Colonial New Zealand was built on the ideal of creating better lives for settlers. Emigrants came looking to escape the shackles of the class-system and poor conditions in Industrial Revolution period Britain. Colonial propaganda claimed that most emigrants achieved their aims, but the lives the colonists actually experienced upon reaching New Zealand remain relatively unexplored from a biosocial perspective. In this paper we present a pilot study of stable isotope results of bone collagen from seven adults interred in the St. John's Cemetery (SJM), Milton, New Zealand (ca. AD 1860-1900. We interpret the diet at Milton and broadly compare our isotopic results with contemporaneous samples from Britain. We show that, like 3 contemporary Britain, the diet of our studied individuals was focused on C3 crops and terrestrial meat sources. Despite higher 𝛿𝛿 15 N values in contemporary UK populations (which can simplistically be interpreted as indicative of higher meat intake), consideration of different local baselines makes it likely that this New Zealand population had relatively similar levels of meat intake. Interestingly marine resources did not form an important part of the Milton diet, despite the site's proximity to the ocean, hinting at the possible stigmatisation of local resources and the development of a European New Zealand (pākehā) food identity.

Historical geography was once a popular element of university curricula in New Zealand. It was also a conspicuous focus of research. Today however there is only one identifiable course in historical geography in New Zealand's university calendars – at Massey – and few writers have maintained an active research interest rooted in the sub‐discipline. This Comment suggests some reasons why now is a good time for New Zealand's geographers to reassess this state of affairs, and outlines five themes that might be pursued in the construction of more explicit historical geographies at the start of the third millennium.

No abstract

No abstract

Even before 1900, the emphasis in New Zealand agriculture shifted from extensive agriculture to more intensive use of existing farmland through pasture improvement. Examination of the contribution of the Department of Agriculture, which together with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research activated the later ‘grasslands revolution’, shows both the extent and the limits of its role in pasture improvement before 1914. It is suggested that until then, the prime agents in this transformation were not Department of Agriculture staff but rather enlightened farmers, with co‐operation between them on an equal footing towards the end of the period.