Hawke's Bay Provincial Gazette

Also known as

The Government Gazette, Province of Hawke's Bay
The Hawke's Bay Government Gazette

Historical Background

Hawke's Bay Province was not one of the six original provinces established in 1853, but was created later under the New Provinces Act 1858. It was formed by separation from Wellington Province, taking effect on 1 November 1858 — a date still commemorated as Hawke's Bay Anniversary Day, observed on the Friday before Labour Day.

When the provincial system was established in 1853, the Hawke's Bay area became part of Wellington Province. The region had originally been within the New Ulster province under the earlier 1846 constitutional arrangement. Settlers in the sparsely populated district felt neglected by Wellington, which absorbed the bulk of customs and land sale revenues and directed spending southward. A campaign for separation — partly driven by the newly founded Hawke's Bay Herald — culminated in a public meeting in Napier in February 1858, and formal separation followed later that year. At the time of its establishment, the European population of the new province was only around 1,185.

The provincial capital was Napier, where the elected Provincial Council sat. The council was notably dominated by pastoral farmers and was characterised by factional rivalry throughout its existence, with conflicts often arising from competition over the purchase of Māori land rather than differences over policy.

Provincial government was abolished under the Abolition of Provinces Act, which took full effect on 1 November 1876. The region was subsequently divided into county councils.

Skipped Issue Numbers

It appears some issue numbers were skipped or omitted

Year	Issue No	Notes
1876	18	"(No. 18 not found. May not exist)" - handwritten note in bound 1876 volume (NatLib)
1875	58	no missing page numbers
1865	28-31	"Apparently not used" - handwritten note on scan of No. 32

Map of provincial boundaries, 1873

1873 Province boundaries (from Wikipedia)

Further reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawke%27s_Bay_Province

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_New_Zealand

https://teara.govt.nz/en/colonial-and-provincial-government/page-2

Browse by Year

1859
1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869
1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876

The Hawke's Bay Provincial Council Chambers (depicted) were completed in 1861 on Shakespeare Road, Napier

Source

Hawke's Bay Provincial Gazette Statistics

18

Years Covered

531

Issues Processed

2,163

Pages Transcribed

10,750

Names Identified

4,244

Unique Names

2,804

Named Officials

349

Unique Officials

As the Gazette has been published for more than 185 years, copyright status depends on the publication date of each issue:

1840–1925 (Public Domain): Issues of the New Zealand Gazette and Provincial Gazettes from this period are in the public domain, as the term of Crown copyright (100 years) has expired. Mechanical reproductions (e.g., scanned PDFs) of these public domain documents do not attract new copyright.
1926–1999 (Crown Copyright): Issues from this period remain subject to Crown copyright. Usage of these issues in this project is "Fair Dealing" for research purposes and consistent with the spirit of the open-access principles championed by NZGOAL, ie, "The default licensing position under ... NZGOAL is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence ... [t]o the greatest extent possible, agencies should apply this licence to copyright material on their websites"
2000–Present (CC-BY 3.0 NZ): Gazette issues published on gazette.govt.nz are Crown copyright but are explicitly licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand licence (CC-BY 3.0 NZ). This project redistributes this content in accordance with those terms.

Nothing in this project is intended to infringe copyright, trademark law or personal privacy. Please contact me immediately if you have any concerns.

Third-Party Content

Where third-party content (e.g., notices submitted by external organisations) is identified within the Gazette, users should satisfy themselves regarding the copyright status of that specific content, as it may be subject to different ownership terms than the Gazette itself.

Sources and Attribution

NZ Gazette Sources

The primary sources for the issues of the NZ Gazette indexed by this project are:

New Zealand Gazette Archive, provided by Victoria University Library, copyright 2008 LexisNexis NZ Limited, Crown Copyright of New Zealand Gazette Office
- Issues from 1841-2008, including the New Munster, New Ulster, and Provincial Gazettes
New Zealand Gazettes by New Zealand Legal Information Institute (note: "NZLII is not the copyright owner in the source documents published on NZLII")
- Issues from 1913-1999
Gazette.govt.nz, Crown copyright / licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs under CC-BY 3.0 NZ
- Issues from 2000-2017

Additional Sources

Wellington City Recollect have made available a comprehensive and excellent-quality scan of the Wellington Provincial Gazette which was used to fill in a number of issues missing from Victoria University's Gazette Archive; in particular, all 1856 issues, issues 22-34 for 1864 and issues 9-19 for 1870.
27 issues of The New Zealand Advertiser and Bay of Islands Gazette (1840) were sourced from Papers Past (public domain).
Gazette Extraordinary No. 1 (1840), held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Imaged by Luke Howison at the National Library reading rooms; PDF released into the public domain.

PDF Icon

The PDF PDF Icon was made by Good Ware, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Masthead

The logo in the header is an edited version of “Winning Coat of Arms Competition Entry, 1908” by Archives New Zealand, CC BY 2.0 (found via Wikipedia).

Who made this?

I'm Luke Howison, a freelance web developer with an interest in genealogy. I have created several websites for genealogical research, such as NZ Ancestor Search Helper.