Difficult Subjects—Researching the Perilous and Unknown Seminar Series
A series of six seminars focusing on difficult subjects, presented by six different presenters.
Uncovering Covert History
Presented by Richard Hill and Steven Loveridge
2 April 2025
Co-authors of Secret History: State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956, Richard Hill and Steven Loveridge are now working on a follow-up volume covering security intelligence in the years from 1956 to 2001. In this seminar, the Stout Research Centre’s Director, Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, will engage in discussion with Richard and Steven. The session will interrogate the various challenges of researching the history of counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism in New Zealand. There will be generous time for audience discussion.
Richard S. Hill is an Emeritus Professor at the Stout Research Centre. Among his outputs are four books in the History of Policing in New Zealand series, and two on Crown-Māori relations in the twentieth century.
Dr Steven Loveridge is an adjunct Research Associate at the Stout Research Centre. His published work includes some major studies of New Zealand society during the First World War, and work on diplomatic history and security intelligence.
No Idle Threat—On dangerous ground investigating Aotearoa New Zealand’s Covid-19 response
Presented by Violet Blue
9 April 2025
No research is without risks. But high-stakes research goes next-level when the topic is a lightning rod for misinformation and disinformation, politically conflicting narratives, hostility and violent threats, potential for misuse, erasure by authoritarian regimes, medical gaslighting, systemic racism, and greater than average risk to research subjects. The heart of this seminar examines ongoing research for a forthcoming book documenting the first three years of Aotearoa’s Covid-19 response against a backdrop of global events and an increasingly volatile political and social landscape. This talk diagrams the unique challenges of researching a politicized pandemic that touches a boggling array of areas including history, health science, political science, media and communications, health equity, sociology, fieldwork, and more. Those challenges require a researcher to also be a threat modeler to protect results, individuals and at-risk populations, as well as the researcher herself; we’ll also look at countermeasures and steps taken to mitigate risks. Finally, a dive into examples of potential social, political, equity-based and inclusive outcomes from taking on this high-risk project–and why we, as researchers, can’t walk away from high-risk storytelling.
Violet Blue is an author and journalist from San Francisco, who is a visiting scholar at the Stout.
View a recording of the seminar on Panopto.
Overcoming the Perilous: Wāhine Māori in the Taonga Māori Research Space
Presented by Dr Awhina Tamarapa
16 April 2025
Dr Awhina Tamarapa, VUW postdoctoral Māori research fellow, explores the nuances of researching taonga and the impositions placed upon Māori women who are engaging in the process of reclaiming and maintaining customary knowledge. Her PhD thesis (Tamarapa 2024) examined the colonial legacy of museums, and the marginalisation of Māori weavers—largely women — in the custodianship of Māori weaving. The research was important to give voice to historical and contemporary challenges faced by weaving practitioners. These included Eurocentric bias, structural racism, controlling patriarchy, ignorance, pay inequity, gatekeeping, co-option and isolation.
Dr Awhina Tamarapa is the postdoctoral Māori Research Fellow with the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.
Writing Invisible History
Presented by Anna Green
30 April 2025
Invisible history is the remembered past we all carry in our minds. It consists primarily of personal experiences, as well as shared family memories and stories. These are the focus of oral histories recorded for the ‘The Missing Link’, a Marsden-funded research project exploring family memory among 19th-century European settler family descendants.
Why is this invisible history important? First of all, for many of those who participated in this research intergenerational family memory was the predominant lens through which they thought about the past and its influence upon their own lives. Furthermore, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued, the remembered past of the family is a foundational element of social or collective memory. But invisible history has a very different focus and content from the conventional national narrative. In this presentation, I will discuss two difficult challenges that invisible history poses for the academic historian.
Anna Green is an Adjunct Professor and oral historian at the Stout Research Centre, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and is currently president of the National Oral History Association Te Kete Kōrero-a-Waha o Te Motu. She taught history at universities in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and her research and publications are in the fields of oral history, public history, memory studies and history and theory. She is currently writing a book about intergenerational family memory among the descendants of nineteenth-century British and European settlers.
Home Front Casualties: Uncovering war-related suicides in WWII New Zealand
Presented by Doug Munro and John C. Weaver
7 May 2025
This seminar will discuss how to research a subject that is shrouded in silences such as self-censorship, family and state shame and shaming. The cataclysm of war throws up unexpected consequences. The lower suicide rates during wartime are a seeming paradox given that war is a time of high stress. Unsurprisingly, however, wartime conditions contributed to, and were sometimes directly responsible for suicides that might not otherwise have occurred. New Zealand was no exception, despite being far from the theatres of war and despite also the country never being invaded. War-related suicides did occur and for a variety of reasons. This is an under-studied aspect of the history of wartime New Zealand. The present seminar delivery will present the motives of the suicidees and the various strains they were under, as well as outlining how we went about our research into their sadly troubled lives.
Doug Munro, the presenter of this seminar, has attachments at both the University of Queensland and the Stout Research Centre. A historian of varied interests, his last two book are History Wars: the Peter Ryan–Manning Clark controversy (2021) and (with Geoffrey Gray and Christine Winter), Chicanery: senior academic appointments in Antipodean anthropology, 1920–1960 (2023).
John Weaver's two books on suicide in New Zealand are A Sadly Troubled History (2009) and Sorrows of a Century (2014).
The Enigma of a Posthumous Prosecution: Who Brought Ihaka Takaanini before the Compensation Court in 1865, and Why?
Presented by Dr Sandra Thomas
14 May 2025
Close to one thousand ‘loyal’ Māori applied to the Compensation Court for compensation for the confiscation of their land following the Crown’s occupation of the Waikato. In breach of te Tiriti/the Treaty and contrary to promises from Governor Grey, the land of non-combatants was confiscated along with the land of the so-called ‘rebels’. However, a compensation process was established for ‘loyal’ Māori to soften the blow. Most applications were approved with little to do, many were settled out of court and simply rubber-stamped by the judges. However, the Crown objected to the applications of two prominent Māori on the basis that they had not remained loyal: the Rev. Heta Tarawhiti and the paramount chief of Te Akitai, Ihaka Takaanini. The evidence was tested in court and the Crown’s arguments were found wanting.
While the decisions of the Judges are available in archives and newspaper records, the hard research is figuring out which of the settler government ministers or officials decided to put these two individuals on trial and why. Someone must have instructed the Crown agent and supplied the Crown’s evidence. Why single out these individuals? Who was trying to make what point by running the case against Ihaka Takaanini? This is nineteenth-century archival research at its most intriguing and frustrating.
Sandra Thomas recently completed her PhD with the Stout Centre examining the operation of the Compensation Court in South Auckland and the Waikato in the 1860s and how the settler government rationalised its poor treatment of its ‘friends’. Sandra has an LLB/BA (Hons) in History and Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington and has worked in Treaty settlements and as a lawyer before completing her PhD in 2023. In 2024, she received a Judith Binney Trust writer’s award and is currently working on a book based on her thesis.
View a recording of the seminar.
Tracing Invisible immigrants—Irish soldiers who took discharge from the Imperial Army in nineteenth-century New Zealand
Presented by Kathryn Patterson
21 May 2025
A group of migrants often overlooked is the soldiers who took their discharge from the Imperial Army with the purpose of settling in New Zealand between 1840 and 1870. To create a manageable sample for examination of how well these men settled into their new country, Irish-born soldiers from the 18th, 58th, 65th and 68th regiments who had fought in the New Zealand wars were selected for close assessment. While all aspects of their lives are being studied, a common measure of colonial settler success is the extent of individual land acquisition. In line with the theme of this seminar series, this presentation will look at the ease or otherwise of tracking the acquisition of land by this group, an exercise that will also throw light on difficulties encountered generally in uncovering information on these settlers.
Kathryn Patterson is an independent researcher and writer and is presently an Adjunct Research Associate at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies. She is currently working on a study of Irish soldiers discharged in New Zealand from the Imperial regiments prior to 1870. She has had a long career in the New Zealand public service, principally in information management, including positions as Deputy Parliamentary Librarian, Director of Information Management at The Treasury, and Director and Chief Archivist of Archives New Zealand. In addition to contributions to the professional literature, Kathryn has co-edited (with Brad Patterson) New Zealand (1998), vol 18 in ABC-Clio’s World Bibliographical Series, and Ireland and the Irish Antipodes: One World or Worlds Apart? (2010), and (with Brad Patterson and Richard Hill) After the Treaty: the settler state, race relations & the exercise of power in colonial New Zealand (2016).