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'Murder will out': intimacy, violence, and the Snow Family in early colonial New Zealand

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posted on 2023-05-24, 05:11 authored by Kristyn HarmanKristyn Harman
The 'murder mystery' genre relies on the relationships that evolve between a death or deaths, the evidence left by the killer(s), the investigators, and the field of prospective suspects. For the historian of intimacy and violence, murder is instructive of community relationships, not only through the facts of the case, but also through the suspicions and circumstances that play out following cases involving violent deaths. In this chapter, I use the murder of a settler colonial family as a focal Point through which to explore the intimate, complex, and changing cross-cultural relationships between Māorl and Pākehā In mid-nineteenth century Aotearoa New Zealand. Revealing issues of class, race, politics, gender, and identity, the wider set of circumstances within which this family was murdered speaks directly to the ambiguities of a frontier society at once both socioeconomically and physically intimate and yet inherently unstable and sometimes violent. In the private domain and public sphere, in the doctoring of evidence and the rumours of newspapermen, in the community of the innocent and the catching of the perpetrator, and in other circumstances and suspicions surrounding this case, one of Auckland's most notorious violent crimes reveals interwoven layers of intimacy and violence.

History

Publication title

The Intimacies of Violence in Settler Colonial Economies: Everyday Encounters around the Pacific Rim

Editors

P Edmonds and A Nettlebeck

Pagination

159-177

ISBN

978-3-319-76230-2

Department/School

School of Humanities

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Extent

12

Rights statement

Copyright 2018 The Author

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in history, heritage and archaeology

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