That's a different story: comparing letters and oral accounts of Dutch immigrants in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper examines how a combination of contemporary letters and retrospective interviews can shed light on the ways in which immigrants made and continue to make sense of their migration experiences. For immigrants of the later 20th century, research tends to focus on interviews, whereas contemporary egodocuments have often been overlooked. This paper aims to contribute to a reverse trend – recently initiated by historians of British emigration Angela McCarthy and Alistair Thomson – by means of a systematic analysis of letters alongside interviews using three theoretical notions derived from oral history debates: retrospectivity, composure and collective memory. In three case-studies of Dutch immigrants who moved to New Zealand in the 1950s and early 1960s, letter and interview materials will be compared and contrasted, focusing especially on the relationship between expectations and achievements. The combination of both types of sources offers a long-term perspective that makes clear that at various stages of the life course, different and sometimes even contradicting and ambiguous perspectives existed. But the value of these sources goes beyond the letters as an account of the past and interviews as an account of the present. They also complement each other by offering insights that help understand the information in the other sources. This study concludes that an integrated and systematic analysis of both sources can offer a rich perspective on the ways in which migrants try to make sense of their experiences, leading to better understanding of often contradictory accounts in which their own expectations, plans, successes and hardships – and those of others – play changing roles. It is well possible that a similar approach can also prove to be interesting for other topics in the field of migration studies, such as integration and identity-formation.