Beyond Punitive Regulation? New Zealand Local Governments' Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which New Zealand local authorities respond to homelessness. It finds that while some punitive bylaws targeting homeless people exist, they are not widespread, and in three case study cities are accompanied by efforts to support social service providers. This indicates that New Zealand local authorities are prepared to look at alternatives to address homelessness, as opposed solely to following trends towards the increasing persecution of homeless people. However, cities' attitudes are subject to political whim, and on occasion they articulate an exclusive vision of public space linked to concerns for public safety and city image. Such thinking has led, for example, to homeless people being served with trespass notices by local authorities asserting “ownership” of public space. Nevertheless, the actions of New Zealand cities depart significantly from the dominant approaches seen elsewhere. This may be explained in part by the relative invisibility of homelessness in New Zealand, and by a popular distinction between “good” and “bad” homeless individuals. The net result is a generally positive approach to reducing homelessness by providing appropriate housing and support to those on the streets, complicating any direct application of the critical geographical literature on this issue to the New Zealand context.     

18th- and 19th-century shipyards at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, London

Archaeological fieldwork in 1997 on the Isle of Dogs, at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, recovered evidence of 17th- to 19th-century shipyards, associated activities and foreign trade. Reused timbers may be the remains of the 17th-century Rolt's yard. Reclamation along the natural inlet was accompanied by the construction of a timber dry dock probably in the late 18th century. This soon fell out of use and was filled in with the construction of new dry docks to the south in 1806 by Thomas Pitcher. Much of the debris dating to the first half of the 19th century from ship repairing and building and from a range of ancillary crafts, together with ceramics from Iberia and the Far East, probably came from Pitcher's yard.     

Collecting Looerryminer's ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women,Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands

In 1832 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ to the antipodean colonies on a mission sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends. This article examines Backhouse and Walker's mission to witness the ‘testimony’ of Looerryminer and other Aboriginal women who had lived with sealers in the Bass Strait Islands. It argues that this investigative journey is best comprehended in the context of the long tradition of Quaker transimperial travel ‘under concern’ and particularly their abolitionist witnessing undertaken from the late eighteenth century and its associated texts with their distinctive form, language and repertoire. Urging that we read ‘along the grain’ of the archive in line with Ann Stoler, the article explores the travel and curious translation of humanitarian abolitionist sentiment, text, and action across and between colonies of settlement, and the various ‘species of slavery’ that were imagined, constructed and examined by Quaker humanitarians in this Age of Reform.     

‘Fashioned from Nature’

Abstract

This paper examines the situation of the male draper in terms of his relationships to textiles and female customers between the 1870s and the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on accounts of shop work produced by men employed as drapers and drapers’ assistants, the essay highlights the ridicule levelled against men who sold textiles, their work with fabrics and clothing, as well as the service they provided for an almost exclusively female clientele, being widely derided as unsuitable labour for a man. Analysing three first-hand accounts of the draper’s lot — H. G. Wells’s discussion of his years as a draper’s apprentice in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934); William Paine’s Shop Slavery and Emancipation (1912), based on the injustices experienced by drapers’ assistants; and the diary of a Bond Street draper, Charles Cavers, posthumously published as Hades! The Ladies! Being Extracts from the Diary of a Draper (1933) — the essay shows how social constructions of masculinity framed the draper’s work, particularly the handling of fabrics.