Wellington Provincial Gazette

Also known as New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Wellington)

Historical Background

Wellington Province was one of the six original provinces established under the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, proclaimed into force on 17 January 1853. It was formed from the southern portion of the former New Munster province, covering much of the lower half of the North Island.

As originally defined, the province stretched from Cook Strait north to the 39th parallel, excluding the western salient around Mount Taranaki which formed part of New Plymouth Province. This made it the second largest of the original provinces.

In 1858, Hawke's Bay Province separated from Wellington under the New Provinces Act, taking roughly a third of Wellington's area. Wellington city served as the provincial capital throughout, and took on greater national significance when it replaced Auckland as the capital of New Zealand in 1865. The former Wellington Provincial Council chamber subsequently became the new home of Parliament.

Provincial government was abolished under the Abolition of Provinces Act, which took full effect on 1 November 1876.

Missing Issues

Year	Issue No	Notes	Pages
1856	11-12	Missing from Wellington Recollect for 1856; VUW has no 1856 issues	47-64
1856	14	Missing from Wellington Recollect for 1856; VUW has no 1856 issues	70-110
1856	18-21	Missing from Wellington Recollect for 1856; VUW has no 1856 issues	131-146

Sources

Wellington City Recollect has scanned and made available a nearly complete set of the Wellington Provincial Gazette, along with Acts and Proceedings of the Provincial Council. See above for issue numbers which are missing.
The Victoria University Gazette Archive has a reasonably complete set of the Wellington Provincial Gazette. However it is missing all 1856 issues, issues 22-34 for 1864, issues 9-19 for 1870 and a dozen others in various years.
Issues 23-25 for 1864 were digitised by volunteers Luke and Carole at the National Library Wellington Reading Rooms in April 2026 for this project. Many thanks to the National Library for their assistance.

Map of provincial boundaries, 1873

1873 Province boundaries (from Wikipedia)

Further reading

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

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

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

Browse by Year

1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859
1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869
1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876

The Wellington Provincial Council Chambers (depicted) were shared with Parliament after 1865

Source

Wellington Provincial Gazette Statistics

24

Years Covered

784

Issues Processed

4,584

Pages Transcribed

61,460

Names Identified

22,923

Unique Names

8,548

Named Officials

1,026

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.