The Lives of Colonial Objects
Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (eds)
Otago University Press, $50.00,
ISBN 9781927322024
The Lives of Colonial Objects seeks to tell the history, or rather a number of histories, of New Zealand’s colonial past through objects. The collection consists of 50 short essays by a range of authors, from academics, archivists and librarians to heritage professionals, each of whom has selected one object to write about “from the perspective that suited them best”. Spanning the highly celebrated to the profoundly mundane, each object serves as a pathway into aspects of New Zealand’s colonial history. Taken together, the essays present a kind of bric-a-brac approach to our past, giving us “history through glimpses”, rather than a unified, totalising narrative of colonial New Zealand.
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