Absent, Indigenous and Imagined: army wives and soldier settlers in the 1860s

Army wives were variously absent, indigenous and imagined in 1860s New Zealand. Very few travelled with the 12,000 imperial soldiers who were sent to defend British sovereignty and settler interests in wars against indigenous Maori resistance. The redcoat presence was a reassuring yet anomalous intervention in a colonist community founded on the model of organized, selective and propertied family settlement. Uniformed men, boorish in habit, brutish by profession and background, barrack rather than cottage dwelling, and rude in their garrison culture, clashed with the orderly sensibility that had been a vision for the colony from the 1840s.

Within a few years a number of men who had arrived as soldiers (perhaps as many as a quarter of the total) had taken their discharge from the regiment, married and become ‘settlers’. Some married Maori women, including a number previously on enemy lines. Others married women immigrants from the Australian colonies, England, Scotland and Ireland.

The paper examines the imagined and actual army wives who form a fundamental, but often unacknowledged link between settler colonialism and imperial conflict. In the catastrophic history of colonial dispossession gender was crucial to the cementing of asymmetries in the world after the fighting. Men were encouraged into civilian life with land grants and prospects as independent, propertied, productive householders. The army as a vector of global mobility, warfare as a complicator of colonial culture, the complex identity and long historical legacy of the ‘soldier settler’ form a history that remains alive in the postcolonial era.