CONTESTED SITES OF MEMORY ON TARARA IN NEW ZEALAND
CONTESTED SITES OF MEMORY ON TARARA IN NEW ZEALAND

Summary/Abstract: During the colonial time in New Zealand Maori and Croatians worked together on the gumfileds of the Far North. On the gumfields both Maori and Croats were stigmatized, each in their own way and for different reasons. This stigmatisation excluded them from the dominant culture and constituted the common terrain for their relationship. The intermarriages were common. This paper explores the ways the stories about Maori and Croatians in New Zealand have been narrated or represented in five different sites of memory, built in different historical time, from colonial New Zealand to the bicultural New Zealand of the present. It argues that a parallel reading of these sites shows that in between these sites, there seems to be a space where all of these gumfield stories are entangled, with motives that are embedded in social reality. Hence these stories reflect processes of differentiation and power relations in the social. Their meanings are constructed retroactively, the past they strive to embody is always presented in the form of tradition, but the meaning of tradition restructures and changes constantly with the political transformations of the social.

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