Before the godwit and the owl: John Pocock’s kiwi history

Soon after the end of World War II, a short, five-page essay entitled 'Historian and Poet in New Zealand' appeared in The Arts in New Zealand, a small periodical based in Wellington.'History is among other things an art', the author asserts in the first line, 'or, more precisely, it stands at the point where the frontiers of science and art meet and partakes in the nature of both'.'To repeat this commonplace', he continues, 'is not merely to present an apology for submitting an essay on history to a periodical dedicated to the arts' but has a more pressing purpose: 'it enables us to ascertain the relevance of history to the basic cultural problem of New Zealand'.In the pages that follow, the young John Greville Agard Pocock (1924-2023), then 21 years old, proceeds to explore this bipartite nature of history writing, its relationship to poetry and what he perceives as the dismissal of history by the settler poets of the mid-century Pacific archipelago. 2 'Historian and Poet' revolves around the intersected themes of poetry, history writing, human society and temporality, and does so principally as a response to the work of the essayist M. H. ('Monte') Holcroft (1902-1993) and the poet Allen Curnow (1911-2001).Ultimately, the essay serves as both a defence of history and a call for history by Pocock as a New Zealander to his fellow pākehā; the Māori term for non-Polynesian settlers, pākehā is mostly used, as Pocock later clarifies, to describe 'people 1In writing this article I accrued various debts.