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.