Kiwi: A Curious Case of National Identity
Richard Wolfe
How did the Māori name for a flightless bird come to mean a New Zealander and a fruit that originated in China, while morphing into the badge for the national rugby league team and the air force? Not to mention becoming the brand name for everything from rabbit traps to a bank, and a term for pilots who are no longer flying?
Kiwi: A Curious Case of National Identity tracks this unlikely evolution. Diving into the natural history of this unique bird and its significance to Māori, the story spreads its wings to relate how ‘kiwi’ came to symbolise the emerging nation during the First World War – thanks in part to a brand of boot polish originating in Australia.
By the mid-twentieth century, while the bird population steadily declined, ‘kiwi’ was propagating everywhere from the Golden Kiwi lottery to the new 20-cent coin.
After 1959, with the coining of ‘kiwifruit’ to replace the Chinese gooseberry, the emergence of this export industry has taken the national symbol into a fruit salad of uses worldwide. Along the way there’s been Kiwi the Melbourne Cup-winner, a couple of Kiwi airlines (neither of which flew for long) and TV’s beloved Goodnight Kiwi.
Richard Wolfe’s decades of Kiwiana collecting furnish the book with an array of colour photos, art and ephemera, making this a visually stimulating work for Kiwis and kiwi fans of all feathers.
The Author
Richard Wolfe is a cultural historian and curator who has written or co-authored over 40 books on themes from the moa to New Zealand art, including Footprints on the Land: How Humans Changed New Zealand (Oratia Books, 2022), Hellhole of the Pacific and New Zealand’s Lost Heritage. He was a display artist at the Auckland and Canterbury museums, and co-curated the first major exhibition of Kiwiana (a term he helped invent). Richard lives with his artist wife Pamela in Auckland.
No comments:
Post a Comment