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New Zealand holds a distinctly ambiguous position among major cricketing countries. Until at least the mid-1890s cricket was the ‘national’ game. Thereafter, in common with South Africa, rugby union superseded it and has remained dominant. But, unlike South Africa, the secondary position of New Zealand cricket produced only sporadic moments of international respectability
New Zealand’s Empire revises and expands received histories of empire and imperialism. In the study of the imperial past, both colonial and postcolonial approaches have often asserted the dualism of core and periphery, with New Zealand as on the ‘edge’ or as a ‘periphery’. This book critically revises and makes complex our understandings of the range of ways that New Zealand has played a role as an ‘imperial power’, including the cultural histories of New Zealand inside the British empire, engagements with imperial practices and notions of imperialism, the special significance of New Zealand in the Pacific region, and the circulation of the ideas of empire both through and inside New Zealand over time. It departs from earlier studies of both imperial and national histories by taking a new approach: seeing New Zealand as both powerful as an imperial envoy, and as having its own sovereign role in Pacific nations - as well as in Australia and Antarctica - but also through its examination of the manifold ways in which New Zealanders both look back at and comment on their relationships with the ‘empire’ over time. In separate essays that span social, cultural, political and economic history, contributors test the concept of ‘New Zealand’s Empire’, taking new directions in both historiographical and empirical research.
of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood, who stated that the Australian government regarded the returned soldier as its ‘best asset against [the] terrible Bolshevists’. 62 However, there were radical elements among the returned soldiery and within the RSL itself. Although essentially an organisation of the right, the government’s recognition of the RSL as
Most of the imperial territories in this book were first engrossed into the British Empire in the eighteenth century, usually acquired in stages. But New Zealand/Aotearoa has discrete origins as a colony in the nineteenth. While the mythic voyages of Cook and others placed the archipelago on the map, literally and metaphorically, and while missionaries, whalers and traders were active
9 Ireland and New Zealand: a legacy and an assault from within This chapter examines two very different cases. FOI in Ireland emerged from a secretive culture propelled by scandal and very specific coalition politics of the early 1990s. Bequeathed to a new government, it was severely cut back and then rebooted. New Zealand’s Official Information Act (OIA) represents perhaps the most unusual story, of a committee of the great and the good, composed of the normally ‘vested interests’, pushing a radical and decisively different sort of openness law. Ireland
While many elements of New Zealand’s ‘use and abuse’ of history and heritage are representative of the wider colonial experience, one of this book’s core arguments has been that, in considering how societies use the past, ‘empire’, ‘nation’, and the ‘local’ cannot be considered outside of the context of one another. This final chapter accordingly offers a counterpoint to
By 1840, the year in which the islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand were annexed by the British, the imperial state had developed a complex range of mechanisms for effecting social and racial control. These controls ranged from the overtly coercive (‘condign’, to borrow from J.K. Galbraith) extreme of suppression by outright warfare to control of the
A little over 150 years ago, a crucial battle took place in the western Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. The event was to be a turning point in New Zealand’s turbulent civil wars; British colonial ambition was effectively stymied and settler and Indigenous Māori relations were severely ruptured for most of the remainder of the nineteenth century
Within the historiography of New Zealand, much of the literature concerned with impressions of the country has arisen from accounts penned by emigration agents or travel writers. Both forms ensured the dissemination of information back to Britain and Ireland. As Lydia Wevers summarised in connection with one travel writer, ‘Every observation about New Zealand, Maori, the
Recent studies of the Irish and the Scots in New Zealand have pointed to the prevalence of social networks for migrants. This book argues that discrimination, even when experienced, was not a precondition for the ethnic consciousness felt by and ascribed to the Irish and Scots in New Zealand. Rather, most aspects of their ethnic identities were positively constructed and articulated. It contends that overarching narratives of exile had little significance in the development of Irish and Scottish ethnic identities in New Zealand. The book looks at the ways in which Irish and Scottish migrants and their sense of Irishness and Scottishness been examined in studies of the diaspora. A sense of being Irish or Scottish is explored, along with identifications such as Highlander, Lowlander, Northern Irish, and Southern Irish, Britishness; New Zealand identities are also considered. The book highlights the range of sources from which we can obtain some insight into the use of and attitudes towards the Irish and Scottish languages and accents in New Zealand. A range of elements including music, festivals, food and drink, and dress is considered to examine the material tokens of Irish and Scottish ethnicity. Religious and political identities were also important aspects of Scottishness and Irishness. A range of national characteristics is examined among the migrants and their descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Views of New Zealand and its indigenous Maori population are further ways in which Irish and Scottish migrants conveyed aspects of their identities.