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PARADISE REFORGED: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000. By James Belich. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2001. 606pp. (Maps.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8248-2542-X.
It was, perhaps, a happy irony that just as this weighty historical disquisition was being finalized and going to press, the New Zealand film-maker Peter Jackson was tying up the first instalment of his version of New Zealand as 'Paradise Reforged': as a transplanted English Middle Earth for his epochal Lord of the Rings movie. For Belich, like Tolkien, offers a mythicization in similarly big, linked tomes (Paradise Reforged is the sequel to Belich's Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century [Auckland: Penguin, 1996]), here as a general history of New Zealand as a reconstructed Paradise.
Belich's core contention-that between the 1880s and 1970s New Zealand was a virtual Scotland-may be captured in the words of the late Ngaio Marsh in 1964: "New...