scholarly journals An Analysis of an Influenza Epidemic in the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy

1927 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon F. Dudley

The analysis of an epidemic of influenza in the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy confirms the following hypotheses which were suggested by previous studies of the same and other diseases.(1) The type of influenza in different places, especially if they are more or less isolated areas, such as islands or ships, tends to assume special characters as regards infectivity, virulence, and clinical type1. In this respect the influenza virus, or viruses, are only following a well-known biological “law,” namely, that isolation tends to encourage the evolution of new varieties and species. A classical example of this “law” is found in Darwin's reference to the fact that each island of the Galapagos Archipelago has its own special flora and fauna—similar to but yet different from that of the other islands.(2) One wave of influenza, even if of a different type, will confer considerable immunity to a subsequent wave not only on the victims attacked, but also on those who apparently escaped infection during the first wave.(3) The brunt of the morbidity of influenza (and other infections) is borne by recruits and junior ratings, not because they are, on the whole, younger, but because they have had less time than the senior men to adapt themselves, by means of auto-vaccination, to the bacterial environment of crowded ships or barracks.The effect of bacterial adaptation to environment is often overlooked. Hence other factors, such as physical fitness, are often given more credit than they deserve as preservers of the public health.(4) Senior ratings mixed with recruits suffer a higher morbidity from infectious disease than they do under similar circumstances in the absence of recruits. This statement, if true, should have a most important practical bearing on military medical administration. The phenomenon is probably due to increased velocities of infection (due to the higher infectibility of the recruits) breaking down the herd immunity of the senior men.(5) In this epidemic New Zealanders suffered more from influenza than the British sailors not, as usually supposed, because of the mere fact of being born in New Zealand, but because all the recruits and the bulk of the junior ratings were New Zealanders.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jordin Tahana

<p>The Man from Nowhere & Other Prose by James McNeish (1991), Berlin Diary by Cilla McQueen (1990), To Each His Own by Philip Temple (1999), and Phone Home Berlin: Collected Non-Fiction by Nigel Cox (2007) are all texts written by New Zealand writers who either visited or lived in Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Their texts chronicle their experiences in Berlin and capture their observations of and reflections on the city, its people and their place as New Zealand writers in Berlin. This thesis discusses the texts they wrote while in Berlin, focussing particularly on the images of war, walls and the idea of ‘antipodean naivety’. My introductory chapter provides a brief history of New Zealand writers in Berlin. The chapter addresses key historical events which took place in Berlin and how they gave rise to artistic and cultural initiatives, providing the opportunity for McNeish, McQueen and Temple to be in the city. In the second chapter, I consider the images of war found in the writers’ texts. McNeish, McQueen and Temple focus particularly on Berlin’s Second World War history and to a lesser extent on the Cold War. I examine the reasons why they focus so heavily on this part of Berlin’s history, especially when the city has a much longer and broader military history that is ignored by the writers when they address issues of war and conflict in their texts. My third chapter addresses images of walls. For the artists and writers resident in Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Wall is a prominent feature in their texts. But as foreigners to the city and country, they encounter other ‘walls’ such as language and cultural barriers. These metaphorical boundaries are examined further in my fourth chapter which discusses the idea of ‘antipodean naivety’. I apply Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the ‘contact zone’ in reverse to the experiences of McNeish, McQueen and Temple in Berlin. In my fifth and final chapter I contrast the work of Nigel Cox who was in Berlin ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and for a different purpose. Perhaps surprisingly Cox nevertheless responds to Berlin in similar ways to the other New Zealanders. I argue that as New Zealanders these writers come to Berlin from a small country on the other side of the world with a less grandiose history to a country they think they know. In reality, the way the writers interpret their surroundings and the things on which they focus in their texts - almost always Berlin’s twentieth century history - illustrates how little they know about the city, but also suggests how unsettling the experience of the contact zone is, especially when it is such a historically and ideologically-loaded place, and how it makes them aware of their place of origin and their own naiveties and anxieties.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jordin Tahana

<p>The Man from Nowhere & Other Prose by James McNeish (1991), Berlin Diary by Cilla McQueen (1990), To Each His Own by Philip Temple (1999), and Phone Home Berlin: Collected Non-Fiction by Nigel Cox (2007) are all texts written by New Zealand writers who either visited or lived in Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Their texts chronicle their experiences in Berlin and capture their observations of and reflections on the city, its people and their place as New Zealand writers in Berlin. This thesis discusses the texts they wrote while in Berlin, focussing particularly on the images of war, walls and the idea of ‘antipodean naivety’. My introductory chapter provides a brief history of New Zealand writers in Berlin. The chapter addresses key historical events which took place in Berlin and how they gave rise to artistic and cultural initiatives, providing the opportunity for McNeish, McQueen and Temple to be in the city. In the second chapter, I consider the images of war found in the writers’ texts. McNeish, McQueen and Temple focus particularly on Berlin’s Second World War history and to a lesser extent on the Cold War. I examine the reasons why they focus so heavily on this part of Berlin’s history, especially when the city has a much longer and broader military history that is ignored by the writers when they address issues of war and conflict in their texts. My third chapter addresses images of walls. For the artists and writers resident in Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Wall is a prominent feature in their texts. But as foreigners to the city and country, they encounter other ‘walls’ such as language and cultural barriers. These metaphorical boundaries are examined further in my fourth chapter which discusses the idea of ‘antipodean naivety’. I apply Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the ‘contact zone’ in reverse to the experiences of McNeish, McQueen and Temple in Berlin. In my fifth and final chapter I contrast the work of Nigel Cox who was in Berlin ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and for a different purpose. Perhaps surprisingly Cox nevertheless responds to Berlin in similar ways to the other New Zealanders. I argue that as New Zealanders these writers come to Berlin from a small country on the other side of the world with a less grandiose history to a country they think they know. In reality, the way the writers interpret their surroundings and the things on which they focus in their texts - almost always Berlin’s twentieth century history - illustrates how little they know about the city, but also suggests how unsettling the experience of the contact zone is, especially when it is such a historically and ideologically-loaded place, and how it makes them aware of their place of origin and their own naiveties and anxieties.</p>


1970 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Grills

The Employment Contracts Act 1991 (the ECA or the Act) is only one of a number of fundamental changes to the basis upon which New Zealand society has recently been required to operate. These changes have been thrust upon New Zealanders by successive governments. The response of the people to such forced feeding has been to change the very basis of how governments are to be elected and are to operate. The public complaint is not only with the fast pace of unanticipated and undesired change. The complaint is more with the failure of politicians once elected to carry out policy announced in the process of electioneering.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nicholas Hoare

<p>The recent resurgence of interest in the ‘other side’ of New Zealand’s colonial history has reaffirmed the need to view the nation’s history in its Pacific context. This historiographical turn has involved taking seriously the fact that as well as being a colony of Britain, New Zealand was an empire-state and metropole in its own right, possessing a tropical, Oceanic empire. What has yet to have been attempted however is a history of the ‘other side’ of the imperial debate. Thus far the historiography has been weighted towards New Zealand’s imperial and colonial agents. By mapping metropolitan critiques of New Zealand’s imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific (1883-1948), this thesis seeks to rebalance the historiographical ledger. This research adds to our understanding of New Zealand’s involvement in the colonial Pacific by demonstrating that anticolonial struggles were not only confined to the colonies, they were also fought on the metropolitan front by colonial critics at once sympathetic to the claims of the colonised populations, and scathing of their own Government’s colonial policy. These critics were, by virtue of their status as white, metropolitan citizens, afforded greater rights and freedoms than indigenous colonial subjects, and so were able to challenge colonial policy in the public domain. At the same time this thesis demonstrates how colonial criticism reflected national anxieties. The grounds for criticism generally depended on the wider social context. In the nineteenth-century in particular, critiques often contained concerns that New Zealand’s Pacific imperialism would disrupt the sanctity of ‘White New Zealand’, however as the twentieth-century wore on criticism bore the imprint of anti-racism and increasingly supported indigenous claims for self-government. By examining a seventy year period of change, this thesis shows that at every stage of the ‘imperial process’, New Zealand’s imperialism in the Pacific was a subject open to persistent public debate.</p>


Author(s):  
Ewan Morris

Consider these statements. On the one hand: '[H]e did not agree with flying the tino rangatiratanga flag because it argued the case of Maori sovereignty, when the Treaty was all about being equal citizens'. 'Maori enjoyed equal citizenship and did not need special treatment, either by having special Maori seats or by having a separate Maori flag fly above public venues.' 'Kiwis should come under a single flag in public places - the current ensign of New Zealand.' On the other hand: 'I can see no particular reason why we wouldn't fly a flag off the Auckland Harbour Bridge and indeed off other prominent government buildings, namely Parliament . . . We are flying a Maori flag, as just another small symbolic step forward in the partnership that was the treaty . . . New Zealanders have a sense of pride that we are doing well in race relations, that is just another step in the partnership'.


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Green

Journalism education in Australia, as it seems in New Zealand, finds itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand universities find themselves under pessure to provide courses that meet industry demands and enhance job success rates; on the other hand journalists seek to be recognised as professionals for a wide range of reasons. Among those reasons is the desire to raise the credibility of journalism in the public perception and the need to argue for higer rates of pay and improved conditions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 192
Author(s):  
Kata Alistar

Kata, Alistar. (2015). The other side of the Tūhoe raids. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 192-194. Review of The Price of Peace [documentary], directed by Kim Webby. English and Te Reo Māori. 2015, 87min. www.nziff.co.nz/2015/auckland/the-price-of-peace/Most New Zealanders will remember when Tūhoe activist Wairere Tame Iti shot the national flag, during a powhiri ceremony, at a Waitangi Tribunal Hearing in 2005. New Zealanders will also remember when Iti, along with three others, was tried and found guilty of firearms charges as part of what the media coined, the ‘Urewera Four’ (Gay, 2012) trial. The man with a full facial Tā moko is regarded throughout the mainstream media as somewhat of a rebel, and by the state as a ‘dangerous proto-terrorist intent on infecting New Zealand’ (Hill, 2012).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nicholas Hoare

<p>The recent resurgence of interest in the ‘other side’ of New Zealand’s colonial history has reaffirmed the need to view the nation’s history in its Pacific context. This historiographical turn has involved taking seriously the fact that as well as being a colony of Britain, New Zealand was an empire-state and metropole in its own right, possessing a tropical, Oceanic empire. What has yet to have been attempted however is a history of the ‘other side’ of the imperial debate. Thus far the historiography has been weighted towards New Zealand’s imperial and colonial agents. By mapping metropolitan critiques of New Zealand’s imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific (1883-1948), this thesis seeks to rebalance the historiographical ledger. This research adds to our understanding of New Zealand’s involvement in the colonial Pacific by demonstrating that anticolonial struggles were not only confined to the colonies, they were also fought on the metropolitan front by colonial critics at once sympathetic to the claims of the colonised populations, and scathing of their own Government’s colonial policy. These critics were, by virtue of their status as white, metropolitan citizens, afforded greater rights and freedoms than indigenous colonial subjects, and so were able to challenge colonial policy in the public domain. At the same time this thesis demonstrates how colonial criticism reflected national anxieties. The grounds for criticism generally depended on the wider social context. In the nineteenth-century in particular, critiques often contained concerns that New Zealand’s Pacific imperialism would disrupt the sanctity of ‘White New Zealand’, however as the twentieth-century wore on criticism bore the imprint of anti-racism and increasingly supported indigenous claims for self-government. By examining a seventy year period of change, this thesis shows that at every stage of the ‘imperial process’, New Zealand’s imperialism in the Pacific was a subject open to persistent public debate.</p>


Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Kia ora and welcome to the second issue of BackStory. The members of the Backstory Editorial Team were gratified by the encouraging response to the first issue of the journal. We hope that our currentreaders enjoy our new issue and that it will bring others to share our interest in and enjoyment of the surprisingly varied backstories of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. This issue takes in a wide variety of topics. Imogen Van Pierce explores the controversy around the Hundertwasser Art Centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery to be developed in Whangarei. This project has generated debate about the role of the arts and civic architecture at both the local and national levels. This is about how much New Zealanders are prepared to invest in the arts. The value of the artist in New Zealand is also examined by Mark Stocker in his article about the sculptor Margaret Butler and the local reception of her work during the late 1930s. The cultural cringe has a long genealogy. New Zealand has been photographed since the 1840s. Alan Cocker analyses the many roles that photography played in the development of local tourism during the nineteenth century. These images challenged notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ and how new technologies mediated the world of lived experience. Recorded sound was another such technology that changed how humans experienced the world. The rise of recorded sound from the 1890s affected lives in many ways and Lewis Tennant’s contribution captures a significant tipping point in this medium’s history in New Zealand as the transition from analogue to digital sound transformed social, commercial and acoustic worlds. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly celebrates its 85th anniversary this year but when it was launched in 1932 it seemed tohave very little chance of success. Its rival, the Mirror, had dominated the local market since its launch in 1922. Gavin Ellis investigates the Depression-era context of the Woman’s Weekly and how its founders identified a gap in the market that the Mirror was failing to fill. The work of the photographer Marti Friedlander (1908-2016) is familiar to most New Zealanders. Friedlander’s 50 year career and huge range of subjects defy easy summary. She captured New Zealanders, their lives, and their surroundings across all social and cultural borders. In the journal’s profile commentary Linda Yang celebrates Freidlander’s remarkable life and work. Linda also discusses some recent images by Friedlander and connects these with themes present in the photographer’s work from the 1960s and 1970s. The Backstory editors hope that our readers enjoy this stimulating and varied collection of work that illuminate some not so well known aspects of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. There are many such stories yet to be told and we look forward to bringing them to you.


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