William Pember Reeves: Writing the Fortunate Isles
William Pember Reeves seldom appears in studies of Australians in London, for the simple reason that he was from New Zealand. Nonetheless, he was one of the leading ‘Anglo-Colonials’ in London in the late 1890s (Sinclair, WPR 247), and appears often in the pages of the British-Australasian and other journals interested in colonial life and topics. A journalist, politician, socialist, legislator, economist, diplomat, historian, and poet, he produced a good deal of writing in many genres. Most of his work was concerned with ‘writing New Zealand,’ or, in one of his favourite classical allusions, ‘the fortunate isles.’  This paper traces his political and literary career, arguing that his move from New Zealand to London allowed him not only to write with the clarity of distance and the authority of being published in the cultural metropolis, but to liaise or mediate between
William Pember Reeves, 1857–1932
William Pember Reeves would be a minor figure in the literary history of New Zealand were it not for his meteoric political career. While a vigorous journalist and capable versifier in the Victorian manner, Reeves’ most lasting achievement is The Long White Cloud, an influential history of the young British colony that reflects his inside political knowledge. Yet, like most of his best literary work, The Long White Cloud was written in England, once his political career in New Zealand had ended. Though in exile, Reeves continued to propagate his view of New Zealand in a range of historical, poetic and political writings. In these, he did more than anyone before him to shape the world’s perceptions of New Zealand as a progressive and egalitarian society.
Louise Mack and Colonial Pseudo-Literature
The colonial novelist and journalist Alfred Buchanan is generally neglected in the recent Australian literary histories: The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), for example, never mentions him. But his collection of essays, The Real Australia (1907), is a vivid and fascinating intervention in the prevailing debates about Australian colonial identity. For Buchanan, literature plays a crucial role as the proper representative of a nation's inner life: 'If a national literature implies anything, it implies the correct artistic and adequate expression of the country's thought and action; it signifies the outward and visible form of what is real and vital and permanent in the inner and intellectual life of a people' (Buchanan 96).