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Forthcoming
Books
Edited by Mary Edmond-Paul
Robin Hyde’s extraordinary but short life (1906–39) 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.
Hyde also produced several major novels, largely during her time at the Lodge, and several manuscripts of autobiographical writings, some written as part of her therapy. Your Unselfish Kindness gathers these together for the first time. Mary Paul's careful and well-researched introduction looks at the background to these writings, bringing many new insights to the study of New Zealand literature through her discussion of mental illness and therapeutic approaches to it in the 1920s–30s.
NZ Literature/ Mental Health
Paperback with flaps, 200 x 148 mm, 320 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 21 2, $40 approx / £27.50 approx. UK
A Neoliberal Generation Leaves School
From 2003 to 2007 Nairn, Higgins and Sligo investigated what life was like for ninety-three young people coming to adulthood in the wake of Rogernomics.
The authors conducted two interviews, one in participants' final year of high school and another twelve months later.
The authors bring the lives, places and hopes of these young people into sharp focus. Their stories reveal the powerful psychic and material impacts of the discourses of neoliberalism, which obscure the structural basis of inequalities and insist that failure to achieve standard transitions is the result of personal inadequacy. They show how institutions drawing on deficit discourses create additional barriers for those who are 'other' – often young Pasifika and Maori, and young working-class women and men. But they show, too, how ordinary lives can be inspirational, and reveal the ways young people attempt to work and re-work the possibilities, opportunities and constraints of their times.
The stories are authentic and hard-hitting. This book is a must for anyone who is interested to understand what it means to be a young person in contemporary times.
Sociology / Education
Paperback, 210 x 148 mm, 196 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 18 2, $45.00
, April 2012
Stories and Soundscapes from Colonial New Zealand
Kirstine Moffat
Piano Forte focuses on the era in which the piano became of central significance in the private, social and cultural lives of many New Zealanders. It is a book composed of many voices, being based on memoirs, diaries, letters, concert programmes, company records and other accounts. The stories begin in 1827, with the arrival of what was probably the first piano to be brought to New Zealand, and end in 1930, when the increasing popularity of the phonograph, the radio and the introduction of talkie movies were beginning to have a profound impact on people’s leisure activities.
Initially, the piano was a stranger in this land, a European musical instrument that introduced Maori to a new sound world and which provided European settlers with a reassuring sense of 'home'. For both, it offered opportunities for social and cultural activities, and, as time went by, a possible career. By the end of the period, the piano, too, had thoroughly settled in, no longer a stranger but a loved, essential part of New Zealand society.
Music history/Cultural history/ History of the Piano
240 x 148 mm, pb, 240 pp, b/w and colour, ISBN 978 1 877372 79 7, $45.00 / 29.50 UK
William Hodges, Cook's Painter in the South Pacific
Laurence Simmons
This study of the art of William Hodges opens fresh theoretical perspectives on the representational problems raised by these early paintings produced in the South Pacific. Following Pacific Island historians of the 1960s, it argues that it is possible to read the texts and visual material produced from early South Seas encounters against the grain, as moments of cross-cultural exchange that challenge postcolonial complacencies.
Tuhituhi is presented in sections that follow the geographical and chronological progression of Cook’s voyage on the Resolution, for which William Hodges was hired as official artist, Cook’s ‘landskip painter’. Painters like Hodges found themselves staring again and again in disbelief at landscapes and seascapes that stretched 18th-century conventions of painting, such as the ‘picturesque’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’. Each chapter of Tuhituhi focuses on the close reading of a significant painting of a South Pacific location by Hodges. The last chapter considers the important influence of Hodges’ work on a series of paintings by the major twentieth-century New Zealand painter Colin McCahon.
Hardback, 240 x 170 mm, 352 pp, b/w and colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877578 17 5
$60 / £34.50
William Colenso
His Life and Journeys
A.G. Bagnall and G.C. Petersen,
edited by Ian St George
Colenso was perhaps the most interesting of New Zealand’s early public figures. He established the first printing press and printed the first book, 5000 copies of the New Testament in Maori, in 1837. He also printed the Treaty of Waitangi. His Authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1890) is regarded as the most reliable European account from the time. Throughout his life, he defended the rights and equality of Maori.
Determined to expand the activities of the mission, Colenso undertook major journeys around New Zealand. He was also a revered botanist and political figure, intensely involved in public life. William Colenso: His Life and Journeys is the most comprehensive biography of this forceful individual, deserving this new edition.
Paperback, 500 pp approx, ISBN 978 1 877578 15 1, $60 approx
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