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2025-12-18
Jock Phillips
At the celebrations of the Stout Centre’s 40 th anniversary, held on Friday 15 August 2025, the present Director of the Centre, Brigitte Bӧnisch-Brednich, was in conversation with the Centre’s founding Director, Jock Phillips. We present a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
2025-12-18
Sophie Thorn
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist is a new substantial publication by Massey University Press 2024 funded by Creative New Zealand, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui and the Edith Collier Trust. The publication was shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham Book Awards and builds on two previous publications on Collier’s work, Edith Collier in Retrospect (1980) and Joanne Drayton’s Edith Collier: Her Life and Work, 1885-1964 (1999).
2025-12-18
Gary Sheffield
Combat in the air brought a rare splash of colour to the Western Front in the First World War. In what otherwise seems to be an anonymous conflict of mass armies and grinding attrition, individual pilots emerged from the mass of khaki and field grey. The names of the most famous of them – the German Manfred von Richthofen, the Canadian William Avery Bishop, and the Englishman Albert Ball, among others – continue to resonate to the present day.
2025-12-18
Mere Berryman
The metaphor He Awa Whiria in the title, clearly signals that this is a book about bringing different perspectives together into new, stronger and mutually interconnected wholes. Reflecting on the life work of the lead editor Professor Angus Macfarlane the idea of bringing together, often complex ideas into new coherent wholes has been a hallmark of his stellar career in psychology, education and research.
2025-12-18
Toon van Meijl
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the sources, including a major new resource, that are currently available on the expedition in 1642-1643 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman to the Pacific, in particular Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, New Britain and New Guinea. It includes a complete chapter from a hitherto unknown book by Nicolaes Witsen, a Dutch statesman, collector and scholar, entitled Noord en Oost Tartarye (‘North and East Tartary’).
2025-12-18
Doug Munro
The historiography of state surveillance of citizens in New Zealand is meagre by comparison with that of Australia and Great Britain. This is partly a function of relative size but also a consequence of far greater restrictions on access to sources in New Zealand. The historiography of state surveillance in New Zealand before 1956 has been impoverished, until now. With the publication of Richard Hill and Steven Loveridge’s Secret History , that part of the equation has been rectified, despite the difficulties they encountered along the way. In the first of a projected two-volume study, they place New Zealand on the map of global state surveillance historiography.
2025-12-18
Carol Neill
Emma Meurant’s death in 1890 at the age of 16 put her briefly but sensationally in New Zealand’s national news spotlight. Her suicide was described across New Zealand daily newspapers as an agonising death caused by her taking the poison “Rough on Rats”. Later, Emma’s death was explained by a coroner as influenced by her reading with sensational literature, which, he and a jury determined, had put her in a state of temporary insanity. They arrived at this finding after hearing the testimony of community and family members two days after Emma’s death. Sensationalism therefore reigned not only in the report of her death, but also in how it was explained – and, one might read, how that conclusion was drawn. This article examines the context of Emma Meurant’s death and its historical setting, to develop understanding of how sensationalism was understood, explained and acted out in late nineteenth century New Zealand through the coroner’s inquest and newspapers. It explores the record of interactions amongst those who were involved in the event of this death, and how they appeared to fashion their own positions in relation to their social standing, their connection with Emma, and their own perspectives on sensationalism.