Over the past two decades Peter Beilharz, Thesis Eleven’s Founding Editor, has inspired me and clarified my thinking and direction on two themes that have infused my work ever since we met: first, the concept of the Antipodes; and second, the idea of cultural traffic. I am grateful to know ‘Peter B’, an internationally celebrated critical cultural theorist and one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, as a collaborator and friend. It is a comfort, too, to find that friendship and collaboration continues effortlessly as it evolves through time due to Peter B’s continued engagement both with me, and with my former students and colleagues from the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In the latest example, in late July 2023 the SBS documentary series Who the Hell are We? aired in Australia on the theme of Australia’s forgotten, or invisible, migrants. The second episode showcased New Zealanders’ significant contribution to Australia since the beginnings of British colonization and the establishment of convict settlements in New South Wales, first at Sydney in 1788. The New Zealand episode was fronted by the Melbourne-based comedian Cal Wilson, who, like me, was an expatriate New Zealander who moved frequently between the countries. (I spent my academic career crossing the Tasman Sea, ever since I moved to Canberra in the 1980s to study for my PhD in History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.) I had acted as a consultant for the documentary on New Zealanders, or ‘Kiwis’, and provided the evidence base for Cal Wilson’s questions and many of her answers.

I remain gratified that, during the COVID lockdowns in 2021, I recommended Peter B to the independent media company that devised the program, when television researchers sought a cultural theorist to reflect on Australians and New Zealanders, their commonalities, differences, and interactions. Peter B fronted in his usual laid-back style and offered a typically brilliant, crystal-clear explanation of complex relations and why certain patterns of being ‘Aussie’ and ‘Kiwi’ endure through time. In short, he did a great job.

Looking back, our academic friendship and pattern of working together began, as I remember, in 2004, when Peter B visited the Department of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. He had traversed New Zealand from Auckland southwards looking for trans-Tasman collaborators for his long-term research project on rethinking the Antipodes, which was constructed around his interrogation of the writings of the celebrated Australian art historian and cultural critic, the former Old Left, card-carrying Communist Bernard Smith. While Bernard Smith had titled one of his books about European explorers during the time of James Cook’s voyages Imagining the Pacific (Smith 1992), Peter B titled his book about Smith’s insights on Pacific exploration and modernity Imagining the Antipodes (Beilharz 1997).

If pleased to see their Australian colleague, local sociologists were not interested in his antipodean enthusiasms. Instead, they referred him to History in the building next door, where he introduced himself to me and Peter Hempenstall, a Pacific historian who had crossed the Tasman to take up a Chair at UC. We two historians, plus Shaun Goldfinch in Political Science, were by then deeply engaged in our ‘Anzac Neighbours’ project on a history of multiple ties between New Zealand and Australia over the ‘long’ twentieth century, from the 1880s until the present, a project which was supported from 2003 to 2006 by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. This generated numerous articles and seminars and conference presentations as well as the co-authored book Remaking the Tasman World (Mein Smith, Hempenstall and Goldfinch 2008).

It did not take long for Peter B’s warmth, energy, and hosting abilities to be on display. On Anzac Weekend in April 2005 – a symbolically appropriate date for a trans-Tasman talk fest – Peter B hosted the ‘Anzac Neighbours’ team from Christchurch at his home in Melbourne, where he ran a Thesis Eleven Centre workshop with Trevor Hogan, then co-editor of the journal, and Thesis Eleven postgraduate students at La Trobe University. What a treat that was intellectually; Peter Hempenstall (Peter H) and I returned enthused and re-energized for our own long-haul project and excited by thinking in terms of what being antipodean meant for New Zealand.

Next came my turn. A contingent of ten scholars from the Thesis Eleven Centre at La Trobe (including a couple of postgraduate students with dual Australia-New Zealand citizenship and one Indian citizen) joined eight of my students and colleagues for a workshop at my home in Moncks Bay, Christchurch, on the weekend before Anzac Day and on Queen Elizabeth II’s actual birthday in April 2006 (Mein Smith to Pocock, personal communication, 13 March 2006). Team Christchurch were all affiliated with the New Zealand Australia Connections Research Centre (NZAC) that Peter H and I had recently established. From Peter B’s perspective, the purpose for his group was to study my team’s work plus the latest writing of J. G. A. Pocock, Emeritus Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, an eminent historian of political thought and UC alumnus.

John Pocock spent most of his early life in Christchurch, where he studied under the Jewish émigré philosopher Karl Popper in the 1940s before moving to Cambridge for his doctoral studies. Peter H and I had connected with Pocock the previous year in Auckland, at the latest in a series of ‘British World’ conferences that examined Pocock’s call for a ‘new’ British history, an appeal he first made to New Zealand historians in 1973 at the time of the University’s centenary, which coincided with Britain’s abandonment of its white Dominions for Europe when the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community (EEC). John Pocock and I had recently exchanged our books published by Cambridge University Press in 2005: my A Concise History of New Zealand (Mein Smith 2005) and Pocock’s (2005) The Discovery of Islands, a collection of essays directed at changing accepted ways of thinking, depicted colourfully in a handwritten letter: ‘post-modern insularity masquerading as globalism being one of them, which I think you are attacking too’ (Pocock to Mein Smith, personal communication, 13 February 2006).

In addition to Peter H, my key colleague participant was Te Maire Tau, who had just been appointed Lecturer in History at UC and was already engaged in a discussion with Pocock on indigenous Māori world views of Aotearoa New Zealand and its Britishness. Indeed, John Pocock wrote to me that Te Maire Tau’s ‘work is part of the architecture of my argument.’ He signed off his letter with a quip: ‘If anyone in Australia has yet developed an interest in New Zealand literary history, that would be very good news – but still a little surprising?’ Little did he know that development was already under way in the form of the research of James Smithies, who had completed his PhD thesis in literary history and was then tutoring for me in New Zealand history courses at UC. The young James Smithies was profoundly affected by his encounter with Peter B at the Christchurch workshop, as we shall see.

Fuelling the excitement on the day was the discussion on Pocock’s (2005) essay ‘An Antipodean Perception’ in The Discovery of Islands. Here he likened himself to a godwit, a migratory bird that spends half the year in Alaska and the Arctic circle, where it breeds, and half the year in New Zealand where it recuperates, rests, and feeds before returning to the Northern Hemisphere. Pocock did not bother with the remarkable scientific details of the Eastern Bar-tailed Godwit’s annual migrations where the birds fly non-stop from the Arctic to New Zealand (and eastern Australia) in September, with a return flight in March, which includes a stop en route in China or Korea, along what ecologists and bird watchers term the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (Godwits New Zealand). Rather, Pocock’s affection for the godwit was literary and metaphorical. He was proudly an expatriate scholar who regularly returned to his childhood feeding ground, in contrast to the scholars he spent years criticising, in particular the Auckland Professor Sir Keith Sinclair, whom he likened to the kiwi, New Zealand’s national bird. His contempt for Sinclair, an arch nationalist and founder of the nationalist New Zealand Journal of History, was implicit in the ‘kiwi’ metaphor, since the real-life kiwi is flightless, nocturnal, has dull plumage and poor eyesight.

‘An Antipodean Perception’ married beautifully with Peter B’s intellectual preoccupations: so much so that the workshop at my home led to a triangular correspondence between John Pocock, me and Peter B. ‘I had a pleasant correspondence with Peter Beilharz about the meeting you were about to have’, Pocock wrote in June. ‘I’d be very interested to hear how that went. Looking forward to hearing from you’ (Pocock to Mein Smith, personal communication, 9 June 2006). By August Pocock was writing to us both jointly. Speaking to Peter B’s and my trans-Tasman collaboration, he wrote:

… some of your language suggests to me that we might do well to deconstruct ‘Asia’ – especially if it’s to form the last two syllables of ‘Australasia’ – and that any demand for an ‘Asian’ Australia might be met with a demand for some further discrimination of terms. Wouldn’t the north of Australia have to interact (if at all) with either a Papuan-Melanesian complex or an Indonesian to the west of the latter, and aren’t the two ecologically and humanly distinct even if there’s a lot of interaction between them? And as for ‘Asia’, doesn’t the Indonesian chain of islands have to interact with a Southeast-Asian mainland, a Chinese Nanyang and (poor blighters) a presently incoherent Islam running all the way to Europe? I don’t see that the term ‘Asia’ does much to provide an umbrella to enclose all this, and I mistrust it because it’s vast and indeterminate. I think the indeterminate is being thrust upon us because the global market want to break down stable identities – they obstruct new market strategies – and the critical intelligentsias have joined in this enterprise because they don’t like states and histories and wrongly think they are criticising the global market.

Pocock to Mein Smith and Beilharz, personal communication, 4 August 2006

How prescient these reflections now seem from that venerable scholar. You can imagine the intellectual excitement I felt engaging with these two superb thinkers, whose trajectories of thought meshed despite their contrasting positions on the Right and the Left of the political spectrum. Both Peter B and John Pocock helped me to understand that the nation state is not necessarily confining but rather, in Pocock’s words, ‘a useful way of living in a history made by a multitude of actors.’ I taught my students in a collaborative course on ‘Inventing Kiwi Culture’ at the time that culture was in the mix. Pocock wrapped up in his inimitable style: ‘if an autonomous community can relate, narrate and debate its own history, it can begin seeing how that history has interrelated and interpenetrated with others; if it can’t do the one, it can’t do the other.’ The danger as he saw it was that internal histories were for internal consumption, and so the people who told those stories often never thought about the history of anyone but themselves. This was the crime committed by the New Zealand Journal of History, which published nothing but nation-centred history, he added irritably, ‘probably under the impression that it’s doing history subsequent to the nation state!’

From a distance, Pocock discerned that the postgraduates from the Thesis Eleven Centre and the NZAC Research Centre at UC perceived that a three-tier difference existed among generations where the third, and youngest, had difficulty in giving their history a ‘British’ dimension. Discovery of Islands (Pocock 2005) aimed to tell them that they needed to handle this and, he hoped, showed them a way of doing it.

The three of us agreed that it was fun to play with the Antipodes as a way of positioning ourselves on the planet. The problem with the concept, Pocock cautioned Peter B especially, was it was largely Anglocentric, and conveyed the idea that we lived and worked as far away as it was possible to be from a starting point that remained important. In answer to Peter B’s question of what happens when the discerning community changes, he responded that: ‘it will still be shaped by its past and had better debate this than deny it’ (Pocock to Mein Smith and Beilharz, personal communication, 4 August 2006). Signing off, Pocock teased that he did not see how New Zealand could be antipodean to Australia; and was pleased that the Canterbury project intended to move beyond the trans-Tasman to the global. ‘As for educating the sociologists,’ he joked, ‘the best of antipodean luck to you.’

Continuing his role as Thought Partner, Peter B next invited Peter H and me to guest edit a special issue of Thesis Eleven on the broad theme of ‘empires, islands and beaches’. Peter H and I were so busy completing our book Remaking the Tasman World (Mein Smith, Hempenstall and Goldfinch 2008) that we only wrote the introduction rather than contributing articles of our own (Mein Smith and Hempenstall 2008). Instead, we commissioned essays from the new and emerging researchers we mentored at the 2006 workshop, and added pieces solicited from colleagues engaged with our Anzac Neighbours project and NZAC Centre.

The ‘antipodean condition’, as Pocock called it (Pocock 2005: 6), was differently inflected in New Zealand. What this issue offered was a series of antipodean perspectives alternative to an Australian set. While the settler colony of New Zealand was co-constituted with the Australian settler colonies from 1840, through annexation to the British empire, we argued that New Zealand’s settler community was an invention of two worlds, firstly Polynesia, in the European Middle Ages, followed 500 years later by the British World south of Asia, which grew from the convict port built at Sydney. The Beilharz influence is evident in sentences such as: ‘To think in terms of traffic with neighbours across the Tasman Sea offers one way to overcome the limits that national narratives impose on how communities view their worlds, or see themselves in relation to others’ (Mein Smith and Hempenstall 2008: 5). A major point of difference from Peter B’s argument, however, was that of race: that Aotearoa New Zealand’s ‘Polynesian communities shape national identity and transnational worlds in ways that are different from Pacific Island and Indigenous Aboriginal influences on Australia’ (Mein Smith and Hempenstall 2008: 6).

At base, New Zealand, like Britain, was an archipelago of islands, geologically and spiritually. New Zealanders past and present saw themselves as an island nation, defined by the voyaging traditions of its early East Polynesian migrants and reshaped consequent to Cook’s voyages by global migrations and traffic that denoted the ‘birth of the modern world’, to borrow a phrase from British historian Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (2004). Australia, by contrast, while an ‘island continent’, was routinely perceived by elites as a ‘continental nation’, a theme emphasised at the time of Australian Federation by politicians and business leaders (Mein Smith 2003). New Zealand, we maintained, not Australia, was the Antipodes of Britain. According to Greenwich Mean Time, when it is 7 am in London, clocks in Christchurch said 7 pm. Settler colonial New Zealand started out as Britain’s Antipodes, at the farthest edge of the modern world. But for its Pacific Island and Asian communities, their antipodes ‘constitute very different worlds’ (Mein Smith and Hempenstall 2008: 6).

Te Maire Tau’s (2008) article in the guest issue stood out for its lateral thinking, as Tau’s work always does. Titled ‘The Discovery of Islands and the Stories of Settlement’, it delighted John Pocock (Tau 2008). Tau’s article responded to an address in 1991 by Pocock to the New Zealand Historical Association (Pocock 2005), given amidst the beginnings of the country’s Treaty of Waitangi settlement process, where both Labour and National governments endeavoured to resolve tribal grievances. In the South Island, the principal tribe, Ngāi Tahu, had just finished presenting their evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal. Māori had always seen the Treaty of Waitangi as a formal agreement between themselves and Queen Victoria as head of the British empire, even though the Treaty was subsequently dismissed as a ‘simple nullity’ by the judicial system because Māori tribes did not comprise a ‘body politic’ (New Zealand Justice Reports [NZJR] 1877: 72). Pocock’s essay set the scene for the sorts of questions that would be asked over the next three decades when tribal groups and the Crown faced off in settlement negotiations.

Implicit in Pocock’s question was the puzzle that once Māori grievances were settled, where did that leave New Zealanders in their relationship with Māori, the land and other resources? To pose this question was to challenge the idea of a ‘people’ claiming an indigenous identity on the basis that they had settled in New Zealand after lengthy voyages, just as Europeans had sailed from Europe. Pocock did not attack claims by Māori for compensation and economic and social justice; on the contrary, he supported Treaty settlements. What Pocock was really questioning, Tau argued, was the settlement process’s meaning in the context of national identity.

Tau went on to examine the logic behind the idea of ‘original occupation’ and the assumed rights associated with this concept. This question remains alive in Aotearoa New Zealand. In parallel, it is front of mind in Australian consciousness in 2023 due to the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which is the subject of intense debate as I write.

In New Zealand, the word ‘indigenous’ usually translates as ‘tangata whenua’, ‘the people of the land’. These words, however, do not mean the same thing. When the Polynesian settlers arrived in New Zealand, they consecrated the land with their mythologies just as the Vikings consecrated Iceland with their tales of Odin and Thor (Tau 2003). Dominant land features such as mountains and rivers were cloaked with ancestral names so that, in a sense, the mountain or the waterway was the ancestor. As Tau explained, when his people claim a mountain, for example, they do so through genealogy or ‘whakapapa’.

A modern seer or priest for his own tribe, Ngāi Tahu, Tau, who is now a Professor of History at UC, pointed out that his was a migrant tribe from the east coast of the North Island, whose forebears migrated to the South Island probably in the 1750s. His tribe were still consolidating their rights to the west coast of the South Island between the 1810s and 1820s. Likewise, tribal groups who now claim tangata whenua status in the Wellington region settled the area between the 1820s and 1830s (Ballara 1990). English migrants (including my ancestors) settled Wellington in the 1840s, an area occupied from the late 1820s by European whalers and sealers. These Wellington tribes, then, were not indigenous and their land rights are based not on original occupation but on conquest.

By 2008, Tau adjudged it was timely to reassess the core question posed by Pocock. Many tribal groups, he wrote, had ‘passed from what Kant would have called “provisory” to one where they now formally exist as “civil” entities by statute.’ The first was his own tribe. Under the 1996 Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu Act the New Zealand Parliament recognized Ngāi Tahu as a tribal personality akin to any other corporate body. Other tribes soon took up this model. Thus, the various Treaty settlements with the Crown, he argued, ‘have acted as a mechanism for Māori to achieve what they wanted in the 19th century – a mechanism which would elevate their status from a state of being a “customary” non-entity to one where their existence was confirmed as a body politic in statute’ (Tau 200: 23, 26). The trade-off was that the early European settlers would also effectively become ‘people of the land’. (In my case, for example, eight generations of my family have made homes in New Zealand.) This is how Tau interpreted Pocock when Pocock wrote: ‘I am affirming that the Pākehā have a whenua in their own transitory way, and I am thinking of the Canterbury poets of my younger days, who set about poetic appropriation on the clear understanding that no dreamtime was available’ (Pocock 1992: 49; Pocock 2005).

Here, Tau saw a fascinating parallel between the New Zealand poet Denis Glover’s poem about the magpie, an Australian bird that migrated across the Tasman Sea, and a famous Māori proverb: ‘People change, but the land remains’. Glover’s poem reads as follows:

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm, the bracken made their bed, and Quardle ardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, the magpies said. Tom’s hand was strong to the plough and Elizabeth’s lips were red, and Quardle ardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, the magpies said. Year in year out they worked while the pines grew overhead, and Quardle ardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, the magpies said.

Tau 2008: 23

I cherish this poem even more now, knowing that the magpie is in fact Australians’ favourite bird.

Tau’s point was that the concept of tangata whenua is based upon ‘poetic imagination’. In the 19^th century, Māori turned to western mythology and religion to recreate a new world for new circumstances. The method adopted ‘to find relevance and meaning in the new world was by what Pocock called “poetic inventiveness”.’ For Tau, this was insufficient, however. Invoking Kant, he suggested that, for Kant, each group simply imposed

a unilateral will over an external object or, if we reverse the situation, simply recit[ed] poetry to itself in a case of cultural narcissism. This has been the story of New Zealand, whether it be the early East Polynesian settlers projecting their stories outward or the settler governments projecting their judicial rationale upon Māori to deny their expectations that they would inherit a civil society.

Tau 2008: 26

He concluded that while the proverb ‘the land remains but the people change’ still has validity, an Australian magpie ‘now sits on a Macrocarpa hedge looking down on Tom and Elizabeth’s graves singing, ‘Quardle ardle oodle ardle wardle doodle”’ (Tau 2008: 26).

After that there was a brief pause in our intellectual engagement when life transitions intervened, in my case because of the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 through 2012. In total the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) numbered over 10,000 shocks, with resulting exhaustion and tumultuous consequences for the University, especially in the Arts. Consequently, I retired early in December 2012. But not for long: I soon found myself at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) in Hobart, where I spent five happy years from March 2013 to March 2018. There, collaboration resumed with Peter B, and with Sian Supski as a second Thought Partner at the Thesis Eleven Centre.

The precise date escapes me but, sometime during the 2010s, Peter B and Sian S stayed with me in Sandy Bay, Hobart, when Peter B was visiting Sociology at UTAS as an invited speaker. His seminar entailed a conversation with a South African writer who was working on a series of documentary texts featuring Johannesburg, his place of residence. The seminar’s focus was city scapes, and the writer Peter B interviewed was Ivan Vladislavic, who is now a professor at the University of Witwatersrand (ivanvladislavic.com). The bonus of the Hobart encounter was I now had Sian S as a collaborator and friend, too!

Once I returned to New Zealand post-Hobart – to work with my friend Te Maire Tau at the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre he founded at UC – Peter B, Sian S and I reconnected over the festschrift book that my two Thought Partners co-edited to celebrate the life of the noted Australian historian and public intellectual Stuart Macintyre, another mutual friend and colleague, who was a leading light at the University of Melbourne for decades. Stuart Forbes Macintyre AO, FAHA, FASSA was Professor and Head of History for much of his career and Dean of Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2008. Sadly, Stuart Macintyre died in November 2021 from cancer, aged 74, just as Peter B’s and Sian S’s volume in his honour went to press. While it puzzled me that my historian colleagues at Melbourne did not step up to this task, it was no surprise that the gang at La Trobe’s Thesis Eleven Centre assumed responsibility and extracted chapters from the various historians who, in my opinion, should have undertaken this important task. The ensuing book, The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre (Beilharz and Supski, eds 2022), is another example of Peter B’s good heartedness and generosity of spirit. Stuart Macintyre was a giant in Australian and British labour history – he was another Australian who completed his postgraduate studies at Cambridge University – and Peter B saw to it that he received due acknowledgment. Macintyre remains, in his Melbourne colleague Janet McCalman’s words, Australia’s ‘greatest historian of politics and society from the late 19^th century to the present day’ (McCalman 2021).

My task for that festschrift was a modest one, to explain how Macintyre’s (1999) A Concise History of Australia, which went to five editions, influenced my writing of A Concise History of New Zealand (Mein Smith 2005) in the same Cambridge Concise Histories series. I also suggested that Peter B invite my former MA thesis supervisor, the New Zealand labour historian Len Richardson, to write a piece for the volume, because of the close friendship between Macintyre and Richardson that had flourished since the 1980s. I was keenly aware that, thanks to the trans-Tasman connection between Len and Stuart, which extended to watching Australian Rules football matches and rugby games, Stuart Macintyre kept a kindly watch over me when I was a postgraduate student and emerging researcher, just as he did over all his postgraduate students at the University of Melbourne.

Characteristically, as a friend both to Stuart Macintyre and of mine, Peter B knew how my Concise History spoke to Stuart’s. Given Macintyre opened his text with the question: where, and what, is Australia? I therefore asked: where, and what, is New Zealand? As Peter B appreciated, I wrote my short history with the idea that it would sit alongside Stuart’s on bookshelves whether of students, especially overseas and undergraduate students, or of general readers (Mein Smith 2022).

That was only one of the collaborations we undertook during the COVID pandemic. Another entailed the medium of television and was initiated this time by me. In 2021, media consultants working on contract for the SBS TV channel commenced research on a documentary series about Australia’s forgotten migrants, titled in Australia-speak Who the Bloody Hell are We?. The second episode was to feature New Zealanders in Australia, and aimed to highlight how much they had contributed to the national story and to the betterment of Australia economically, socially, and culturally, despite harsh policies of exclusion imposed by conservative Liberal-National Coalition governments after 2001. Fortunately, those misguided policies were rescinded in July 2023, ending over two decades of needless injustice to Kiwis in Australia. The injustice especially stung young people who migrated to the ‘big smoke’ of Australian cities or sought highly paid work in the professions, trades, and in the mining sector. They paid high taxes and yet were denied access to social welfare and, more gallingly, a path to citizenship when Australians in New Zealand retained their historical rights to permanent residence on arrival, including voting rights and access to government health and social benefits.

I was the historical consultant for the series’ New Zealand episode in the planning phase, and when the media researchers asked me if I knew of a cultural theorist they could interview, Peter B was the obvious candidate. Even better for a cash-strapped alternative television channel, Peter B was in Melbourne, where the SBS headquarters are situated. Naturally, Peter B did a superb job of making complex concepts simple for a broad audience to comprehend. He appeared on Australian television screens in late July 2023, interviewed by the Melbourne-based comedian Cal Wilson, who was also from Christchurch, New Zealand, and I was chuffed with his contribution. It was vintage Peter B: lucid and effortless. Who better to explain what is like and unlike about Australians and New Zealanders, and to laud the continued traffic both ways across the Tasman Sea?

As Peter B himself reflected in a recent issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven is in transition, now presided over by a new generation (Beilharz and Supski 2021). So is my relationship with Peter B, a fellow baby boomer. In ‘retirement’, I relish my role as ‘academic auntie’ to the following generations of scholars, X, Y, and millennials. One generation X-er is my erstwhile protégé, James Smithies, who is now Professor of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London. In 2006, Peter B made a big impact on young Smithie’s thinking about anti-modernism and post-modernism. This year, Professor Smithies has again connected with Peter B, who is characteristically happy to read Smithies’ book manuscript on rethinking the relationship between technology and the humanities. For my Thought Partner, this is a cutting-edge subject Thesis Eleven should engage with.

As James Smithies wrote on his blog in 2021, the Digital Laboratory that he established at King’s College is ‘a techno-philosophical experiment that reimagines the boundaries of scholarly production. At the core of that activity is a desire to fundamentally rethink the relationship between technology and the humanities’. With the exponential rise of AI, humans would increasingly co-exist with machines of their own making. From where Smithies sat in central London, it was:

symbolic of the next phase of digital humanities qua humanities, where machines of various sorts are increasingly drawn into the core practices and culture of scholarship and debate, and people with the expertise to design, develop, and maintain them are sought after. Raising our expectations of digital humanities design, engineering, and scholarship to this level assumes a contribution to and engagement with foundational issues in not only epistemology and method but human and machine ethics, and wider issues in economy, society, and culture.

Smithies 2021

In what Smithies experienced as a natural progression, he subsequently shifted to King’s Department of Digital Humanities, where such issues are explored in research, teaching and learning.

Will AI save us or destroy us? For Gaia’s sake, a global reset of values is vital. Hope is essential, and as I reflect on what I value about working with the Peter B and Sian S partnership, I feel revitalized by their energy and warmth. It has been a privilege to be in the orbit of Peter B and Thesis Eleven as a recipient of his seemingly limitless empathy and scholarship, and I am honoured, and thankful, to remain in the loop.

References

Ballara A (1990) Te Whanganui-a-Tara: Phases of Maori Occupation of Wellington Harbour c. 1800–1840, in D. Hamer and R. Nicholls (eds) The Making of Wellington 1800–1914. Wellington: Victoria University Press, pp. 9-34.

Bayly C (2004) The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780-1914. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Beilharz P (1997) Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Beilharz P and Supski S (eds) (2021) Thesis Eleven: In transition. Thesis Eleven 163(1): 3-4.

Beilharz P and Supski S (eds) (2022) The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Godwits New Zealand (n.d.) Facebook Page.

McCalman J (2021) Vale Stuart Macintyre: A history warrior who worked for a better Australia. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/vale-stuart-macintyre-a-history-warrior-who-worked-for-a-better-australia-172394. (accessed 11 October 2023).

Macintyre S (1999) A Concise History of Australia, 1^st edn. Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Mein Smith P (2003) New Zealand Federation commissioners in Australia: One past, two historiographies. Australian Historical Studies 34(122): 305-325.

Mein Smith P (2005) A Concise History of New Zealand, 1^st edn. Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Mein Smith P and Hempenstall P (2008) Introduction. Thesis Eleven92(1): 5-10.

Mein Smith P  Hempenstall P and Goldfinch S (2008) Remaking the Tasman World. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press.

Mein Smith P (2022) Oceanic connections, in P. Beilharz and S. Supski (eds), The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, pp. 271-275.

Pocock JGA (2005) The Discovery of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prendergast Judgement (1877) New Zealand Justice Reports [NZJR]: 92.

Smith B (1992) Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Smithies J (2021) Announcing My Departure. In: James Smithies: Digital Humanities. Available at: https://www.jamessmithies.org/blog/2021/09/06/announcing-my-departure-kdl/index.html (accessed 11 October 2023).

Tau TM (2008) The Discovery of Islands and the Stories of Settlement. Thesis Eleven 92(1): 11-28.

Tau TM (2003) The Oral Traditions of Ngāi Tahu. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.

Vladislavic I (n.d.) www.ivanvladislavic.com.

Biographic Information

Philippa Mein Smith is Emeritus Professor of History and Ahorangi Tauhere at the Ngāi Tahu Centre, the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Adjunct in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. Her first two monographs explored policies and practices concerning mothers and babies: Maternity in Dispute (1986) investigated the politics of childbirth in New Zealand between the wars, and Mothers and King Baby (1997) the infant mortality decline and the infant welfare movement in white settler Australia from 1880 to 1950.

From the 1990s Philippa’s research widened to embrace Australia and New Zealand, the southern neighbours’ similarities and differences, their shared past and shared histories since European ‘discovery’ of the Pacific region. Co-author of A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (2000) with Donald Denoon, and of Remaking the Tasman World (2008) with Peter Hempenstall, Shaun Goldfinch and her research team, she wrote A Concise History of New Zealand for the Cambridge Concise Histories Series (2005, 2^nd edition 2012), and has published numerous book chapters, articles, and essays on relations between New Zealand and Australia, which reflect her keen interest in real world governance and ethical issues.