11 Jun 2018

A history of duelling in New Zealand

From Afternoons, 1:35 pm on 11 June 2018

You might associate "duelling" with the American Wild West: leather chaps and cowboy hats and one-shot pistols on a dusty shanty-town road against a blood-orange sunrise...

But New Zealand has its own particular history of duelling - more than three-dozen took place between 1830 and 1935, and at least two people were killed. 

Dr Donald Kerr is the Special Collections Librarian at Otago University, and he's written a book on the country's duels called The Smell of Powder. He tells us what the duels entailed.  

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons