Holding on to Home: New Zealand Stories and Objects of the First World War

Description

A powerfully human and emotional illustrated history of New Zealand's war experience, focusing on material culture and social history. From trenches to department stores, internment camps to classrooms, memorial services to Queen Carnivals, Holding on to Home provides a regionally broad, multi-faceted look at this historical conflict. It reveals how soldiers and `home' were interconnected, and how New Zealanders, individually and collectively, faced the Great War. Based on original research, this new emphasis helps reveal new understandings of the War that are long overdue, broadening the view of who New Zealanders at war were, what they treasured and why. Featuring all-new photographs of objects from Te Papa's history collections and other institutions nationwide, personal letters and diaries, photographs, propaganda and advertising, Holding on to Home places objects and material/archival culture at the centre of the history they evoke, and draws out their role in maintaining relationships and identities - as well as their place in collective memory. "

Kate Hunter is a social historian with an interest in World War One. Currently Associate Professor and Head of the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, she researches and teaches on gender, family and race relations, including the social and cultural histories of the Great War. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the author of many articles and books, including Father's Right-Hand Man: Women on Australia's Family Farms, 1880s to the 1920s (2004) and Hunting: A New Zealand History (2009). Kirstie Ross is Curator Modern New Zealand at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, specialising in 20th century social history and material culture. She has curated numerous exhibitions including Slice of Heaven: 20th Century Aotearoa and Te Papa's World War One centennial exhibition, and has written popular and scholarly articles and essays on topics ranging from soldier photography to camping and tramping, as well as the book Going Bush: New Zealanders and Nature in the Twentieth Century (2008).