Ment and his short one in 1872 in Fox's governments, 1861-72, and also the Domett and Weld governments, 1862-5, during the Anglo-Maori wars.Īs well as these intermittent periods of ministerial office in the colony, Sewell was briefly legal adviser to the first Canterbury Provincial Executive in 1853 and represented Lyttelton in the Provincial Council for one session, 1855-6. These were the short-lived 'mixed-ministry' of 1854 his own even briefer period as the first Premier under responsible government in 1856 Stafford's long 1856-61 govern. For most of his parliamentary career he was also a member of the government. For eleven of those years he sat in the General Assembly of the colony-over four years as a member of the House of Representatives for Christchurch and, briefly, for New Plymouth, and for seven years in the Legislative Council, the nominated upper house.

Yet he and his wife were never reconciled to colonial life and, like so many early New Zealand leaders, he finally returned to England to end his days.īetween his forty-sixth and sixty-ninth years Sewell spent seventeen and a half years in New Zealand in three periods of residence, 1853-6, 1859-76. A solicitor from the Isle of Wight who seemed a failure at home, beset by family financial embarrassments, he made something of a mark in New Zealand, where he was also able by modest land dealings to recoup his finances. Henry Sewell was a man who faced this dilemma. The emigrants' dilemma was that success, comfort and respect could be found only in a distant colony, while ambition, aspiration and identity were focused on 'Home'. While countless emigrants became reconciled to exile-found fulfilment undreamt of in their homelands-there were many who always aspired to metropolitan celebrity, who hoped to end their days in the land of their birth. Few successful, contented, established men would emigrate-that was for the discontented, the discredited and the failures.

It is also often the story of men who regarded themselves as failures. We need to remember that the history of colonisation is the story of obscure men and women, a few of whom were sometimes called to fulfil unexpectedly exalted roles. Yet the successful transplantation of branches of European civilisation in the Americas, the Antipodes and elsewhere should not blind us to the harshness and drabness of the pioneering life. The idea of the 'frontier' has had as deep an impact on some historians as it has on film-makers. THE HISTORY of colonisation has often been portrayed in romantic, even heroic terms.

Nonofficial Asset by William Sewell