Biography/memoir

A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley

A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley by Elspeth Sandys is a multi-layered narrative centred on New Zealander Rewi Alley and his part in the momentous political events of mid-twentieth-century China.

A Deserter's Adventures

One of the first Benedictine monks to be sent to New Zealand, Dom Felice Vaggioli arrived in 1879 and returned home in 1887, having worked in Gisborne, Auckland and the Coromandel.

A Gift of Stories

The life stories in this book are by people who, at some point in their lives, have been diagnosed with a mental illness which they have learned to deal with. They have found the courage to speak publicly about their experience in a world which is still prejudiced against people with mental illness.

A Snake in the Shrine

David Geraghty taught English and travelled in Japan for three years in the late 1990s. This book is a wonderfully entertaining record of some of his experiences.

A Southern Architecture

The forms of Ted McCoy’s houses can recall the early stone and mud brick buildings of the colonial era in Otago, as this region has been both his locus and his inspiration.

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington

A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood.

A Theatre in the House

For most of the 1960s, Dunedin's Globe Theatre was the most important thing happening in serious New Zealand theatre. In this book, Rosalie Carey tells the story of the theatre in its Carey years.

Across the Pass

Across the Pass includes writing from New Zealanders such as trampers Mark Pickering and Geoff Spearpoint, writers John Mulgan, David Hill and Elsie Locke, mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, adventurer Graeme Dingle, journalist Elsie K Morton, and poets Blanche Baughan, Sam Hunt and Brian Turner.

Always Going Home

Always Going Home is the compelling personal story of Frances Edmond’s relationship with her ‘beloved, complicated, difficult’ mother, the award-winning poet Lauris Edmond (1924–2000). Told through memories, family recollections, and the ‘goldmine’ of Lauris’s correspondence and diaries, Frances takes a more intimate look at areas of Lauris’s private life than have been detailed in previous family histories and autobiographies.

Amassing Treasures for All Times

Sir George Grey, governor of New Zealand, South Australia and the Cape Colony, was an outstanding British colonial statesman in the nineteenth century. This study sheds light on the genius and magnanimity of an increasingly controversial figure, demonstrating the complex humanity underlying his apparent remoteness.

Among Secret Beauties

Climbing entered the world stage in the 1950s: this was the era that produced not only Sir Edmund Hillary but a strong body of world-class New Zealand climbers. In this important and dramatic book Brian Wilkins, who was part of the adventure, shares his experiences of climbing in the Southern Alps and the Himalayas.

Annie’s War

Annie’s War is a remarkable book. There have been many published collections of soldiers’ diaries and letters from the First World War, but never a first-hand account of one New Zealand family’s life in England during these challenging and frightening years.

Beyond the Scene

What contribution does landscape make to our sense of identity? For Beyond the Scene the editors asked eleven writers to choose a landscape that was important to them and to write it from the perspective of their life experience and knowledge. From farmer to art historian and film critic, geographer and planner to lawyer, from landscape architect to poet and environmentalist – these are diverse voices.

Bob Crowder: A New Zealand organics pioneer

Bob Crowder: A New Zealand organics pioneer tells the story of Bob Crowder, a leading horticulturist and early champion of regenerative agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand. Crowder played a pivotal role in the birth of the organics movement in New Zealand, establishing the country’s only university-based organics research unit in the early 1960s and helping to build a sector now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Books and Boots

A.H. Reed's enduring contribution to his adopted homeland was as a publisher, writer and benefactor, but he is also fondly remembered by many as a long-distance walker. This biography offers an engaging portrait of 'Alf', his love of Belle, his ceaseless activity and his many contributions to the wider community. It includes a bibliography of his works and is profusely illustrated.

Bus Stops on the Moon

Bus Stops on the Moon is a personal and a cultural history. As memoir, it is a sequel to The Dreaming Land (2015). A troubled and restless young Martin Edmond is on his way to becoming the wiser, older man who will sit down and write both narratives. As cultural history, the book gives us a participant’s-eye view of the early years of Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell’s avant-garde theatre troupe Red Mole.

Casting Off: a memoir

Elspeth Sandys’ refreshing honesty and her skill as a writer of ction and drama propel the reader through an absorbing life story that is equally a commentary on the meaning of memoir and the peculiarities of memory.

Charles Brasch Journals 1938–1945

For most of his adult life, Charles Brasch’s most intimate companion was his diary. In these journals, written in London during the Second World War, he is a young man searching for answers. Is he a pacifist? Should he join the army? Is he homosexual? Should he marry? Should he return home to New Zealand when the war ends? Are his poems any good? Some questions are resolved in the course of the journals, others not, but it all makes compelling reading.

Charles Brasch Journals 1945–1957

This volume of Charles Brasch’s journals covers the years from late 1945 to the end of 1957, when the poet and editor was aged 36 to 48. The journals cover the first decade or so of his distinguished editorship of Landfall, a role that brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand’s leading artists and intelligentsia.

Charles Brasch Journals 1958–1973

This third and final volume of Charles Brasch’s compelling private journals covers the years from when he was 48 to his death at 64.

Come Back to Mona Vale

Come Back to Mona Vale is a beautifully written, compelling narrative/memoir that sets about unravelling the mysteries and anomalies behind the public history of a wealthy Christchurch business family in the first half of the 20th century.

Curved Horizon

At a time when Brasch, Fairburn, Glover and other spoke bitterly of the lack of support given to New Zealand artists, how did a single woman from Southland live and work as a writer, establishing herself as a poet and author of international regard. In Curved Horizon Dallas recounts her remarkable life with the insight and assurance we expect from this most accomplished poet.

Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920

Using confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 reveals the remarkable stories of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance.

Detours

Summer, 1981. A youngish Neville Peat set out from Cape Reinga on his imported 10-speed bike ‘Blue’, aiming to cycle through small-town New Zealand from north to south, all the way to Stewart Island. The week before Easter, he reached his destination. He wrote a book about it, Detours: A journey through small-town New Zealand, which sold lots of copies and was broadcast on radio. Many times in the intervening years, usually on anniversaries of the journey – ten years, fifteen years, twenty years – he wished to try a repeat journey, but life held other challenges. Now, as a leading author and in the age of the personal computer and cell phone, a very different world, he has revisited many of the towns and regions, not on a bicycle, but by car. In Detours – A generation on, he reflects once again on how small-town New Zealand is doing.

Diplomatic Ladies

Diplomatic Ladies tells the inside story of New Zealand’s diplomatic wives and daughters over a hundred years of diplomacy. Based on private letters, MFAT archives and personal interviews, it records many unknown episodes in New Zealand’s diplomatic history, including the part played by the spouses in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and the perils faced by diplomatic wives in Saigon and Tehran. It also gives a unique insight into the workings of diplomatic life and the role of the diplomatic hostess.

Doctors in Denial: The forgotten women in the ‘unfortunate experiment’

Published by Otago University Press, 'Doctors in Denial' is a gripping inside account of professional arrogance and denial written by one of the doctors who exposed the truth about ‘the unfortunate experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital.

Dumont d’Urville

Explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842) is sometimes called France’s Captain Cook. Born less than a year after the beginning of the French Revolution, he lived through turbulent times. He was an erudite polymath: a maritime explorer fascinated by botany, entomology, ethnography and the diverse languages of the world.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive

Every morning, so far, I’m alive is about what it’s like to live in a world where shaking a stranger’s and, catching a taxi or touching a door handle are fraught with fear and dread.\nThis memoir charts the author’s breakdown after migrating from New Zealand to England: what begins as homesickness and career burn-out develops into depression, contamination phobia and OCD.

Eyewitness

In 1932, Geoffrey Cox travelled to Britain to take up a Rhodes Scholarship. First as a student, then as a journalist, Cox became an eyewitness to events which have since become history: Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, Stalin's brutal collectivisation of agriculture. Rich in detail, Cox's elegantly written prose offers a ringside seat to major 20th century events. This is a memorable memoir by one of the world's premier journalists.

Facing the Music

The Triad was founded in 1893 and ran into the late 1920s. For its first twenty-two years it was published in New Zealand, but in 1915 publication was transferred to Sydney where it was re-launched as an Australasian magazine. The magazine offered well-informed coverage of cultural activities in New Zealand, Australia and internationally in a broad mix of critical and original writing. Notoriously outspoken, Baeyertz was feared and respected as a critic. His music criticism was particularly intelligent and rigorous, making no concessions to personality or amateur or professional status. His later co-editor, the self-styled ‘decadent’ Frank Morton, was equally candid. This is an engaging biography of a fascinating man which also throws new light on a long-neglected period of New Zealand’s cultural past.

Flu Hunter

When a new influenza virus emerges that is able to be transmitted between humans, it spreads globally as a pandemic, often with high mortality. \nGripping account of tenacious scientific detective work. Clear explanation of the science behind the headlines. Insights from a long and celebrated career.

Four Generations from Maoridom

Memoir of Syd Cormack, a South Island kaumatua and fisherman

Heart Stood Still

Heart Stood Still is an eco-memoir and a lyrical portrait of Manawatū, Aotearoa. In early 2020, Miriam Sharland was nearing the end of a 17-year adventure in Aotearoa and was set to return to her family and friends in England when Covid put an end to her travel plans. Facing isolation, Sharland turned to the natural beauty of Manawatū to find healing and a sense of belonging in a time of uncertainty.

Hocken

Dr Thomas Morland Hocken (1836–1910) arrived in Dunedin in 1862, aged 26. Throughout his busy life as a medical practitioner he amassed books, manuscripts, sketches, maps and photographs of early New Zealand. Much of his initial collecting focused on the early discovery narratives of James Cook; along with the writings of Rev. Samuel Marsden and his contemporaries; Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Company; and Māori, especially in the south. He gifted his collection to the University of Otago in 1910. Hocken was a contemporary of New Zealand’s other two notable early book collectors, Sir George Grey and Alexander Turnbull. In this magnificent piece of research, a companion volume to his Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, colonial bookman and collector, Donald Kerr examines Hocken’s collecting activities and his vital contribution to preserving the history of New Zealand’s early post-contact period.

Hudson & Halls

A riveting account of legendary New Zealand TV chefs in 1970s and 1980s who were a groundbreaking gay duo in socially conservative era, by internationally acclaimed author Joanne Drayton.

In a Slant Light

In this absorbing poetic memoir of her early life, Cilla McQueen, one of New Zealand’s major women poets, leads us over the stepping stones of childhood memory, some half submerged, some strong and glinting in the light of her wit. With humour and openness, clarity and grace, the memoir continues through her teenage years and the excitement and turbulence, the expansion and vulnerability, of university days and early motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s ... raising a young child alone, falling in love with Ralph Hotere and witnessing his deeply immersive artistic practice ... This account of the life of an extraordinary verbal artist is immensely warm and welcoming: time falls away as we read. The lightness of Cilla’s touch coupled with the grit of her endurance through challenging personal circumstances makes the reader feel privileged to be invited in to the quiet wisdom worn here with both integrity and modesty. From the sweet shocks of her imagery to the joy of recognition of many shared experiences of a New Zealand childhood, this memoir brings a honeyed, sensitive yet utterly resilient voice in our local literature as close as the voice of a good friend. This is a book not only for those who love Cilla McQueen’s poetry, but for anyone fascinated by the social, artistic and literary history of New Zealand.

James Courage Diaries

Between 1920 and 1963, New Zealand author James Courage confided his innermost thoughts to a private diary. He wrote about leaving New Zealand, the men he met in London’s streets, and forging friendships in the literary scene. He was an evocative chronicler of landscapes and indoor settings: life on long ocean voyages, air raid shelters during the war, and the psychiatrist’s clinic at a time when society was deeply ambivalent about homosexuality.

Kate Edger

In 1877, Kate Edger became the first woman to graduate from a New Zealand university. The New Zealand Herald enthusiastically hailed her achievement as ‘the first rays of the rising sun of female intellectual advancement’.

Katherine Mansfield's Europe

Beautifully written and illustrated with maps and stunning photography, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, author Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died.

Landfall 240: Spring 2020

Landfall 240; Featuring the winners of the Landfall Essay Competition 2020, Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2020 and the Frank Sargeson Prize 2020.

Letters of Denis Glover

In this magnificent volume Sarah Shieff presents around 500 of Glover’s letters to around 110 people, drawn from an archive of nearly 3000 letters to over 430 recipients.

Map for the Heart

Map for the Heart is a haunting collection of essays braiding history and memoir with environmentalism, amid an awareness of the seasonal fluctuations of light and wind, heat and snow, plants and creatures, and the lives and work of locals.

Marilynn Webb

An outstanding artist and art educator, Marilynn Webb gained international stature as a print-maker early in her career. Working as an art adviser in Northland and Auckland she created memorable images that were instantly recognisable as coming from her hand. Less well-known are her pastel drawings, a development in her work after she moved to Dunedin in 1974 to take up a Frances Hodgkin Fellowship. She has created several brilliant series based on New Zealand's southern wilderness areas: Lake Mahinerangi, the Ida Valley, Fiordland and Stewart Island in particular. Her work makes us aware that we are always in the landscape, and draws us into the environmental and social issues surrounding it.

My Body, My Business

In My Body, My Business, 11 former and current New Zealand sex workers speak frankly, in their own voices, about their lives in and out of the sex industry. Their stories are by turns eye-opening, poignant, heartening, disturbing and compelling.

Ngā Kete Mātauranga

In this beautiful and transformative book, 24 Māori academics share their personal journeys, revealing what being Māori has meant for them in their work. Their perspectives provide insight for all New Zealanders into how mātauranga is positively influencing the Western-dominated disciplines of knowledge in the research sector.

Notes on Womanhood

After Sarah Jane Barnett had a hysterectomy in her forties, a comment by her doctor that she wouldn’t be “less of a woman” prompted her to investigate what the concept of womanhood meant to her. Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, part coming-of-middle-age story, Notes on Womanhood is the result.

Oceanian Journeys and Sojourns

Oceanian Journeys and Sojourns focuses on how Pacific Island peoples – Oceanians – think about a range of journeys near and far: their meanings, motives and implications. In addition to addressing human mobility in various island locales, these essays deal with the interconnections of culture, identity and academic research among indigenous Pacific peoples that have emerged from the contributors’ personal observations and fieldwork encounters. Firmly grounded in the human experience, this edited work offers insights into the development of new knowledge in and of the Pacific. More than half the authors are themselves Oceanians and five of twelve essays are by island women.

Operation Vietnam

New Zealand has a long and honourable record of sending health service personnel to trouble spots around the world. Michael Shackleton was an energetic and determined pioneer. In 1963 he established and led a New Zealand surgical team in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. Until East Timor, this was New Zealand's biggest ever overseas medical operation and was sustained until 1975.

Painting Myself In

Expressing oneself through creativity can be an immensely challenging and satisfying experience. Nina Mariette, a survivor of childhood abuse, uses painting to make sense of her past, and tells her story with pictures and words in this book.

Passageways

The author’s eight great grandparents all arrived in New Zealand between 1858 and 1868. Their family names were Harrop, Sales, Campbell, Brown, Valentine, Maxwell, Jefcoate and Oliver. She looks at their reasons for migration, how they fared once settled, and at their participation in gold-digging, farming, road-making, school-teaching and surveying. Both of her parents were graduates of Canterbury University and A.J. Harrop was a respected New Zealand historian.

Pickerill

The first biography of Henry Percy Pickerill, a pioneer in plastic surgery, dental education and dental research.

Polly Plum: A firm and earnest woman’s advocate

Polly Plum is a biography of one of New Zealand’s earliest feminists, Mary Ann Colclough, whose publicly voiced opinions saw her described in the nineteenth century as ‘our own little stray strap of a modern female fanatic’.

Promised New Zealand

Promised New Zealand is the true tale of refugees who fled Nazi terror in Europe for a safe haven on the opposite side of the world – New Zealand.

Reconstructing Faces

The two world wars played an important role in the evolution of plastic and maxillofacial surgery in the first half of the 20th century. This book is about four of the key figures involved. Sir Harold Gillies and Sir Archibald McIndoe were born in Dunedin; McIndoe and Rainsford Mowlem studied medicine at the University of Otago Medical School, and Henry Pickerill was foundation Dean of the University of Otago Dental School. The author describes how these surgeons revolutionised plastic surgery and the treatment of facial trauma, working on soldiers, fighter pilots and civilians disfigured by bombs, shrapnel and burns.

Robert Lord Diaries

Robert Lord (1945–1992) is an important figure in the history of literature and theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand. Co-founder of Playmarket and author of Well Hung, Bert and Maisy and Joyful and Triumphant, Robert Lord wrote incisive and often satiric radio and stage plays, experimenting with traditional theatre forms and incorporating queer characters at a time when almost nobody else did. His diaries, which record his life from 1974, when he first moved to New York, until his death in Dunedin in 1992, capture the highs and lows of his writing practice, the theatre world and his social life. Revealing the dramatic contrast between life as a gay man in 1970s and 80s New York – a world of sex, drugs and socialising – and provincial New Zealand, with its respectable living rooms, fields of carrots and the occasional homoerotic demonstration of sheep shearing, his diary entries tell of torn loyalties and reveal the intense creative momentum Lord forged from his dislocated, outsider status.

Slippery Jim or Patriotic Statesman?

This is a biography of one of New Zealand’s most colourful and persuasive politicians, James Macandrew – a devoted family man, a staunch Presbyterian and a consummate politician. It examines the numerous local institutions that benefited from Macandrew’s touch – the University of Otago, the Art School (now Otago Polytechnic School of Art), the Normal School (later the College of Education) – along with his contributions to the building of roads, railways, wharves, harbours, schools and churches. Macandrew made plenty of enemies along the way, and has been severely judged by history. This re-examination of his life and political work reveals a man who both inspired and infuriated the citizens of Otago, and New Zealand, for almost four decades.

Standing My Ground

For more than five decades, Alan Mark has been a voice for conservation in New Zealand. From his call in the 1960s for the establishment of tussock-grassland reserves in the South Island high country to his involvement in the 2011–13 campaign to save the Denniston Plateau from mining, he has been a passionate and effective advocate for the preservation of areas of ecological importance. In 'Standing My Ground', Alan describes the challenges and achievements, the frustrations and successes that have made up his remarkable life, now in its ninth decade. As well as providing an important record of New Zealand’s conservation battles and documenting the life of an outstanding New Zealander, 'Standing My Ground' is an inspiring reminder of the power of individuals to make a difference.

Strong Words #2

The best of the Landfall essay competition

Strong Words 3

Strong Words 3 showcases the best of the best of Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary essays from 2021 and 2022, selected from entries into the Landfall Essay Competition. Strong Words 3 is packed with Aotearoa New Zealand’s most compelling new writing on contemporary issues, tackling topics such as grief, lost language, poetic childhood recollections, gender, the long aftermath of colonisation, the nature of traumatic memory, and working as a comedian while solo parenting.

Stunning debut of the repairing of a life

SIMPLE BROKEN BEAUTIFUL is the title on a notebook of poetry written by Leigh Davis in 2008. This was during radiotherapy treatment following surgery for a brain tumour, which was affecting his ability to express himself in words. The notebook writing was the beginning of a work that developed into a long poem called 'Stunning debut of the repairing of a life'. The resulting manuscript won The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2009, judged by Ian Wedde.

Taking My Mother to the Opera

Piquant, frank, open, wistful, tender, funny ... this personal memoir by Diane Brown is deftly ‘marbled’ throughout with social history. From carefully chosen anecdotes it slowly unfolds a vivid and compelling sense of character and the psychological dynamics within the family. Many readers will recognise the New Zealand so vividly portrayed here, as Brown marshals deeply personal events and childhood memories in a delightfully astute, understated poetic form.

The Braided River: Migration and the Personal Essay

The Braided River explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages.

The Case of the Missing Body

'The Case of the Missing Body' is the true and unusual story of Lily, who has no sense of her body. She has struggled with the effects of this her whole life. Desperate to try anything to ‘be normal’, a nevertheless sceptical Lily agrees to begin work with her physiotherapist in a gymnasium. One extraordinary day, working in the gym, Lily discovers she has shoulder blades. All her life she has thought people only felt their heads, with thoughts trailing along in and behind them. Now she has shoulder blades. There is nothing easy about what is to follow. Neither Patrick (the physiotherapist) nor Lily could have predicted it. But with help from professionals, the writer of this beautiful, moving memoir becomes her own detective, searching for clues to help her find her own body.

The Paper Nautilus

Strong, fresh and honest writing, The Paper Nautilus is about loss – the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. This partly autobiographical work is a mesmerising and engaging experience.

The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington

A.C. (Archie) Barrington was a leading New Zealand pacifist during World War 2. Incarcerated in Mount Crawford Prison for his beliefs in 1941, he kept an illicit diary, scrawled in the margins of books. Many years later his son John happened across the diary and painstakingly reconstructed it. Barrington vividly and compellingly recorded the squalid, rundown conditions, monotonous and exhausting labour, the intense cold from which there was little protection, and the strategies he and his fellow pacifists adopted to enable them to cope with prison life. John Pratt has edited the diary and provides a fascinating commentary on the issues it raises in relation to prison life then and now.

The Real McKay

The Scot Alexander McKay arrived in New Zealand in 1863 at the age of twenty-six with just two full years of schooling. Seeking his fortune on the goldfields of the South Island, he developed an eye for the structure and history of the land. Ten years later, he attracted the interest of the pioneer geologist Julius Haast, founder of the Canterbury Museum, who offered him his first job in geology, as a field assistant and collector of fossils for the displays of the fledgling museum.

The Story of a New Zealand Writer

Who was Jane Mander? Why did she write The Story of a New Zealand River? Many people know the book, but few know anything of the writer. Rae McGregor has drawn a rich absorbing portrair of Mander – from her early years in the north, to Sydney socialist, New York intellectual, London writer, and home again as Auckland critic and literary personality.

The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell

Appointed New Zealand’s first state nutritionist in 1940, a position she held for almost a quarter-century, Muriel Bell was behind ground-breaking public health schemes such as milk in schools, iodised salt and water fluoridation.

The Urewera Notebook

The Urewera Notebook, by Katherine Mansfield, edited by Anna Plumridge

The Writer at Work

Into this volume C.K. Stead gathers a selection of his essays from the past decade, mixing literary criticism with autobiography. He reviews the work of other writers, meditates on the teaching of literature, revisits some controversies and explores literary history. Always interesting, the essays travel through time and space - from Janet Frame, to Barry Humphries' birthday, to Paul Theroux and telling the truth, to Shelley's Constantia - on a brilliant carpet of scholarship and wit.

Thomas Potts of Canterbury

Thomas Potts of Canterbury will appeal to anyone interested in the early history of Canterbury, in environmental change, and in early efforts in New Zealand towards conservation. It is a story of conflicting goals, magnificently exemplified in the life and writings of a man who strove, 150 years ago, to be both colonist and conservationist.

To Catch the Spirit

The memoir of mathematician A C Aitken

To the Mountains

Drawing on 150 years of published and unpublished material, Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey, two top contemporary authors, have compiled a wide-ranging, fascinating and moving glimpse into New Zealand’s mountaineering culture and the people who write about it.

We Will Not Cease

We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I.

West Island: Five twentieth-century New Zealanders in Australia

Five notable twentieth-century New Zealanders who made their lives in Australia are the subject of this fascinating biographical investigation by award-winning author Stephanie Johnson.

What Lies Beneath

Writer Elspeth Sandys was born during the Second World War, spent the first nine months of her life in the Truby King Karitane Hospital in Dunedin, and was adopted into the Somerville family at the age of nine months. What Lies Beneath: A Memoir is the story of her search for her birth parents. What she discovered provided answers that were both disturbing and, ultimately, rewarding. This is a searing, amusing, and never less than gripping tale of a difficult life, beautifully told.

William Colenso

Born in Penzance in 1811, Colenso was perhaps the most interesting of New Zealand's early missionaries. A Church Missionary Society printer, he established the first printing press, was our first printer and printed the first book, 5000 copies of the New Testament in Maori, 365 pages in extent, in 1837. Next came 27,000 copies of the Book of Common Prayer in Maori.

Witi Ihimaera

Witi Ihimaera is one of New Zealand's best-known and most loved writers. Author of seven volumes of fiction – including the award-winning Pounamu, Pounamu, Tangi and The Matriarch – he has also written essays, editorials, and an opera, Waituhi.

Women and Children Last

A sea voyage in the nineteenth century was not for the faint-hearted. The hazards were many and accidents commonplace. Of the ways a ship might meet its end, destruction by fire was perhaps the most feared. Wooden sailing vessels were particularly vulnerable and without breathing apparatus it was next to impossible to fight a fire below decks.

Your Unselfish Kindness

Robin Hyde’s extraordinary but short life (1906–1939) included a precocious early career as poet and parliamentary reporter. As a journalist, she juggled writing for the social pages with highly political reporting on unemployment, prison conditions and the alienation of Maori land. She struggled with drug addiction and depression, single motherhood twice over, and a lengthy period as a voluntary patient in a residential clinic (The Lodge) attached to Auckland Mental Hospital in Avondale. Her life culminated in brilliant reporting on the Sino/Japanese War following a journey into China in 1938.