Urban histories of the nation and beyond in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

The state of the field of urban history has been the subject of debate in recent years. Whether it is in decline, or experiencing a resurgence of interest; whether its concerns have been subsumed within other subdisciplinary projects, turns or methodologies; and the relative utility of analysing ‘the urban’ as a discrete topic of inquiry. Two recent works, by Ben Schrader and Seamus O’Hanlon, are recognisably works about cities and their function, but eschew explicitly championing ‘urban history’ as a narrow subdisciplinary approach. Both works present fresh and innovative histories that are recognisably urban in their scope, but are not constrained by this label, and which model ways in which urban histories can speak to much broader literatures and debates. The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities, 1840–1920 by Ben Schrader is an urban history of New Zealand, drawing on the stories of Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch and, to a lesser extent, Nelson, while weaving these into a single narrative. While broadly maintaining a chronological approach, the chapters are organised thematically, with narratives of colonisation and boosterist literatures forming the backdrop to later chapters on urban crowds and street life, public health, and ‘the backlash against the city’ (327). The Big Smoke is extensively illustrated, meaning that interwoven with its historical narrative, the book presents an extensive range of primary source materials from photographs to letters and textual sources to audiences at a distance from New Zealand archives. By presenting a narrative that is conceptually as well as chronologically oriented, The Big Smoke addresses questions of how such a historically urban-oriented nation came to privilege the mythology of a rural identity. Rather than doing so by mapping the development of these competing narratives, Schrader’s work seeks to re-centre a social history approach to New Zealand cities, presenting human-scale narratives of those whose urban realities risk being overshadowed or lost by the persistent cultural primacy of the ideal of the rural. While The Big Smoke positions this partly as a return to a social historical approach, by maintaining this balance between critique of mythologies and stories of everyday urban life,