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Books & Authors
Recently Published
Dolphins Down Under: Understanding the New Zealand Dolphin
Liz Slooten and Steve Dawson
New Zealand dolphins, also known as Hector’s dolphins, are fascinating and beautiful animals. Found only in New Zealand waters, they are as ‘kiwi’ as the kiwi but their numbers are under threat – especially from human fishing activities.
This book introduces the dolphin to readers of all ages. Liz Slooten and Steve Dawson began their study in 1984. In the 1990s they sold their house to buy a catamaran to carry out a dolphin survey.
They were determined to make the latest information about these creatures accessible to a general public. ‘There is a lot of literature on New Zealand dolphins but most of it is in scientific journals,’ says Liz. ‘This book “translates” all of this information into a format that is user friendly, interesting and exciting.’
The authors have intensively studied the dolphin’s distribution, behaviour, biology, reproduction and communication,
using photography as their principal research tool. They pull no punches on conservation questions. Early on in their research they realised that dolphin numbers are not sustainable under current fishing practices. Says Liz, ‘The last section of the book provides suggestions for effective dolphin protection measures and encourages readers to get actively involved. This part of the book will be controversial in some circles but very popular in other circles.’
The authors’ passion for science – and for the New Zealand dolphin – is obvious and contagious.
Paperback, 96 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 38 0, $30.00, April 2013
 Dangerous Enthusiasms: E-Government, Computer Failure and Information System Development
Robin Gauld and Shaun Goldfinch
Information and the technology that supports its collection, communication and analysis is a core concern of modern government, making e-government (meaning electronically enabled government) fundamental to the ongoing 'reinvention' of public administration.
This book is written for a general audience and takes a critical look at policies, problems and prospects for e-government in a series of case studies. Why have ICT failures in the public sector occurred and what lessons do they provide for the future?
Paperback, 160 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 34 6, $39.95, reprinted December 2012
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, $65, December 2012
Joanna Woods
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.
Paperback, 224 pp approx., illustrated throughout, ISBN 978 1 877578 30 4, $49.99, December 2012
Afife Skafi Harris and Beryl Lee
More than a recipe book, this colourful collection arose from a unique community project and invites us to explore the dishes and food lore of 26 people from Asia, Africa, the Pacific, South America, Europe and The Middle East. Each migrant’s story is followed by a selection of their favourite recipes, carefully chosen to make a meal and to reflect the distinctive flavours, textures and traditions of their inherited foodways. All recipes have been adapted for use with locally available ingredients.
In presenting their recipes, each ‘new New Zealander’ reflects on their ethnic heritage and identity in relation to the food traditions of their country of birth, including preparation methods, rituals and celebrations. Beautifully presented, the book inspires new ways of thinking about food and encourages an appreciation of the richness of our diverse communities.
Paperback, 192 pp approx, colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877578 29 8, $39.99, December 2012
Miriam Laugesen and Robin Gauld
New Zealand is the only country in the world where elected health boards have long been a core feature of the health care system. These boards are conceptually important and aspirational for policy-makers and communities across the world grappling with issues of how to increase public participation in health care.
This book traces the development of New Zealand’s elected health boards, from the 1930s to the present District Health Board structure, analysing the history of democratic governance of health care, how boards have functioned, the politics surrounding their reform, and the idea of local democracy in health care decision-making. Based on extensive primary research, it assesses the capacity of elected boards to effectively govern the allocation of public expenditure on behalf of taxpayers and patients.
Paperback, 220 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 27 4, $40.00, December 2012
Brian Patrick and Hamish Patrick
The South Pacific is a vast expanse of ocean – over 50 million km² – with tiny scattered islands and island groups. From Kiribati, Tuvalu and Fiji in the west, to the far-flung Marquesas and Austral Islands in French Polynesia in the east, this book surveys (and discovers) the butterfly inhabitants of these tropical islands. For completeness, Hawai’i to the north – where there are many fewer islands in an otherwise empty ocean – is included. To the south and with a much larger land area, lies temperate New Zealand, with a further string of islands reaching into subantarctic waters.
Hardback, 240 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 04 5, $49.99, November 2012
Alastair Grant
For the past three years Alastair Grant has travelled the great inland harbours of the west coast of the North Island creating a photographic record of these fascinating and under-appreciated regions, trying to capture their atmosphere and a feel for the people who live and work around them.
The harbours are drowned river valleys. They differ greatly in size, but share a similar climate with prevailing westerly winds. They are all tidal. They were settled by Maori following the great migration in the 13th and 14th centuries and have played significant roles in Maori history. To this day, marae dot their shores.
Hardback with dustjacket, 240 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 33 5, $80.00, November 2012
David Eggleton
Home is a classic Landfall 'Open House' issue, where anything and everything goes. Submissions poured in on every topic conceivable, and the result is truly a feast of good writing and imagination.
Courtney Sina Meredith, Emma Barnes, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Tony Beyer and C.K. Stead (among others) offer up new poems exploring topics as disparate as the body, the corner dairy, 'cloud' technology, silent film stars and more. All make for exhilarating reads. Be enchanted too by a wealth of short stories: Alex Wild Jespersen's deftly humorous tale of a media studies tutor's first experience with girl-on-girl boxing, Vivienne Plumb's 'The Cabin Trunk', David Herkt's story set in the rarefied world of the uber-wealthy at the height of the financial crisis and Laura Solomon's futuristic piece about a Kiwi cult that breeds 'shumans' (sheep/humans).
Nicholas Reid, John Horrocks, Peter Simpson and others offer up considered reviews of recent New Zealand books and Martin Rumsby investigates moving image installations. As for art, there's Anita DeSoto's otherworldly paintings, while Darryn George's unique blend of geometric abstraction and kowhaiwhai are present in both the portfolio pages and under discussion by David Eggleton in The Landfall Review.
Paperback, 208 pp, 16 pp colour portfolios
ISBN 978 1 877578 43 4, $30.00 / 16.50 UK, November 2012
Edited by Lyndon Fraser and Angela McCarthy
For almost 200 years, the English have been one of the largest migrant streams to New Zealand (they have been on the move globally since around 1600). Yet relatively little has been written about their experiences in New Zealand, compared with their Irish, Scottish, Indian, Chinese and Pacific counterparts. This book brings together leading international scholars and prominent local researchers to explore a wide range of topics and issues at the very heart of research into human mobility. Why did English-born people decide to emigrate? What factors shaped their migration and adaptation? How might we best describe and explain their experiences? This collection of essays will interest anyone interested in migration and/or family history.
Paperback, 232 pp, illustrated, ISBN 978 1 877578 32 8, $45.00
Edited by Christine Prentice and Lisa Warrington
First published in 1996 and now updated, this book contains plays by established New Zealand writers that were written for lunchtime theatre.
They are informal one-act plays, lasting less than an hour, requiring little in the way of stage equipment and props, and suitable for a wide range of audiences.
Their condensed form gave their authors an opportunity to experiment with scripting and characterisation. Together, they represent a variety of perspectives and performance styles.
The plays offered small 'adventures in theatre' for the writer, and continue to do so for directors, performers, audiences and readers.
Paperback, 112 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 24 3, $30 / 17.50 UK
 Pat Barrett
• Walks for everyone – from families to the fit and experienced
• 46 easy walks, 59 moderate tramps, 27 hard routes
• Perfect holiday planner: 15 maps showing locations of walks
• Over 100 colour photos
Essential guide to the many tracks and trails of the beautiful inland regions of the lower half of the South Island, with an emphasis on foothills and forests. Includes the Mackenzie Country, Mount Cook, Lake Wanaka and Matukituki valleys, Mount Aspiring National Park, Makarora/Haast, and the Wakatipu regions.
In each chapter:
• Maps showing locations of walks
• Walk time involved
• Access information
• Difficulty grade (Easy to Hard+)
• Description of route and its attractions + more
August 2012, Paperback, 192 pp, full colour, ISBN 978 1 877578 06 9, $40.00
 Emma Neale
• Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2011
'The breath held or expelled in wonder, frustration or delight energises Emma Neale's writing. Poems in The Truth Garden take risks because they need to; in the clamour of family life they have required attention, collected thought and a spirited attitude. How else to "stockpile time, how hoard its shine", except in poems drawn from relationships, home and garden and cast in words that "spill like incandescence around your hands".' (Cilla McQueen, 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award judge)
July 2012, Hardback, 64 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 25 0, $30
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research – specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth'. Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonisation of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, published in New Zealand by Otago University Press, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, and the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.
June 2012,
Indigenous/Maori & Pacific Studies/Anthropology/Cultural Studies/ Sociology and Social Policy, Paperback, 216 x 138 mm, 256 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 28 1, $39.99
Edited by David Eggleton
• A fantastic issue – pushing the bounds of the real
• Announces the recipient of the Seresin Landfall Residency 2012
• Publishes shortlisted essay from the Landfall Essay Competition 2011
•Art by Barry Cleavin, Peter Madden, Sriwhana Spong, Ruth Cleland
From the gothic and the carnivalesque to the speculative and beyond, this issue of Landfall pushes the bounds of the real and delves into worlds just-sideways of ours. We have fiction told from the perspective of a giant squid in Nina Seja's piece 'The Collectors', and a short story by Raewyn Alexander set in an uncanny not-so-distant future where 'reality TV is illegal' and live, unedited 'Life TV' is the only acceptable term.
Poems offer diverse perspectives on un-reality, and there's also 'Bad Blood', a story by Anna Smith about the mysterious patupaiarehe – and gnarly feet. Also in this issue are Siobhan Harvey's shortlisted essay from the 2011 Landfall Essay Competition, and new poetry by Elizabeth Smither, Joanna Preston, Holly Painter, Therese Lloyd, Lynley Edmeades, Belinda Diepenheim and more.
Vaughan Rapatahana discusses traditional poetry in te reo Maori and Stephen Oliver confesses 'A Nostalgia for Books'. And of course there's the Landfall Review, featuring insightful and in-depth reviews of recent New Zealand books.
June 2012, Literature/Art/Culture, Paperback, 215 x 165 mm, pb, 208 pp, 16 in colour, ISBN 978 1 877578 42 7, $30 / UK 16.50
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.
April 2012, Sociology / Education, Paperback, 210 x 148 mm, 196 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 18 2, $45.00, April 2012
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.
March 2012, NZ Literature/ Mental Health, Paperback, 200 x 148 mm, 320 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 21 2, $40 / £27.50 UK
Stories and Soundscapes from Colonial New Zealand
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.
March 2012, 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
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.
March 2012, Hardback, 240 x 170 mm, 352 pp, b/w and colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877578 17 5
$60 / £34.50
The story of Natanahira Waruwarutu, as recorded by Thomas Green
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 Akaora.
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.
Feb 2012, Paperback with flaps, 230 x 155 mm, 112 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 12 0, $30 / £18.50 UK
We are all participants in an increasingly visual culture, yet we rarely give thought to the ways that photographs shape our experience and understanding of the world and historical past. This book looks at a range of New Zealand photographs up to 1918 and analyses them as photo-objects, considering how they were made, who made them, what they show and how our understanding of them can vary or change over time. This emphasis on the materiality of the photograph is a new direction in scholarship on colonial photographs.
The writers include photographers, museum curators, academics and other researchers. Their essays are not intended as definitive readings but rather offer a variety of ways in which to read the images they have chosen. In the course of the book, they explore a host of issues related to the development of photography in New Zealand. World War I is the end point, as it coincided with profound cultural shifts with the expansion of the mass illustrated press and the rise of consumer photography, as well as a change in New Zealand's place in the world.
Paperback, 208 pp,
ISBN 978 1 877578 16 8, $50.00 / £29.50 UK, December 2011
‘ … you have the Press, both open and free: use it. Give your thoughts life; let all good measures be brought forward, discussed, and well ventilated.’
– William Colenso, writing to the Hawkes Bay Herald in 1859
The provincial newspaper columns were the ‘public spheres’ of their time, places for geographically separated individuals to contribute opinions to the debates of an immature democracy. But equally they were the vehicles for the passionately held views of bigots egged on by unscrupulous editors eager for exciting copy. These letters from Colenso, and their replies, show colonial politics to be argumentative, fervent and nasty – and the rants of opinionated, self-styled experts are thrilling in their vehemence.
Paperback, 500 pp approx, ISBN 978 1 877578 14 4, $65, December 2011
The 'Dunedin Sound' of the 1980s is a phenomenon known throughout the world. But what does Dunedin music-making sound like in the 21st century? Dunedin Soundings features writing from musicians, composers and scholar/practitioners. They discuss genres as diverse as brass band, opera, classical, Indonesian gamelan, jazz, rock and more, the intricacies of the composition and lyric-writing processes, digital remixing, and scoring for film and TV. Together, they reveal the ways in which these supposedly separate music fields have the potential to inform and stimulate each other.
The theoretical idea behind the book is that performance and composition practices constitute a process of research. The writers are practitioners who are recognised nationally and internationally for their contributions to New Zealand music across genres, including composer Anthony Ritchie, the Verlaines' Graeme Downes and Emmy-award nominee Trevor Coleman.
This book is for everyone with a serious passion and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity for music, and anyone wanting an insider's glimpse into music-making in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Paperback, 176 pp approx, b/w illustrations,
ISBN 978 1 877578 22 9, $40.00 / £27.50 UK / December 2011
A very good essay opens this issue, the winner of the Landfall Essay Competition 2011. Then, this being issue 222, we move into drawings, poems, 'letters', and an essay, largely from Christchurch and Lyttelton writers and artists, written since the September and February earthquakes. The section closes with Julia Morison's earthquake artefacts in her art portfolio, Meet Me on the Other Side.
Next up is a tribute to Allen Curnow for the centenary of his birth, in which fellow writers remember Curnow as brother, young writer, teacher, scholar, leading poet, and friend.
The final section leads off with paintings by Christchurch artist Miranda Parkes, followed by a selection of submitted poetry and short fiction and the announcement of The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2011. And of course The Landfall Review! A feast of good reading.
Paperback, 208 pp, 16 in colour, ISBN 978 1 877578 41 0, $29.95
Helen Leach, Mary Browne, Raelene Inglis
• Accessible well-illustrated food history
• Same format and same author as The Pavlova Story
• Includes 12 historic Christmas cake recipes for today’s cooks
• Plus hints for ensuring your Christmas cake is rich and moist!
The many and varied Christmas cakes we enjoy today have a lineage that stretches back to at least the twelfth century. This wonderful book traces their history, with a special focus on the twentieth century.
Hardback, 192 pp approx, b/w and colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877578 19 9, $40.00
Seabird Genius
The story of L.E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross and the
Yellow-eyed Penguin
The first biography of Lance Richdale, who achieved international fame as the father of Otago’s albatross colony from 1936 and for his research on the behaviour of the Yellow-eyed Penguin – Time magazine dubbed him ‘The Dr Kinsey of the penguin world’ – and the sooty shearwater, or muttonbird.
Richdale grew up in Wanganui, took a tertiary course in agriculture in New South Wales, and returned to New Zealand to teach mainly in rural schools in the North Island for several years, eventually taking up a position with the Otago Education Board in 1928 as an inspiring itinerant agricultural instructor and nature study teacher.
Richdale never gave up his day job and incredibly in the weekends, holidays and evenings undertook major, meticulous and time-consuming research on penguins, albatrosses and several petrel species. His study of the muttonbird was achieved during prolonged solo camps on tiny Whero Island in stormy Foveaux Strait, where the wind blew straight from Antarctica. Neville Peat’s biography searches the traces left by this shy and obsessed man for some answers to two questions: why? and what drove him? Richdale’s legacy is a nature tourism industry in Dunedin worth $100 million a year, and the longest-running seabird population study in the world.
Paperback, 240 x 170 mm, 288 pp, b/w and colour throughout,
ISBN 978 1 877578 11 3, $45 / £27.50 UK, 10 November 2011
Wild Heart
The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand
Images of pristine forests, mountain ranges, untameable rivers and empty expanses of coastline are the key attraction in how we promote Aotearoa New Zealand internationally: ‘100% Pure’ no less. Such wildness is at this nation’s psychological and physical core.
This book searches for an understanding of ‘the wild’, of what makes wilderness such an important part of our psyche. What could wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand become, and, consequently, what might we its people also become?
Contributors: Mick Abbott, Allison Ballance, Shaun Barnett, James Beattie, Mike Boyes, Tom Brooking, Stephen Espiner, Gerard Hindmarsh, Julian Kuzma, Robin McNeill, Cilla McQueen, Les Molloy, Harvey Perkins, Kerry Popplewell, Richard Reeve, Jacinta Ruru, Geoff Spearpoint, Brian Turner, Pip Wells, Jon West, Kerry Wray.
Paperback, 244 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 20 5, illus, $45.00, 8 November 2011
The twentieth century was a time of great change in early years education. As the century opened, the use of Froebel's kindergarten methods infiltrated more infant classrooms. The emergence of psychology as a discipline, and especially its work on child development, was beginning to influence thinking about how infants learn through play. While there were many teachers who maintained Victorian approaches in their classrooms, some others experimented, were widely read and a few even travelled to the US and Europe and brought new ideas home. As well, there was increasing political support for new approaches to the 'new education' ideas at the turn of the century.
All was not plain sailing, however, and this book charts both the progress made and the obstacles overcome in the course of the century, as the nation battled its way through world wars and depressions.
Early childhood education/Maori education/Alternative education /NZ History/Psychology
Paperback,
210 x 170 mm, 320 pp approx, b/w and colour throughout,
ISBN 978 1 877372 86 5, $49.95 approx, in stores October
Ruling Passions
Essays On Just About Everything
These essays are by one of Australasia's leading media and social science intellectuals.
'Culture’ is often seen as somehow elevated above daily life (set in a rarefied realm) or set apart from it (e.g. the anthropological study of cultures other than our own). But for contemporary sociologists and media theorists, culture is better seen as the matter-of-fact practice and taken-for-granted nature of everyday life. Culture is inherent to how the world is made to mean something, how knowledge is produced and how society functions. As a result, we need to interrogate what we take as ‘given’.
Nick Perry is well placed to interrogate the stuff of daily life. In Ruling Passions, his lucid, enjoyable and probing essays on shopping, telephoning, watching TV, playing sport, gambling and travel show us how we can ‘read’ our own environments and, in so doing, interpret the world around us and our place within it.
Media and Cultural Studies / Social Science
paperback, 230 x 155 mm, 224 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 89 6, $45.00, in stores September 22
• Winner of The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2010
I am travelling away from my life, towards my life.
This city knows all my secrets.
And that tram, lit from within, waiting at the end of the line.
This city, which is nowhere else.’
So begins Jennifer Compton’s new volume, winner of the 2010 Kathleen Grattan Award.
This City circles the globe from Florence to Palmerston North but the resulting volume is far more than so-called armchair travel. Topography and public space are a preoccupation (buses and trains, roads and houses, architecture and even Google Earth’s Street View all get a mention) but it is her evocation of the transient grounded in these spaces: snippets overheard on an Italian strada, scenes on a bus on Moxham Ave, imaginings of lives from long ago (Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson), that leaves a taut and exciting impression of lives lived here, in this place, in This City.
Kathleen Grattan Award judge Vincent O'Sullivan commented about this collection:
'It is a volume that sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind's engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right. This is a complete book of poetry, coherent, gathering its parts to arrive at a cast of mind, a distinctive voice, far more than simply adding one good poem to another.'
Paperback, 64 pp
ISBN 978 1 877578 10 6, NZ $30 / UK £13.99, in stores July 2011
 Making our Place
Exploring land-use tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand
Fascination with the interplay of people and place inspired the editors to bring together New Zealanders from differing backgrounds and disciplines to explore some of the stories and sites of conflict and change to be found amongst our sacred, historic, rural, urban and coastal landscapes. All engage with the underlying question: are there better ways to reconcile the tensions inherent in our struggles with the land and each other?
The authors are from fields as diverse as architecture, ecology, design, history, planning, law, theology and tourism. They discuss issues ranging from the early-settler surveying lines to the Wanganui/Whanganui naming debate, the legal arguments over wahi tapu and Maori customary land to dairying in the Mackenzie Basin. In exploring different ways of framing landscape tensions, they seek new understandings of why such passion, reverence and contest is generated and ways to identify new approaches to resolving problems.
Environmental Studies, Planning, Geography, Cultural Studies
Paperback, 240 x 170 mm, 240 pp, b/w photographs
ISBN 978 1 877372 88 9, $45.00 / £18.50 UK
Fiona Pardington
The Pressure of Sunlight Falling
Edited by Kriselle Baker & Elizabeth Rankin
European explorers of the Pacific in the 18th and early 19th centuries faced a problem – how to describe the people they met and report what they had seen and found. From Cook onwards, any serious expedition included artists and scientists in its ship’s company.
An ambitious journey of the 19th century was the third voyage of the French explorer Dumont d’Urville, from 1837 to 1840. It was just before the invention of photography, when phrenology, the study of people’s skulls, was the latest thing. D’Urville chose to take on the voyage an eminent phrenologist, Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, to preserve likenesses of people by making life casts. When the expedition returned to France, the casts were displayed, and later stored in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, to be joined eventually by other casts from Dumoutier’s collection, including those of the d’Urville and Dumoutier families. All were overtaken by photography and history.
Fiona Pardington first learnt of the life casts in 2007, when a chance conversation initiated a four-year project. It took her from Auckland to the Musée de l’Homme, as she researched and photographed some of more than fifty casts of Maori, Pacific and European heads, including casts of her Ngai Tahu ancestors. This book publishes these photographs and coincides with the opening of a major travelling exhibition.
The photographs are extraordinarily beautiful, evocative and spiritually powerful images. They recover likenesses and revive the life force of Dumoutier’s subjects, eliciting our empathy and fascination with a world we can never really know.
This is a rich and engaging book. With essays by leading scholars in Pacific history, art and photography, on subjects as diverse as phrenology and cast-making, the voyage, and the identity of the Maori casts, it will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth-century encounters between voyagers and the peoples of the Pacific, or contemporary art and photography.
Photography/History/Maori & Pacific studies, 330 x 245 mm, 160 pp, hardback with dustjacket, colour throughout
ISBN 978 1 877578 09 0, $120 / £49.99 UK, in stores now, published June 2011
An Accidental Utopia?
Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 1880–1940
Erik Olssen, Clyde Griffen & Frank Jones
This book reminds us of our egalitarian past at a time when New Zealand ranks fourth in the developed world for social inequality. It is our first systematic analysis of urban social structure and focuses on three major forms of mobility – marital, worklife and intergenerational. This enables it to identify the distinctive forms taken by the capitalist class structure in urban New Zealand during a formative historical period, 1890–1940.
By placing the analysis deep within the context of a particular community – the southern suburbs of Dunedin – the book also identifies in rich detail complex occupational pathways, their meanings, and the way in which shifts in the mobility pattern both reflect and explain changes in political behaviour. This unique discovery provides the book with one of its most stimulating themes.
Social History
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 300 pp approx, b/w photographs ISBN 978 1 877372 64 3, $49.95 , in stores now, published June 2011
Outspoken
Coming Out in the Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand
Liz Lightfoot
 In 2007, I underwent a crisis of sexual identity. I was married, with two young children, when I became attracted to another woman. The hostility I encountered at the Anglican church I was attending made me curious about other people's experiences. It seemed to me imperative that stories of being gay in the Church be heard, especially in the context of the current maelstrom within the Anglican community in which the Church has been encouraged to undergo a 'listening process'. This book is the result.
Outspoken presents the narratives of eleven people who have come out in the Anglican Church in New Zealand, including two ordained church members. The author has written a general introduction, plus an introduction to each individual story and reflections on it. The book closes with a Postscript that discusses truth and the Church; community, belonging and rejection; ideas about hell and damnation; the theology of denial; and the implications and ramifications of the 'Don't ask, don't tell' approach.
The author notes that 'People's lives are sacred ground and the area of sexuality is one where people are arguably at their most vulnerable.' She hopes that this research will contribute to community building within the Anglican Church.
Religion / Gay & Lesbian / Spirituality
Paperback,
230 x 155 mm, 218 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 08 3, NZ$40.00, 18.50 UK
, in stores now, published June 2011
Evocative titles in this Landfall, ranging from 'Windfarm at Woodville', to 'didymo', 'Fly-over Country', 'The Poisoned Apple', 'Ministry of Food', 'Beauty' and 'A day of pleasure in Auckland'. Essays: on architecture by Tim Corballis, on pollution in Azerbaijan by New Zealand journalist David Brown, on going nursing by Stephanie de Montalk, on chemical poisoning by Mia Watkins, and the 'Dunedin Sound' by Alastair Galbraith.
Stories: about contemporary living, by Albert Wendt and Jennifer Compton. Art: colour portfolios by environmental artists Russell Moses and Maureen Lander, graphic art by Jeffrey Harris, and Back Page artwork by John Pule and Gregory O'Brien. Poems: about the environment and related matters by, amongst others, Brian Turner, Richard Reeve, Vincent O'Sullivan, Christina Conrad, Karen Zelas, Holly Painter, Alice Miller, Joanna Aitchison, Reihana Robinson, Alistair Paterson, Ranui Taiapa, Ouyang Yu, Pat White, Leonard Lambert, Stephanie Christie and Kate McKinstry.
The Landfall Review: critical writing by C.K. Stead, Vincent O'Sullivan, Elizabeth Smither, Iain Sharp and more.
Literature/Art/Culture
Paperback, 215 x 165 mm, pb, 208 pp, 16 in colour,
978 1 877578 40 3, $29.95 NZ / 14.50 UK, in stores May 2011
Reappraising William Ferguson Massey
Edited by James Watson and Lachy Paterson
One of New Zealand's longest-serving Prime Ministers, his political legacy has not always been treated kindly. However, recent work by historians suggests that a reappraisal of Bill Massey – which this book provides – is overdue.
It is clear, a century later, that Massey was Prime Minister at a particularly turbulent time in its history. The opening essay by Erik Olssen reviews the development of his own assessment of Massey over almost five decades. After initially imbibing the established Labour Party view of the man as thoroughly reactionary and anti-democratic, he recounts his growing awareness that there was much about Massey's personality and career that contradicted that portrayal. The following chapters examine aspects of Massey's life and leadership in chronological order – from his experience as a teenage immigrant from Ulster through to his part in the Versailles Peace Conference and the tough campaign in 1923, less than two years before his death, for Imperial Preference, which secured the market for New Zealand products in Britain for the next half century.
New Zealand History
Paperback,
230 x 150 mm, 172 pp, b/w photographs,
ISBN 978 1 877578 07 6, $40.00 / £18.50 UK, in stores March 2011
• Food history anthology from Montana-shortlisted author
• Early Polynesian cooking and colonial cookery to the present
In the past two decades, cuisine and culinary history have attracted increasing attention, with both popular and academic books reflecting the growth of interest. Yet despite the vast number of cookbooks that survive, they have not been the primary focus of research projects. Acknowledgement of their potential contribution to our understanding of culinary history has been slow. This book is a first in its field.
The essays explore several themes in New Zealand's food history, including the adaptation of British and Maori culinary traditions in the nineteenth century and the fate of the Maori tradition in the twentieth, external influences on New Zealand cookery (previously thought to be predominantly British until after World War II), the transmission of cookery knowledge between and within generations, the impact of changing technology on cooking methods and recipes, nutritional advice in community cookbooks, and the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as seen in the cookbooks of Aunt Daisy and Lois Daish.
This book will entertain anyone interested in food, New Zealand history or domestic culture.
Culinary History / Anthropology
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 208 pp, illustrated in b/w and colour, ISBN 978 1 877372 75 9, $40.00 /£17.50 UK, in stores November 2010
* Announces the winner of The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2010,
Judged by Vincent O'Sullivan
* Announces and publishes the winner of the Landfall Essay Competition 2010, Judged by Cilla McQueen
Landfall Open House makes for an exhilarating read. There's new voices, an eclectic range of poetry, a whole bunch of 'first-person' fictions, reviews of dozens of recent New Zealand books, and terrific artwork.
The mailbox (electronic and snail-mail) has delivered some treats for this issue: be charmed by Terence Rissetto's Son of Sam, Francis Cooke's Satisfaction, or Andrew Ross's take on Southland: for playful poetry, try Anna Jackson or Bernard Cadogan; and sit back and savour serious reviews of books by Patricia Grace, Francis Pound, Kerry Popplewell, Judith Dell Panny and Penelope Todd (that's just the Ps). Cilla McQueen presents the winner and a runner-up of the Landfall Essay Competition 2010 and Vincent O'Sullivan announces his pick from the Kathleen Grattan Award entries.
Literature / Art / Culture
Paperback, 215 x 165 mm, 208 pp, 16 in colour, ISBN 978 1 877372 99 5, $29.95, in stores November 2010
In The Radio Room, Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen travels space and time, throwing ‘thought-lines' from her present-day corner of the world to the ancient Celtic islands of her ancestors (‘On a cliff-top above screeching gulls I stand still thinking backwards, antipodean poet grafted from ancient taproot in this bedrock' … ‘if they spoke, what would they say? Could I understand that language at the root of my tongue?'
Her point of view is at once small, interior and intimate (‘I sit on an upturned apple box in the shade of my hat looking up through the pores of its straw') and in the next breath, flung outwards and upwards: ‘Discovered in lenses, bent around stars. I leap island to island, altar to altar'.
The collection is about the writing and reading of poetry, too: ‘Poem in hand, the tendons slide and muscles smile under the skin'. ‘Soapy Water' riffs on modern politics to play with this theme: ‘world poetry is running low. Naturally, there is speculation in solar poetry, wind poetry, tidal poetry, all as old as mankind, since he learned to talk to himself'.
Whether investigating the extinction of the natural landscape or space-time, molecules and mathematics, writing to her dear departed, watching an insect (‘I am too big to be seen, like the weather'), or playfully pondering the perspective of a sock, McQueen's word-ware is as polished and intelligent as ever, and demands multiple readings to uncover each subtle layer. ‘Poetry takes you apart, puts you back different' she intimates in ‘Foveaux Express'. The Radio Room does just that. These are words to be visited again and again, by one of this country's most talented writers.
Poetry / NZ Literature
Paperback, 210 x 140 mm, 80 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 03 8, $30.00, in stores November 2010
Much of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present 'hurtling globalisation's highway' where 'Google tells Google that Google saves'. As he says 'I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.'
In this time of winebars and infotainment, 'Ngati Cappucino and Ngati Bogan' stalk the streets bent beneath hoodies and 'boxy four-wheel-drives plane through the wet' piloted by 'yummy mummies'. Titles of poems reflect the absurdities of 21st century existence: 'Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card' riffs off an ad in the New Yorker, while 'Not for Human Consumption', and 'Twenty Second Century' hint at the ecological chaos of the modern world. Name-droppers, debt-dodgers, ghettoised gods and 'Vern Acular, that good keen bloke' all make an appearance, as does the lost five-cent coin.
Poems set in Suva, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin locate this book firmly in the South Pacific. Eggleton traverses the country: from Cantabrian landscapes of 'a geology sculpted into fists' and Dunedin 'tipped out of a colonial toy-box' to North Island summer idylls where you could 'follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut by the soaraway kite of blue sky'. Nationality and 'kiwiness' are under investigation. This is no mere intellectual exercise as through it all thrums the steady beat of life.
Poetry / NZ Literature
Paperback, 210 x 140 mm, 88 pages, ISBN 978 1 877578 02 1, NZ $25.00 / UK £13.99, in stores October 2010
The Far Downers 
The People and History of Haast and Jackson Bay
Julia Bradshaw
At the end of the road on the southwest coast of the South Island, Jackson Bay is today a fishing village. In 1874, it was established as a special settlement for European immigrants, some of whom refused to disembark from their ships, such were the harsh and isolated conditions of life they saw before them. Those who remained were a feisty lot, living a pioneering life while elsewhere in New Zealand people went to the movies, listened to the radio and drove cars. No road link to the area existed until 1960.
This book introduces the reader to the Maori and European history of the Haast district, and shares the life stories of nine people who grew up there in the first half of the twentieth century.
History / Biography
Paperback, 170 x 240 mm, 152 pp, b/w photographs, ISBN 978 1877276 07 1, $34.99, reprinting September 2010,
Olive Trotter
The definitive biography of a much-beloved and respected colonial activist. Born in Bengal in 1810 but educated in England, Richardson spent his early career in India in the military, achieving the rank of major. He served in the Afghanistan campaign in 1842 and was ADC to Sir Harry Smith throughout the Sikh Wars. On his retirement from the army in the 1850s he spent four months in New Zealand and subsequently decided to migrate permanently, settling in Otago in 1856.
'The old Major' as he was known, soon became politically active, first being elected to the Otago Provincial Council serving as its Superintendent during the goldrush years, then becoming an MP and, in 1868, Speaker of the Legislative Council. He was the father of a family that included two bright daughters and it was largely his advocacy that ensured the University of Otago should open its doors to women – becoming the first university in the Southern Hemisphere to admit women to all its classes.
Biography / NZ History
Paperback,
230 x 155 mm, 208 pp, b/w photos,
ISBN 978 1 877578 01 4, $45.00, in stores October 2010
Edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Indian people in 'bi-cultural' New Zealand have long been an invisible minority, rarely mentioned in our history books. This volume is a second contribution to remedying this historical silence, following the publication of Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community by Jacqueline Leckie.
The first section introduces the context, briefly tracing the history of Empire and migration, which saw a few hundred adventurers from Gujarat and Punjab braving the seas and settling here in the late 19th century. Now Indians constitute the second-largest Asian-Kiwi group in our population (having more than doubled in number between 1991 and 2001). This increasing diversity has initiated a fresh debate on New Zealand’s changing national identity, with the emphasis shifting from its bicultural foundation to greater recognition of ethnic minorities within the nation-space. The second section critically addresses the issue of a distinctive and uniform ‘New Zealand Indian’ identity and rethinks diasporic identity. In the third section, the Indian diaspora in New Zealand is looked at from a wider global perspective.
Asian Studies / Cultural Studies / Ethnic Studies / History / Society
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 264 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 85 8 , $49.95, in stores September 2010
Malaria Letters
The Ross–Laveran Correspondence, 1896–1908
Edwin R. Nye
 It has been estimated that every thirty seconds a child dies from malaria somewhere in the world. New cases of the disease affect more than one hundred million people each year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. But with global warming the distribution of mosquito vectors is changing and whole populations are at increasing risk. Alphonse Laveran first demonstrated the parasitic nature of malaria in 1880 and within twenty years the role of mosquitoes in transmission had been worked out by Ronald Ross. This first translation of the two scientists' correspondence asks whether the world has let them down, failing to translate their findings into 'straightforward action'.
This book places modern science in a broader historical context, inviting the reader to both share the excitement of a major scientific discovery and to ask pressing questions about the application of such findings.
Medical history / Science
hardback, 210 x 140mm, 64 pages, b/w photographs
ISBN
978 1877372 66 7, $ 45.00 / 19.50 UK
Quarantine!
Protecting New Zealand at the Border
Gavin McLean & Tim Shoebridge
Every day, all over the world, quarantine officials screen international passengers and cargo and every week a border protection story is in the news. As a group of islands for which biosecurity is vital, New Zealand provides an ideal focus for this book, the world’s first national history of quarantine.
Colonial border control was ad hoc and reactive, initially focusing more on human disease than plants and animals, although sheep scab was held at bay. From the early 1890s, the new Agriculture Department’s fruit inspectors took on codlin moth, fruit fly and other nasties, building fumigation sheds and trying to educate importers.
Aircraft dramatically increased the biosecurity threat and fear of malarial mosquitoes and fruit fly forced the country to rewrite its rulebooks in the 1950s. As trade diversified, new sea routes posed new biological threats and at last the government began inspecting imported timber. More recently, MAF Biosecurity NZ has been exercised defending the country against such headline-makers as varroa mite, didymo, Mediterranean fruit fly, and the painted apple moth.
The result? Although there have been some costly incursions, New Zealand remains free from many dangerous diseases and agricultural and environmental threats. How this was achieved makes an exciting story.
Biodiversity / Public Policy / History
Hardback, 240 x 170 mm, 192 pp approx, colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877372 82 7, $45.00 / £19.50 UK, in stores August 2010
Leigh Davis
 • Winner of The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2009
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.
Poetry / Literature, 280 x 220 mm, 216 pp, ISBN 978 1 877578 00 7, $39.95, in stores July 30 2010
Edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Nathalie Kermoal, Chris Andersen, Anna Petersen, Michael Reilly, Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez
and Poia Rewi
 Indigenous Identity and Resistance brings together the work of Indigenous Studies scholars working in Canada, New Zealand and the Pacific in research conversations that transcend the imperial boundaries of the colonial nations in which they are located. Their lucid, accessible, and thought-provoking essays provide a critical understanding of the ways in which Indigenous peoples are rearticulating their histories, knowledges, and the Indigenous self.
Hana O'Regan discusses a programme of language regeneration initiated by members of her iwi, Kai Tahu. Chris Andersen describes the power of Canada's colonial nation-state in constructing categories of indigeneity. Brendan Hokowhitu problematises the common discourses underpinning Indigenous resistance. Janine Hayward compares Indigenous political representation in Canada and New Zealand. This is just a snapshot of the forward-looking research in this reader. Taken together, it heralds a new way of thinking about Indigenous Studies in the 21st Century.
Indigenous Studies
paperback, 155 x 235 mm, 264 pp, b/w photographs, ISBN 978 1 877372 83 4, $45.00, in stores July 2010
Hauaga
The Art of John Pule
Edited by Nicholas Thomas
 John Pule is one of the most significant artists living and working in New Zealand today. From the mid-1990s his powerful, enigmatic and personal paintings attracted great interest, and his work came to be widely shown. Famously inspired by hiapo, the innovative barkcloths of nineteenth-century Niue, Pule has been fascinated by the Polynesian past and present, but his work ranges far more widely, responding both to ancestral culture, and to the global terror and violence of our time.
This is the first book to deal with John Pule’s art. It ranges over his drawing, print-making and writing – he is the author of two novels and several volumes of poetry – as well as his painting. Essays by Gregory O’Brien, Peter Brunt, and Nicholas Thomas provide several routes into Pule’s engaging and compelling works, considering his formation as a writer and artist, his meditations on life and loss, and the extraordinary architecture of his visual art. John Pule speaks himself, through an extended interview, and in a series of extracts from his poetry and prose.
Published to coincide with the first major survey exhibition of John Pule’s work, curated by the City Gallery Wellington, Hauaga provides an indispensable guide to the work of one of the most powerful and original artists of the new Oceania.
Art / Art History / Pacific Studies
Hardback, 290 x 275 mm, 184 pp, colour illustrations, ISBN 978 1 877372 80 3, $120.00, in stores June 2010
Mad or Bad?
The Life and Exploits of Amy Bock 1859–1943
Jenny Coleman
Amy Bock's life has been the inspiration for plays, books, a TV programme, music, poems, an exhibition and more, but Mad or Bad? is the first comprehensive biography. And while Amy gained notoriety as a daring, duplicitous and talked-about con artist who impersonated a man and married an unsuspecting woman, in this book the author shows how her story was not a straightforward case of fraud and misrepresentation.
Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Amy had a convict heritage on both sides of her family. While she gained notoriety in 1909 for her impersonation of a man and marriage with an unsuspecting woman, the author shows how her whole life was one of fraud and misrepresentation. After teaching for six years in Victorian schools until she was asked to resign, Amy migrated to New Zealand in 1884. Assuming a variety of personae and remaining conveniently itinerant, she pursued a consistent course of petty crime for the next twenty-five years. In presenting her colourful and chequered life, this biography leaves the reader to judge whether she was essentially mad or just bad.
History / Biography
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 370 pp approx, b/w photographs, ISBN 978 1 877372 71 1, $49.95 / £22.50 UK, in stores June 2010
Guest edited by Bill Direen
New Zealand music has been made with electric guitars, European orchestral instruments, laptops, bones, voices, skin, wood, pvc piping, air, magnetic tape and digital media. Our musicians and composers are many and varied, whether within these shores or travelling the world.
Being both writer and musician, editor Bill Direen is well equipped to look at music and music-making in our culture and has produced a great mix of work in Landfall 219. The musical aspect of poetry – phrasing, timing and the insinuation of meaning during performance – is an aspect that creative writers might respond to. Musical aspects of prose – alliterative and rhythmical or structural devices – may carry meaning quite as much as syntactical ones. There are essays and reviews on a musical theme, as well as writings related to the experience of listening and the role of NZ music and ways of making it in a wider context.
Literature / Art / Culture
Paperback, 215 x 165 mm, 208 pp, 8 pages colour, ISBN 978 1 877372 98 8, $29.95, in stores May 2010
Beyond the Scene
Landscape and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand
The Book
What contribution does landscape make to our sense of identity? Images of spectacular natural features pervade the media – between the pages of glossy coffee-table books, in tourism promotions and on screen as the setting for blockbuster movies – but are these scenes that define its people?
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. Each discusses a very different landscape: from suburban Auckland and rural Waikato to a planned town in Canterbury and much-filmed Otago. Together, they investigate the relationship landscape has to identity, community and psyche.
Environmental Studies / Planning / Geography / Cultural Studies
Paperback, 240 x 170 mm, 224 pp,
b/w photographs, 4 pages colour, ISBN 978 1 877372 81 0, $45.00 / £18.50 UK, in stores March 2010
Doing Well and Doing Good
Ross and Gendining: Scottish Enterprise in New Zealand
S.R.H Jones
The Book
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries large numbers of Scots emigrated to seek their fortunes abroad. Better educated than the English and with a strong Presbyterian ethic, they were unusually successful in business and politics. This was true for New Zealand as elsewhere.
Ross & Glendining Ltd was founded in Dunedin in 1862, during the gold rush, by two contrasting characters: Caithness-born John Ross and Robert Glendining, from Dumfries. Initially a drapery importing business, it opened branches throughout New Zealand and warehouses in all the main centres. Careful management and efficient systems enabled the business to grow, despite strong competition from Australia. After the investment boom of the seventies, R&G began to diversify, investing in sheep runs, a woollen mill, other manufacturing, and even a coal mine. This history offers not only a portrait of a firm but a window on the development of the New Zealand economy and the emergence of a manufacturing sector.
History / Business studies
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 300 pp approx, b/w photographs, ISBN 978 1 877372 74 2, $49.95 / £24.50 UK, in stores February 2010
The Catlins
and the Southern Scenic Route
The Book
An out-of-the-way corner in the south-east of the South Island, The Catlins is now gaining the recognition it deserves as a beautiful, relatively unspoilt area with many natural attractions, including that rare thing on the east coast, native forest.
Neville Peat introduces the history, geology and attractions of the region – its flora, wildlife, bush walks, caves and waterfalls – before tracing the journey along the stunning Southern Scenic Route linking Otago, Southland and Fiordland.
Ecotourism / Heritage / Travel Guides
Paperback,
240 x 170 mm, 64 pp, colour photographs throughout, ISBN 978 1 877372 78 0, $19.95 / £13.99 UK, new edition in stores
February 2010
The Book
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.
The narrative skilfully interweaves the lives of twenty-four Jewish exiles: the Viennese philosopher, Karl Popper, is saved by travelling across the oceans to New Zealand, and German author Karl Wolfskehl likewise. The journey brings others to this land from very diverse places, even from Dr Mengele’s experiment rooms in Auschwitz. Klier depicts the plight of these immigrants, whose stories could scarcely be more varied. Yet they have one common link: they all flee to New Zealand, the one place furthest from Germany, their promised land at the end of the earth.
This book is a significant piece of world history, featuring vital stories that need to be told before they are lost to subsequent generations. It is the first English-language translation of this important work and the first time it has been published outside of Germany.
Memoir / Jewish history
Paperback, 235 x 155 mm, 256 pp, b/w photos, ISBN 978 1 877372 76 6, $45.00, in stores
November 2009
The prominence of the rural world in NewZealand’ssocial, cultural andeconomic history is long established and undisputed. For decades, the country was termed ‘Britain’s overseas farm’ or ‘the Empire’s dairy farm’. This is the first book to explore the rich heritage of language the rural sector has generated.
For two hundred years people have come from all over the world to work in New Zealand’s rural enterprises. From this linguistic melting pot, which includes the addition of indigenous Maori words, phrases and adaptations, the author has compiled this book,
including historical citations for all words listed.
Language / History / Culture
Paperback, 464 pp, b/w photographs , ISBN 978 1 877372 72 8, $50.00 / £24.50 UK
James Herries Beattie
Edited by Atholl Anderson
Journalist and researcher Herries Beattie worked withSouthernMaori for almost fifty years andproduced many books. With a strong sense that traditional knowledge needed to be recorded, in 1920 he interviewed people from Foveaux Strait to North Canterbury and from Nelson and Westland, with Otago Museum support. He then transcribed notebooks lent to him by his informants, visited the Museum with them, recording southern names for fauna and artefacts, travelled to traditional sites, and consulted the work of earlier researchers. Finally he worked his findings up into the systematic notes which eventually became MS 181 in the Hocken Library, a highly valued but increasingly fragile treasury of knowledge. This was first published by Otago University Press in 1994 and is now reprinted with a new cover.
Editor Atholl Anderson introduces the book with a biography of Beattie, a description of his work and information about his informants. This book is a wonderful source of information, unique in New Zealand literature. As Tipene O’Regan writes in his foreword, ‘Ngai Tahu will be the richer for the emergence of this remarkable text. Maori studies, in general, will be the richer. The texture of southern knowledge will be better etched in our landscape.’
Maori studies / Anthropology
Paperback, 230 x 155 mm, 640 pp, illustrated, ISBN 978 1 877372 77 3, $59.95 / £32.50 UK
The Watchdog
New Zealand’s Audit Office 1840 to 2008
In a global economic climate troubled by the consequences of a dearth of fiscal accountability and transparency, the importance of independent auditing bodies, whether in the public or private sector, is not to be underestimated.
Today New Zealand is perceived as one of the world’s least corrupt nations – ranking alongside Denmark and Finland – indicating a job well done by its national Audit Office in inspiring public confidence. Yet the government auditing function set up in 1840 was initially a ‘timid creature’. The authors trace the Office’s rise and decline towards ‘impotent irrelevance’ before it was saved by computers, which facilitated more targeted and searching methods of examination. This absorbing tale moves from the teething problems of difficult origins, in which ‘the fulminations of Auditors-General were increasingly dismissed as nit-picking and legislated around – or ignored’, to the brave new world of radical ‘value for money’ auditing in the 1970s. The public sector reforms of the 1980s saw questioning of the very need for an Audit Office – questions that the Office was by then well equipped to answer.
History/ Public Policy/ Governance
Hardback, 255 x 190 mm, 208 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 73 5, $59.95 / £32.50 UK
Secular Sermons
Essays on Science and Philosophy
Discursive, entertaining and provocative, Secular Sermons contains fourteen essays by celebrated philosopher Professor Alan Musgrave, examining the basic assumptions of science, religion and mathematics.
Can we decide what to believe? Why do scientists do experiments and what can their experiments show? Is evolution a scientific theory? Such apparently simple questions are brilliantly investigated by Musgrave in order to interrogate the worldviews we inhabit – and their consequences. He brings to these questions an expansive historical knowledge, provoking his readers to enter the now-discredited belief-systems of earlier ages in order to compare these with their own.
Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Paperback, 230 x 155 mm, 208 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 70 4, $39.95 approx / £00 approx UK
First winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, this book reveals an exciting new Australasian voice.
The Summer King tells stories, exploring the world we inhabit and our relationships with the other. Myth, catastrophe, family, strangers, sex, sport – all feature in this ‘fine and fierce first collection’ (Gillian Clark). The book contains two sequences: ‘Cowarral’, about Preston’s family farm in the Forbes Valley of NSW, and ‘Venery’, which was inspired by the collective nouns that first appeared in the Book of St Albans.
‘Joanna Preston writes a poised and sensual poetry, with unsettling energies always threatening to break through the surface.’ (Philip Gross)
Poetry
Hardback, 240 x 170 mm, 80 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 69 8, $29.95 / £13.99 UK, in stores July 2009
Rauru
Tene Waitere, Maori Carving,
Colonial History
Editor: Nicholas Thomas; Photographer: Mark Adams
Interviews with James Schuster (great-grandson) and Lyonel Grant (carver)
Tene Waitere of Ngati Tarawhai (1854-1931) was the most innovative Maori carver of his time and his works reached global audiences decades before the globalisation of culture became a fashionable topic. Three out of four historic Maori meeting-houses located outside New Zealand were carved or partly carved by Waitere.
The meeting house Rauru is the highlight of a famous anthropological museum in Germany. Hinemihi, the carved house featured in one section of this book, sheltered survivors of the Tarawera eruption in 1886 before being removed to the park of an English country house. The magnificent carved Ta Moko panel is one of Te Papa the Museum of New Zealand's icons.
The travels of Waitere's work tell us something about the interplay between empire and art, about what is made of history now. This book is unique as a dialogue as well as a revelation of great works of Maori art.
Art / Maori
Hardback, 275 x 290 mm, 184 pp, colour throughout, ISBN 978 1 877372 61 2, $120.00 / £49.99 UK
Passageways
The Story of a New Zealand Family
Passageways, the family history of acclaimed biographer Ann Thwaite, is in equal parts a window on colonial times in many parts of New Zealand, the story of a generation of New Zealand ex-patriate intellectuals, a tender portrait of parent-child relations strained by distance, and a domestic account of World War II. The author writes with charm and erudition.
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. They founded and ran New Zealand News in London and A.J. Harrop became a respected New Zealand historian. This is an engaging portrait of a brilliant and unconventional New Zealand-British family.
Family History
Paperback, 240 x 170 mm, 368 pp, illustrated, ISBN 978 1 877372 67 4, $45 / £19.50 UK
First published in 2001 and now revised and updated to post-election 2008, this is a classic account of critical issues for children that will interest parents as well as policy-makers, teachers and students.
In the decade of the 2000s, New Zealand early childhood policy was at the forefront of political attention and the country was regarded as a world leader. The book describes the expansion of early childhood education and care in postwar New Zealand, including the development of Kohanga Reo. Covers many aspects of social history and considers the ongoing political debates, including some cautious consideration of the young child citizen in the 2000s.
Early Childhood Education
Paperback, 210 x 148 mm, 368 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 68 1, $49.95 / £21.50 UK
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Diplomatic Ladies
Far from 'Home'
Landfall 222
The Twelve Cakes of Christmas
Edited by 
