Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand最新文献

In this paper we test a long-held assumption regarding Otago, New Zealand, goldfields life and death- that scurvy was a ubiquitous and persistent cause of misery and death among the goldminers. We will also explore a parallel argument that the Chinese market gardeners played a large role in stamping out the disease in the goldfields. Through the interrogation of various archival medical primary sources, we show that scurvy was indeed a terrible scourge in the Otago goldfields, but only during the initial rushes into new regions. We also argue that while Chinese market gardeners undoubtedly contributed to a more nutritious and varied diet for European miners and settlers, scurvy had already markedly reduced in frequency by the time of their arrival in the gold fields. Patient-oriented accounts of scurvy in the gold demonstrate the clinical and functional cost of scurvy in during the initial gold rushes of Otago. Furthermore, individual stories of previously anonymous patients found locked in these archival sources demonstrate the importance of re-humanising the past to understand the biological and social context of these frontier times.

The majority of children and young people in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) experience good health and wellbeing, but there are key areas where they compare unfavourably to those in other rich countries. However, current measures of wellbeing are critically limited in their suitability to reflect the dynamic, culture-bound, and subjective nature of the concept of 'wellbeing'. In particular, there is a lack of measurement in primary school-aged children and in ways that incorporate Māori perspectives on wellbeing. A Better Start National Science Challenge work in the areas of Big Data, Healthy Weight, Resilient Teens, and Successful learning demonstrates how research is increasing our understanding of, and our ability to enhance, wellbeing for NZ children. As we look ahead to the future, opportunities to support the wellbeing of NZ young people will be shaped by how we embrace and mitigate against potential harms of new technologies, and our ability to respond to new challenges that arise due to climate change. In order to avoid increasing inequity in who experiences wellbeing in NZ, wellbeing must be monitored in ways that are culturally acceptable, universal, and recognise what makes children flourish.

There is increasing support, in international legal theory and advocacy, for water governance approaches that go beyond the technocratic, and recognise the reciprocal relatedness of water peoples and water places. Such an approach may seem logical within certain Indigenous law and belief systems, but can Western legal frameworks become more 'relational'? How can they evolve to be capable of meaningfully relating with Indigenous systems of law and governance for water? This article draws on a comprehensive survey of comparative legal developments affecting water across seven settler-colonial countries in Australasia and Latin America that attempt (or profess) to be relational. I critically evaluate these attempts against the 'yardstick' of relationality. In each jurisdiction there are unresolved calls for a social, cultural and constitutional transformation of some sort, in which Indigenous and environmental justice are key. The analysis here reveals the potential for constitutional law to drive relational water laws, although without place-based specificity and supporting institutions, resources and redistributions of power, constitutional approaches risk having little practical impact.