Click photo to enlarge
The Smith Gallery at the Otago Settlers Museum. Photo by
Peter McIntosh.
Historians have often made assumptions about the
character of early immigrants to New Zealand but a new book,
Settlers: New Zealand immigrants from England, Ireland and
Scotland 1800-1945, sets out the results of research through
old records and tells a different tale.
Charmian Smith talks to historian and co-author Dr Terry
Hearn.
New Zealand's history is both complicated and exciting
because so much went on here so rapidly, Dr Terry Hearn says.
A professional historian and consultant on topics as diverse
as the way the Crown treated its Maori subjects after the
Treaty of Waitangi, to histories of the gold-miners and
immigration, he is co-author with Dr Jock Phillips of
Settlers: New Zealand immigrants from England, Ireland and
Scotland 1800-1945.
The project started because of Dr Phillips' interest in the
wellsprings of Pakeha culture.
Now general editor of "Te Ara: Online Encyclopedia of New
Zealand", he was then New Zealand's official historian and
realised we couldn't really begin to understand that culture
until we understood who came here.
Earlier immigration studies had looked at assisted immigrants
because information on ships' passenger lists was available,
but getting information about general immigrants was more
difficult, according to Dr Hearn.
He became involved because he had used registers of deaths
and other sources to build up detailed profiles during his
research on gold-miners.
Those techniques were applied to the general population as
the authors were given unlimited, but not unqualified, access
to all the New Zealand death registers.
"These were held in a windowless bunker in Lower Hutt, and we
were locked in and had a single electric lamp and a table and
a noisy air-conditioner.
"It was really trying but in the end, we extracted the
details of more than 11,000 people in order to give data sets
that were large enough for us to be confident about the
results. It was like sitting in the national whakapapa," Dr
Hearn said.
Although they were not allowed to use personal names, the
historians were excited to see unexpected patterns emerging.
The big surprise was the under-representation of the English,
and the marked changes in regional origins through the
century or so they examined.
Pakeha New Zealanders came predominantly from different parts
of the United Kingdom at different times, Dr Hearn said.
"There are distinct regional groups and regional cultures,
and we wanted to try to unpick New Zealand's immigration
history to find out who had come, where they had come from
and, therefore, what kind of cultural baggage they brought
with them."
While many of the early English immigrants came from the
south, later in the 19th century they came from the
industrial areas in the north, from Yorkshire and Lancashire,
and they brought new traditions and pastimes, such as rugby
league.
"In those big industrial areas of northeast and northwest,
big transnational shifts were going on.
"A lot of the heavy industry we associate with the Industrial
Revolution was actually shifting offshore to the US and
across to Europe, and towards the end of the 19th century and
early 20th century, the British were looking for different
forms of industry and enterprise.
"Now, of course, it's shifting again, to east Asia. These
things all happened before and will happen again. Some of the
big industries like textiles, iron and steel migrated first,
and we've seen that happen again - from the US to east Asia.
"It's a long process that has been going on for 300 or 400
years," Dr Hearn said.
