There’s Something Missing…

If Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and decided to give me $60 billion there’s quite a lot of stuff I’d do with that money. Some of it is fairly altruistic (but problematic) because, basically, I’d try and use my windfall to build this (for why it’s a problem you can get a sketch of the issues in the early paragraphs of this) but a lot of it’s just things I want to see get movie adaptations. And then there are the vanity projects. Chief among which would be a documentary series with a title along the lines of “A History of New Zealand”.

That probably doesn’t sound too much like a vanity project. And, sure, it need not be so. But these ex-Bezosian billions would definitely be put towards making the documentary in accordance with how I see it. I don’t mean that I’d be paying experts to say what I want to hear, I mean I’d be paying people to contribute to a structure that exists fairly clearly in my mind. And that would be a list of episodes with the following titles (square brackets not included, round brackets are):

1. A Geological and Biological “History” of New Zealand
2. An Evolutionary “History” of Humanity [history is about what humans do, think and believe, not how humans happened]
3. A Ecological “History” of Anatomically Modern Humans [history is about what humans do, think and believe and is thus to be distinguished from ecology, even cross temporal ecologies]
4. The Human Web before 500 AD [this is a specific approach to Global History based on this book… would definitely try and the surviving author involved]
5. The Pacific 500–1200 AD
6. England in Medieval Europe
7. The Discovery of New Zealand [causes and consequences of the arrival of the Maori]
8. Aotearoa [a history of New Zealand before the moa went extinct]
9. A Global History of the Age of Exploration
10. Tudor and Stuart England
11. Anglo-Dutch Early Modernity
12. The Discovery of New Zealand (reprise) [Abel Tasman and Cook]
13. Pre-Contact Maori Society [a traditional view/historiography of pre-contact society]
14. History from Below: Life in Aotearoa [a more modern take on the same time period, quite different subject matter]
15. Imperial Politics [the status of the British Empire in global affairs between Cook and 1836]
16. An Englishman’s Home is His Castle [life in Britain for common folk… a very history from below idea]
17. Contact [focussing on interactions between Europeans and NZers after Cook]
18. The Musket Wars [Maori society in the contact period]
19. Independence [causes and consequences of the 1836 declaration]
20. Pakeha [Maori perspectives on Europeans from contact to 1840]
21. The Natives [European perspectives on Maori from contact to 1840]
22. Te Tiriti o Waitangi [causes and consequences of the 1840 treaty]
23. The New Zealand Wars [the Belich interpretation of the 19th Century conflicts]
24. The Land Wars [the Maori interpretation of the 19th Century conflicts, with allusions to the substance of episode 16]
25. New Zealand Forgot its First War Memorial [the lesser known aspects of the period… Pai Marire, Parihaka and so on]
26. Settler Society [a history from below POV]
27. King Country [Maori society between the 1860s and 1880s, with a particular focus on King Country]
28. The Global Situation [this is the period of New Imperialism/the Scramble for Africa]
29. Settler Societies, a Comparison [opportunity to look at technology, economies (including gold rushes), political arrangements and so on]
30. Dominion [NZ’s relationship with Britain]
31. Our Kinsmen, the Boers [the Boer Wars]
32. New Zealand Needn’t Have Bothered with the Great War
33. WWI, or, Why New Zealand Had to Fight [really just part I and part II of NZ in WWI]
34. Our Empire [the roots of the Realm of New Zealand]
35. The Inter-War Years
36. The New International Order [emphasis on the League of Nations and Japan in Manchuria]
37. Where She Goes, We Go [why NZ joined in WWII and its origins]
38. The European Theatre
39. The Pacific Theatre [NZ-centric WWII narratives]
40. Post-War New Zealand [focus on history from below and culture]
41. First World [Cold War]
42. Whither Empire? [NZ as colony and imperialist; the Malayan Emergency; the Commonwealth; decolonisation around the world]
43. Everything You Know About the 1960s is American
44. All Out of Proportion to the Numbers [NZ in the Vietnam War]
45. Dawn Raids
46. Sport is Sporting [sport diplomacy as well as actual sporting history… leading up to the two 1981 sports problems]
47. The Natural Enemy of Britain is France [nuclear testing, Rainbow Warrior and the EEC]
48. White New Zealand [immigration to NZ, Maori Policy and our forgotten empire]
49. The Maori Renaissance
50. Small Open Economy [an Economic Perspective on 1945–1984]
51. There is No Depression in New Zealand [A Cultural History of 1980s NZ]
52. Rogernomics and Ruthanasia [with an emphasis on history from below]
53. MMP [a political history of NZ… make pains to connect it with material developed all the way back in episode 11]
54. Asia is Closed for Business [NZ and Asia through the decades, esp. the recent years]
55. How We Banned the Sausage Sizzle [the Clark years]
56. Brain Drains, Exchange Rates and House Prices [the Key government]
57. Bicultural Government, Multicultural Life
58. The Anti-Immigrant, Pro-Refugee Election [2017 to Covid]
59. Pandemics [through NZ’s history but particular emphasis on 2019’s Measles and 2020’s Covid “storylines”]
60. CANZUK [a global view of 21st Century NZ and conclusion to the series]

And in addition to this, there’d also be three specials:

1. Industrialisation
2. The Causes of WWI
3. Captain Cookers [NZ’s Ecology and Environment after Cook]

Of course, why is this called “There’s Something Missing”? Well, it’s because it’s basically the same as the advised structure for teaching NZ history. The problem is that that structure really doesn’t explain anything at all about why Europeans came to New Zealand at all. You can’t consider NZ’s history in isolation from Medieval History (as a lazy and far too pat argument, Magna Carta is law here)… and you definitely can’t do it without the Tudor/Stuart period, which is foundational to NZ’s extant constitutional arrangements.

Oh… and if it seems like there’s a lot of 19th Century stuff in here? Well, if you take NZ as an entity that exists from 1836 onwards, you’ll find that there should be about 14.35 episodes. There are ten in that time period so there are fewer than there ought to be. Conversely, there ought to be around 4.5 episodes on the 21st Century, not 6.

Anyway, how would this entirely hypothetical vanity project actually be made?

Well, I think history documentaries work best when you’ve got authentic visuals (rather than re-enactments). The reality is that the options for that are fairly limited for a lot of NZ’s history. If you’re doing something on Medieval England, it’s pretty easy to go out and find a church or a castle or a small artefact and have that feature on screen whilst the hopefully lively presenter talks. In NZ a lot of the stuff we’d be looking at consists of basically grassy slopes. But, yeah, it’s not spectacular but we can do those sorts of visuals. And it gives us an opportunity to get some variable experts in for these episodes to point out what exactly it is we’re seeing. A couple of these episodes can also employ visual effects or graphics.

The next question is the presenter.

By the nature of my programme, we’re not going to find a single presenter who’s an expert in the entire gamut… you don’t, as a professional historian, specialise in Medieval history, colonial history, NZ history and so on all at the same time. Thus, it would seem the best option is to find someone who isn’t an expert but has some sort of pre-established credibility as an amateur historian. I could do it myself, of course, but I’m not 100% sure I’d want to be in front of camera. So, if we’re choosing a celebrity/professional, there’s also the question of tone… hell, maybe it’d work best with two presenters? I can’t say I’ve seen many straight (as opposed to travelogue) documentaries played that way though (just, I believe, Last Chance to See). But the prospective benefit is we get to ship these two all over the country and the world… can do a parallel travelogue series… and we’ve got the opportunity to play them off each other. We can also insert a classical narrator as well (or a sarcastic one), which is something I would just cast myself for.

Hmm… well, I’ve got the money, right? Maybe I just have to create the person I’m looking for via two or three small documentaries. Perhaps the specials would be made first with this presenter? Or presenters?

Of course, the presenter should be marshalling the narrative. So, if there were two of them, one would have to be in the expert role. Yes, it needs to be one person… but we’ll do the travelogue as well. It’d be a making of, where we keep the presenter in the dark about what they’re saying and who they’re meeting as long as we possibly can.