Thursday 5 May 2022 // 6pm – 8pm //

Led by Zoe Thompson-Moore

From New Zealand Journal of History, 48, 1 (2014), download the article here.

Making shift, combined ‘any number of expedients: kin support and complex patterns of co-residence; gentry hospitality and communal charity; migration and mendicancy; petty theft and the embezzlement of perquisites’. Making shift in rural England also involved ‘drawing one’s resources from a range of natural sources’ and could […] be described as an “economy of diversified resources”.

‘Making Shift’ tells us of the departure and arrival, from from Nottingham in the early 1840s to Aotearoa New Zealand in October 1842 by the agricultural labourer German Hodgkinson, aged 31, his wife Mary Ann, 26, a framework knitter, and their three children. Their narrative is not a unique one, but one of adapting to ever changing circumstance and environment.

Please register to attend in-person or online.

This event is made possible thanks to funding from Wellington City Council.