Reading as a 'necessity of life' on the Tuapeka goldfields in nineteenth-century New Zealand

Abstract

Contrary to the image of the mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand 'gold rush' township as a place consumed by hedonism and greed, such frontier settlements were also places where culture took root, not least in terms of the reading of material supplied by the various types of social library that were speedily established after the discovery in the early 1860s of extensive gold deposits. Gold diggers working in small groups and in geographical isolation, and the merchants, tradesmen, publicans, professionals and officials who followed them into the wilderness, felt keenly the need to connect with the outside world and with the societies they had left behind, and books, periodicals, and newspapers were an effective means of doing this.