Articles by Julie Halligan

This month we are observing the words of a man whose footprints across the pages of history are indelibly tattooed into the global psyche in such a manner as never before seen in modern history. That the world is still fascinated by this man’s life and compellingly by his death lies not so much within the allegory of the mythic hero being cut down in his prime on his quest for…

The general feeling of the time was that it would all be over by Christmas. For four long years the people of Papakura waited for that end and when it came on Armistice Day 11th November 1918, the final tally of the roll of the dead for Papakura and Karaka stood at 32. It was billed as The Great War and it was said it would never happen again as the walking wounded and…

As a terrible storm raged over the North Island coast in December 1769 the ships of Captain Cook and the French explorer Jean-François-Marie de Surville unknowingly passed within a relatively short distance of each other. Both the British and the French governments on behalf of their respective monarchies were engaged in a progressive programme of expansion of their foreign…

In the early decades of the 18th century New Zealand was enjoying the profitable beginnings of international trade with its nearest neighbour, New South Wales. The establishment of a British penal colony in Sydney was Great Britain’s solution a group of inter-related problems. A rapidly increasing population, displaced by the social behemoth ‘Industrial Revolution’, the rise of…

In the Northern Hemisphere the traditional ‘May Day’ celebration is an ancient festival whose origins are shrouded in the mists of time. It is said that the earliest May Day observances began in pre-Christian times out of the Roman empire, a dedication to the Roman flower goddess Floralia, or Flora and a celebration of the advent of the arrival of Summer and blossoming flowers. Ho…

The white man who figuratively held the gun for a chief to pull the trigger thus igniting the worst holocaust New Zealand in New Zealand’s history. In 1799 a ‘new dissent’ had been afoot for some several decades, the intense and radical revivalist child of ‘The Great Awakening’ that had spread throughout Christendom like a plague during the 18th century. ‘The Great Awakening’…

The question hung in the air between us ‘So what drew you to the Chatham Islands in the first place? The two pairs of eyes looking back at me widened, the heads nodded together and two voices in unison replied ‘Fossilised sharks teeth’. Kiri jumped up from her chair and disappeared into the farm house returning minutes later with an oblong box. Plonking it down on the table she…

Part 2 in a 6 part series looking at the ‘scumbuggering’ that has happened through the years in New Zealand. The Georgian England of the 1800s was a savage regime still attempting to come to grips with the sweeping social changes that had arisen as a direct result of the industrial revolution of the 1700s. A massive exodus of country folk from off the land into the newly…

‘Once Were Whalers…’ is part 1 of a 6 part series looking at the ‘scumbuggery’ that has happened through the years in New Zealand. It was the era that has retrospectively been described as the Age of Discovery, a time when the commercial and imperial interests of Europe sought to expand their power through global exploratory expeditions. It was also a time when the foreign policy…

Situated on the picturesque Otago Peninsula perched atop a rising ridge stands the imposing and lasting monument to one man’s insistent desire to announce to the world that he had arrived, that he was someone and that he had ‘done good’. William Larnach had grown up on the rural estate of Rosemount, in the Patrick Plains of the Hunter Valley near Singleton in New South Wales,…