Postgraduate Students

Daniel Davy, BA (Ave Maria), MSC (Edinburgh)

BA (Ave Maria University, USA), MSc (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Lost Tailings: Gold rush societies and cultures in Otago, New Zealand, 1861-1911

The nineteenth-century Pacific Rim gold rushes have long been assimilated into national history. While this approach presents the Australian, American and Canadian rushes as seminal moments in the crystallisation of national identities, the New Zealand rushes, and the Otago rushes in particular, never really found a home in a national historiography centred on Maori-Pakeha relations in the North Island. Rather than argue for the importance of the Otago rushes to national formation, my research stresses the need to locate them within wider Tasman, British, Chinese and Pacific worlds. Colonists in Otago frequently drew on accounts from Victoria and California, circulated in Otago newspapers and private correspondences, to understand the course of their province’s gold rushes. Migration, commerce and communication webs entangled the daily lives of European gold seekers with local cultures and communities in Victoria and the British Isles. Through material culture, ritual, migration and remittances, Chinese gold seekers likewise remained firmly connected to family and village networks in China. Rather than simply replace a New Zealand context with an Australian, British or Pacific one, my thesis highlights the importance of shifting our historiographical lens beneath the nation to ‘dig up’ the local and translocal social, economic and cultural constellations that characterised the Otago gold rushes.

I plan to submit my thesis later in 2012.

Supervisors: Professor Angela McCarthy, Dr Vanessa Ward

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