Untangling Polish Threads

A history of the Polish Immigrants Who Helped Build Early New Zealand

In the 1870s, New Zealand was a new colony hungry for labourers to build its infrastructure and tame its natural environment. When immigrants did not arrive fast enough from the United Kingdom, the colonial government looked to continental Europe, where Poles in the northwestern regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were eager to leave an increasingly oppressive Prussian rule.

What seemed like a mutually beneficial solution became complicated once it became clear that the more than 900 new immigrant Poles who arrived did not speak English.

This book examines what happened to them: how they were received, and how they coped, or not, in a place where they struggled to communicate with authorities, and where record-takers mis-transcribed the spellings of their names; how they survived in the remote regions where they were first sent, and where they later chose to settle; and what they did, in the end, to survive.