Community formation in a colonial port town: Port Chalmers, 1860-1875

Abstract

This thesis explores ideas about the nature and development of colonial communities raised by Miles Fairburn and his critics in a specific local context. Fairburn’s bold characterization of colonial New Zealand society as “atomized” has provoked numerous responses but not yet yielded sustained analysis of social formations and community in a port community. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from newspapers, Census data, and archival material relating to churches, voluntary institutions, and the police, this thesis examines the ways in which colonists, both settled residents and mobile sojourners, worked to build community against challenges particular to Port Chalmers during the period 1860-1875. Colonists built strong communities around religious denominations and other voluntary institutions, which provided opportunities for sociability and promoted the negotiation of interdependencies and shared values. The relatively fluid and flexible community boundaries shaped by the port’s characteristically high rates of population mobility enabled these smaller communities to coalesce into two larger communities with relative cohesion. The most significant social boundary in the port existed between the communities of seamen and non-seamen, but even these overlapped and the results of their interactions suggest that histories of colonial community formation need to consider the nature of interactions between mobile and more settled populations as well as the respective characteristics of both. Analysing how high population mobility shaped Port Chalmers as a location indicates the need to reassess mobility’s role in defining colonial places and shaping the formation of colonial communities. This demonstrates the advantages place-centred local studies hold for unravelling how the global processes of colonialism played out on the ground and shaped colonial lives lived in local contexts.