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Prison Diary coverThe Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington

Dissent and conformity in wartime New Zealand

By John Pratt

A.C. (Archie) Barrington was a leading New Zealand pacifist during World War 11. 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 commentary on the issues it raises in relation to prison life, then and now. He also addresses a fundamental question – what were Barrington and his like doing in prison when similar expressions of dissent would almost certainly have been ignored in Australia or Britain?

Alan Mark coverStanding My Ground

A voice for nature conservation

By Alan F. Mark

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.

His conservation activities have paralleled – and are informed by – a distinguished academic career as a botanist and ecologist. A member of Otago University's Botany Department from 1955 until his retirement as Professor and Head of Department in 1998, he has run and participated in numerous research projects, taught and mentored thousands of students and published 200 academic papers.

In Standing My Ground, Alan Mark 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.

For further information:

Otago University Press
Website otago.ac.nz/press
Email university.press@otago.ac.nz

Books by Otago alumni

Finding the Forgotten God: Credible Faith for a Secular Age, by Ron Hay, DayStar Books, Auckland, November 2014.

Eternity Begins Now, by Bruce Billington, Naultinus Publishing, 2014.

Remembering Christchurch: Voices from Decades Past, by Alison Parr, Penguin Random House, 2015.

The Pacific Festivals of Aotearoa New Zealand: Negotiating Place and Identity in a New Homeland, by Jared Mackley-Crump, University of Hawai'i Press, May 2015.

Turning Stone into Jade: The History of The New Zealand Chinese Association, by David Fung, New Zealand Chinese Association, June 2015.

More That Just a Place of Work: A History of Dunedin's Hillside Railway Workshops, by Ian Dougherty, New Zealand Railway and Locomotive Society, Wellington, December 2015.

Descent into Hell: Civilian Memories of the Battle of Okinawa, by Ryukyu Shimpo, translated by Alastair McLauchlan and Mark Ealey, University of Hawai'i Press, 2014.

Drugs, Sex and Protein Shakes: the Pursuit of the Perfect Body, by Joseph Shield, 2016.

Alumni, if you have recently published a book, please email the magazine editor.

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