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William Golder Electronic Edition

This edition of William Golder’s poetry is designed to make the poetry of a British settler poet available to readers in New Zealand and internationally with interests in the intellectual and cultural history of colonisation and the origins of modern New Zealand.

The corpus of Golder’s publications, spanning the first thirty years of British settlement in the Wellington region of New Zealand, constitutes an important taonga (or treasure) of Pakeha (or British settler) culture.

The edition is a work in progress, being developed in three dimensions:

  1. the 4 volumes of poetry Golder published after arrival in Wellington in 1840 (the equivalent of a scholarly edition of a writer’s works);
  2. contextual materials of many kinds — journalism, pictures, diaries, letters, reports, music, books of all kinds to do with the responses of colonists to their new world — which provide access to the cultural and intellectual environment of early Wellington and which assist interpretation of Golder’s poetry; and
  3. published research, which is being progressively republished in conjunction with these materials as an immediately accessible interpretive perspective (the equivalent of a book of essays on an author’s works).