‘Tourists like Ourselves’: New Zealanders’ International Travel Diaries and their Journeys, 1919–1963

Abstract

This thesis examines international travel diaries written by New Zealanders between the end of World War I and the beginning of the ‘jet age’. These diaries functioned as communicative tools, connecting the tourists who wrote them with their communities at home. Equally, the words of the diarists emphasised the communities tourists encountered and entered abroad. Given its influence over the physical diary and its contents, I argue that ‘community’ should be central to the ways we understand the travel diary in this period. This unconventional approach to travel history allows us to assess the relative value of national or imperial allegiances while also exploring other ways tourists constructed emotional and behavioural connections. Travel writing scholarship has not explored the ways that travel diaries functioned as a particular genre of travel writing, nor have the diaries’ material components been investigated at length. Here the diaries are treated as objects and text, providing novel insights into tourist subjectivity while also recognising their specific cultural functions, particularly with regard to community formation and strengthening. The diaries also reveal much about the material culture of mid-twentieth-century travel, and allow historians to tap into the thoughts, impressions, and rhetorical practices of a diverse group of New Zealanders. Individual chapters in the thesis engage with tourists’ somatic, emotional and intellectual responses to writing practice, work and workers, religious spaces and services, shopping areas, natural environments and components of foreign cultures and technologies. The words used by the tourists in their diaries were both idiosyncratic and utilised cultural norms of expression and ideas about otherness and similarity. They allow us to reflect on the diversity and creativity of New Zealanders in a period often characterised as staid, and to assess broader cultural perceptions of the globe and New Zealand’s place within it. This thesis suggests new ways of defining and engaging with genre. It inserts material culture, emotion, and bodily representation into travel history in new ways, redefines the activities which were understood as part of tourism in this period, and illuminates situations when the line between tourists and residents blurred. I argue that paying closer attention to New Zealanders’ travelling pasts adds complexity to existing national narratives, decentres the nation as an interpretive framework, and opens our eyes to the many communities New Zealanders formed at home and abroad.