ABSTRACT
It has been argued that, traditionally, the ownership of a second home for the purpose of recreation epitomized the luxury of leisure and pleasure and placed the owner amongst the elite (Coppock 1977; Wolfe 1977). While this may have been the case in some places overseas (see e.g. Halseth 2004; Hall and Müller 2004), the popular history of recreational second home ownership in New Zealand constructs quite a different proposition. Both ownership and the type of leisure indulged in at the second home have been portrayed in the popular mass media as simple pleasures available to all New Zealanders, and thus not a luxury, at least until relatively recently (Male 2001; Peart 2009). For example:
Statements such as these reflect a tacit nostalgia for the old, and yet the popular media have generally failed to recognize the luxury inherent in the vernacular second home of old that they describe. Despite a mythology of democratic ownership, not every New Zealander had access to a second home. At no point from 1926 to 1981 when official records of the number of second homes were kept, were they owned by more than 5% of New Zealand households (Keen and Hall 2004). This paper provides a new and different perspective on the traditional New Zealand popular mass media discourse about leisure and pleasure at the second home. It argues that leisure and pleasure at the New Zealand second home, as represented in Home New Zealand magazine, has always carried connotations of luxury. This provides a significant point of departure not only from the popular mass media constructions but also from much of the academic literature.
