David Burn and 'The Maori Messenger'

The publication of government-sponsored newspapers and translations of the literature of the colonisers is acknowledged as a significant aspect of the colonising processes of the British Empire. The significance of such publications in New Zealand was certainly apparent in nineteenth-century New Zealand. In a paper with the telling subtitle 'Translation and Colonial Acculturation in Victorian New Zealand' Shef Rogers notes two examples: the translation into Maori of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe published in Wellington in 1852 and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in 1854.