Living on New Zealand Street: Maori Presence in Parramatta

Conventional narratives of Maori encounters with non-Maori logically cohere around the geographic space of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and tend to focus on the post-1840 (treaty) period and on Maori encounters with Europeans. This article examines two institutions in Parramatta, now a suburb of Sydney, Australia, at which Maori students were present in the first decades of the nineteenth century—the New Zealand Seminary and the Native Institution—in order to explore what can happen to our understandings of Maori history if we start at a small street in that suburb named New Zealand Street. In Parramatta, Maori presence is diasporic, early, complex, and deeply entangled in the histories of other indigenous people.