Once Were English

Jane Campion's The piano is perhaps the best known image to date of New Zealand in the cinema. For the larger world it is a romantic story of settlement set in a wild, undiscovered country. For New Zealanders it remains an unsettling story. For them it is bad history. They think they know history better than this film, that it misrepresents Maori and romanticises the place, and that therefore it misrepresents them (as if the film should represent what they think). What really bothers them is that the film registers in magisterial form their own habitual forms of self-deceit. New Zealanders live according to narratives of history they dare not speak. This is because for them there are no good narratives of history. When one is spoken it must be disowned. The piano betrays the secret fantasy that there exists a good story of settlement.