What happens when a pandemic hits and the country is locked down? How can we help keep New Zealanders connected?In collaboration with Sue Berman, Principal Oral History Advisor Auckland Libraries, staff at Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage got on Zoom and hatched a plan to use free online software to encourage nine oral historians from various communities around the country to collect short oral histories with our support. Thirty-five stories with Ngāti Porou, LGBTQI community...

In this Public History Talk,  co-editor and a writer for City at the Centre: A History of Palmerston North Margaret Tennant will discuss the dilemmas faced by its editors and the question of audience for such a volume: whether to take a thematic, ‘slice’ or chronological approach, how much to assume in terms of local knowledge, and whether to link with a commemorative event. City at the Centre evolved with the knowledge of other, complementary forms of story-telling about place, but also...

‘He Pukapuka Tātaku i ngā Mahi a Te Rauparaha Nui’ is a 50,000-word account of Te Rauparaha’s life written by his son Tamihana Te Rauparaha in the late 1860s. A rich source of Ngāti Toa history, language and culture, it offers fascinating insights into traditional Māori society and the tumultuous history of the 1820s and 1830s. This was an era characterised by intertribal conflict and the redrawing of the tribal map of Aotearoa, as well as by early encounters between Māori and Europeans that...

Today, te reo Māori is recognised as an important part of New Zealand culture and identity. But things were not always so hopeful for the language. By the 1970s, te reo Māori was on the verge of extinction. The long journey of revitalisation has been marked with many challenges and many victories. Part of the journey was taking Wai 11, the te reo Māori claim, to the Waitangi Tribunal. The resulting report confirmed te reo Māori was a taonga the Crown had to actively protect and contributed to...

When German-Jewish refugees arrived in New Zealand in the 1930s fleeing Hitler’s Europe, they brought everything they could from their former homes: furniture, luggage, personal documents, musical instruments, artwork, books, silverware, linen, a typewriter. Some of these humble and remarkable domestic objects survive today, a few in public heritage collections; most in the private family homes of descendants. But while the Jewish refugee migration story is well known, less so is the story of...

Angela Wanhalla (Kāi Tahu), is an associate professor in the History Programme, University of Otago. She teaches and writes about New Zealand history and is currently involved in a collaborative research project on the histories and legacies of the Māori home front during the Second World War. In this Public History Talk Angela Wanhalla looks at the recruitment of Māori women into the auxiliary services, why they joined, and how their wartime service impacted on their post-war lives. These...

  How do we remember the past? What place do colonial memorials have in public spaces? How can we better represent diverse histories in the landscape? In this first Public History Talk for 2020, Professor of Māori education at Victoria University, Joanna Kidman hosts a panel to discuss these issues and offer a facilitated conversation with the public on colonial memorials, history and memory. About the panelists: Morrie Love (Te Atiawa ki te Upoko o te Ika a Mauī, Taranaki, Ngati Ruanui) is...

In this talk, authors Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns will provide insights into the stories and objects that fill the recent publication ‘Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance’, their material history of activism in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Since 2010, the small town of Wairoa on the East Coast of New Zealand has been at the centre of the most bitter and protracted industrial dispute in New Zealand’s recent history. The agri-business giant, Talley’s Group, took over the town’s meat plant in 2010 and commenced a campaign to ‘draw the line on union influence’. Drawing on oral histories, this talk by Ross Webb focuses on the campaign by meat workers to save their union, the sacrifices involved, and the legacy of three successive...

From Porgy and Bess to haka, to Elsdon Best and Tuini Ngāwai, Pūkana will range far and wide to give a sense of the ihi, wehi and wana, inherent to Maori performance. Paul Diamond is lead curator for the Pūkana exhibition, and talks about the background to the exhibition which celebrates Māori performance across time. Paul (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa and Ngāpuhi) was appointed as Curator, Māori at the Alexander Turnbull Library in 2011. He is an author and has also worked as an oral historian and...

In a career that spans more than 30 books, time as a librarian, radio producer and screenwriter, Wellington writer Dame Fiona Kidman also claimed New Zealand's most prestigious literary prize in 2019. At the 51st Ockham Book Awards. This Mortal Boy was awarded the Acorn Foundation's Prize for Fiction. In this Public History Talk, Dame Fiona talks about her latest work which explores one of New Zealand's last executions, and the events that followed. These monthly Public History Talks are a...

The Tararua Tramping Club (TTC) was founded in 1919. At that time, most people in New Zealand viewed tramping as an odd form of recreation, but today tramping has become one of New Zealand’s most popular leisure pursuits. The club also fostered climbing, embraced skiing and encouraged women to participate in all these activities. And its leaders encouraged the formation of other clubs throughout the country.   In this presentation, freelance writer and photographer Shaun Barnett and author...

In our 50th episode, ‘The Hidden Women of the Public Stage: Women in New Zealand orchestras at the turn of the twentieth century’, Inge van Rij, Associate Professor of Musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, explores the paradoxical position of women in New Zealand’s early orchestral history. Focusing on two New Zealand exhibition orchestras (from 1889 and 1906), and contextualising them in relation to the women’s suffrage movement and representations of Maori culture, her talk aims...

In this presentation, oral historian, writer and editor Caren Wilton talks about using oral history – ‘history from below’ – to document what can seem to be a secret or hidden world, and telling stories that are both extraordinary and ordinary.   Her book 'My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change’ is a collection of intimate portraits of New Zealand sex workers, based on her series of oral-history interviews carried out over a nine-year period. These monthly Public...

New Zealand, an island nation, the sea surrounds us. Both barrier and highway, it was the only way for people, goods and ideas to come to this country for hundreds of years. In this first Public History Talk for 2019, Sarah Ell, author of the book 'Ocean: tales of voyaging and encounter that defined New Zealand', explores the relationship between our peoples and the sea, from the earliest Polynesian voyagers to explorers and entrepreneurs, immigrants and...

Soon after the opening of Old St Paul’s church in Mulgrave Street, Wellington, in 1866, Charles Abraham, the first Anglican Bishop of Wellington, said of the church that it was ‘a very handsome building of wood, and the interior is a great success. Being built of tōtara, it may last, unless some accident occurs to it, several centuries’. However, less than a century later, the future of the church was under threat, as the Wellington Anglican authorities, at the time building a large new...

In October 1918 the SS Talune was permitted to leave Auckland bound for Fiji and Polynesia, even though the ship's master knew that influenza was rife in the city and that there were sick on board ship when it left port. The state of the ship was also known prior to its arrival in many of its destination ports. Within eight weeks of berthing at Fiji, Western Samoa and Tonga, at least 5% of Fijians, 7% of Tongans and one-quarter of Western Samoa's population had died of influenza. In this...

As we celebrate 125 years of women’s suffrage, it's time to re-evaluate Polly Plum, once described as ‘a highly controversial public figure for a few years only’. In this Public History Talk, feminist historian and author Jenny Coleman shares some of the lesser-known parts of social reformer Mary Ann Colclough's (AKA Polly Plum) life, and her role in the “first wave” of feminism in New Zealand. She was also a leading educationalist and one of the earliest published female authors in New...

In this Public History Talk about an iconic kiwi institution, two historians of early childhood education present the outline of their new book, Growing a Kindergarten Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago Helen May, and retired senior lecturer Kerry Bethell, Massey Universtiy, have published and presented nationally and internationally on the subject of early childhood education. This book is their first joint publication which saw them...

The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography was originally published in five print volumes between 1990 and 2000. It comprised 3000 biographical essays about a wide range of deceased New Zealanders who had come to prominence by 1960. The Dictionary went online in 2001. In 2010 it was merged with Te Ara: the Encyclopedia of New Zealand to form the single largest reference work on New Zealand's history and society https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies The combined Dictionary and Te Ara website is...

Douglas Lilburn Research Fellow, Dr Aleisha Ward explores some of the many facets of ‘jazz’ in New Zealand’s Jazz Age. The image of 1920s New Zealand is frequently one of a quiet, staid society that ‘closed at 5’. Contrary to belief however, New Zealand had a flourishing, vibrant, urban landscape and a burgeoning jazz scene. Dr Aleisha Ward is the 2017 Douglas Lilburn Research Fellow and a recipient of a 2018 Ministry for Culture and Heritage New Zealand History Research Trust Fund award...

Redmer Yska is a Wellington based writer and historian, and is author to many New Zealand history works. Redmer presents his latest work 'A Strange Beautiful Excitement, Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington, 1888-1903’, and discusses a new connection between Mansfield's family and Women's Suffrage. He tried, as he put it, to ‘catch a glimpse of her in the open air: striding through the gale, long hair flying’. His research into Thorndon’s festering, deadly surroundings also led him to propose...

Dr Angela Wanhalla teaches in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, Dunedin. This presentation draws upon her most recent book, He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century, co-authored with Māori-language scholar and historian, Lachy Paterson. Collective petitions have helped force significant political and social reform in New Zealand. This talk introduces women petitioners and their concerns and argues that petitions are an important...

The Great War for New Zealand tells the story of the defining conflict in New Zealand history. War in the Waikato in 1863-64 shaped the nation in all kinds of ways, setting back Māori and Pākehā relations by several generations, marking an end to any hopes of meaningful partnership and allowing the government to begin to assert the kind of real control over the country that had eluded it since 1840. Spanning nearly two centuries from first contacts in the Waikato in the early nineteenth...

In this episode, Charlotte Macdonald and Rebecca Lenihan will discuss the development of a database of men serving in the imperial regiments in New Zealand, the nature of the ‘big data’ generated by the War Office, issues, limitations and possibilities to date, and goals for the database’s continuing development, along with some preliminary analysis. An initial release of the database is planned ahead of Rā Maumahara – the National Day of Commemoration on 28 October. At least 12,000...