The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand

Europeans arrive on a beach, make markets and push inland. They take the land and transform it. They make themselves at home; they dream of other places. And the stories they write take shape in settings – the beach, the farm, the bush, the suburb – that become imaginary versions of actual places. Those settings sometimes host stories that are too simple – too flattering, too blaming – but in the work of our best writers, a richer history of settlement comes into focus.

Taking a new approach to the cultural history of this country, The Settler’s Plot is a study of the relationship between literature and place in New Zealand. Through fascinating and unpredictable readings of some of our greatest literature, from Maning and Guthrie-Smith to Mansfield, Sargeson, Curnow and Frame, Calder investigates the often contradictory meanings that Pakeha have found in our most familiar settings.

Alex Calder teaches New Zealand and American literature in the English Department of The University of Auckland. He has written extensively on the literature of the cross-cultural frontier and the problems of settlement, and is an authority on the works of Herman Melville. He is the author of The Writing of New Zealand: Inventions and Identities (Reed, 1993) and co-editor of Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999).