The 'New Chum': writings of the English Diaspora in New Zealand 1860-1914

This article studies the writing of first generation English settlers in New Zealand, identifying a strong sense of alienation as key to its orientation. This both 'underlies and subverts the myth of settlement'. The article argues that the writing of early English Diaspora writers like Alfred Domett, Lady Mary Anne Barker, Samuel Butler, Blanche Baughan and Margaret Escott anticipates and overlaps with the cultural nationalism of the 1930s in its concern with the social outsider, at first appearing in the figure of the 'new chum' and by the 1930s represented by that of the 'man alone'