New Munster Gazette

Historical Background

Prior to 1846, "New Munster" was a geographic designation for the South Island. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1846 formally divided the colony into two distinct political provinces. The Province of New Munster encompassed a massive area: the North Island south of the Patea River mouth (including the Wellington settlements), the entire South Island, and Stewart Island. Everything north of the Patea River was New Ulster.

New Munster was governed by an appointed Lieutenant-Governor and an un-elected executive council. Settler dissatisfaction with this lack of representation was high, and New Munster's legislative council met only once, in 1849.

The province (and the Gazette) ceased to exist following the implementation of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, which divided New Zealand into six new provinces with elected representatives.

From 1853 the main New Zealand Gazette was published again.

Publication History:

17 Aug 1847 – 26 Jan 1848: Published as New Zealand Government Gazette (Southern Province)
2 Feb 1848 – 28 Feb 1853: Renamed to New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of New Munster)

Issue numbers

Issues are numbered continuously for 1847-48, then restart each year in January thereafter.

Skipped issue numbers

It appears that 1852 No. 14 does not exist. There is a No. 13A and no missing page numbers in between.

Map of New Ulster and New Munster (from Wikipedia)

Further reading

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

https://teara.govt.nz/en/colonial-and-provincial-government/page-1

Browse by Year

1847 1848 1849
1850 1851 1852 1853

The Province of New Munster was led by Lieutenant-Governor Edward John Eyre, whose residence was First Government House (depicted) on the land where Parliament now sits in Wellington.

Source

New Munster Gazette Statistics

7

Years Covered

157

Issues Processed

957

Pages Transcribed

12,047

Names Identified

5,720

Unique Names

2,218

Named Officials

422

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.