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"Secret History: State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900–1956" by Richard S. Hill and Steven Loveridge is a groundbreaking book that explores the history of state surveillance in New Zealand. The authors challenge the perception of New Zealand as a "free and open society" by revealing the extensive role played by the New Zealand Police Force in state surveillance. The book highlights the focus on left-wing threats and the lack of oversight in the surveillance system. This meticulously researched study provides valuable insights into New Zealand's history and challenges the idealized image of the country. [Extracted from the article]

Over the long nineteenth century, translations of Christian scripture into indigenous languages were produced at a far greater rate than at any time previously, a product of both the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement and the acceleration of British imperial and Anglo settler colonial conquest. This article explores a dimension of the global evangelical translation project: the translation of the word "God." Where, at the close of the sixteenth century, there were just under 30 different words used to translate "God" in published vernacular, between 1800 and the early twentieth century close to 400 new "Gods" entered the Christian lexicon. Reading translation conflicts for what they tell us about the way power was imagined on the modern Anglo-American colonial frontier, this article argues that contests over the translation of "God" offer a window into the cultural and intellectual dimension of colonial conflict, and reveal a neglected chapter in the conceptual history of sovereignty: at the very moment when the concept of sovereignty was increasingly imagined on the model of the law-bound territorial state, alternative theories of sovereign power entered global circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australasian colonies were promoted as 'lands of opportunity' for British medical practitioners of the Victorian period, but once there doctors often found that any problems they faced had travelled with them. Furthermore, the act of migration could add to personal difficulty. This article builds on existing work about the challenges confronting doctors in England, and on the potential of asylum records to address the consequences of migration, to consider the experiences of men who chose to move round the globe. It concerns practitioners' turbulent careers in New Zealand, with an emphasis on their poor mental health and suicide. Official and personal sources are used to evaluate the impact of professional drivers, and the consequences for medical men. It concludes that migration did not mitigate professional stresses and instead induced or exacerbated personal crisis. The visibility of alcohol-related distress is particularly marked in contrast to evidence for practitioners in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical missionary Samuel Hayward Ford arrived in New Zealand's Bay of Islands in the late 1830s, a few years before the formal colonisation of the country. His letters and medical reports to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society revealed the complicated and malleable nature of medicine in the cross-cultural encounter. Through close study of Ford's writings, this article argues that medicine worked to transform and interweave Māori and missionary worlds in precolonial New Zealand. Experiencing the spread of disease in the Bay of Islands, Ford practised and was influenced by evangelical humanitarianism, and he was also entangled in the politics of empire. More than this, his medicine exposed the missionary objective to transform Māori society, and it showcased not just cultural differences regarding medical knowledge but also the exchange of ideas and treatments between Māori and the missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the collection and collecting activity of the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute of Napier, New Zealand. It examines the development of the Institute’s museum and considers the motivations, intentions and interests of the collectors and their activity within the broader scientific and museum context. The work of two significant collectors is examined in detail: William Colenso, FLS, FRS, missionary, explorer and enthusiastic botanist, who engaged in over fifty years of correspondence and botanical exchange with Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens; and Augustus Hamilton, the curator of the museum who later became Director of New Zealand’s national collection at the Colonial Museum in Wellington. Through consideration of the Institute’s activities during the period 1874 to 1899, it is proposed that within the collection, the emergence of a distinct local identity can be discerned, during the early colonial period of Hawke’s Bay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Kiwiana’ is the term used for New Zealand locally-produced objects from the post-war period: everyday objects, once prosaic, are now the stuff of wilful nostalgia. During that era one local ceramics manufacturer, Crown Lynn, dominated the New Zealand market. The household crockery Crown Lynn produced was valued because it was useful, affordable and readily available when imported goods were very scarce. The items made by that company have now become desirable collectibles. This is not because of perceptions of superior design elements inherent in those everyday goods, but because of their now revised status as sentimental socio-political symbols of nation. In the following ethnographic study, Crown Lynn tableware collectors explain their commitment to these objects as features of their own biography within the larger context of national history. Specific issues addressed include consumption and collecting; memories, nostalgia and fantasies about the past; the attachment of meaning to objects; and collectors as self-assigned saviours of a nation’s unique but potentially lost artefacts. Against the threat of globalisation and its obliteration of national distinction, and the deluge of anonymous cheap generic imported commodities onto the market, there is an enthusiasm for insistently local materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses postcolonialism literature in New Zealand and the U.S. The author explains that after British colonialism, New Zealand writers struggled to reconcile their dependence on British literary models. The article cites the book "Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872-1914," by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams. The portrayal of colonial history in the book "The Greenstone Door," by William Satchell, is examined. The article also discusses reading strategies for studying postcolonial literature in the U.S.