1860s: The New Zealand Death

December 5, 2021

By AHNZ

Drownings in New Zealand, at one time, became so pronounced that it began to be referred to as The New Zealand Death. As often happens in mainstream history writing an idea is blindly copied examined, its truth taken for granted. One influential writer sets down an idea and it becomes repeated and quoted over and over by many students in many papers who go on to repeat it to their students until the idea becomes “common knowledge.” Anarchist History of New Zealand aims to disrupt that copy-paste narrative by examining first causes.

When did we start calling drowning The New Zealand Death?

“The “New Zealand death” — drowning — still maintains its pre-eminent fatality, as many as 162 deaths being recorded from this cause.” – Evening Post (1877), Papers Past

“…”violent” deaths commonly numbering from 8 to 10 monthly — the majority from drowning, which at one time used to be called ” the New Zealand death.” – Evening Post (1879), Papers Past

“By 1870, just a few decades after European settlers first arrived, rivers had been responsible for 1,115 recorded drownings. Drowning became known as ‘the New Zealand death’.” – Te Ara.govt.nz

“In colonial times drowning was so rife it was known as ‘the New Zealand death’.” – NZ on Screen

Drowning Still New Zealand Death – The Northland Times (1959); Maynard (2013)

“By 1940… drowning had long since lost its haunting nineteenth-century status as the ‘New Zealand Death’.” – Maynard (2013)

As we see from the above headlines, the Evening Post was already looking back in retrospect in 1879 at what had “at one time” been the New Zealand Death. The evidence for that ‘one time’ only exists in the very same publication, Evening Post, for having said so in 1877. However, the terminology stuck and has been repeated ever since without much bother for what time period it is supposed to describe. The more the Colonial Period or Pioneering Period or even the Vogel Boom/Bust comes into the rear-view mirror the more they are subsumed and elided into being all the same thing; Just ‘back in the old days’ of the ‘nineteenth-century’.

Absolutely, in the 1860s there was enough of an outbreak of drownings to raise public alarm. The House of Representatives, in 1870, responded (with usual politician-speed when their own direct interests are not involved) by creating a yearly register of Persons Drowned in New Zealand and back-dated it to 1840. But where was this concern before? The fact that the concern had a start point in the late 1860s and had become retrospective by the late 1870s suggests to me that the New Zealand Death was particular to a generation. The numbers appear to agree…

The above data comes from the  Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR) which I’ve transcribed and graphed. You can see why 1860s New Zealanders considered themselves in the midst of a ‘New Zealand Death’ of drownings. The same information was graphed by Maynard/Statistics NZ showing the same bump. Neither data set is population-weighted so should over-state the early up-tick in drownings because the Gold Rushes and Assisted Immigration brought many people in and out of New Zealand during this time period…

The contemporary observation that New Zealand did indeed have a problem with drowning shows on the graphs, especially the AHNZ/AJHR one. Why, then, did it take 20 years before the Colonial Settlers all of a sudden became especially unsafe in the water? And, then, after another 20 years, improved?

Second Turning Kids Don’t Listen

And obvious explanation for the 20-year era of The New Zealand Death is to blame the Gold Rush. Gabriel Read’s discovery of payable Otago gold in mid-1861 drew tens of thousands of diggers from all over the world to the new rugged and unfamiliar New Zealand wilderness. Plenty of them had no experience and took risks and ended up getting hurt in a business that revolved around being in and near water. Earlier pioneers working with trees and sheep didn’t face same risk profile as men camping by rivers and wrestling with races and sluices (not to mention snow, Ref. 1863: Mass Deaths in Otago.)

Maybe that reason would be quite enough but I’m going for another: A generation of young people who abandoned traditional wisdom.

I’ve found what historiographers William Strauss and Neil Howe call a First Turning between 1850-1870 and their Second Turning from 1870-1890. The young generation (0-20 years old) of a Second Turning are called a Prophet generation and their era a time of Awakening. An Awakening time is experimental, an era of social and spiritual idealism, risk-taking, anti-establishment, a turning away from conventional wisdom. The last Prophet generation are still alive today, they are the generation of the Boomer Awakening (1957-1978) but New Zealand’s first Prophet generation were of the Vogel Boomer Awakening (1870-1890.)

Both the Vogel Boomers and the Baby Boomers exhibit the same disregard for the traditional wisdom of past generations. In their generational arrogance they disregarded the beliefs and knowledge, the good along with the bad, of their forefathers to find out the hard way what they needed and what they could let go.

“In the Strauss Howe Chronology, Boomers are identified as a prophetic or idealistic generation…massively entitled and self-absorbed” – 2010s: Baby Boomer Self-Entitlement

“Boomers were just as good at parenting as they were at traffic safety…” – 1970s: Road Warrior Boomers

” The legal Boomer is a lying, spinning, political policeman out for his own profit and the criminal Boomer is a lying mastermind tearing his community apart for his own profit.” – 2009: Harry Brown

“These Boomer kids were setting a new standard for the disposable consumer goods they preferred over caring for and owning durable products.” – 1961: Salty Cycles

“Among the codes and restraint that people in the communes swept aside- quite purposely- were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle..or takes tokes from the same cigarette…they were relearning..the laws of hygiene..by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scoff, the rot.” – Wolfe, Ref. 1971: BLERTA

“In New Zealand the loss of traditional wisdom in handling newborn babies has made it necessary for medical authorities to try and step into that role, suggesting that babies should not be subjected to fatigue from unnecessary travel and interruption of sleep; that they shouldn’t be handled by too many people; and that they should be protected from other people’s infections.” – Cot Death, Max (1990)

“..a time of economic and social disintegration…The anti-authoritarian attitudes of the mass youth ..a collapse of thetraditional family structure and the falling apart of age-old moral codes. It was a time of obsessive individualism.”- on the 1970s, Jesson (1988)

“Before re-learning the traditional wisdom of prior generations huge damage had been done to New Zealand by Vogel’s scams. He led our radical ancestral morons straight into the twenty years of The Long Depression…Perhaps the next iteration of the Vogel Boomer/Baby Boomer generation will do this in the 2050s when they come of age and it will again help cause another depression?” – 1872: Hochstetter Water Race, AHNZ

Vogel Boomer Awakening (1870-1890) generation, I suggest, were unable to receive the water safety lessons that their elders could provide. And, they drowned trying to figure it out for themselves. All sorts of behavior can be accounted for by this discontinuity in traditional wisdom including Cot Death, dangerous driving, sexually transmitted diseases, economic depression, and even the resorting to State retirement programs.

No wonder that Ruru the Wise Owl (1955) and Water Goon Godfrey (1959) were deployed as part of State intervention to try to save the Boomer kids from drowning like their fellow Prophet predecessors.

We even have a case study based on the grave of one of these Vogel Boomers who drowned in 1885. John Cressey’s relationship with his parents was so bad that they practically inscribed on his tombstone that he had lost his life as a result of disobeying them!

So, The New Zealand Death is most properly applied to any member New Zealand Prophet generation who gets himself or others killed as a result of a fatal generation-gap; An inability to connect to those who came before and take on cultural software that would have saved a life. That extends beyond water safety to car safety, sexually transmitted diseases, air safety, basic hygiene, and even keeping babies from premature death.

—
Image ref. “Water Goon Godfrey”, a character created to promote water safety, issued by the National Water Safety Committee, 1959; History Always Repeats: Remembering New Zealand (2014,) Facebook

Image ref. “Ruru the Owl” was a water safety character cooked up by the National Prevent Drowning Committee in 1955, on behalf of the New Zealand Internal Affairs Department; History Always Repeats: Remembering New Zealand (2014,) Facebook

Ref. Drown-proofing New Zealand: The Learn-to-Swim and Prevent Drowning Campaigns, 1936-1956 by Jessica Maynard (2013), Core

Ref. Children, Endangered Species?, Lesley Max (1990)

Ref. Revival of the right : New Zealand politics in the 1980s, Bruce Jesson (1988)

Datasets:

1840-1869, Ref. AJHR (1870)
1870-1875, Ref. AJHR (1875)
1875-1877, Ref. AJHR (1877)
1877-1881, Ref. AJHR (1877)
1885-1887, Ref. AJHR (1877)
(Department of Justice)
From 1882 on I take the tally as given between mid-year to mid-year and attributing it to the given year. 1886 I counted. 1887 I counted the half-year and multiplied by 2. Here the count appears to stop and I have too.

Like    Comment     Share