Becoming a 'Kiwi"

War brides and their children were “repatriated” in a crisscrossing pattern around the world. The term repatriation had in itself connotations that impacted on war brides' conception of themselves and of what they might expect from life in New Zealand.

Marriage transformed war brides into New Zealanders, and it was as New Zealanders that they undertook their voyages across the globe.⁶⁴ Upon marriage they automatically acquired New Zealand citizenship and the concomitant rights of entry and free passage to which dependents of ser­vicemen were entitled.⁶⁵ Nancy Cott has argued that the conferring of citi­zenship privileges by way of marriage defines the boundaries of the nation.⁶⁶ However, on arrival in New Zealand, war brides discovered that they were not embraced wholeheartedly by the nation that had bequeathed them citizenship. A quest for acceptance and a sense of belonging then stretched out in front of them. They occupied contrary positions—supposedly being New Zealanders and at the same time not being familiar with local ways. They were required to relinquish their own customs and identities, but hand in hand with these expectations was a certain amount of acclaim for novelty. Being expected to fit in and simultaneously being regarded as dif­ferent was sometimes difficult to accommodate, and many women endured ongoing rebuffs and struggled to attain equilibrium.⁶⁷ British-born Nancy Dickie wrote in 1988, 40 years after she arrived:

My first struggle was trying to become a New Zealander.

Tsuruko Lynch, a Japanese war bride, expressed a similar sense of discom­fiture. She was helped by neighbors to adapt to New Zealand society and “focus on being a good wife and mother.”⁶⁹ Pressure to assimilate “meant that until quite recently [1999] she had put her life in Japan completely behind her.”⁷⁰ It seems that this was not peculiar to Japanese women as Englishwomen found acceptance and acclimatization took time and were often not completely achievable. As Nancy Dickie found, rather than assimilate completely, she simply came to terms with her own “difference.”⁷¹

In general, war brides were anxious to make a good impression on their in-laws and to avoid conflict and were, therefore, unlikely to object, as evi­denced by English-speaking women who felt similar pressure to conform.

For example, religious affiliation proved to be a site of contention as families tried to impose their denominational beliefs on the newly arrived brides. Sylvia Smith, an Anglican from Derbyshire (United Kingdom), was expected to join the Methodist Church in Rangiora, the small South Island hometown of her in-laws. Her father-in-law presented her with a Methodist hymnbook soon after she arrived and, impervious to her protests, assured her that, having married his son, she was now a Methodist.⁷² She experi­enced the letting go of her religious affiliations as a threat to her identity. In this case, English-speaking Sylvia felt that her past had to be abandoned if she was to be accepted in New Zealand.⁷³ Her compromise was to incor­porate attendance at both churches each Sunday for as long as she lived with her in-laws.

War brides faced issues relating to acculturation and conforming regard­less of their origins. Being labeled as “repatriated” and gaining citizenship did not automatically equate to being a “Kiwi.” Differences in language, culture, and lifestyle brought war brides into sharp relief against their receiving communities. While they struggled to rationalize their choice of marrying a foreign serviceman and negotiated the transition to their hus­band's home country, they also had to overcome hurdles that the acquisition of citizenship privileges did not automatically level.

On migrating to New Zealand, gendered expectations dictated that they would be good wives and mothers, but they often found their in-laws skeptical of their capacity for the job—a skepticism based on suspicion of anything “foreign.” British women, no less than European and other women, found this to be the case. Marygold Miller, English war bride, wrote to her mother in October 1946 that she was

beginning to realize there was a lot of local resentment against the English which I did not expect. Here and there small slightly insulting remarks were passed which I did my best to ignore. I was amazed to find that English women were judged to be inefficient housekeepers, and every mistake I made was pointed out as proof of this.⁷⁴

For the most part, war brides were willing to learn new skills and adapt to new living arrangements, ingredients, and cooking facilities that differed greatly from those they had previously enjoyed, but mistakes were lighted upon as evidence of ineptitude or “inefficient foreign ways.”⁷⁵

To assist war brides' adaptation, women were introduced to the New Zealand way of life, its culture, and customs through talks and films on board ship and in Italy even before they sailed. Instruction courses notwithstanding, war brides found themselves on a steep learning curve once they arrived in New Zealand. The government seemed anxious to promote conservative domestic and family values, distributing copies of Frederick Wood's Understanding New Zealand and New Zealand: The Land, the People, the Way of Life.

The farmer who merely supervises the work of others is virtually unknown. He himself (often aided by his wife) splashes through the mud of Taranaki or the Manawatu or the Waikato to the cowshed.⁷⁶

Professor Wood at least warned about the mud, and his books left them in no doubt of the rural nature of New Zealand society, the predominance of employment in primary production, and the sparseness of the population.⁷⁷ However, most war brides were unprepared for the demands of New Zealand life and could not always hide their disappointment at the lack of shops and entertainment.

War brides in New Zealand were relegated to the “home front,” but in comparison with New Zealand women, most had a heightened awareness of what it meant to be at war. Home front and warfront had not, for many of these women, been separated by geography and for some had been one and the same. They found themselves out of step with the wives and mothers who had remained in New Zealand for the duration of the conflict and who had not had a similar “war experience.” While New Zealand had actively partici­pated in the war by supplying 130,000 Allied troops for war service and been a hub for manufacture and primary production, supplying Britain as well as the U.S. forces stationed in the Pacific, it did not suffer the immediacy of war as had occurred in Europe, the Middle East, and, arguably, North America.⁷⁸ Although New Zealand feared a Japanese invasion, this did not eventuate, resulting in a general lack of appreciation after the fact of the impact of war destruction experienced by many of the war brides. Talk of such experiences was deprecated, and war brides felt forced to drop their war (and other) past(s) from conversation. As noncombatants there was no place for “heroic” versions of their wartime experiences, but there was also little tolerance for what Penny Summerfield terms a “stoic” narrative version of their war lives.⁷⁹ While they may not have been combatants in the war that spawned their marriages, many had firsthand experience of bombings, black­outs, evacuation, severe shortages, and crossing oceans where torpedoes and mines were present.

Because they “belonged” in existing established families, war brides were quickly immersed in New Zealand society, possibly more quickly than other immigrants. Quick absorption is more problematic that it might appear. Anne Imamura noted that women who arrived as migrants in their hus­bands’ countries could not move into “local society gradually but face immediate problems of establishing themselves in their husbands’ social world.”⁸⁰ It was at this point that war-bride clubs proved most useful to those women living in close proximity to one another. Based on their com­mon experience of traveling on the ships and the mixed reception upon arrival, they offered one another acceptance, confidentiality, and moral sup­port. Many war brides, however, were dispersed around the country to their husbands’ rural homes, and the impact of this dispersal heightened their loneliness.⁸¹ Although the war ended in 1945, the sense of dislocation experienced by these “war” brides extended far beyond the immediate end of the war and relocation to a peacetime society so very far away.