Article · 2026
Before the Godwit and the Owl: John Pocock’s Kiwi History
By Thomas Ashby
Australian Journal of Biography and History 12, 65–94, 2026
About this article
The first close reading of ‘Historian and Poet in New Zealand’ (1946), an essay J. G. A. Pocock wrote at 21 in reply to the essayist M. H. Holcroft and the poet Allen Curnow. Ashby shows how the young Pocock defended history writing against its dismissal by New Zealand’s settler poets and called on his fellow pākehā to take up history as the country moved towards fuller independence, and traces how this ‘antipodean perception’ ran through Pocock’s later work, including The Discovery of Islands (2005).