School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemImperial game: a history of hunting, society, exotic species and the environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901( 2004)Hunting was a popular and prestigious pastime in Britain and her colonies during the nineteenth century - indeed, during that period, the word 'sport' was used to mean hunting. The Hunt was valued as a form of social and cultural display, and its practice was tightly bound to the Victorian Imperialism, and to the British class system. It was as a result of its cultural connotations that the Hunt arrived in New Zealand and Victoria. The Hunts that developed in these two colonies provide an interesting comparison: while the colonies were very similar in settler culture, they differed enormously in their natural environments. However, the natural environments of New Zealand and Victoria were not conducive to the types of sport seen in Britain, in India, and in Africa. Both New Zealand and Victoria lacked the large, prestigious game animals that Imperial Britons had come to associate with the colonies. What sport was available was judged to be inadequate - the European settlers of New Zealand and Victoria brought with them cultural assumptions about the types of animal worth pursuing (for example, foxes, deer, grouse, pheasants, trout, salmon, and elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, antelopes, lions, tigers and bears) and the Antipodean colonies could not supply them. Other prey species were killed but, lacking cultural significance, they were not considered satisfactory 'sport'. As a result, the wild environments of both New Zealand and Victoria were modified to accord with settler notions of appropriate prey. Both places were settler colonies, and so the animals introduced to provide game were generally those of the British Isles. Once suitable prey became available settlers energetically reproduced culturally familiar hunting forms in the Antipodes, often participating in culturally familiar, but personally unknown, forms of the Hunt for the first time in their new homes. The colonies allowed many settlers to make new claims to authority, and to try to create a more egalitarian society, and these aspirations were both expressed through the Hunt. Settlers used symbolic game species to express cultural relationships with each other, and with their new, colonial landscapes. In a colonial context culturally important animal species were used to express belonging, and possession. This thesis examines the cultural phenomenon of 'the Hunt' in the Antipodes, and its embodiment in symbolic species of animal.