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Many historians associate adolescent pleasures and subcultures with the mid-twentieth century. Sensations and their personifications, this article suggests, also formed a focus for commentary and experience during the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War. There was a noisy public discussion around adolescence in New Zealand in which notions of sensation and pleasure played a key role. In scrutinizing a number of young, sensation-loving characters—larrikins and larrikinesses, mashers, dudes and the flapper—the discussion considers the intersections of social changes (urbanization and gendered work and leisure), cultural influences (literature and language), the significance of gender, and anxieties over morality and propriety. The making of New Zealand adolescence, I suggest, involved broad social transformations as well as the local rearticulation of internationally-inflected cultural ideas about sensation and its social control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the relationship between nineteenth-century girls' literature and the personal diaries kept by adolescent female settlers in New Zealand during the period 1850–1920. If, as might be assumed, literary texts play a part in the construction of identity, the representation of the colonial girl in literature should resemble, at least in part, the lived experience of the settler. As the authors discover, though, the difference in genre convention between fiction and diary plays an enormous role in dictating to what degree this shared conception of the “New Girl” is evident. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain claimed full territorial sovereignty over New Zealand, even though substantive enforcement of its authority against Maori often faced significant challenges. Alarmed at the weakness of British governance in relation to Maori, Governor Thomas Gore Browne proposed a Native Offenders Bill. The Bill proposed giving the New Zealand Governor sweeping powers to ban ‘any communication’ or trade with any Maori within a specified district, or with a particular tribe. Such a ban would, it was claimed, ensure compliance with colonial law. However, the bill was twice rejected by the settler legislature (1856 and 1860), on both constitutional and practical grounds. The paper places the bill in its political and legal contexts, and examines some of the ways colonial administrators and politicians responded to the difference between the government's claim to extensive legal authority and its more limited substantive power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Warfare in New Zealand during the 1860s has recently been linked to the rise of the central state and growth of the national debt in that colony. This article argues that any parallel to the growth of the European fiscal-military state is misguided. The fundamental cause of state centralisation and rising indebtedness was the same long-run dynamic of colonial development active in all settler societies during the nineteenth century. The colonial state functioned, in part, to raise capital for development, and if necessary the colonial state would be remodelled in order to achieve this. New Zealand was no exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective ‘identities’. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities—marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few—and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of ‘wild workhouse girls’ undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of ‘modulation’ used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.1 This article traces and links the ‘institutionalised’ behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of ‘modulation’ in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the ‘outside’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the formation of the Canterbury Society of Arts (CSA) and its role in shaping the cultural, intellectual, and social life of Canterbury, New Zealand in the late 19th century. It describes the influence of English art on New Zealand art societies, the relation of the CSA to the Royal Academy in London, England, and the influence of Enlightenment ideals concerning liberalism and individualism on the cultivation of fine art in Canterbury. Other subjects under discussion include the relation between New Zealand art and British nationalism, the influence of the CSA on forming a New Zealand identity, and the role of the CSA in forming the Canterbury College School of Art.

The article discusses alcohol consumption in New Zealand in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, with a view to balancing previous historiography seen as overly focused on alcoholism, temperance movements, and social problems caused by excessive drinking. Topics discussed include the reasons people chose to drink, whether drinking in New Zealand was excessive compared to other countries, how drinking behavior changed over time, and the social role of brewers and the owners of drinking establishments.

The author presents a discussion of author Sygrud Wiśniowski's portrayal of the Maori people of New Zealand in the book "Ten Years in Australia." The author discusses Wiśniowski's terminological framework, his descriptions of the Maori's physical appearance, and his characterization of the Maori in both a pre-colonial and a colonial context.