Post by Summer Scholar Lily Pare Hall-Butcher

It’s 1860 and the Crown has just declared war on its Māori subjects in the province of Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand. In response, thousands of men from throughout the British Empire come to New Zealand as soldiers of the British Imperial Army. Over the next few years the Army fights battles all over the North Island and bolsters the white settler presence in the South Island. While the majority of these men leave Aotearoa with their regiments, others are officially discharged and stay as settlers. Yet another group left their regiments unofficially – the deserters. Elusive in the archives as they often were in life, most simply disappear from the records. Some became infamous, while others rose to positions of prominence in settler society. 

Over the summer of 2017-18 we were once again very fortunate to be joined by 4 Summer Scholars.
 
At the Auckland War Memorial Museum Max Nichol was exploring the transformation of Auckland from a town dominated by barracks and the coming and going of military in the early 1860s to a confident colonial port city by the end of the century. The thorough and detailed report of his research findings looks at, among other things, the temperance movement in Auckland, leisure and social lives in Auckland, and the transformation of Albert Barracks to Albert Park.
 
At Puke Ariki Sian Smith worked with amateur photographer and collector William Francis Gordon’s photograph album “Some “Soldiers of the Queen” who served in the Maori wars and other notable persons connected herewith” (PHO2011-1997). A unique historical artefact, the album dates from around 1900 and contains over 450 photographs of soldiers, civilians and Māori involved with the New Zealand Wars. The portraits are loosely ordered into regiments and most are annotated in Gordon’s distinctive handwriting. The album is an integral part of Puke Ariki’s collection of Taranaki Wars material, memorialising those who are depicted and bringing their faces/identities into striking contemporary view/attention.
 
Sian began her project entering the 20% of the album not yet catalogued into Puke Ariki’s collection management system and created networks between images in the album with other items and records in Puki Ariki’s collection. Beyond this useful work that has made the full album more accessible to researchers, Sian developed biographical information for both a selection of people depicted in the album and the regiments mentioned.
 
At Te Papa Caitlin Lynch was also working with photographs compiled by W.F. Gordon, in this case a collection of carte-de-visite photographs acquired by the Dominion Museum in 1916. Caitlin worked to contextualise the photographs by identifying related objects in other collections across Te Papa. Beyond this linking of records/items in the collection, Caitlin meticulously pieced together narratives of specific individuals and battles. You can read about some of her speculations/thoughts/research trails while working on the project on the Te Papa Blogs linked below:

• ‘Frown for the camera’: The unsettling gaze of the New Zealand wars wounded
• Playing Sherlock: How a chair unlocked the story behind a portrait of a New Zealand wars soldier
• Reimagining our history: Two young scholars discuss the New Zealand wars​

 
Our internal VUW Summer Scholar was Philip Little, who transcribed and analysed the ‘Effects and Credits’ pages of the WO 12 Muster Roll archives of the 50th, 65th, and 68th regiments in search of answers to such questions as where did they come from, what did they do, how did they live and how did they die. A poster of his findings is available here.

Covers (envelopes), even without the original letters they enclosed, have great value for historians of the 19th century wars. The markings on the envelopes show us the elaborate network of communication which war spread across the globe and across New Zealand. An integral aspect of the postal system globally was the use of postmarks to signify that a letter had been processed through a receiving post office, any further post offices along the way, and also whether it had travelled by ship (a commonplace practice when rail was still in a state of early development in New Zealand, and roads were dangerous or non-existent). Postmarks thus show the route that a letter took between being sent and received – with exact dates and locations. Redirected mail, or anything that affected the postal process, was also clearly marked by civilian and military postmasters.

Military postmasters were soldiers appointed to process mail passing through the various redoubts, military encampments, or even sites of battle. The Ellott collection shows that these temporary post offices were integral to the British communication system during the New Zealand Wars. Overall, the postmarks provide highly valuable evidence of the structure and speed along which communication travelled across the globe in the mid-nineteenth century, providing an insight into the speed and modernity of contemporary networks.

Most New Zealand Wars-related material from the Ellott collection was sent during the 1860s, a decade which saw warfare across the North Island. Much of the fighting occurred in Waikato and Taranaki, and the Ellott collection reflects this in terms of content origin. There are many letters from the period 1863-1866. 

Year                            No. of objects in collection
1860                            9
1861                            8
1862                            7
1863                            18
1864                            59
1865                            37
1866                            22
1867                            7
1868                            2
1869                            5
​
The Ellott collection holds exceptionally rich and rare material which is useful to researchers in a number of different ways. Data about the nature and specifics of communication can be found in postal markings, while the voices of soldiers and civilians (both Maori and European) and their loved ones make themselves heard very clearly in letters and notes. ​

Scott has highlighted several of the items in the collection in a StoryMap.

The biennial New Zealand Historical Association conference was held this year at Auckland University over 28 November to 1 December. Wednesday morning began with a wonderful welcome onto Waipapa Marae, where, on Friday morning, our ‘Auckland at the Crossroads of Nineteenth-century Military and Civilian Worlds’ panel had the great honour of presenting in the wharenui.

The conference was filled with fantastic papers across a broad range of topics that have left us with much to think about. Several papers were of particular relevance to this project.

One such was a fantastic and moving session by our VUW colleagues Arini Loader, Mike Ross, and Kelly Keane-Tuala, ‘He aroha hoki nōku ki te iwi: An Expression of my Affection for the People’, looking at the waiata recorded by prisoners of the battle of Rangiriri. A short interview with them here, recorded for the conference

​Jamie Hawkins Elder, a VUW MA student working with Charlotte, presented on Thursday afternoon on aspects of her MA research, looking at the ‘emotional and practical responses to refugee settler women during the New Zealand Land Wars 1860-1872’. In that same session Lyndon Fraser presented on death at sea as detailed in 19th century shipboard accounts, leaving us to further examine what similarities there might be between these practices and those among imperial soldiers dying on their way to New Zealand.

We (Charlotte and Rebecca, with John McLellan) presented our panel to a wonderful audience who left us with much to ponder. Charlotte presented on ‘Auckland via Calcutta: Military Cosmopolitanism in the Mid-nineteenth Century’, Rebecca on ‘Death and Disease in 1860s Garrison Auckland’, and John on ‘Soldiers and Colonists: Lives of Imperial Soldiers as Settlers in Nineteenth-century New Zealand’ Though it would have been wonderful to have been joined, as had been the original plan, by Daniel Thompson, presenting on his MA work regarding the Enfield Rifle, Daniel’s absence did mean we had an extra half hour for discussion at the end of our papers which was great. We’re very grateful to all those who asked questions, and who provided some tips and avenues for follow up, in the session itself and in subsequent conversations.

Our congratulations to Vincent O’Malley for winning the Mary Boyd Prize for best article on any aspect of New Zealand history published in a refereed journal for his article ‘Recording the incident with a monument’, charting the changing perceptions of the Waikato War in national memory and consciousness.