Taradale Meets The Ideal Society and its Enemies

Abstract

IN a very favourable review of Miles Fairburn's The Ideal Society and its Enemies, Alan Ward suggested that 'Fairburn has set the terms of debate for some time to come. His terms, his statistics, his chronology will be challenged by specialists in the field. But the categories he has used will no doubt illuminate comparable studies of the twentieth century — and perhaps produce surprises for Fairburn himself.' In the same publication, Rollo Arnold began that challenge, especially to Fairburn's statistics, questioning the transience figures he used for "Normanby and Marton. The argument and pace of The Ideal Society and its Enemies are intense. The reader is swept along as Fairburn outlines and then rejects alternative interpretations of nineteenth-century New Zealand before offering his own atomization thesis. His book is undoubtedly one of the most important recent works in Pakeha historiography. It is therefore crucial to step back from it and critically assess the validity of its central thesis and to do so now, before a Fairburnian legend of nineteenth-century Pakeha society becomes entrenched. I have been engaged in an historical study of Taradale, in Hawke's Bay. Today Taradale is a suburb of Napier but in the time period of my work, 18861930, it was quite a separate area, with never more than 3000 inhabitants. Taradale provides us with an opportunity to test the general theory Fairburn propounds on a particular place. As Ward predicted, I intend to question Fairburn's terms, statistics and chronology as Taradale meets The Ideal Society and its Enemies. Two aspects of Fairburn's terminology I will question first: his notion of atomization, and his use and rejection of the idea of local community. Since at least the early 1980s, Fairburn has been promoting the idea of atomization. He believes that the nature of the immigrant population, combined with the situation they faced in New Zealand, meant that people in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially 1850-80, were atomized. They travelled to New Zealand either alone or without extended family support. More men than women migrated and immigrants tended to be young: Pakeha New Zealand had an age and sex imbalance in its population. On arrival, these people did not settle