In Old New Zealand (1863), F.E. Maning recalls living alongside Maori in "the good old times before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that." His account of the early contact period is widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece of some sort, but the extent to which it is fiction, autobiography, ethnography, history, or satire remains a matter for debate. This is the first scholarly edition of Maning's writings. It includes a revealing selection of Maning's unpublished letters, and Alex Calder contributes an introduction and notes that illuminate the works' historical, ethnographic, and literary contexts, showing how settler colonialism is an incomplete and contested process, the problems of which are enacted in Maning's writings, and repeated in the history of their reception.
