ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF
Jock Phillips was one of the prime movers behind the vision of New Zealand history presented by in the national museum Te Papa.
REVIEW: Jock Phillips is New Zealand's greatest recent public historian. His 1987 book, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pākehā Male, A History, outlined and scrutinised the ideas which shaped masculine Pākehā identity.
It was a lightbulb moment. A nation suddenly questioned one of its primary stereotypes. The effects of Phillips' book were immediately observable in TV programmes, magazine articles and everyday behaviour.
Now Phillips has written an autobiography, Making History: A New Zealand Story. As he states in the introduction, it is the record of his life as an historian, working both inside and outside the academy. Except tangentially, it is not the story of his private world, his relationships and family.
It is very much a public version of an influential New Zealand life. This is both its importance and – perhaps – its failing.
Jock Phillips is New Zealand's greatest recent public historian.
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On his father's side, Phillips descends from his grandfather, a Jewish Londoner, emigrating to New Zealand at the age of 16, and his son, Phillips' father, himself an historian, a military man and finally a university vice-chancellor. On his mother's side, there were successful bankers and Hawkes Bay farmers
Phillips himself eventually studied at Harvard, leaving for the USA in 1968, that year of rebellion and social tumult. Upon his return, he too became an academic historian, but it was after departing university life that he would make his real mark on New Zealand culture.
Jock Phillips' Making History: A New Zealand Story is out now.
He became the founding director of the Stout Research Centre and the country's Chief Historian. As a "conceptual leader", Phillips was one of the prime movers behind the vision of New Zealand history presented in the national museum Te Papa.
He was also the general editor of the great Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, the go-to net resource, covering everything from the extinct moa to lawn-mowers.
However one regards Te Papa – as a failed historical sideshow in a white-elephant of a building, or the site of an intellectually-accessible national story for a new generation – Phillips' details on its philosophy and practice are fascinating. The same can be said for his account of his work on the online Te Ara encyclopaedia, which is already shaping future minds.
At 350 pages, Making History is a longish book which could have been judiciously pruned, but it is a significant work by a significant New Zealand figure. This makes some of Phillips' distinctions much more problematic.
"Private faces in public places are wiser and nicer," the poet W.H. Auden wrote pertinently in 1932, "Than public faces in private places."
Making History: A New Zealand Story by Jock Phillips (AUP, $45)
Sunday Star Times
