The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre would like to announce the publication of the Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde, edited and annotated by Dr. Nikki Hessell (Massey University).
On the 25th of June 1925, the then nineteen-year-old Robin Hyde sat for the first time in the Ladies’ Gallery overlooking the New Zealand House of Representatives. Employed by the conservative Dominion newspaper, her job was to produce a daily column about events in the House—‘Peeps at Parliament’. Using the pseudonym ‘Novitia’, Hyde wrote in the persona of a naïve but sardonic female observer of New Zealand political life. After she left the Dominion, Hyde would reprise her role as parliamentary reporter for the Mirrorand New Zealand Observer newspapers.
These columns have now been collected, edited, and extensively annotated, and are freely available through the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Dr. Hessell has also written a scholarly introduction to Hyde’s political journalism, and provided a biographical key to the figures mentioned in the columns. The Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde provide both a valuable addition to Robin Hyde scholarship, and an illuminating insight into New Zealand’s social and political culture in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
The Parliamentary Reports and their supplementary texts are hosted here.
