong indeed with culture history and semiotics.⁵⁶

Historians, and most scholars and artists perhaps, need to find their key points of reference not within their academic or artistic sub-cultures but within the wider community and its concerns. Those concerns are not just about the subject-matter of history, I suggest, but relate to Professor Bloom’s demand that the Humanities get away from cultural relativism and make informed evaluations; to Smith’s concern for some kind of truth – at least more ultimate than that which preceded it; but also to Geertz and Dening’s recognition that people demand of their culture that it provide life with meaning. Professor Manning Clark can pack the lecture halls because, apart from the intrinsic interest of his subject and the attractiveness of his presentation, he is prepared, on the basis of a very large framework of evaluation, to say, in effect, ‘That is what it all adds up to’, ‘That is what it means’.

I am not saying that finding a reference point in the community’s needs is to succumb to parochialism, to let the local community write the entire agenda, let alone dictate the conclusions. On the contrary, the professional historian’s task like that of any other scholar, is to widen horizons, not lower his own. But the beauty of history is that the local and particular so readily relate to the gamut of human experience. So the relations between indigenous peoples and settlers, between landlords and tenants, convicts and masters, capital and labour in the Hunter Valley or in a Pacific island, as well as having intrinsic local worth, can illuminate the larger questions of race and class, of power and status, which are the concerns of all humankind. Though he has a sharp awareness of the needs of his own people and an ability to communicate with them, Manning Clark is an international scholar, making his interpretations against a lifetime’s reading of human history, of residence abroad, of mixing with people of all kinds and stations and with considerable regard, though not slavish or over-deferential regard, to the canons of his profession. Both dimensions, professionalism and a concern for the needs of the community beyond the profession, are necessary for the making of a truly independent scholar, able to meet some of the challenges that Professor Bloom lays down, whilst avoiding the dangers against which Professor Smith warns. That is, to be able to make evaluations and judgments with a moral quality, inevitably individual, inevitably the product of their times, but not merely so, because they are given from a background of the widest professional experience and human concern.

So to recapitulate my points. As Bloch said, if good history is not written, bad history will be. There will always be a community demand for history because of the fundamental search for meaning and purpose – the need to make sense of it all. In an increasingly aware community that demand will grow, as History has been growing in the University by 10% a year. If no artificial constraints are put in the way – reintroduction of fees or staff ceilings – there is potentially no limit to our growth. Moreover, the forces of history at work in our region, especially those concerning race relations, are such that no government can afford an ill­informed community, ill-equipped to wrestle with tough choices.

But though the study of history in our region is largely about tough problems – there is nothing tougher than struggles of race, struggles for land – it doesn’t have to be a dour and joyless business. Though calling for the truth, Bernard Smith also calls history an art form. So, correctly I believe, he lines us up with the poets and the dramatists and the novelists with a licence to interpret reality as well as to describe it.

The most enduring art, we all believe, includes a personal vision and may well relate to specific time and place but it endures precisely because it reaches beyond the circumstances of time and place. It is, as Smith says, ‘for and about others’ in a very large sense. If we are talking about artistic truth as distinct from scientific truth we are entitled to make our interpretations with what Clark calls ‘the madness of art’. The distinctions between myths, lies and history, though still real and important, lose their sharpness. So let us leave the last word with a poet, Byron:

A relevant verse from Don Juan goes like this:

And after all what is a lie? Tis but

The truth in masquerade; and I defy

Historians, heroes, lawyers, priests, to put

A fact without some leaven of a lie.

Alan Ward

23/3/88

Editorial note

The transcribed lecture has been copyedited and minor amendments made. As the original lecture was not footnoted, an effort has been made to identify the principal references and quotations. The slide or slides that originally accompanied the lecture could not be identified or located.

Acknowledgements

Ingrid Ward: This lecture is published posthumously and in the memory of my father Professor Alan Ward (d. 12 December 2014). As head of history at the University of Newcastle he tutored and supervised a significant cadre of Pacific historians. His thoughts and writings have enriched the scholarship of many. I believe his words resonate as powerfully today as they did when he delivered them in his inaugural lecture as History Professor at Newcastle University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ On the significance of this text see: Vincent O’Malley, ‘Unsettling New Zealand History: The Revisionism of Sinclair and Ward’, in Texts and Contexts: Reflections in Pacific Island Historiography, ed. Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 154–65.

² For overviews of Ward’s career see: Michael Belgrave, ‘Obituary: Professor Alan Dudley Ward ONZM, 1935–2014’, New Zealand Journal of History 49 no. 2 (2015): 209–13; Peter Hempenstall, ‘Obituary: Alan Dudley Ward’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 50, no. 1 (2015): 89–92; and Ross Webb, ‘Ward, Alan Dudley’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 2023, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6w9/ward-alan-dudley (accessed 29 Nov. 2023). Hempenstall also offers a wider discussion of Ward’s place within trans-Tasman scholarship in ‘Overcoming Separate Histories: Historians as ‘Ideas Traders’ in a Trans-Tasman World’, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 4.1–4.16, DOI: 10.2104/ha070004.

³ Hempenstall, ‘Overcoming Separate Histories’, 4.10.

⁴ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987).

⁵ Alan Ward, ‘History and Historians before the Waitangi Tribunal’, New Zealand Journal of History 24, no. 2 (1990): 157. My emphasis. For a more detailed exposition of this essay in the context of a discussion of the development of public history in New Zealand, see Bain Attwood, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2023), 146–51. Attwood dates the essay to a talk given in 1989 to the Department of History at the University of Auckland.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid., 160. On Novick’s work see the Forum devoted to it in the American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991).

⁸ Attwood, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’, 162. The ‘moderate relativism’ that Ward accepts here appears similar to the ‘tolerant pluralism’ defended by Novick in his rejection of the objectivist myth. Novick’s critics, however, demurred that this stance cloaked inequalities of power and provided an inadequate defence of freedom in the face of conservative backlash. See: Peter Novick, ‘My Correct Views on Everything’, American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991): 703; and Dorothy Ross, ‘Afterword’, American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991): 707.

⁹ Attwood, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’, 163, citing Thomas Haskell as quoted in Novick, 570. For a similar summary see: Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1997), 145.

¹⁰ Ward, ‘History and Historians’, 163.

¹¹ Alan Ward, ‘The Crisis of Our Times: Ethnic Resurgence and the Liberal Ideal’, JPH 27, no. 1 (1992): 83–95.

¹² Ibid., 84 and 85.

¹³ Ibid., 87.

¹⁴ Ibid., 88.

¹⁵ Ibid., 89.

¹⁶ Alan Ward, ‘Comfortable Voyagers? Some Reflections on the Pacific and Its Historians’, JPH 31, no. 2 (1996): 236–42. The reviewed works were: Dangerous Liaisons. Essays in Honour of Greg Dening (ed. Donna Merwick); and Pacific Islands History; Journeys and Transformations (ed. Brij V. Lal).

¹⁷ Ward, ‘Comfortable Voyagers?’, 238.

¹⁸ Ibid., 240–41. For Dening’s intervention in the Mead/Freeman debate see: Greg Dening, ‘Inventing Others: Mead, Freeman and the “Samoans”’, Australasian Journal of American Studies 2, no. 2 (1983): 44–50.

¹⁹ Alan Ward, ‘Historical Method and Waitangi Tribunal Claims’, in The Certainty of Doubt: Tributes to Peter Munz, ed. Miles Fairburn and W.H. Oliver (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996), 140–56; Attwood, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’, 150–51.

²⁰ Ward, ‘Historical Method’, 152.

²¹ Ibid., 150–51.

²² Ibid., 150.

²³ See Peter Munz: ‘The Limitations of EthnoHistory and the Fruits of Transgression’, in Histories in Cultural Systems (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 1991), 408–27; and ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress’, New Zealand Journal of History 28, no. 1 (1984): 60–75.

²⁴ Ward, ‘Historical Method’, 155.

²⁵ As attested to by the large archive of New Caledonian materials that he amassed. See the inventory of his papers in the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau’s collection (PMB MS 1168): https://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/pambu/catalogue/index.php/papers-on-pacific-islands-land-matters. The originals are held in the Australian National University (ANU) Archives: ANU 272, https://archivescollection.anu.edu.au/index.php/research-papers-pacific-island-land-matters.

²⁶ Alan Ward, Land and Politics in New Caledonia, Political and Social Change Monograph 2 (Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1982); Alan Ward, New Caledonia­­­­ –The Immediate Prospects, Parliament of Australia Legislative Research Service Discussion Papers, No. 4 [May] 1983 (Canberra: Department of the Parliamentary Library, Revised ed. [July] 1984). See also: Alan Ward, ‘New Caledonia: The Politics of Land’, in Melanesia: Beyond Diversity, vol. 2, ed. R.J. May and Hank Nelson (Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1982), 531–48.

²⁷ Letter from Ward to the author dated 22 November 2012.

²⁸ Ward, New Caledonia – The Immediate Prospects, 63–4.

²⁹ Ibid., 64–5.

³⁰ Ibid., 66.

³¹ Ward, Land and Politics, 73.

³² Ibid.

³³ Alan Ward, ‘New Caledonia 1945–55: The Formative Decade’, in Proceedings of the Fifth George Rudé Seminar in French History, ed. Peter McPhee (Wellington: History Department, Victoria University of Wellington, 1986), 253–4. This essay challenged the independentist perception that the demographic marginalization of Melanesians dated from the period of the nickel boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Ward instead shows that the key moment came in the post-war decade.

³⁴ Alan Ward, ‘New Caledonia 1945–1955: Land Policy and Immigration’, in New Caledonia: Essays in Nationalism and Dependency, ed. Michael Spencer et al. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988), 102.

³⁵ Ward, ‘The Crisis of Our Times’, 94. My emphasis.

³⁶ Henry Ford, My Life and Work (London: Heinemann, 1923).

³⁷ AM. The work referred to here was first read by Bernard Smith at a forum at the University of Melbourne in 1985 and published in a collection of his essays in 1988. Bernard Smith, ‘History as Criticism (1985)’, in Bernard Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 70. Ward draws on this for the discussion of Bloch in the opening section of the lecture.

³⁸ Ibid., 69.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ AM. Ward’s notes refer to an unidentified slide at this point in the presentation.

⁴¹ AM. The event in question occurred on 10 January 1983. Koindé and Ouipoin (or Ouipoint) are two reserves or tribus in the middle of the Grande terre’s central dividing range between La Foa and Canala.

⁴² AM. Some minor errors have slipped into Ward’s account here. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 17 Jan. 1983, 9, states that the two gendarmes, Jacques Morice and Eric Galardon, had arrived 12 days beforehand. Neither was from Chartres; one was from Britanny, the other from Normandy.

⁴³ AM. A footnote in Ward’s 1983 essay (as revised in 1984) gives his principal reference for the following discussion as Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 14 Jan. 1983. The lecture appears though to draw on issues of the same newspaper from the surrounding days as well.

⁴⁴ AM. The leader cited here was the Union Calédonienne’s Secretary-General, Eloi Machoro. For the full statement see Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 14 Jan. 1983, 27.

⁴⁵ AM. In his 1983 essay (as revised in 1984) Ward identifies the Palika leader as Nidoish Naisseline. Naisseline though had by this time broken away from Palika to form his own party, Libération Kanak Socialiste (LKS). Two statements issued by Naisseline for LKS can be found in Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 13 Jan. 1983, 7, one rebutting a statement by the high commissioner Jacques Roynette and another calling on New Caledonia’s grands chefs to express ‘solidarity with the custom of the La Foa region’ and to boycott a forthcoming reunion organized by the administration. Ward seems be drawing from the language used in the latter, but omits the appeal to custom.

⁴⁶ AM. This may be a reference to the statement made by the Union Progressiste Mélanésienne led by André Gopea. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 15 Jan. 1983, 7.

⁴⁷ AM. The original source of this quote has not been identified. It is worth noting, however, that Henri Emmanuelli’s initial statement on the incident had been equivocal if not sympathetic to the Koindé villagers and it was strongly criticized in some quarters precisely because it acknowledged the existence of customary law and the conflict that existed between customary law and the application of French legislation. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, 12 Jan. 1983, 16; and 13 Jan. 1983, 6.

⁴⁸ AM. In 1986 the principal accused, Sylvestre Némouaré, received a 10-year prison sentence. Pascal Némouaré received a two-year prison sentence. Fifteen others were acquitted or amnestied. Le Monde, 25 June 1986.

⁴⁹ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

⁵⁰ AM. Here Ward appears to be paraphrasing Bloom rather than directly quoting. Related passages can be found on Bloom, 37–8 and 372.

⁵¹ Smith, ‘History as Criticism’, 69.

⁵² Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance 1788–1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 41.

⁵³ AM. Here Ward refers to a statement widely attributed to the activist Titewhai Harawira (1932–2023). In 2004 it re-emerged in the New Zealand media in debate over MP Trevor Mallard’s assertion of his indigenous identity as a Pākeha. In a 2009 interview her son, Hone Harawira, attributes the statement to academic Pat Hohepa. See: https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0905/S00321/qas-guyon-espiner-interviews-hone-harawira.htm?from-mobile=bottom-link-01 (accessed 12 Dec. 2023).

⁵⁴ Smith, ‘History as Criticism’, 70

⁵⁵ Ibid., 70.

⁵⁶ AM. See Greg Dening, ‘Inventing Others: Mead, Freeman and the “Samoans”’, Australasian Journal of American Studies 2, no. 2 (1983): 44–50.