Wednesday 17 May 2023, 12:10pm to 1:30pm
Taiwhanga Kauhau — Auditorium, (lower ground) National Library Wellington. Entrance on Aitken Street or on Zoom.
Join for an enthralling talk by Professor Bain Attwood, author of ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History’.
A ground-breaking historian
In 1972 a remarkable Pākehā woman, Ruth Ross, published a scholarly journal article about the Treaty of Waitangi. Most articles of this kind are rarely read beyond academic circles. Ross’s was. In fact, her painstaking lifelong work on te Tiriti o Waitangi was taken up in ways that helped to transform public understanding of the Treaty and make te Tiriti o Waitangi central to Aotearoa New Zealand’s law, politics and culture.
The impact of a changing narrative
Professor Attwood will pose a series of challenging questions about the advantages and disadvantages for New Zealand life of the histories that lawyers and historians have been telling about the Treaty over the last fifty years.
Bain Attwood (Pākehā) is a professor of history at Monash University in Melbourne. A graduate of universities on both sides of the Tasman, he has authored of nine monographs including Empire and the Making of Native Title, the joint winner of the New Zealand Historical Association’s 2021 prize for the best book on any aspect of New Zealand history.
More information can be found here.