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~14thC. |
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|
The canoe Mataatua is in danger of being carried out to sea and, the men having gone ashore, Wairaka or her aunt Muriwai says "E! Kia whakatäne ake au i ahau!" (Oh, let me make myself a man!) and drags it ashore, hence the name of that place, Whakatane. |
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~17thC. |
|
|
Hinemoa swims Lake Rotorua and takes Tütänekai from his takatäpui, Tiki. |
|
1814 |
December |
25 |
In the Bay of Islands, a sadist, the Rev. Samuel Marsden, preaches the first Christian service. |
|
1835 |
October |
28 |
Maori Declaration of Independence signed |
|
1836 |
|
|
The Rev. William Yate is expelled from New Zealand for scandalous practices (tïtoitoi) with young Maori. |
|
1840 |
February |
6 |
The Treaty of Waitangi grants the Maori tino rangatiratanga and brings Aotearoa/NZ under British law. |
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1845 |
|
|
Mary Taylor, a former lover of Charlotte Bronte, arrives from England with her brother Waring and sets up a drapery store. She returns in 1859. The store is later sold to James Smith. |
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1861 |
|
|
(UK: Death penalty for buggery abolished) |
|
1863 |
September |
|
Charles Paine Pauli visits Samuel Butler at the Carlton Hotel, Christchurch, and their relationship develops. |
|
1867 |
|
|
Offences Against the Person Act incorporates UK reform of Buggery law. (There were no known executions for buggery in NZ) |
|
1869 |
April |
28 |
Frances Hodgkins is born in Dunedin |
|
1885 |
|
|
(UK: Criminal Law Amendment Act passed raising the age of consent from 12 to 16, with the amendment of Henry Labouchère - intended to protect boys - which criminalises all same sex activity.) |
|
1888 |
October |
14 |
Kathleen Beauchamp, later Katherine Mansfield, is born in Wellington. |
|
1893 |
|
|
NZ Criminal Code adds crime of "indecent assault on male" and adds flogging or whipping to hard labour as penalties. |
|
1893 |
September |
19 |
Parliament grants women the vote. |
|
1895 |
|
|
(UK: Oscar Wilde sentenced to two years hard labour for "indecent assault on males") |
|
1897 |
May |
14 |
(Germany: Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Scientific-humanitarian committee.) |
|
1901 |
February |
6 |
Frances Hodgkins leaves NZ for Europe. She meets Dorothy Kate Richmond around this time. |
|
1907 |
|
|
Kathleen Beauchamp begins affairs with Maata Mahupuku and Edith Bendall. |
|
1906 |
December |
|
"Boy" Bertha, from Hokitika, arrested in Sydney in male clothing and described as "sapphic". |
|
1908 |
July |
6 |
Kathleen Beauchamp leaves for England after her father reads her lesbian short story, "Leves Amores" (signed "K. Mansfield") |
|
1909 |
|
|
Amy Bock is imprisoned for fraud after passing as a man and marrying a woman (who thought she was a man). She later lived with a woman in Taranaki. |
|
1910 |
May |
10 |
Moetu Haangu Ngawai is born at Tokomaru Bay. Her twin sister dies young and she becomes known as Tuini |
|
1910 |
December |
3 |
(8.40am) Lesbian Freda Du Faur is the first woman to climb Mt Cook |
|
1913 |
December |
17 |
Rupert Brooke arrives in Auckland. He visits Wairakei and Taihape and leaves from Wellington on January 8, 1914 |
|
1916 |
June |
18 |
Alexander Turnbull dies and leaves his library to "the King". |
|
1917 |
January |
30 |
W. Somerset Maugham and his lover Gerald Haxton spend one night in Wellington on their way between Samoa (Rain) and Tahiti (TheMoon and Sixpence). |
|
1919 |
July |
6 |
(Germany: Magnus Hirschfeld opens the Institute for Sexual Sciences, Berlin) |
|
1920s |
|
|
"Harry Crawford" is arrested for the murder of "his" first wife in Australia and revealed to be a woman, Eugenia Falleni, who had cross-dressed from an early age in Wellington. |
|
1920 |
May |
15 |
Charles Mackay, mayor of Wanganui, shoots and wounds bad poet D’Arcy Cresswell after Cresswell (an agent provocateur, himself gay) threatens to expose him. McKay serves seven years. |
|
1923 |
January |
9 |
(Fontainbleu, France: Katherine Mansfield dies of tuberculosis.) |
|
1923 |
October |
|
(Kassel, Hesse, Germany: 500 take part in first-ever gay rights/pride march, organised by Magnus Hirschfeld) |
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1924 |
|
|
Effie Pollen moves from Wellington to Christchurch to live with poet Mary Ursula Bethell for the rest of her life. |
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1928 |
|
|
(UK: Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, is published, and banned in New Zealand.) |
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1929 |
|
|
Deresley Morton, who left NZ early in the century, dies in California and is found to have been a woman, though she had married a woman. Her papers reveal her love of women. |
|
1929 |
September |
|
Norris Davey (later Frank Sargeson) is arrested at a boarding house with Leonard Hollobon and charged with performing indecent acts. |
|
1929 |
October |
29 |
Norris Davey is convicted and given a suspended sentence (in return for giving evidence). |
|
1933 |
May |
6 |
(Germany: Nazi youths sack Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Sciences and on the 10th, publicly burn it. Film of this is usually identified only as "Nazis burning books.") |
|
1936 |
|
|
"The Well of Loneliness" is released in New Zealand. |
|
1936 |
|
|
Musician Eric Mareo is accused of the murder of Thelma Mareo. Prosecution witness Freda Stark (famous for dancing clad only in gold paint at the Civic Theatre, Auckland) is revealed to be her bedmate. Mareo is convicted. |
|
1936 |
June |
30 |
(Germany: Minister of the Reich, a founder of the Nazi Party, and Chief of Staff of the SA, Ernst Roehm, shot in the Night of the Long Knives.) |
|
1939 |
late |
|
Tuini Ngawai composes "Arohaina Mai" and "E te Hokowhitu-a-Tu" for the departure of C Company, 28th (Maori) Battalion. They are still sung today. |
|
1943 |
August -
September |
27 -
3 |
US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visits New Zealand, without her lover Lorena Hikok, but with a "personal aide", Norah Walton, who could not type, though Eleanor had to produce a daily syndicated column. |
|
1945 |
September |
|
Two women, 30 and 18, are convicted of breaking the Marriage Act by marrying each other. The older woman, who had undergone mammectomy in order to "pass" is given three years probation and psychiatric treatment. |
|
1946 |
February |
6 |
Miles Radcliffe is murdered at the Adams Bruce chocolate factory, 16 College St, Wellington, by an unknown man. |
|
1947 |
May |
13 |
(UK: Frances Hodgkins dies.) |
|
1948 |
May |
13-16 |
Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, visits New Zealand. He tells an Auckland audience "the real test of a democracy is the protection it gives its minorities" though he probably did not have his fellow homosexuals in mind. |
|
1950 |
November |
|
(US: Androgynes Anonymous, later the Mattachine Society, forms in Los Angeles) |
|
1954 |
|
|
(UK: Wolfenden Committee begins considering homosexual law.) |
|
1954 |
June |
22 |
Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker kill Pauline’s mother Honora Parker in Victoria Park, Christchurch. |
|
1954 |
August |
28 |
Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker are sentenced to be detained "at Her Majesty’s pleasure" casting a shadow over lesbianism that lasts for over a decade. |
|
1955 |
|
|
New Zealand Pictorial reports that "gangs of homosexuals...live together for the sake of perversion. You see these warped-brain men - and women too - wandering about the streets or sitting idly in night cafes." |
|
1956 |
|
|
(US: Daughters of Bilitis formed.) |
|
1957 |
|
|
(UK: Wolfenden Committee recommends decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.) |
|
1959 |
|
|
Expatriate James Courage’s gay novel "A Way of Love" published in England, banned by Customs here. |
|
1959 |
|
|
The Attorney-General (H G R Mason) in the second Labour Government tries unsuccessfully to have the penalties for homosexual acts reduced. |
|
1961 |
|
|
Crimes Act removes flogging and whipping as penalties. |
|
1961 |
|
|
Dorian Society established in Wellington by Kees Cooge, Jack Goodwin, Claude Tanner and John Mackay. It lasts (at four different premises) until 1988. |
|
1961 |
|
|
Tuini Ngawai wins the women’s section of the Golden Shears at Gisborne. |
|
~1962 |
|
|
Magistrate Lee discharges Cock and Smith without conviction for indecent acts in a St Albans, Christchurch, bog, because the law "is soon to change". Police appeal successfully. |
|
~1963 |
|
|
Some Wellington lesbians advertise for any interested women to contact "the Radclyffe Hall Memorial Society". They are disappointed that respondents are more social than political. |
|
1963 |
|
|
The Dorian Society sets up a legal subcommittee, which later forms the Homosexual Law Reform Society. |
|
1963 |
|
|
Many newspapers would not print the word "homosexual". |
|
1964 |
January |
23 |
Charles Aberhart is killed in Hagley Park, Christchurch, by six youths |
|
1964 |
May |
10 |
The youths who killed Charles Aberhart are acquitted of manslaughter |
|
1964-5 |
|
|
Ralph Knowles is "treated" for homosexuality by aversion. |
|
1967 |
|
|
(UK: Sexual Offences Act embodies Wolfenden Report reforms. Homosexual acts still illegal except in private - no more than two people - between consenting adults) |
|
1967 |
|
|
Ellen Davis is accused of the murder of her lover, Raewyn Petley. Petley is characterised as "predatory", Davis acquitted. |
|
1967 |
April |
17 |
The Wolfenden Association (later the Homosexual Law Reform Society) formed by members of the legal subcommittee of the Dorian Club in Wellington. |
|
1967 |
July |
8 |
Former G-G Lord Cobham declines an invitation to be patron of the Wolfenden Association, comparing homosexuality to smallpox. |
|
1968 |
|
|
A petition signed by 75 prominent citizens organised by the Homosexual Law Reform Society is presented to the government, and rejected. |
|
1969 |
June |
27 |
(US: Stonewall riots, New York, mark the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement.) |
|
1969 |
July |
6 |
Homosexual Law Reform Committee of University of Canterbury Students’ Association holds a public meeting at which Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan - a prominent opponent of the 1985 Wilde Bill - speaks. |
|
1970 |
April |
|
Composer/pianist Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears pay a brief visit to Christchurch and Auckland, giving one recital to a packed Auckland Town Hall on April 7. Auckland’s A-gays give a private dinner to the couple. |
|
1971 |
|
|
First feminist magazine, "Up From Under", is produced by Wellington Women’s Liberation Front. |
|
1971 |
September |
19 |
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku leads women’s liberation in a Suffrage Day of Mourning. In a "Gallery" TV interview, she describes herself as "a sapphic woman" and says lesbians have been in the vanguard of women’s struggles for centuries. |
|
1971 |
October |
|
"Lesbians should be banned from viewing material in bookshops showing the naked female form, as they are likely to be as excited as any young men." - morals campaigner Patricia Bartlett. |
|
1971 |
late |
|
The KG [Kamp Girls] Club, a social club for lesbians, established in private homes in Auckland, then in premises in Karangahape Rd, Beach Rd, Hereford St Ponsonby, and Albert St. |
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