New Zealand History

In this talk recorded on 4 June 2014 Nancy Swarbrick discusses pet culture in New Zealand in the context of the international movement that began in the nineteenth century and still resonates today .

Seminar presented by Malcolm McKinnon at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 2 April 2014. In this talk Malcolm McKinnon discusses ways in which a trans-Tasman frame of reference expands our understanding of the economic depression in 1930s New Zealand. Investors moved their money, workers their labour, politicians their laws and economists their advice back and forth across the Tasman. Malco...

Seminar presented by Dr Jarrod Gilbert at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 5 March 2014. Rape, murder, violence and drugs: gangs are synonymous with them all. Despite having a significant presence in New Zealand since the 1950s, though, our gangs have been under-researched and remain poorly understood. One reason for this is the difficulty of doing fieldwork. This seminar looks at the prob...

Seminar presented by historian Gavin McLean at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 6 November 2013. In 1915 the New Zealand government converted the liners Maheno and Marama into state-of-the art floating hospitals. Fitted out partly with funds raised by high profile public appeals, the ships had a busy war, eventually carrying 47,000 people. Painted distinctively in accordance with internati...

Seminar presented by historian Peter Clayworth at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 2 October 2013.  The Great Strike of 1913 was one of the largest and most disruptive in New Zealand’s history. From October 1913 to January 1914 a strike wave swept across the country, involving about 14,000 workers, hundreds of police and thousands of special constables. In this talk Peter Clayworth gives a...

Seminar presented by historians Chris Maclean and Shaun Barnett at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 4 September 2013.  Introduced by Jock Phillips New Zealand offers some of finest tramping anywhere with some of the most striking scenery on the planet, arguably the best hut and track network in the world, a small population, no dangerous wild animals, poisonous snakes or toxic spiders, goo...

Seminar presented by historian Margaret Tennant at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 3 July 2013. While writing an institutional history requires attention to the framework of the organisation itself, its membership, leadership and changes over time, it invariably provides a lens into broader historical themes and how they are played out within particular local and national frameworks. In t...

Seminar presented at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 3 July 2013 Coast is a novel from David Young after some decades as a writer of non-fiction, particularly in the field of history and environment. Exploring the effects of two world wars on three generations of men from the same family, Coast is also a meditation on the power of landscape. The east coast of Kincardineshire, Scotland and...

Seminar delivered by Gerald Hensley at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 5 June 2013. In 1984 the anti-nuclear policy of the newly elected Labour Government collided with the United States policy of nuclear deterrence. It led to the rebuff of a US naval visit and after two years in which tempers rose and diplomacy struggled with David Lange's free-wheeling press conferences, the standoff ende...

Part of the Public Service Act centenary series, this talk by Prof. Peter Hughes, School of Government was presented on 30 October 2012. The talk is introduced by Lewis Holden, CEO of Manatū Tanoga - the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

Part of the Public Service Act centenary series, this talk by Prof. Jonathon Boston, Institute of Governance and Policy Studies was presented on 23 October 2012.

Talk by John R. Martin, IPANZ Fellow, presented on 16 October 2012.

Talk by Dr. John E. Martin, Parliamentary Historian on 8 October 2012.  This is the first in the IPANZ series of talks marking the centenary of the Public Service Act.

In 1929 Charles Mackay, a former mayor of Wanganui bled to death on a Berlin street corner – a victim of violent clashes between police and Communist protesters. How did he get there? An earlier incident triggered Mackay’s tragic trajectory: in 1920 he shot the returned soldier-cum-writer Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, who was blackmailing the (secretly homosexual) mayor. Paul Diamond’s research into th...

Belgian historian Charlotte Descamps, who has lived her whole life in the First World War battlefields of the Ypres Salient, talks about her experiences at Varlet Farm, how evidence of the conflict is unearthed every year, how modern technology is helping to identify human remains almost a century after the war, the ‘iron harvest’ in the Salient (over 200 tons of live ammunition is still collected...

Redmer Yska recalls his involvement with 'NZ Truth' newspaper over three decades: first, as a journalist, second as a historical researcher, and lastly as its biographer, resulting in the 2010 book NZ Truth: the Rise and Fall of the People's Paper. This seminar was presented on 5 October 2011.

Dr Joanne Drayton discusses her biography of crime writer Anne Perry, better known in New Zealand as the convicted muderer Juliet Hulme. On 22 June 1954, Juliet Hulme and her friend Pauline Parker, set out for an afternoon in Victoria Park, Christchurch with Pauline’s mother, Honora Parker. For Honora, the walk ended with her murder. Juliet and Pauline were subsequently tried in a sensational cour...