The antipathy toward the city of Wellington in Ian Wedde's 1986 novel Symmes Hole can be understood in relation to a complex affinity for the land that has long shaped New Zealand culture. The trope of city versus country, which was a defining feature of the literary renaissance of the 1930s, has been revitalized by the social upheavals since the 1960s. A crisis of conscience occasioned by the revival of Maori land protests has seen many Pakeha embrace a Maori model of identity based on connection to the land as a means of retrospectively legitimizing their own claim to occupancy. Furthermore, the weakening of traditional colonial ties following Britain's entry to the EEC, and the emergence of new forms of imperialism in the Pacific--particularly corporate globalization and nuclear testing--have heightened this awareness of location on the part of New Zealanders. Accordingly, the land has come to embody all that is original, pure, and innocent, while the city signifies the artificial, the heterogeneous, and the displaced. Although Wedde's dystopian vision of Wellington encourages a situated reading of history by tracing the city's decline into superficial consumerism back to the Great Age of European exploration, his conception of urban space is premised on an opposition with 'the natural,' which is problematically associated with 'the native' and thus serves, paradoxically, to reinforce the essentializing rationales of imperialism. A critical excavation of the monuments to national (and multinational) history in the novel further reveals how the task of recuperating New Zealand's cultural identity by valorizing indigenous customs over imposed or imported ones is compromised by a covert desire to break free from the colonial past. This approach, which draws on Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the monumental and critical species of history, brings together and develops prior interpretations of Symmes Hole, notably Linda Hardy's influential account of the natural settlement syndrome and David Dowling's analysis of Wedde's turn from a satirical to a romantic mode. The city/country split thus highlights the contradictions inherent in the novel's dual attempt to expose the folly and vice of history while seeking absolution in myth. The elaborate double narrative of Symmes Hole spans more than two centuries of foreign influence in the Pacific. The novel's chief historical protagonist is James 'Worser' Heberley, who sailed into Te Awaiti channel on April Fool's Day, 1830. Like a number of his fellow whalers, Heberley married into the local Maori community, forming what colonial promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield called 'a new people.' As noted, however, in Wedde's pseudonymous introduction to the novel, the history of these new people 'was to go underground before the advancing wave of organized colonization' (8). Drawing on Heberley's journal and an array of other texts relating to the Pacific, the authorial figure of 'the researcher' imaginatively recuperates the fragments of this buried history as he wanders around modernday Wellington.
