Convicts

New Zealand's Pakeha origin as a bolt - hole for convicts escaping Australia, a place where former convicts joined whaling and sealing gangs, and where sea captains thumbed their noses at the law, has been quietly forgotten. It has become a hidden part of our past, buried under the convenient fiction that the Treaty of Waitangi is the sole pivot of New Zealand's colonial story. In Convicts: New Zealand's Hidden Criminal Past, noted historian Matthew Wright challenges that notion. Our early nineteenth - century Pakeha past is, at least in part, a story of convicts who had found their way past the edge of the law, an age of heroic tales of survival, scurrilous deeds, cannibalism and piracy.