Nearly out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer's Diary

This original and thought-provoking book is based on the 800,000-word diary of James Cox, an itinerant laborer living in New Zealand between 1880 and 1925. Cox's diary is a rare record of the daily life of a permanent member of the colonial working class - nothing like it exists in a New Zealand archive and little elsewhere. Rather than reproducing selections of the somewhat down-to-earth diary entries, Fairburn uses it more interestingly, taking the life of this obscure and unimportant man t…