Teenagers ─ The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand

Teenagers is a ground-breaking history of young people in New Zealand from the nineteenth century to the 1960s. Through the diaries and letters, photographs and drawings that teenagers left behind, we meet New Zealanders as they transition from children to adults: sealers and bushfellers, factory girls and newspaper boys, the male ‘mashers’ of the 1880s and the female ‘flappers’ of the 1910s and ’20s, schoolgirls and rock’n’rollers, larrikins and louts. By taking us inside the lives of young New Zealanders, the book illuminates from a new angle large-scale changes in our society: the rise and fall of domestic service, the impact of compulsory education, the movement of Pakeha and then Maori from country to city, the rise of consumer culture and popular psychology. Teenagers shows us how young people made sense of their personal and social transformations: in language and song and dress, at dances and picnics and social clubs, in talking and playing and reading. Teenagers provides an intimate and evocative insight into the lives of young people and the history of New Zealand.

Chris Brickell is an associate professor in gender studies at the University of Otago. His first book, Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (2008) won the NZSA E. H. McCormick Best First Book Award for Non-Fiction in the 2009 Montana Book Awards. His other books are Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1885–1915 (2012), Two-by-Two: Men in Pairs (2013) and Southern Men: Gay Lives in Pictures (2014). He has published on the history and sociology of sexuality, masculinity and adolescence in many international journals, including Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Sociological Review, Rethinking History, Visual Anthropology, Gender, Place & Culture and Journal of Social History.