History Programme Seminar: "Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi: Māori editorial staff and the New Zealand School Journal in the 1970s"

This talk explores the centrality of relationships in the working lives of Māori editorial staff at the School Publications Branch of the Education Department and its flagship publication, the New Zealand School Journal. Drawing on interviews with my mother Mary Hall (Ngāi Te Rangi) who worked as an art editor on the Journal, as well as her personal archive, this paper argues for the significance of the relational values of whanaungatanga and manaakitanga in Māori editorial practices, which have been largely overlooked in the existing scholarship on the history of the Journal and New Zealand children’s literature as a whole.

Seminar details

Lily Pare Hall Butcher (Ngāi Te Rangi) (she/her) is an MA student in History at Victoria University of Wellington. Her thesis research focuses on Māori contributions to the New Zealand School Journal during the 1960s–1970s. Previously, she has worked as a story writer creating non-fiction texts for children as part of the ongoing Tangata Whenua Stories project at Bridget Williams Books.

When:

4.00 pm on 24 September 2026

Where:

OK406, Kelburn Campus and Online via Zoom