Angela Wanhalla keynote speaker at Law & History Conference
The next Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society conference is meeting at the University of Wollongong in December hosted by that university’s Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies. Its theme is “Exclusion, Confinement, Dispossession: Uneven Citizenship and Spaces of Sovereignty”, with the call for papers closing on 20 July. It’s great news that Angela Wanhalla, CROCC co-director, will be a keynote speaker at this conference, drawing on her Rutherford Fellowship research on marriage in conjunction with the conference themes.
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Three Centre members finalists for best History book award
Professor Tony Ballantyne, Professor Tom Brooking, and Dr Angela Wanhalla, are three of the the four finalists for the inaugural W.H. Oliver Prize for best book on New Zealand history, to be awarded next week at the New Zealand Historical Association conference. The books are Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (AUP); Tom Brooking, Richard Seddon, King of God’s Own: The Life and Times of New Zealand’s Longest Serving Prime Minister (Penguin); and Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (AUP).
All three finalists are academics within the Department of History and Art History, but also members of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. For the full story, read the latest article in the Otago Bulletin Board.
New collaborations for Angela Wanhalla
Dr Angela Wanhalla
Dr Angela Wanhalla, an active CROCC member, has been building on her success (two Marsden funded projects, a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship) with the success of an Australian Research Council Grant of just over $A500,000. Angela is a named international partner investigator on a Discovery Project headed by Profs. Lyndall Ryan, Amanda Nettleback, A/Profs Anna Johnston, Penelope Edmonds, and Victoria Haskins looking at violence and intimacy in settler societies across the Anglophone Pacific Rim, 1840-1940.
Quick News: Overseas Invitations
Two of CROCC’s members are currently in Australia, having been invited to give presentations at universities there. CROCC Director is at the University of Brisbane, and gave a talk last night on “Colonial Knowledge Making” to the Centre for the History of European Discourses.
Angela Wanhalla will be presenting today on the Mothers Darlings Project, at the University of Melbourne, as part of the “Writing the Pacific: Re-writing Australia” symposium.
Born of Conflict video now available on Youtube
The video documentary, Born of Conflict: Children of the Pacific War is a major outcome of a Marsden-funded project, the Mothers’ Darlings Project, led by Judy Bennett and Angela Wanhalla (History) that investigates the lives of children born of US servicemen and indigenous women of New Zealand and the Pacific during World War Two. The documentary, a shorter version of which played on Maori TV this year as part of their ANZAC Day programming, looks at three case studies from the research. It also features Judy and Angela, both members of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, along with Louise Mataia (graduate of Otago and researcher on the Mothers’ Darlings Project).
US servicemen and locals, Aitutaki, Cook Islands.
The video was produced by Steven Talley, Peggy Holter and Judy Bennett, with funding support from University of Otago. Click here for free viewing.
Click here for more information on the work of the Mothers’ Darlings Project.
Dr Angela Wanhalla wins Ernest Scott Prize
At the Australian Historical Association conference in Brisbane last night, 
CROCC member Dr Angela Wanhalla was awarded the Ernest Scott Prize for History. This prize is awarded annually to the book judged to be the most distinguished contribution to the History of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonization published in the previous year.
Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand was published by Auckland University Press.
As the judges commented “Angela Wanhalla’s ground breaking history of interracial relationships in New Zealand across two hundred years utilises not only the usual range of church and state records but also personal papers, family and local histories to track the lives of couples whose relationship was sustained over a period of time. While Maori women left little trace for the historian, Wanhalla uses analysis of images, particularly photography, to overcome some of the gaps and silences in the record. She takes a broad view of coupling which incorporates common law relationships, Maori ceremonies and Christian marriages sanctioned by the State and also takes account of various debates and legislative action in relation to marriage over time.
“Wanhalla draws on the recent work by anthropologists and historians such as Ann Laura Stoler to explore the history of emotion and sentiment as central to these encounters. She historicises the specific context in which these are expressed and how they changed over time in relation to the society and demographics. She notes that interracial relationships in New Zealand have often been used as evidence of ‘gentle colonialism’ but while her study of intimacy makes an important contribution to overturning simplistic paradigms of race relations on the frontier and beyond, Wanhalla still emphasises the framework of gendered and racial power struggles within which these relationships operated.”
Congratulations to Angela for her ongoing success!
CRoCC member shortlisted for prestigious book prize
Congratulations to Angela Wanhalla, member of CRoCC and the University of Otago’s History Department, for the shortlisting of her recent book, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand, for the Ernest Scott Prize for History for 2014. This prize, given annually to the book judged to be the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonization, will be awarded at the upcoming Australian Historical Association Conference in Brisbane in July. Angela’s book was published by Auckland University Press.
