JUDITH BINNEY FELLOW 2025
Dr Rachel Buchanan
Manuhiri – the many guises of the guest
Dr Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki iwi, Te Ātiawa) is a member of Te Aro Pā Poets collective and Te Pouhere Kōrero Māori Historians Network.
A long-term resident in Naarm/Melbourne, Rachel has worked as a journalist, an academic and a curator and is an established award-winning author. Rachel has funded her writing through part-time work as a speechwriter and senior policy officer in the Victorian public service. The Judith Binney Fellowship will allow her to take at least 12 months away from paid employment and to focus, completely, on writing, thinking and research in Aotearoa and in Te Ao Moemoea (Australia).
Manuhiri – the many guises of the guest will focus on the shifting roles and guises of visitors and guests in three interconnected places – Wellington, Taranaki and Australia. An intimate and innovative collection of linked historical essays will explore the theme and impact of manuhiri, the fleeting or long-term visitors – welcome or not – that uplift, overturn, challenge and transform the lives of individuals and communities.
Rachel Buchanan’s most recent award-winning book, Te Motunui Epa, was supported by a Judith Binney Trust Writing Award in 2020. The publication was a co-winner of the 2023 Ernest Scott Prize and the W. H. Oliver Prize and a finalist in the Māori Literature Trust’s inaugural Keri Hulme Award and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Rei – A whānau history of Aotearoa Art, a small book based on Rachel’s 2023 Gordon H Brown lecture, will be published by Art History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in November 2024 and her essay, ‘Beating Shame: Parihaka and the very long sorry’ is anthologised in Maranga! Maranga! Maranga! The Call to Māori History: Essays from Te Pouhere Kōrero 1999-2023 (BWB Books, 2024). A new edition of her first book, The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget (Huia, 2009), is coming out soon.
JUDITH BINNEY WRITING AWARD 2025
Dr Marianne Schultz
Stepping Lightly: The Dancing Life of Thomas O’Carroll/Jan Caryll
Marianne Schultz completed her Masters and PhD in History from the University of Auckland, in addition to a MA Performing Arts from Middlesex University, London. Prior to this she attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts. While pursuing her doctorate she held the Keith Sinclair Scholarship in History at the University of Auckland.
She is the author of two books; Performing Indigenous Culture on Stage and Screen: A Harmony of Frenzy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Limbs Dance Company: Dance for All People (DANZ, 2017). Articles and chapters on dance and performing arts history have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals including Dance Research, Theatre Journal, the New Zealand Journal of History and the Melbourne Historical Journal.
Alongside her work as a historian and writer, Marianne has danced professionally in the United States and New Zealand, including with Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians, Limbs Dance Company, Douglas Wright and Dancers and The Foster Group.
Her teaching environment includes both the classroom and studio and she has taught dance technique and dance history at the University of Auckland, Unitec, the London School of Contemporary Dance, the New Zealand School of Dance and with many professional dance companies in Aotearoa. A recent teaching post was as Humanities lecturer at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York.
When not writing, dancing or teaching Marianne works as an archivist for several performing arts organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand and the USA.
The Judith Binney Writing Award will allow the completion of a biography of Thomas O’Carroll, aka Jan Caryll, New Zealand’s ‘first male ballet student’. Stepping Lightly will explore the life of a relatively unknown New Zealander who established an international career in dance throughout the UK and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in Rangiora in 1893, and raised in Ashburton, he settled in London, where his ballet teacher christened him Jan Caryll. At the end of World War I he established a career in dance performing throughout the UK and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Intertwined with O’Carroll’s/ Caryll’s story is the transnational development of the art form of ballet in the twentieth century alongside the development of a new geopolitical world order following World War I. As the century progressed, other types of dance emerged in his repertoire, reflecting changing social norms and cultural expression.
O’Carroll’s/Caryll’s personal story also intersects with tales of exiled New Zealand male artists who, needing to find an outlet for their talent and commitment to their art, left New Zealand and who were all but overlooked thereafter in their homeland. His story highlights the changing representations of masculinity in the early twentieth century and the ways that men who danced found ways to create their own masculine identities within a period of war and reconstruction. This biography illuminates Caryll’s life story and rescues his unique dancing life from obscurity.
JUDITH BINNEY WRITING AWARD 2025
Dr Sandra Thomas
‘Friends’ on Trial: Ihāka Takānini and Heta Tarawhiti in the Compensation Court 1865-67
Dr Sandra Thomas is a graduate of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She has a BA (Hons) in History and Political Science, an LLB, and she completed her PhD through the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies in 2023. She is based in Auckland.
Early in her career Sandra was a member of the Crown team which supported Sir Douglas Graham in the negotiation of the 1995 Waikato-Tainui raupatu claims treaty settlement. She has subsequently worked as a lawyer and as an independent researcher and says her thesis topic has been percolating since she worked on the raupatu claim negotiations.
Sandra’s thesis ‘At the arbitrary disposal of the Government’: ‘Loyal’ Māori, confiscation, and the operation of the Compensation Court in South Auckland and Waikato 1865-67 looked at the confiscation of land from Māori who were ‘loyal’ non-combatants during the Waikato war of 1863-64 and at the compensation process established at that time to legitimise the settler government’s actions. Her thesis cast new light on this period of New Zealand’s settlement highlighting the settler state’s ‘take now, pay later’ approach towards the property of its ‘friends’.
The Judith Binney writing award will assist Sandra to prepare a book manuscript drawing on the thesis which focuses in greater detail on the settler government’s treatment of two applicants to the court who were singled out for special treatment by the settler government. ‘Friends’ on Trial: Ihāka Takānini and Heta Tarawhiti in the Compensation Court 1865-67 will explore why these two men were required to prove their ‘loyalty’ while other applications were as good as rubber-stamped or settled out of court.
The Judith Binney Trust grant will enable Sandra to dig deeper into the motivations of the decision-makers to make a show of Takānini in 1865 and Tarawhiti in 1867, and how on both occasions the judges of the Compensation Court could only mitigate the effects of those actions – they could not reverse the wrong.
Sandra is keen to cast light on an aspect of New Zealand’s colonisation which remains largely unexplored.
JUDITH BINNEY WRITING AWARD 2025
Will Hansen
Queer Activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1962 – 2013
Will Hansen is a Wellington based historian whose PhD thesis: Queer Activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1962 – 2013, has been submitted in the History Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Will Hansen is proudly transgender and a trustee of Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa.
This research project explores queer activism in Aotearoa from 1962 to 2013 and is the first work of its kind to bring the politics of transgender, bisexual, takatāpui, intersex, and more communities jointly into focus.
“Queer” is used purposefully here. Working in a transfeminist framework, “queer” foregrounds how materially entwined the myriad communities of people with diverse genders, sexualities, and sex characteristics really are. Through oral histories the relationships between multiple queer activist communities are interrogated, fierce debates examined alongside collaborations and moments of profound solidarity.
The Judith Binney Writing Award will support the transformation of a PhD thesis into a manuscript for publication. Will’s work is based on oral histories and he hopes to prepare a manuscript and publish a book that will highlight diverse life histories and their interconnections in ways that will appeal to the general reader as well as queer readers.