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Kiwi Icons and the Re‐Settlement of New Zealand 1 as Colonial Space
Author(s) -
PICKLES KATIE
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
new zealand geographer
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.335
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1745-7939
pISSN - 0028-8144
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2002.tb01631.x
Subject(s) - settlement (finance) , colonialism , kiwi , narrative , mythology , history , reading (process) , sociology , aesthetics , ethnology , art , archaeology , literature , political science , law , classics , ecology , biology , world wide web , computer science , payment
This article offers a critical reading of the celebratory biographical and autobiographical texts for three ‘kiwi icons’. It argues that kiwi icons signal the enduring influence of British colonialism upon national imaginings – through a process that I term ‘re‐settlement’. I demonstrate how representations of Barry Crump, Sir Edmund Hillary and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, prominent New Zealanders during the 1990s, are entwined with dominant constructions of New Zealand society. Further, I explore how these kiwi icons are constructed to serve the quest for nationhood; an endeavour, it is argued, that is about the reinvention of settlement mythology that involves the continuation of particular narratives of colonisation from the past.