Today’s slender dailies, hanging by a thread, make it sound unlikely; but local papers once groaned with advertising. As Ian Grant recalls, Auckland’s Herald even boasted in 1963 that it carried more advertising than any of its inky rivals, the holes around the ads filled with shared NZ Press Association copy.
The Aramoana smelter proposal of 1980-1983 sparked a major New Zealand environmental controversy, which ended in the abandonment of the project and the protection of Aramoana with reserve status. What led to this result? There is a widespread perception that the collapse of the project was due solely to economic factors rather than the energetic “Save Aramoana Campaign” against the smelter. I reconsider and reevaluate the evidence, and argue that while the economic factors were undoubtedly important, the protest movement was also influential on the final outcome.
In his introduction, Vincent O’Malley, calls The Invasion of the Waikato: Te Riri Ki Tainui, a companion piece to his magnum opus, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000, published in 2016. It is one of an impressive series of books that establish him as the recognised authority on the New Zealand Wars and the Waikato War in particular.
Through rigorous research, extensive interviews, and investigative reporting, Untold Intimacies exists as a vitally important document demonstrating that when sex work is made safely legal, society does not, in fact, unravel. It’s a rare look at an aspect of history seldom documented with unvarnished first-person perspectives, and each of the twenty-five individuals here provides invaluable insight into sex work inside and outside the law, policing and safety, health and well-being. Notably, the lived experiences documented across the book’s eight chapters depict a powerful human rights struggle that remains a flashpoint as bodily autonomy and sexual agency is being violently stripped from populations today, now, in the world and at home.
This thirteenth volume in Stephen Levine’s long-running election series continues a project of sustained documentary and analytical importance to the study of New Zealand politics. Spanning the full electoral history from first-past-the-post through the mixed-member proportional (MMP) era, the series constitutes one of the most consistent longitudinal records of democratic practice in any comparable polity. Levine, Professor of Political Science at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington and founder of its parliamentary internship programme, has been editor and contributor to volumes covering every MMP election from 1996 to 2023. That institutional continuity is itself a scholarly achievement: few comparable democracies have produced anything approaching this level of systematic electoral documentation across successive cycles.
In December 1955, young Maire aged ten and her brother Keith aged eleven accompanied their mother Elsie to a meeting of the William Morris Group, a Christchurch-based organisation intended to provide ‘art for the people and by the people’. Elsie Locke and her husband Jack were also members of the New Zealand Communist Party, and Elsie had been under continual surveillance by the New Zealand Police since she first joined the party in 1933. Special Branch opened files for Maire and Keith in December 1955, for, as the ‘red diaper babies’ of two communist parents, they themselves were already marked as persons of interest.
Erik Olssen is a great kaumātua of Pākehā history, and this fascinating book on New Zealand’s first post-contact century sustains his reputation. He describes his approach as ‘a marriage of social and intellectual-cultural history’ (p. 11). It also flirts usefully with several other sub-genres, such as health, religious and demographic history. But there is indeed more focus on ideas than in his previous work. He envisages this volume as the first of three, in which case it will fill the niche of Alan Atkinson’s fine trilogy, The Europeans in Australia. The big difference is that Olssen is able to deal more evenly with indigenous as well as settler history. This book is rich, reflective, humane and benign – arguably too benign towards some of its leading characters, notably Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
In 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which continues to dominate the public imagination in many corners of the globe, including Australia and New Zealand. Indeed, recent research has shown that the conflict enjoys the greatest level of interest among the Australian public, who also feel more strongly about this conflict than any other in which Australia has been involved.[i] While similar studies are not available in the New Zealand context, the Second World War nonetheless had a significant effect on the country. The conflict remains the nation’s largest mobilisation in history. Around 140,000 New Zealanders served overseas between 1939 and 1945, and nearly 12,000 died. For a country whose population numbered only 1.6 million in 1940, this was a significant loss: one in every 150 New Zealanders died in the conflict.[ii] For many of those who returned from the war, life was forever changed for them and their families, with the ‘traumatic effects’ of the war rippling into the post-war period.
It is now commonplace to believe that Māori were misled into signing Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi and misunderstood that it involved a cession of sovereignty to the Crown. This interpretation of the Treaty was first argued by Ruth Ross in her 1972 article, “Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Texts and Translations”, and many today continue to rely on that interpretation, including the Waitangi Tribunal. The following essay critiques Ross’s interpretation and finds it lacking in key areas. Most importantly, Ross misunderstood or ignored the explanations of the British humanitarians who authored or were later charged with upholding the Treaty. She also ignored the statements of the Māori leaders who signed and later sought to hold the Crown to its undertakings. Their statements make clear that the Treaty was not the fraud or misunderstanding that Ross first suggested and which many today believe. It was instead an exceptional and mutual declaration by the Crown and te iwi Māori that they would unite for their mutual benefit under the law and authority of God and the Queen, and that both parties would abide by the Christian principles of “love”.
Alongside the history of public housing in Aotearoa runs a less well-documented history of rental housing provided by the state not as a welfare measure but to its employees—including teachers, police officers, soldiers, miners, loggers, railways workers, construction workers, and civil servants. Rather than being developed side by side, public housing and employee housing often competed for scarce funding and resources and an overburdened construction workforce. Both when these two forms of state rental housing were established and when they were wound down, public and political support was sharply polarised, and their competing demands were used as wedge issues by political parties to undermine the housing priorities of their opponents. This paper considers how the state has navigated the competing political and economic demands stemming from its simultaneous roles as employer, landlord, regulator, and welfare provider.
This article explores the shared visions of the New Zealand-born short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and the Scottish-born painter James Nairn, and their portrayal of the New Zealand landscape, notably Wellington and its harbour. Examining selected stories by Mansfield and paintings by Nairn, the article demonstrates their commitment to capturing the essence of their environment and their local surroundings. In particular, it examines their mutual sensitivity to light and atmosphere at a specific historical moment: the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A further link between them is the likelihood of Nairn having inspired the artist-narrator in Mansfield’s short story “Daphne” (1921). The article highlights how their unique but complementary approaches have enriched our understanding of aspects of New Zealand’s cultural and artistic heritage.
This essay re examines Gottfried Lindauer’s 1878 Portrait of Pare Watene as a dynamic site of transcultural encounter rather than a passive artifact of colonial ethnography. Through decolonial frameworks—Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” and Ariella Azoulay’s “watching”—it argues that Pare Watana’s image, though rooted in colonial photographic traditions such as the cartes-de-visites, embodies Māori agency and autoethnographic resistance. By analysing the interplay between Lindauer’s painting, its photographic source, and possible iwi collaboration, the essay reveals how Indigenous presence and mana persist within and against colonial visual systems, reframing the work as a living taonga that demands continued critical and institutional reconsideration.
A biography of Harry Holland, the most prominent of Labour’s early leaders, has been well overdue. Patrick O’Farrell’s insubstantial and sometimes prejudiced account of his life and work, Harry Holland: Militant Socialist, appeared in 1964 and there has been nothing since except appearances as a minor player in other political biographies and essays.
Avril Bell’s Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Māori, Honouring the Treaty arrived at a moment when the political ground it described was actively shifting. Published in August 2024, it appeared as the incoming coalition government’s Treaty Principles Bill was generating fierce public debate in Aotearoa, and just months before over 40,000 people – many of us identifying as Tangata Tiriti – marched on Parliament to protest it in the hīkoi mō te Tiriti in November of that year. In the months that followed, I recognised one of Bell’s central arguments in news and social media commentary on the coalition government’s hostility to Te Tiriti o Waitangi: that non-Māori (Pākehā especially) need to learn the art of stepping up and stepping back as we work with Māori toward a Tiriti-based society.
World War Two may have ended in 1945, but this did not mean that returned soldiers left the darkness and violence of those years behind. Many continued the war on a new front – home and family. This was the case with Mary Kisler’s father, Jack Arnott, who had been an Allied Prisoner of War (POW) in Italy and Germany from late-1941 to 1945. Fighting with the 2nd New Zealand Division, Jack was captured by the Germans after the two month campaign and battle of Sidi Rezegh in Libya. Little has been written about this, which is surprising because the number of dead, injured and captured is greater than that of any other campaign by New Zealand soldiers during World War Two.
This article argues that the early PhD in Aotearoa developed through hesitation, collapse, and reinvention as the University of New Zealand attempted to build a research culture within the constraints of a small dominion. Examining the period 1922–1961, it traces the doctorate’s fragile introduction, its suspension due to limited supervision and resources, and its wartime reinstatement amid expanding scientific and national needs. Analysis of early cohorts demonstrates narrow disciplinary participation and persistent dependence on overseas training. The article shows how structural inequalities shaped who could pursue doctoral study, revealing the uneven foundations of Aotearoa’s modern research system.
The value of Daniel McKay’s Beyond Hostile Islands, a study of treatments of the Pacific War in fiction from the United States and New Zealand, is its range. McKay follows master narratives and images from war writing across decades, and through archives many readers are unlikely to look in or move between.
Dougal McNeill’s book Forms of Freedom is a study of literary culture and its material determinations on both sides of the Tasman. In his readings of New Zealand and Australian literature, McNeill adopts an overtly Marxist approach, shunning both conventional (new) historicism and the dematerialised politics of identity that form the contemporary critical orthodoxy.
Safety was a major concern for both motorists and other road users in the early decades of the twentieth century in New Zealand, as it was in many other countries. This article looks at road accidents, perceptions of reckless driving and the dangers posed to pedestrians, placing them in an international context. The response to the new dangers included a variety of safety campaigns, targeted particularly at children. The New Zealand experience closely matches the four traffic-safety paradigms identified by Peter Norton for the United States.
