Over sixteen months in 1857 and 1858, Walter Buller produced a weekly newspaper for Māori of the Wellington region in their own language. Although he was the son of a Wesleyan missionary and an official interpreter, the niupepa was neither a church nor a government publication, although it promoted discourses favoured by both. A number of niupepa had preceded Buller's Te Karere o Poneke, the first appearing in 1842, but his paper was distinctive in the sizable platform he provided for correspondence. Over half of the items printed comprised letters from Māori, many of them commenting on, and occasionally critiquing the colonial milieu.

The concept of “public sphere” is heavily theorized, often postulated in acultural terms (although suspiciously European in form) and it is debatable if Te Karere o Poneke's readership and their engagement with the textual discourse meet the theory's required criteria of constituting a public sphere. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire in 1840, meaning that by 1857 colonization was still a relatively new phenomenon, but with substantial immigration and a developing infrastructure, change was both extensive and dynamic. According to the theory, it may be difficult to apply the concept of “public sphere” to Māori anytime during the changing contexts of nineteenth-century colonialism, and indeed other colonised cultures for whom the advent of literacy, Christianity, market economy and colonial administration had been sudden and unexpected. Of course this does not mean that Māori lacked a voice, at times critical. Using Te Karere o Poneke as a case study, this essay argues that Wellington Māori of 1857 do not readily fit the Western model of the “public sphere”, but they nevertheless utilized the discursive spaces available to them to discuss and evaluate the world they now encountered.

在1857年和1858年的16个月中，沃尔特·布尔以自己的语言为惠灵顿地区的毛利人制作了每周报纸。尽管他是卫斯理传教士的儿子和正式的口译员，但纽佩帕既不是教堂也不是政府出版物，尽管它促进了双方都喜欢的话语。许多niupepa已经先布勒的特KarereØPoneke，在1842年第一次出现，但他的论文是他提供了对应的大宗平台与众不同。印刷的物品中有一半以上是毛利人的来信，其中许多都在评论，有时还会批评殖民地的环境。

“公共领域”的概念经过严格的理论推论，通常以文化上的假设（尽管以可疑的欧洲形式出现），并且如果蒂卡瑞·欧·庞克（Te Karere o Poneke）值得商bat它的读者群以及他们对文本话语的参与符合该理论构成公共领域的必要标准。新西兰于1840年被大英帝国吞并，这意味着到1857年，殖民化仍是一个相对较新的现象，但是随着大量移民和基础设施的发展，变化既广泛又充满活力。根据该理论，在十九世纪殖民主义以及确实出现了扫盲，基督教，市场经济和殖民地行政管理的其他殖民文化不断变化的背景下，随时可能将“公共领域”的概念应用于毛利人突然而出乎意料。当然，这并不意味着毛利人有时甚至没有声音。使用Te Karere o Poneke 作为案例研究，本文认为1857年的惠灵顿毛利人并不很适合西方的“公共领域”模型，但他们仍然利用他们可用的话语空间来讨论和评估他们现在所遇到的世界。