Lyndon Fraser 

This article offers new insights into New Zealand’s early alpine recreation and tourism heritage. It focuses on Joseph James Kinsey (1852–1936), an extraordinary yet typical Victorian gentleman of the day, and his collection of alpine photographs and related ephemera held at Canterbury Museum, which captures the evolutionary moment of the South Island’s mountains’ transformation into a tourist site.

Lummis G, Fraser L, Cobley J. 2021. Kinsey’s Southern “Wonderland of Ice and Snow”: New Insights into Early Alpine Photography. Records of the Canterbury Museum 35: 211–245.

Canterbury Museum houses a small but varied collection of memorial jewellery from the nineteenth century that provides a window into European deathways during the period. This article places these objects in the context of far-reaching changes that led to a new social order of the dead.

Fraser L, Bradshaw J. 2020. “Any relic of the dead is precious”: Nineteenth-Century Mourning Jewellery at the Canterbury Museum. Records of the Canterbury Museum 34: 63–84.

This paper presents the initial findings from a collaborative and cross-institutional history project between researchers at the University of Canterbury and Canterbury Museum. We aimed to establish the number and provenance of the extant shipboard narratives currently held by the Museum for the period 1842 to 1914. One of the major findings of our work has been the fact that the Museum holds more than 200 personal narratives, some of which have associated artefacts or images. This makes the collection one of the largest of its type in New Zealand and certainly very significant in the wider context of Australasian migration history.

Fraser L, Szczepanski J, Rosevear E. 2019. “The sea was going mountains high”: Shipboard accounts at Canterbury Museum. Records of the Canterbury Museum 33: 31–77.

This study compares the field experience and development of sense of place (in this case, human attributed meanings and attachments to the field area) in geoscience students on three separate course sections of a six-day introductory geological mapping field trip.

Jolley A, Hampton S, Brogt E, Kennedy B, Fraser L, Knox A. 2019. Student field experiences: designing for different instructors and variable weather. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 43 (1): 71–95.

Lyndon edited and wrote the introduction for the section of this huge multi-disciplinary project entitled ‘Ethnicity, Migration, and Labor’ (pp. 1643–1709). It seeks to answer two main questions: How can we best explain the creation of ethnic categorisations, boundaries and identifications in particular circumstances? What is the relationship between ethnic configurations and labour migrancy, the introduction of capitalist systems of production, and state-building in colonial and postcolonial societies?

Ratuva S, Fraser L et al, editors. 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity. Nagasaki: Palgrave.

This essay explores the centuries of human mobility across the Tasman Sea and how Australasia’s shared migration histories have been obscured by national narratives. It teases out the policy implications of these movements, including those related to social services reciprocation and deportation.

Fraser L. 2019. Migration, Nation and Public Histories in New Zealand: New Perspectives and Possibilities. In: Henrich E, Simpson J, editors. History, Historians and the Immigration Debate: Going Back to Where We Came From. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; pp55–70.

This article uses questionnaire data collected at the start of two geoscience field trips, and compares motivation and connection to Earth of study abroad students from the United States with local New Zealand students. Results show that study abroad students have more expert-like motivations and ecological worldviews, and are more attached to and see more positive and diverse meanings in the field area.

Jolley A, Brogt E, Kennedy B, Hampton S, Fraser L. 2018. Motivation and connection to Earth on geology field trips in New Zealand: Comparing American study abroad student with local undergraduates. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 30 (3): 72–99.

This study compares the field experience of students participating in two distinct modules of a study abroad field camp in New Zealand, through sense of place and perceptions of learning. The situated module was geological mapping based in a single site, whereas the roadside module was based on smaller exercises in multiple discrete sites. We assimilate our field observations and student and instructor interview data into a schematic model of the two field trip styles. This model is then used to visualize an improved pedagogy to foster greater engagement with the landscape and geology in the roadside trip.

Jolley A, Kennedy B, Brogt E, Hampton S, Fraser L. 2018. Are we there yet? Sense of place and the student experience on roadside and situated geology field trips. Geosphere 14 (2): 651–667.

This essay highlights two key areas in the investigation of Australasian“deathways,”a term that scholars have used to capture the diversity of mortuary beliefs and practices, including ideas about the afterlife, relations with the dead, the preparation of corpses, funerary commerce, burial ceremonies, and rites of commemoration and remembrance: (a) the scholarship surrounding indigenous practices and cross-cultural encounters on the colonial frontier and (b) the great waves of migration to New Zealand and Australia during the nineteenth century.

Fraser, L. 2017. Death in Nineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand. History Compass 15 (7): 1-14.

This paper draws on more than 500 shipboard accounts, including those held by Canterbury Museum, to explore the private experiences of death, grief and mourning on voyages from Britain to New Zealand from the beginnings of systematic colonisation in the 1840s until a decline in new arrivals during the early 1880s in the wake of an economic recession.

Fraser L. 2022. ‘The Watery Grave’: Representations of Death, Grief and Mourning in the Shipboard Accounts of British and Irish Migrants to New Zealand’, DNS XVIII Marine Worlds of the Long Eighteenth Century Conference, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

Fraser L. 2020. “To my child now expecting to be born”: Women’s Wills as Acts of Remembrance in Victorian Canterbury. Aotearoa New Zealand Gender History Seminar, University of Waikato, 28 October.

This paper seeks to address fundamental questions about context, symbolism, materiality, writing and memory in relation to Victorian deathways. It features a close study of two South Island graveyards that brings together the field and the archive. In so doing, I critically engage with Thomas Laqueur’s recent claims about the "newly configured idolatry of the dead" and the interests served by the ‘historicist jumble’ of the nineteenth-century cemetery.

Fraser L. 2019. The Place of the Dead: Religion, Remembrance and the New Regime on the Edge of Empire. For the New Zealand Historical Association Conference, Victorian University of Wellington.

This paper draws on probate files from Victorian Canterbury to explore will-making as a mode of cultural production. How can we best understand and frame the actions of will-makers? What are we to make of their bequests? To what extent did the practice of ‘gifting’ differ between, say, women and men, or between denominations? At a deeper anthropological level, what does will-making tell us about the ways that these people viewed their world and the one to come?

Fraser L. 2019. ‘To my child now expecting to be born’: Women’s Wills as Acts of Remembrance in Victorian Canterbury. For the 1869 Conference, University of Otago.

This paper offers a broad overview of the Canterbury Museum collection shipboard accounts, which is one of the most significant in Australasia.

Fraser L, Szczepanski J, Rosevear E. 2019. “The sea was going mountains high”: Shipboard accounts at Canterbury Museum. For the Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba.

In a magisterial study of death in the New World, Erik R. Seeman reminds us that for thousands of years one of the first questions humans asked when they encountered unfamiliar peoples was about their deathways. Scholars have found a similar fascination at work in ‘the meeting places’ of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. This paper offers some preliminary reflections on the state of scholarship in this area.

Fraser L. 2018. Some Reflections on Death and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Victorian New Zealand. For the RememberMe: The Changing Face of Memorialisation Conference, University.

This short paper reports some preliminary findings from a study of shipboard accounts held by Canterbury Museum.

Fraser L. 2018. The Watery Grave: Death at Sea on voyages to New Zealand. For the RememberMe: The Changing Face of Memorialisation Conference, University of Hull.

This ‘live’ paper uses a night tour of the Barbadoes Street Cemetery in Christchurch to reveal aspects of Victorian and early Edwardian deathways in a colonial setting.

Fraser L. 2018. The Barbadoes Street Cemetery Tour – After Dark. For the Museums Aotearoa Annual Conference, Christchurch.