Lydia Wevers is a literary critic, editor and book reviewer. She is the director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and she has published widely on Australian and New Zealand literature. In this interview she discusses the scarcity of nineteenth century New Zealand fiction, and the ways in which New Zealand’s national literature has evolved over time.

 
One of the things your essay speculates about is whether the scarcity of novels in nineteenth century New Zealand might be linked to ‘cultural temperament and the history of colonisation.’ How did those conditions differ between Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century?