“Born to a soldier-settler family at the end of a decade of colonial conflict, James Cowan grew up on the site of the Battle of Ōrākau. In the anxious years after the Waikato War, he learned the language and the stories of people on both sides. He went on to become a journalist and a historian of colonial New Zealand, and perhaps the most widely-read interpreter between Māori and Pākehā cultures in the first half of the twentieth century.”
In February 2014 a successful one-day conference on James Cowan and his impact was held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, jointly organized by Associate Professor Annabel Cooper from CROCC and Ariana Tikao, Research Librarian Māori at the Turnbull. Research from the conference has now been published (freely available online) in a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Studies, “James Cowan and the Legacies of Late Colonial Culture in Aotearoa New Zealand”.
