Same street, different worlds: secondary school years in Masterton, 1945-1960

Abstract

This thesis explores the impact of time and place on a group of young people who went to secondary school in the New Zealand North Island town of Masterton between the years 1945 and 1960. It argues that, in this period, age did not cut across the social divisions of this small provincial town. The first part of the thesis places this argument within the context of the existing historiography and examines the theoretical and methodological issues that the study, and its use of oral history, raises. The thesis then explores the attitudes and ideologies about young people that were expressed in the 1950s. It argues that the creation of youth as a problem category during these years was one way of maintaining the 'myth' that New Zealand was an homogeneous and egalitarian society. The 'juvenile delinquent' and the 'teenager' could be seen as an individualised problem, the result of the inadequacies of individual families, rather than a structural one. The thesis then narrows in focus from the ideologies of the time, postwar New Zealand, to the particularities of place, Masterton and the Wairarapa. Masterton, it argues, although a small and parochial community was also a divided one. The origins of these divisions are traced back to the nineteenth century and it is shown how they reflected the interrelationship of social and spatial relationships. The fourth part of the thesis narrows the focus still further by looking at the experiences of a particular group of young people who attended two different secondary schools in Masterton between the years 1945 and 1960. It argues that secondary schooling did not overcome the town's social divisions by creating a classless age-based culture, but rather reinforced social differences and inequality.