Postgraduate Students

Grace Bateman, BA (Hons), BA, BSc (Auckland)

Signs and Graces: Remembering religion in childhood in southern Dunedin, 1920-1950

Grace's thesis research explores meanings of everyday experiences of religion for children in southern Dunedin 1920-1950, and investigates the role of emotion and belief in the development of self and identity. As such, it joins the growing array of voices calling for greater investigation of religion in New Zealand's past, particularly in the influential and significant period of childhood. In keeping with international trends, Grace focuses not only on institutions, but also looks at 'lived religion' through evidence relating to everyday life and popular culture. Spatiality is a key to understanding religion, for the everyday spaces in which religion is lived span both 'public' and 'private' spaces. Grace looks at how children lived religion in places including home, school, Sunday school, church, clubs, civic events, concert halls and streets. This 'lived religion' approach illustrates how the boundaries between sacred/secular and public/private are significantly less clear-cut than has often been assumed. Grace offers evidence that favoured theories about New Zealand's past - that New Zealand culture and identity was secular from an early stage, with religion disappearing into the private realm - deserve reassessment. This research is explicitly interdisciplinary, as is necessary to investigate the diverse range of everyday worlds in which children in southern Dunedin 'lived religion'. This is one of its unique contributions, drawing together different threads in a montage that makes connections not previously made, in particular between literature, religion, prayer, death, music, childhood and development of identities at different spatial levels. These spatial levels in which identities were constructed reach from the personal, family and local community level, to wider regional, national and international contexts. This research demonstrates that for many children in southern Dunedin in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Christianity was a significant part of the fabric of everyday life, contributing to the formation of these children's sense of identity as they grew up, and continuing to influence their lives in diverse and complicated ways through their adult years.

Contact: batgr373@student.otago.ac.nz

Supervisors: Associate Professor John Stenhouse and Dr Rani Kerin

Publications

• ‘Everyday experiences of religion in childhood in southern Dunedin, 1920-1950’, University of Otago History Department Seminar, May 2008.
• ‘Everyday experiences of religion in childhood in southern Dunedin, 1920-1950’, New Zealand Historical Association Conference, Wellington, November 2007
• ‘Bateman’s variations on a theme by Cohen’, Histeria! Historical Society Annual,  University of Auckland, 2005: 35–42.
• ‘The Anzac Legend’, Histeria! Historical Society Annual, University of Auckland, 2004: 71–84.

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