Nearly Out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer's Diary

This original and thought-provoking book is based on the 800,000-word diary of James Cox, an itinerant laborer living in New Zealand between 1880 and 1925. Cox's diary is a rare record of the daily life of a permanent member of the colonial working class - nothing like it exists in a New Zealand archive and little elsewhere. Rather than reproducing selections of the somewhat down-to-earth diary entries, Fairburn uses it more interestingly, taking the life of this obscure and unimportant man to explore in novel and ambitious ways some issues in writing and understanding nineteenth-century New Zealand history, colonial societies and working-class experience.

Miles Fairburn is senior lecturer in history at Victoria University of Wellington.