NZs

Science

Uncovering the past: How NZ’s first prison tells a complex story of colonial identity

View of Kororareka in the Bay of Islands, 1845. Credit: George Thomas Clayton, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY New Zealand’s first prison was a simple, symmetrical four-room log building built in 1840 at Okiato in the Bay of Islands, not far from present-day Russell. But its history, especially its forgotten parts, can tell us a lot about how we have constructed…