Copyright
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 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).
Site Updates
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| 18 June 2026 | Adjusted search results to show larger snippets |
| 16 June 2026 | Added missing years 1853-1858 for Taranaki Provincial Gazette, kindly provided by Rachel from Puke Ariki |
| 12 June 2026 | Site featured in Unsettling (Vincent O'Malley's blog) |
| 5 June 2026 | Added missing years 1863-1873 for Nelson Provincial Gazette, and missing year 1874 for Canterbury Provincial Gazette |
| 20 May 2026 | Added missing years 1853-1862 and 1874-1876 for Nelson Provincial Gazette; added missing years and issues for Otago Provincial Gazette |
| 5 May 2026 | Added missing issues for Hawke's Bay, Auckland and Marlborough Provincial Gazettes |
| 24 April 2026 | Added missing issues for Otago, New Ulster and Wellington Provincial Gazettes |
| 17 April 2026 | Added missing years 1852-1853 for New Munster Provincial Gazette; added missing issues for Canterbury and Westland Provincial Gazettes |
| 3 April 2026 | Added various missing Wellington Provincial Gazette issues from Wellington Recollect, kindly digitised by Wellington City Libraries |
| 24 March 2026 | Site launched |
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.