Southland Provincial Gazette

Also known as Southland Provincial Government Gazette

Historical Background

Southland Province had a shorter and more eventful existence than most, being the only province to be abolished before the general abolition of provincial government in 1876. It was created under the New Provinces Act 1858 by separation from Otago Province, taking effect on 1 April 1861, and was reabsorbed into Otago in 1870.

The region — known to Māori as Murihiku, meaning "the last joint of the tail" — had originally been part of New Munster under the 1846 constitutional arrangement, before passing to Otago Province when the six original provinces were established in 1853. Settlement of the Southland plains had begun in the mid-1850s, and growing population led to calls for separation from the distant Otago administration in Dunedin. Stewart Island, which had not been part of any province since 1853, was annexed to Southland on 10 November 1863.

The province was centred on Invercargill, named in honour of William Cargill, the first Superintendent of Otago. Like its parent province, Southland had a strongly Scottish character. Its provincial council building in Invercargill is one of only two surviving provincial council buildings in New Zealand, the other being Canterbury's.

Southland accumulated significant debt during its brief existence, and with Otago prospering from its gold rush revenues, the two provinces were reunited in 1870. The area continued as part of Otago Province until the abolition of all provincial government on 1 November 1876.

Missing Issues

Year	Issue No	Notes	Page numbers
1869	7	late March	35-36
1868	29	early December	165-166

Map of provincial boundaries, 1873

1873 Province boundaries (from Wikipedia)

Further reading

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

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

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

Browse by Year

1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869
1870

Built in 1864 as a Masonic lodge, this building was purchased by the Southland Provincial Council as their council chambers in 1866. It still stands today.

Source

Southland Provincial Gazette Statistics

10

Years Covered

265

Issues Processed

1,478

Pages Transcribed

7,790

Names Identified

4,255

Unique Names

2,307

Named Officials

453

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.