This book "reproduces in full colour the beautiful and fascinating Album presented to Mrs Hobson, the wife of New Zealand's first governor, when she left New Zealand in 1843 after the death of her husband. [It] contains fifty charming watercolours and drawings by at least eight known artists... There are ... some important and attractive scenes of contemporary Māori life and customs. ... The Album also contains a letter from Te Wherowhero, the first Māori king, to Queen Victoria, and a moving farewell to Mrs Hobson from the distinguished Māori chief Wiremu Hoete. Edward Shortland's written examples and comment on Māori customs, songs, and proverbs are also of considerable interest."--Book jacket.
What would a history of New Zealand look like that rejected Thomas Carlyle’s definition of history as ‘the biography of great men’, and focused instead on the experiences of women? One that shifted the angle of vision and examined the stages of this country’s development from the points of view of wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts? That considered their lives as distinct from (though often unwillingly influenced by) those of history’s ‘great men’? In her ground-breaking History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes provides just such a history. This is more than an account of women in New Zealand, from those who arrived on the first waka to the Grammy and Man Booker Prize-winning young women of the current decade. It is a comprehensive history of New Zealand seen through a female lens. Brookes argues that while European men erected the political scaffolding to create a small nation, women created the infrastructure necessary for colonial society to succeed. Concepts of home, marriage and family brought by settler women, and integral to the developing state, transformed the lives of Māori women. The small scale of New Zealand society facilitated rapid change so that, by the twenty-first century, women are no longer defined by family contexts. In her long-awaited book, Barbara Brookes traces the factors that drove that change. Her lively narrative draws on a wide variety of sources to map the importance in women’s lives not just of legal and economic changes, but of smaller joys, such as the arrival of a piano from England, or the freedom of riding a bicycle.
Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young ’native’ children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain’s infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed a radical and enlightened tool that was meant to hasten the conversion of 'heathen' peoples by missionaries to Christianity and to European modes of civilization. The intertwined legacies of European exploration, enlightenment ideals, education, and empire building, the authors argue, provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Informed by archival research and focused on the shared as well as unique aspects of the infant schools’ colonial experience, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods illuminates both the pervasiveness of missionary education and the diverse contexts in which its attendant ideals were applied.
How did the European settler perceive M&āori? What images of M&āori society and culture did European artists create for their distant audiences? What preconceptions and aesthetic models lay behind early European depictions of M&āori? These are some of the questions explored by art historian Leonard Bell in this major study of the relationship between the visual representation of M&āori and the ideology of colonialism. He explores the complex and unbalanced cultural interchange between Europeans and M&āori in nineteenth-century New Zealand, in addition to showing how the great range and variety of pictures often revealed more about the artists &– and their society and its attitudes &– than they did about M&āori themselves. This lively and readable book is well illustrated with examples of the artists' work and will be an important contribution to the understanding of colonial New Zealand and the role played by the artist in expressing and creating cultural patterns.
Written by a former managing editor who is also a distinguished writer, this book charts the origins of the Auckland University Press up to its formal recognition in 1972. It provides a valuable document in the history of the book in New Zealand, an intriguing view of university politics and administration, and glimpses of New Zealand culture in the making.
