BEGINNINGS: TWO HEMISPHERES

In her earliest autobiographical account Fleur Adcock announces the central fact of her life, her divided nationality. Like most white settlers this stems from having one parent or grandparent born in Britain and another born in the colony but of British origin:

In acknowledging this mixed ancestry, Adcock ‘naturalises’ her decision to repatriate, to return to the country of her father's birth, as though the right of someone who can claim dual English and Irish ancestry. This personal mythology points to the psychological impasse of the white settler (or the white Creole, the white settler's descendant) of the Second World, who according to Alan Lawson is:

The white settler suffers from separation from Europe and an 'anxiety of proximity7 in relation to the indigene. Ambivalence towards the Maori, New Zealand's indigenous people, never featured strongly in Adcock's complex self-identification, although her recent genealogical research embodies another characteristic of the white settler, the desire to reconnect to pure and authentic origins. At the age of eighteen she married the half-Polynesian poet, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, who was born in the Cook Islands and brought up in Rarotonga. Campbell's first volume, Mine Eyes Dazzle (1950), had been an instant success. Theirs was a whirlwind courtship. Like that of the poet James K. Baxter and his Maori wife, Jackie C. Sturm, later a published writer herself, their inter-racial marriage reflected the egalitarian myth which prevailed in New Zealand at a time when government policy on race relations was one of assimilation.