Teenagers The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand

Teenagers is a groundbreaking history of young people in New Zealand from the nineteenth century to the 1960s. Through the diaries and letters, photographs and drawings that teenagers left behind, we meet New Zealanders as they transition from children to adults: sealers and bushfellers, factory girls and newspaper boys, the male ‘mashers’ of the 1880s and the female ‘flappers’ of the 1910s and ’20s, schoolgirls and rock’n’rollers, larrikins and louts. By taking us inside the lives of young New Zealanders, the book illuminates from a new angle large-scale changes in our society.

Chris Brickell is an associate professor in gender studies at the University of Otago. His first book, Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (2008) won the NZSA E. H. McCormick Best First Book Award for Non-Fiction in the 2009 Montana Book Awards.