Barbara Brookes

The Peckham Health Centre, "PEP", and the concept of general practice during the 1930s and 1940s.

This paper documents the proposals put forward by George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse, founders of the Peckham Health Centre and members of the Political and Economic Planning (PEP) Health Group, to enhance the role and status of the general practitioner (GP). Their ideas are significant in terms of their understanding of the threat that specialism posed to general practice and of the problems of control and finance raised by reform. Their solution - the establishment of GP therapeutic centres or cells - is located in terms of their own ideas regarding health and medical practice and is compared with the other major proposal for group practice in health centres, which emanated from the Dawson Committee in 1920. Finally, the paper provides some suggestions as to the reason for their failure.

Nostalgia for ‘innocent homely pleasures’: The 1964 New Zealand Controversy over Washday at the Pa

In 1964, the New Zealand Department of Education withdrew and destroyed 38,000 copies of Washday at the Pa, a booklet depicting Maori family life, at the request of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. This essay explores the raced and gendered context of the ensuing uproar in the press, which debated aspects of New Zealand identity. It situates the Washday controversy in the context of post-war housing and differential standards of living experienced by Maori and pakeha. It argues that the League upheld claims to both modernity and tradition, while many pakeha used the occasion to express nostalgia for mother–centred domesticity.

Making girls modern: pakeha women and menstruation in New Zealand, 1930–70[1]

Abstract This article is about the experience of menstruation, a function which many women spend much of their lives concealing. It is a topic which many regard as intensely private. Some, men and women, consider it distasteful and others still, historically unchanging and inconsequential. The authors argue that menstruation has played an important role in the twentieth-century construction of ‘womanhood’, and in constituting women as ‘the other’ in the eyes of male non-menstruators. This New Zealand study draws principally on two narratives about womens bodies. One is derived from cultural representations of the modern feminine body through sanitary product advertising, some of it international in origin, covering the time span 1935 to 1969. This is considered alongside the practical lives of bodies, the personal narratives given to us by 50 women relating their experiences of menarche and subsequent periods.

Taking Private Life Seriously: Marriage and Nationhood

In her path-breaking book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Nancy Cott notes how although marriage is commonly viewed as part of private life, assumptions about marriage have been an integral part of public policy and had implications for citizenship.1 A number of American colonies passed laws that aimed to prevent intermarriage between white and Negro or mulatto persons, in order to retain the dominance of the white race. Marriage and the nation are, therefore, intimately entwined, and histories which explore the intimate ties created by marriage are likely to throw new light on the evolution of nationhood.

Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

In the 2017 Reith Lectures, the historical novelist Hilary Mantel reminded us that writing history is an ‘interpretative act’. Evidence is ‘always partial’ and ‘facts are not the truth but the record of what’s left on the record’. But writing is never simply ‘left’. Every record is also an interpretive work which sifts and selects from a vast array of experiential data and wraps this data in language, fitting it into linguistic categories which give it form and protect it from oblivion. Many ‘records’ have been gathered into archives, repositories which house not what is left but what has been kept, and organise these calcified writings into hierarchical families which limit and shape the range of possible interpretations. A workshop at the University of Otago in May 2017, sponsored by the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, interrogated the ways that bureaucracy has governed these siftings and keepings. The scholars whose work is presented here discussed the ways in which public and private institutions – asylums, hospitals, and armies – developed bureaucratic systems which have determined the parameters of our access to the past. The workshop delved deeper, however, than the parameters and systems, to consider how the very materiality of the paper has influenced the records which it accommodates. At a time when digital data teems around us, paper becomes rare and its qualities come into focus. As bureaucracy abandons paper, we pause to ask how paper itself has shaped our knowledge. The articles which follow are case studies of paperwork in different national and transnational contexts which engage with themes of privacy and public accountability, the beginning of record-keeping practices and their ‘ends’, both in the sense of their purposes and in what happens to paper after the work has finished – from preservation and curation in repositories through to the place of paper and paperwork in a ‘paperless’

Papering over madness: accountability and resistance in colonial asylum files: a New Zealand case study

ABSTRACT Through an examination of New Zealand legislation governing lunacy and the files from the Seacliff Asylum, this article argues how paperwork served to uphold an elusive ideal of a compassionate society. Paper, in the form of letters, reports and forms, was sent up and down the country in order to prevent wrongful confinement and to monitor costs and cure rates. Paper provided for patients allowed them to challenge their incarceration, sometimes successfully. That maze of paperwork, generated for both statutory and institutional administrative ends, mirrored the disorder of those confined within the institution. The curating of digital exhibitions of such materials flattens out their complexity and smooths over what were often disjointed narratives.

‘Aristocrats of Knowledge’: Māori Anthropologists and the Survival of the ‘Race’

This chapter explores the significant role played by well-educated Māori politicians in the racial and bio-political debates of early twentieth-century New Zealand. Māori leaders such as Āpirana Ngata and Peter Buck contested the idea, promulgated by some colonial intellectuals and politicians, that the Māori race was doomed to disappear before the incoming Briton. They argued instead that government policy should enable Māori to flourish alongside settlers of British descent in a bi-racial society. They did, however, express concern about and opposition to reproductive relationships between Chinese men and Māori women, echoing the concerns of politicians such as William Pember Reeves.