Case 1
- New Zealand Christmas Numbers 1
New Zealand Graphic. Christmas Number, 1895.
The Christmas issue of New Zealand Graphic was published in Auckland by Henry Brett between 1890 and 1907. For a time it bore the lengthier title The New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, and frequently featured stories and articles by women writers. While Christmas issues were largely pictorial, regular issues comprised mainly text and advertisements.
The cover artwork of this 1895 issue is by Robert Hawcridge (1866-1920) a Yorkshire-born, Dunedin-based commercial artist who specialised in book illustration and lithography. He taught at Dunedin School of Art and exhibited his work at the Otago Art Society.
The Otago Daily Times & Witness. Christmas Annual, 1898.
The Christmas annual issued by the Otago Daily Times & Witness was an extremely popular publication during the 1890s and 1900s. Notable for its photographic illustrations of Māori people and of ‘town, province and colony’, it was frequently sent as a memento to relations in the ‘home country’.
The cover artwork of this 1898 issue, again by Hawcridge, depicts a Māori family cooking a Christmas pudding over a thermal pool. As Dunedin historian Ali Clarke states “the portrayal … conveys the sense of the exotic and the desire for the familiar felt by colonists at Christmas in their adopted country. It also reveals something of the way colonists felt an ideal Māori family would look – a nuclear group in front of an individual family home.”
