Abstract:
When English novelist Samuel Butler was 24 years old he lived in a cob cottage he built himself in the foothills of New Zealand's Southern Alps. He had pictures, books, music, companionship and a healthy lifestyle, but wrote that, "The only thing I really do want is the intellectual society of clever men." Samuel Butler to his aunt Mrs Philip Worsley, 8 September 1861 He found it to a large extent, as other colonial men of ideas and letters did, through pioneer journalism. He used his local newspaper as his springboard into literature.
When the first shiploads of English and Scots settlers arrived in the Middle Island of New Zealand they saw it through colonial eyes. They knew little about the sealers, whalers, missionaries and explorers who had been before them, and even less about the complex history, culture and politics of indigenous Maori. By definition, they were "people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state" Oxford English Dictionary, definition of "colony". They brought with them the physical means of printing, through presses and skilled tradesmen, and the cultural expectation of communicating through the written word, but as colonists, the writers among them also worked in their familiar genre and within their traditional constraints.
