Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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The Limits of Endurance: Shell Shock and Dissent in World War One
Get PDFSoldiers serving on the Western Front had few opportunities to question the situation in which they found themselves. Censorship limited what they could tell people at home, though there were acceptable forms of dissent such as grumbling, jokes, poems and songs. More serious responses to the intolerable conditions of modern warfare were the nervous conditions variously described as shell shock, concussion neurasthenia, hysteria, exhaustion, pithiatism, and psychasthenia. The need to provide treatment for many servicemen after they returned to New Zealand revealed the extent of the psychological damage among these veterans. Such consequences are now better understood in terms of concepts like post-traumatic stress, but a purely medical model of these effects can overlook the degree to which "shell shock" could also be an expression of an involuntary protest against military service.  
Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature, 1908–1945
Get PDFJohn Newton’s Hard Frost opens by chiming the death knell for New Zealand literature. New Zealand writing, or at least the habit of thinking about it as such – a habit instilled so carefully and well by the arbiters of cultural nationalism – is over
Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology
Get PDFHistorian Peter Hempenstall has undertaken a challenging task in tracing the intellectual journey of the Wellington born, Victoria University College graduate and Australian National University (ANU) anthropologist, Derek Freeman
Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984–2008: Market Fictions
Get PDFDoes neoliberalism have its national and local variants? If so, is it important to emphasise their differences, or is it more productive to look for their similarities? The answer to the first question would be yes and no
Is there a need for intrinsic values in conservation biology?
Get PDFConservation biology has amongst its aims the conservation of the biologically valuable. As a consequence, some underlying theory of value is invoked. Clear challenges to orthodox value theory have been on the table for some time now, with some arguing for recognition of intrinsic values in nature, and some conservation biologists subsequently drawing on such a view. However, this development of value theory has recently been criticised for lacking sufficient clarity and failing to serve the needs of decision-making in conservation biology. These criticisms serve to highlight confusion and difficulties in the development of a coherent and efficacious theory of intrinsic value for application in decision-making. They do not, however, count as sufficient grounds for the rejection of such a theory. Sylvan appears to offer a theory that avoids the criticisms made. The debate here is instructive in clearing away some of the misguided claims frequently encountered in this area and in seeing the value in Sylvan’s “deep green theory”
Sylvan's Bottle and other Problems
Get PDFAccording to Richard Routley, a comprehensive theory of fiction is impossible, since almost anything is in principle imaginable. In my view, Routley is right: for any purported logic of fiction, there will be actual or imaginable fictions that successfully counterexample the logic. Using the example of ‘impossible’ fictions, I test this claim against theories proposed by Routley’s Meinongian contemporaries and also by Routley himself (for what he called ‘esoteric’ works of fiction) and his 21st century heirs. I argue that the phenomenon of impossible fictions challenges even today’s modal Meinongians
In the Mists of Time: Searching for traces of the first settlement of four Southland families
Get PDFDuring the 1870s, the Provincial government terminated grazing licences on large runs in Eastern Southland and West Otago. In a series of land sales, this land was surveyed into 200-acre farms and auctioned to prospective farmers on a delayed repayment scheme. 150 years later, this research searches for traces of the first buildings from this time. It focuses on the housing of eight ancestors, great grandparents of the author, who settled within a 30 km radius in the districts of Waikoikoi, Maitland, Waikaka Valley and Otama. Information was gathered from National Library collections, district and family history books, old photographs and maps, 2018 surveys of the homestead sites and interviews with cousins still living in the area. In 1870, the rolling hills were covered with open tussock. Found artefacts suggest that Māori camped in the area during expeditions to gather food from Mataura river sites. The new settlers, often in extended family groups, travelled by horse and dray overland from Dunedin or Bluff. The Dunedin to Gore railway did not open until 1879. Their first shelters were camp-sites and wagon tilts lined in felt. Soon after they arrived, established families were able to fund the building of modest timber houses often constructed by carpenter uncles and brothers. Young single men "bached" in sod and/or timber huts until they married. One great grandmother spent childhood years "comfortably" in a "half-sod and half-timber shepherd's cottage" but her teenage years at the "Big House," the 20-room homestead on the Otama Station. It was built in 1867 of "white pine" from the forest at Tapanui. By the turn of the twentieth-century, simple cottages had received additional rooms, porches and decorative verandahs or they were upstaged by new grand timber villas. In 2018, only one homestead, originally named Hopetoun, is still standing although it is substantially altered. Family photographs, usually of the front façade, provide a limited perspective only. Memoirs and local histories offer a few more clues. While buildings from the 1870s exist, historical touchstones in these country districts are more elusive
Rich Pickings: the intellectual life of Josephine Gordon Rich (1866-1940)
Get PDFThe title of this paper is a little misleading as the adjective “meagre” rather than “rich” better suits the picking over of the life of Josephine Gordon Rich (1866-1940), but the intentional pun would have been lost. She was one of a handful of women of her generation in New Zealand to actively pursue science and deserves due recognition for her zoological achievements, and this is the aim of this paper. Information gleaned about Rich’s activities and interests is incomplete, enigmatic and largely inferred through the activities of her teacher, Professor Thomas Jeffery Parker (1850-1897) in Dunedin, and her husband, Professor William Aitcheson Haswell (1854-1925) in Sydney
Native Hostelries in New Zealand's Colonial Cities
Get PDFHistorians have argued that while Māori were important players in founding and sustaining New Zealand’s colonial cities, the rapid growth of the settler population saw them excluded from city space and return to tribal homelands. This article examines the marginalisation process and how the perceived threat of Māori economic power and changes in European racial theory informed it. It then argues that marginalisation was only ever partial, with Māori continuing to engage with city life in innovative ways. In doing so they not only claimed city spaces but contributed to the production of new spaces as well.
 
Ragnar Redbeard: The Antipodean origins of radical fabulist Arthur Desmond
Get PDFThe radicalism of Arthur Desmond, let alone his biographical details and life experience, is hard to pin down. I first came across this red-bearded poet and firebrand when writing Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism & Early New Zealand Anarchism.
 
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