A young writer's journey into the New Zealand interior: Katherine Mansfield's The Urewera Notebook

Abstract

In 1907, aged nineteen, the writer Katherine Mansfield set out on a camping trip that was for her arguably the New Zealand equivalent of the European Grand Tour in that it functioned as a rite of passage into the independence of adulthood and as a way of educating herself about her country's indigenous peoples. The route taken by the small group of friends she travelled with was through an extremely remote and hilly part of the North Island known as the Ureweras, a region inhabited by the Tuhoe people who had retreated there after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Undertaken in two horse-pulled roofed coaches, the trip also took in the Rotorua Lake district where Maori commandeered a booming touri..