Sale of the centuries

The series will help fulfil the growing interest in our past. Picture / Whakapapa Productions

History is the new black. So says Bronwyn Dalley in the introduction to the hefty coffee table book-of-the-TV-series Frontier of Dreams due to screen in September. What can she mean?

Two historians and a publisher had no idea. The font of all matters moderne in our household, the 14-year-old, figured it out: "Well, when they say, 'Pink is the new black', they mean it's the new thang. So I guess it means history is the new thang."

Confused? Dalley, chief historian at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, coined the phrase because "there seems to be a hell of a lot of history being done". Go into a bookshop, she says, and you'll find stacks of the stuff.

"Suddenly, in the past five years or so, it seemed as though everyone was doing it, reading it and writing it. We seem to be getting a lot of history per capita in this country, which is, I think, a big change from 20-30 years ago."

History, it seems, is hot, like the ever-fashionable black.

Dalley is happy for Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand to be labelled a coffee table book.

"I'm always looking at books on people's coffee tables. It gets people looking at it. They might not actually read the text, but they might look at the panels and the pictures and they'll come away with something they didn't have before."

Penguin New Zealand publishing director Geoff Walker sees the trend in the way in which history has been popularised and personalised - key reasons for the phenomenal, 189,000 sales success of Michael King's The Penguin History of New Zealand. "It was a single volume, single author approach and thus very, very accessible and read well."

Walker says it's an international trend, pointing to Dava Sobel's Longitude. Who would have thought a book about time keeping at sea would become a best seller? Frontier departs from that trend in that it doesn't haven't a single presenter expressing a point of view, as Simon Schama did in A History Of Britain or James Belich in The New Zealand Wars.

Dalley says that was deliberate, to ensure a range of voices came through while maintaining a Belich-like style - "that history is fun, not boring and you can write about it and present it in a witty way".

THE $4.5 million TV project, which gained $3.6 million funding from New Zealand on Air, began with 13 foundation essays by noted historians, including Judith Binney and Dame Anne Salmond. The essays provided the basis for scriptwriters to develop each one-hour episode.

A separate book contract was won by Hodder Moa (now owned by Hachette Livre). Chapter headings are the same as the episode titles, but the book is written by historians at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, with two commissioned chapters by David Young and Claudia Orange.

Binney describes the approach as "determined egalitarianism", to get away from the cult of personality in favour of multiple voices and multiple narratives. But she is a little perplexed by the anti-Simon Schama sentiment.

"I thought his sharp intellect that brought new ideas to bear in a well visualised way was very good. I was surprised they were so hostile to it."

Walker says while there's no doubt a TV series can sell lots of books, the popularisation of history is a much wider phenomenon. The commissioning of King's book stemmed from what he saw as a gap in general histories of New Zealand since Keith Sinclair's A History of New Zealand, first published in 1959.

That gap is now over-filled, with Frontier following Phillippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand and a host of others (see list). Oxford University Press also has a general history in the pipeline.

SENIOR historian at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage Gavin McLean, who along with Dalley edited the book and wrote several chapters, sees evidence of a broad interest in history.

"It's what I call history across the spectrum, a background noise about culture and heritage". He's talking about everything from historic sites and heritage trails, debates about the value of heritage, interest in old technology such as tractors and trains, to the expansion of museums.

McLean says capturing a sense of the background noise of each era - "history in the round" - was a key aim of the book, which has images on every page.

Salmond sees today's history books spawning a type of chain reaction - "navigating into the other art forms".

Her own highly readable account of Captain Cook's voyages of discovery and encounter in the South Seas, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, has reverberations in exhibitions by Michael Tuffrey and other artists. A New Zealand ex-pat at Yale is writing an opera and various film proposals are in the works. History doesn't get much more popular than that.

"The things that they do I never would have dreamt of - it's quite exciting to see that. It's almost like a string of crackers - you light the first one but what happens after that is anyone's guess." Salmond says the difference is in the way histories such as Belich's, King's and her own are told.

"Perhaps we've been a bit serious about our history in the past, a bit pious. I think maybe we focused before on the gloomier sides of our history, the entanglements that didn't work, the land wars and the things that went awry."

Through retellings of founding myths and reassessments of the past, Salmond says there's a sense of experimentation. "People are bouncing across boundaries - we are starting to have fun with our history rather than seeing it as something we have to castigate ourselves for."

Walker says the Treaty of Waitangi is undoubtedly a significant factor in the history thirst. "The treaty settlement process has forced every Pakeha who cares to look at their own history."

Binney points out there is now "a time depth" in Pakeha society that is sufficient for people to be interested, whereas her generation, educated in the late 1950s and early 60s, were told there was no such thing as New Zealand history. She, too, sees the rebirth of the Treaty of Waitangi process since the 1970s as vital - "bringing in the awareness there was another Maori history around the treaty which people didn't know about, people hadn't been taught."

It's an awareness that brings some discomfort, but is also necessary in what she calls our "internal de-colonisation", discomfort that becomes apparent when history doesn't stay safely in the past.

Witness the outcry over some wahi tapu sites, the destruction of heritage homes in places such as Devonport and battles in Auckland about granting historic status to buildings.

Binney gives another example - the relocation of the bridge at the Kerikeri basin to prevent flood damage to historic sites. Some in the local community want the bridge to stay put and have argued Kemp House, the oldest European house in country, and the nearby pa site are not terribly significant.

History, it seems, is not always fashionable when it invades one's own backyard.

"You get these debates in local communities and it is part of the wider debate - about how Maori and other people are going to articulate with each other in New Zealand and that can be a painful interface," says Salmond. But she believes New Zealanders have reached a point in how they feel about their ancestral past that is not going to be reversed.

"The debate is quite exciting. I would much rather that we're sitting there having a vehement argument than there was just sullen silence around these issues. It's part of trying to work it all out."