One Land Expert: Dr Lyndon Fraser
Dr Lyndon Fraser
Dr Lyndon Fraser - Historian
A prize-winning author and historian, Dr. Lyndon Fraser is a senior
lecturer at Canterbury University.
With his long hair and rock and roll attire Fraser is definitely
not your stereotypical stuffy historian! But history is certainly
his passion - he says it is not just his job, but his favourite
hobby too. He blames his grandparents and visits to the
reconstructed 19th Century street at the Canterbury Museum for his
love of the era: "The diorama of the worker's cottage and the
first-class shipboard cabin. It really got my imagination
going ... the smell & look of the past.
So I love 'stuff' from that period and always wonder what it must
have been like ... I just love migrant letters and hearing the
voices of ordinary people buried waist deep in daily routines! Love
the clothes, the rituals, the smell & look of the period."
He specialises in colonial migration history in New Zealand and has published a raft of books on the subject including A Distant Shore: Irish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (2000, as editor), Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History (2002, co-edited with Katie Pickles) and Castles of Gold: A History of New Zealand's West Coast Irish (2007).
A big fan of previous series Colonial House and Pioneer House Lyndon jumped at the chance of being involved with One Land and the opportunity to beam history into living rooms around New Zealand.
He is immensely proud of the One Land series:
"One Land is a beautiful and compelling series that takes three families on an exciting journey back to New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows us the challenges faced by our ancestors - both Maori and Pakeha - during a pivotal moment in the nation's history.
"We discover the kinds of clothes people wore, the nature of their working lives, their leisure time and the foods that they ate. Most of all, One Land tells us something very important about the relationship between Maori and Pakeha and the need to understand our shared colonial past in order to move forward together in the twenty-first century."
