The Baby Boomers: the first generation to unite globally with music, culture and action to challenge the personal and political power of those in authority. Growing up in a post-war world but living with the daily shadow of the Cold War and the growing horror of the Vietnam War, the Baby Boomers protested. They were loud. They were visible. They weren’t going to take it anymore. And they made a difference. So what happened to all that juice and energy, that passion to change the world for the better that marked many of those who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies? Were they just a bunch of hippies after all? Activist, creative entrepreneur and counsellor Robin Woodsford is a Baby Boomer and in this moving reflection on his life and times he discovers that his personal story is also a universal one. More, he says the job’s not done yet and calls on fellow Baby Boomers to remember their passionate youth, to dust off their placards and to join their grandchildren on the front line as the world faces the new monster at the door – climate change. Baby Boomers: it’s time to make your legacy count.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 152

Dimensions: 152 x 229 mm

Publication Date: 22-05-2024

Echoes from Hawaiki is a comprehensive account of taonga pūoro ancestral musical traditions and instrument-playing techniques. In this thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated book, Jennifer Cattermole traces the origins and development of taonga pūoro, the stories they carry and how they connect present-day iwi with ancestral knowledge and traditions. She shows how traditional Māori and Moriori musical instruments have developed in response to available materials and evolving cultural needs, from their ancestral origins through the suppression of their use in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, to their revival in the present day. An essential resource for all who are interested in taonga pūoro as treasured objects and as voices through time and place. ‘How did our forebears succeed in creating a bountiful array of musical instruments using stone tools and natural materials? This book answers that question in fine detail and also reveals how our present generation is reviving indigenous culture and language, thereby sustaining our brightly burning fires.’ —Huata Holmes (Kāitahu, Kāti Mamoe, Waitaha, Hāwea a Rapuwai ano)

Bind: paperback

Pages: 236

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 20-06-2024

Histories of Pakeha settlement in New Zealand have often ignored the role of women, or devalued their contribution to mere adjuncts to the work of men. In Nailed Boots and Crinoline Gowns historian Robert Peden argues that not only were women present from the very beginnings of settlement, they were also industrious partners with their menfolk in farming and other enterprises. Despite the Victorian ideal of women as primarily domestic helpmates to their husbands, many women succeeded on the farm and in the wider world. Many settlers on New Zealand’s rural frontier lived in extreme isolation, far from friends, family and support. In times of crisis, such as childbirth or severe illness, their resourcefulness was sorely tried. Many developed a healthy self-reliance to manage this acute deprivation, some were broken by it. Nailed Boots and Crinoline Gowns presents the stories of women living on the rural frontier in the first two or three Pakeha generations. Through their diaries, letters and other sources the author relates the vivid stories of women who toiled long and hard, shoulder to shoulder with their men, even as they cared for their families.

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Pages: 236

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 04-04-2024

In 1920, when Lasting Impressions, the first volume in this history of New Zealand newspapers ended, the large number of newspapers in the country were the profitable, well-respected vehicles of nearly all the news from around the world and around the corner welcomed into households in the largest cities and smallest hamlets. Newspapers were also the principal means by which manufacturers and merchants sold their products and services to people. This strange amalgam – provision of a public service in an essentially commercial operation – worked, for the most part, very successfully. All that changed over the next 80 years. There were ownership changes to what had been, both large and small, mainly family businesses. Radio, television and the Internet severely disrupted the press’s virtual monopoly of the news. The commercial model that allowed newspapers to function successfully was severely disrupted. Foreign owners, without the same commitment to New Zealand society, entered and began to dominate the local market. By 2000, the New Zealand newspaper market had changed forever – and in ways that put its very survival at risk. Pressing On is the story of how and why this happened.

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Pages: 680

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 16-04-2024

Every four years the NZ Military History Committee runs a conference and publishes the best papers from it about New Zealand’s varied and fascinating military history. This book brings together the latest thinking on aspects of New Zealand’s Second World War from perspectives as wide as Germany, Canada, Britain and Australia and on subjects covering combat, forces, personalities, attitudes and after-effects. This book includes essays from some of the most renowned New Zealand and international historians, including Jonathan Fennell, Chris Pugsley, Peter Lieb, Robert Engen, Claire Cookson-Hills, and John Crawford. See following page for more details.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 486

Dimensions: 235 x 260 mm

Publication Date: 30-03-2024

Natanahira Waruwarutu was a child at the time of the capture of Kaiapoi Pa by Te Rauparaha's Ngati Toa warriors in 1832. The early years of his life, recounted here in the original Maori text and an accompanying translation, saw great change in the Maori communities of Waitaha (Canterbury) and Akaroa. Otako leaders set aside Moeraki, further south, for Kaiapoi refugees and Waruwarutu moved between the two places until he died in 1895. Before his death, he passed on to scribe Thomas Green, himself a Ngai Tahu elder, a substantial body of material that now defines modern understanding of the traditional history of Ngai Tahu. This manuscript was part of that material and, as Te Maire Tau describes in his introduction, has a history of its own. The story in this book is not a Ngai Tahu 'Grand narrative'. As Te Maire Tau says, Maori history simply does not work like that. Rather, it is one narrative by a survivor of the period 'that recollects the reality of what he saw as a child; on this basis, it is a superb example of an oral tradition.' The author has included a chapter on the historical context of Waruwarutu manuscript and annotations for both Maori and English texts. A further chapter presents in Maori with English translations a text recorded by scribe Charles Creed that supplements Waruwarutu's account of his induction into the Kaiapoi whare purakau (house of learning). It is one of the few manuscripts that provides a glimpse into a world that no longer exists.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 112

Dimensions: 155 x 230 mm

New Zealand Railways At Night seeks to redress a void in our written history, covering the night railway as experienced in the period from the mid-1920s through to 1982 when the Government railway was corporatised, a period when many New Zealanders’ chose the railway as their principal form of transport. This was a time when most of the night travel was endured sitting upright on firm non-reclinable seats. Refreshment room stops caused a minor disruption in the darkened carriage as some travellers unable to sleep sought comfort in food, or simply stretched their legs on the platform, while others more fortunate slumbered on… It is occasions like that which images in the book evoke memories of. Converse to the night railway view by the travelling public, featured also is the night railway endured by the railway shift worker, exposing a life at work after dark. Images “in the dark” create a sense of mystique, as it is sometimes not just what is highlighted in the images, but equally what lurks in the darkened background. Considered by many as an “art book”, with 239 photographs, the majority presented full-size, this book is a visual treat.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 256

Dimensions: 285 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 13-05-2024

Journalist James Herries Beattie recorded southern Māori history for almost fifty years and produced many popular books and pamphlets. Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori is his most important work. This significant resource, which is based on a major field project Beattie carried out for the Otago Museum in 1920, was first published by Otago University Press in 1994 and is now available in this new edition. Beattie had a strong sense that traditional knowledge needed to be recorded fast. For twelve months, he interviewed people from Foveaux Strait to North Canterbury, and from Nelson and Westland. He also visited libraries to check information compiled by earlier researchers, spent time with Māori in Otago Museum recording southern names for fauna and artefacts, visited pā sites, and copied notebooks lent to him by informants. Finally he worked his findings up into systematic notes, which eventually became manuscript 181 in the Hocken Collections, and now this book. Editor Atholl Anderson introduces the book with a biography of Beattie, a description of his work and information about his informants. Beattie wrote a foreword and introduction to the Murihiku section, which are also included here.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 640

Dimensions: 155 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 22-02-2024

For decades, whenever a heritage building in Christchurch has been under threat, especially in the aftermath of the 2010–11 earthquakes, one woman has consistently defended this city’s architecture and history against shortsightedness and the threat of bulldozers – Dame Anna Crighton. Fearless and articulate, she has fought tirelessly and passionately, not only for the heritage of her hometown, but for the built past of Aotearoa New Zealand. But behind this well-known persona, the city councillor and heritage advocate, lies an extraordinary and unexpected life story, now told publicly for the first time. In Still Standing, Anna recounts, with her usual unflinching honesty, a childhood bereft of parental affection, a wild adolescence that included a stay at the Mount Magdala Convent ‘to straighten her out’, unsuitable relationships clung to in a desperate search for love, an unplanned pregnancy that led to adoption, and a violent marriage. Not many people would survive all this, let alone rise above it, to bring up a beloved son, to restore a magnificent Victorian home, to begin university study as an adult and end up with a PhD, to travel the world and, in 2020, to be appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to heritage preservation and governance. Still Standing will delight anyone interested in history, architecture and the arts, but, even more than that, it is a riveting story of a life lived with courage, and of triumph over adversity. About the author History, classics, art and architectural history have been at the heart of Anna Crighton’s careers in the public and private sector. Before graduating in these subjects later in life at Canterbury and Otago universities, she was registrar of Christchurch’s Robert McDougall Art Gallery for 20 years. She then embarked on a career in local politics as a Christchurch city councillor for 12 years and a member of the Canterbury District Health Board for a further 12. Over three decades, she was a trustee and director of many trusts and companies. Anna has lived in Wellington, Sydney and England but has always returned to the city of her birth. In 2020 she was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to heritage preservation and governance.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 152 x 228 mm

Publication Date: 01-01-2024

The Book: Carterton’s Hector Tankersley was involved with the YMCA in the late 1930s, and lived in the ‘Y’ hostel while working in Wellington from 1938- 1940. He was recruited as a YMCA secretary to work on New Zealand military bases. This led to secondment to the British YMCA in North Africa, running canteens, entertainment and providing some well-being services for the British Empire forces there. Shortly after arriving in Egypt he was sent to Tobruk, arriving just before the besieging German and Italian forces in April 1941. Hector’s diaries and photographs record his YMCA life, for which he was awarded the MBE in late 1942. His service extended to mid-1943 before he returned to New Zealand, where he continued his YMCA work at RNZAF bases in the South Island. Hector’s story brings to life the busy and exhausting experiences of a New Zealand non-combatant in the Desert War. The Editor: Neil Frances, who has edited Hector Tankersley’s diaries and added explanatory notes, is a military historian. His books, published by Fraser Books, include Ketchil (2005), Things have been pretty lively (2008), Safe Haven (2012), A Long, Long Trail (2015), A Rifle and a Camera (2017), and On the Move Again (2021).

Bind: paperback

Pages: 150

Dimensions: 175 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 28-10-2023