Art and Lifestyle

A Global Feast

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.

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 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.

Artefacts of Encounter

The Pacific artefacts and works of art collected during the three voyages of Captain James Cook and the navigators, traders and missionaries who followed him are of foundational importance for the study of art and culture in Oceania. These collections are representative not only of technologies or belief systems but of indigenous cultures at the formative stages of their modern histories, and exemplify Islanders’ institutions, cosmologies and social relationships. Recently, scholars from the Pacific and further afield, working with Pacific artefacts at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA), have set out to challenge and rethink some longstanding assumptions on their significance. The Cook voyage collection at the MAA is among the four or five most important in the world, containing over 200 of the 2000-odd objects with Cook voyage provenance that are dispersed throughout the world. The collection includes some 100 artefacts dating from Cook’s first voyage. This stunning book catalogues this collection, and its cutting-edge scholarship sheds new light on the significance of many artefacts of encounter.

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.

Built for Us

Surrounding us in our everyday lives are public buildings we all relate to: post offices, state houses, schools, railway stations, courthouses, office buildings, police stations. Many of these buildings were designed by six men, who held the post of Colonial or Government Architect from the 1860s to 1960s. This book brings together all of their surviving public works, with drawings illustrating the distinctive style of design and particular brilliance of each.

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.

Charles Meryon

A bibliography on French artist Charles Meryon by R D J Collins.

Creature Comforts

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world – in 2011, 68 per cent of all Kiwi households had at least one pet: almost half had a cat and nearly a third had a dog. Yet until now no book has explored how pets came to be such an integral part of the New Zealand way of life. Creature Comforts does just this. By chronicling the major events and ideas that have shaped pet keeping in New Zealand, this fascinating and entertaining book explains the strong relationship we have with our animal friends, and how this has changed over time.

Dunedin Soundings

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.

Early New Zealand Photography

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.

FigureWork

Although landscape has dominated New Zealand art, the human form has also been a focus for many artists. The importance of the nude in New Zealand art is explored in FigureWork: The Nude and Life Modelling in New Zealand Art by Sandra Chesterman. The first to take this fresh approach to New Zealand art, FigureWork provides absorbing insights into the wide range of artists who have worked with the nude, the models who posed for them, and the controversies they may have encountered along the way.

Fiona Pardington

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, a 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.

Flying Kiwis

Leaving home to see the world is something that succeeding generations of young New Zealanders have done in ever-increasing numbers. ‘Overseas experience’ or the ‘OE’ has been the topic of countless individual travel accounts, and has provided the subject matter for plays, films and novels. Until now, there hasn’t been a history of the OE. Based on the oral accounts of several hundred travellers, across all seven decades of the OE, this vibrant history shows how the OE has changed over time.

Francis Shurrock

This book presents a sketch of the life and work of this ‘sculptor's sculptor’ (1887–1977) who as a teacher and a practitioner inspired several generations of New Zealand artists but has been neglected by scholars. Mark Stocker traces the development of Shurrock's work from late Victorian-influenced symbolism to stylish, streamlined Art Deco and beyond. This title contains many black-and-white photographs and 13 colour plates showing sculptures and prints by Shurrock, as well as the artist at work. It also includes a bibliography and catalogue of exhibits.

From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen

In the past two decades, cuisine and culinary history have attracted increasing attention, with both popular and academic books reflecting the growth of interest. Recipes are both sensitive markers of the socioeconomic conditions of their times and written representations of a culture's culinary repertoire 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.

Gothic NZ

Contemporary creative writers, intellectuals, photographers, painters and other artists have all contributed to this volume exploring the idea of 'gothic' in New Zealand culture. From Martin Edmond's abandoned houses, to Ian Lochhead's Victorian corrugated iron structures, to Otis Frizzell's tattoos, from Peter Jackson's movie-making to ghost paintings - there's plenty of it. As the editors suggest, gothic is 'endemic to New Zealand's self-representation'.

Grace Joel

Dunedin-born artist Grace Joel (1865–1924) exhibited to acclaim in London and Paris, yet she and her art are relatively unknown today. Joel excelled at portraiture and mother and child studies, and was skilled in portraying the nude. She received her artistic training in Melbourne, and lived for the mature years of her career in London, where her work appeared at the prestigious Royal Academy, as well as the Paris Salon and the Royal Scottish Academy. She also held a number of solo exhibitions at prominent venues in Australasian, English and European cities. Today she is claimed by New Zealand, Australia and Britain.

Harbour

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.

Hauaga

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.

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.

Hiapo

'Hiapo' is the word for barkcloth or tapa in the language of Niue. The aim of this book 'is to reveal the power of a remarkable art, that until now has been obscure to all but a few specialists' - the painted hiapo of Niue island in central Polynesia. Most known pieces of hiapo were produced in the mid to late nineteenth century and are now dispersed, largely in museum collections, all over the world. The authors have worked on this project for a decade, visiting museums, collecting information, travelling to Niue, talking to old people, trying to find out how these paintings were done and who made them.

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.

Ka Taoka Hakena

In 1907 Dr T.M. Hocken of Dunedin – historian, bibliographer and collector – undertook to gift to the University of Otago his magnificent collection of books, manuscripts, paintings and other historical documents relating to New Zealand and the Pacific.

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.

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand

In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared: ‘We are all New Zealanders.’ These words resonated, an instant meme that asserted our national diversity and inclusiveness and, at the same time, issued a rebuke to hatred and divisiveness. Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand is bursting with new works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art created in response to the editors’ questions: What is New Zealand now, in all its rich variety and contradiction, darkness and light? Who are New Zealanders?

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.

Landfall 241: Autumn 2021

Results from the 2021 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition

Landfall 242: Spring 2021

Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Edited by Lynley Edmeades.

Landfall 243: Autumn 2022

Announcing the winner of the 2022 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Exciting contemporary art and writing

Landfall 244: Spring 2022

Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. In the 2022 Spring edition, Landfall 244, Lynley Edmeades brings together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging voices.

Landfall 245: Autumn 2023

Landfall is Aotearoa’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. Landfall 245, Autumn 2023 edition, announces the winner of the 2023 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition and features exciting new literature and art.

Landfall 246

Edited by Lynley Edmeades Announces the winner of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition, Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award and 2023 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize Aotearoa’s longest-running arts and literary journal Showcases exciting new contemporary art and writing Paperback, 230 x 150mm, 208pp ISBN 9781990048647, RRP $30 Release date: 27 November 2023

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.

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.

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.

Pasifika Styles

Pasifika Styles is about a groundbreaking experiment in the display of contemporary Pacific art. The artists flung open the stores of the museum and installed their works in cases next to taonga collected on the voyages of Cook and Vancouver. This heralds a new era of collaborative curatorship in ethnographic museums.

Queer Objects

Queer lives give rise to a vast array of objects: the things we fill our houses with the gifts we share with our friends, the commodities we consume at work and at play, the clothes and accessories we wear, various reminders of state power, as well as the analogue and digital technologies we use to communicate with one another. But what makes an object queer?

Rauru

Tene Waitere of Ngati Tarawhai (1854-1931) was the most innovative Maori carver of his time; his works reached global audiences decades before the globalisation of culture became a fashionable topic. 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 His carved Ta Moko panel is one of Te Papa the Museum of New Zealandís icons.

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses offers a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums located at the corners of the so-called Polynesian triangle: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapa Nui.

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.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary: The discovery of wonder is an engaging and moving book full of spiritual insight, wisdom and warmth. It is the result of a decade of exploration and contemplation of the concept of sanctuary by Julie Leibrich, a poet and writer, formerly a research psychologist and Mental Health Commissioner. Sanctuary is written in a way that happily combines reason and imagination, poetry and critical thinking, knowledge and originality, producing a highly readable and rewarding book. Sanctuary cuts across genres: at once a spiritual memoir; a collection of personal journal entries and brief discourses; and a window into the views of influential writers, thinkers and poets, and of the author’s friends and acquaintances. Julie Leibrich’s life journey has led her to discover through ‘wondering, wandering and wonderment’ the elements of the world and self that are most sacred.

Shifting Nature

Shifting Nature: Photographs by Wayne Barrar, with an essay by Geoff Park

Shifting Nature

Photographs by Wayne Barrar accompanied by an essay by Geoff Park

Snark

Winner of the 2017 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, the delightfully dark Snark is a tumultuous romp through worlds created by Lewis Carroll and here brought to life through the vivid imaginings and fabulous art of award-winning author and illustrator David Elliot.

Southern Lakes Tracks & Trails

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.

Stained Glass Windows of Canterbury, New Zealand

Stained glass is a public art form of immense visual appeal. The region of Canterbury contains a collection of nineteenth and twentieth century windows of international significance, including works by Arts and Crafts Movement artists.

Stewart Island Rakiura National Park

Revised and Updated 2019 Edition. Stewart Island is an increasingly popular holiday destination for eco-tourism and outdoor recreation, with many bush walks and a wealth of natural features to enjoy. Neville Peat introduces the attractions of the island – what to see and do, its walks and tramps, its national park, wildlife, history and magnificent scenery.

Strong Words #2

The best of the Landfall essay competition

Sustainable House

Sydney's first self-sufficient house offers a blueprint for future urban living. The house gets energy from the sun, water from the rain, and takes care of its waste disposal needs. It is off mains water supply, puts solar electricity back into the main electricity grid, recycles all water on the property, and processes all sewage on site.

Te Papa to Berlin

Ken Gorbey is a remarkable man who for 15 years was involved with developing and realising the revolutionary cultural concept that became Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Then in 1999 he was headhunted by W. Michael Blumenthal to salvage the Jewish Museum Berlin, which was failing and fast becoming a national embarrassment. Led by Gorbey, a young, inexperienced staff, facing impossible deadlines, rose to the challenge and the museum, housed in Daniel Libeskind’s lightning-bolt design, opened to acclaim. As Blumenthal writes in the foreword: ‘I can no longer remember what possessed me to seriously consider actually reaching out to this fabled Kiwi as a possible answer to my increasingly serious dilemma ...’ but the notion paid off and today the JMB is one of Germany’s premier cultural institutions.

The Heart Sutra

A vibrant, engrossing collection, where satisfying storytelling meets a very modern sensibility. Caren Wilton is funny and engaging. Her characters find themselves in unfamiliar landscapes: sometimes physical - a Bangkok flat, a youth hostel in Edinburgh, a Wellington massage parlour - and sometimes personal. Wherever they are, she takes a vivid, compassionate look at human strengths and vulnerabilities, and people's skewed attempts at finding happiness. Unsatisfactory sex, coin-flipping doctors and an elephant with a wooden leg - Caren Wilton writes page-turning stories whose characters always ring true.

The Pavlova Story

While Australians and New Zealanders have long debated which country invented the pavlova (a large meringue dessert cake said to emulate the lightness of the famous ballerina, Anna Pavlova), the real story of the ballerina’s visit to the Antipodes and the emergence of three different pavlovas was neglected.

Tsugaru

Tsugaru is located in the northwest corner of Japan's main island, Honshu. With a rugged landscape and challenging weather, it was bypassed by Japan's industrial development after World War II. It has remained relatively rustic, with its countryside dotted with rice paddies and apple orchards. As a result, it is rich in culture and diversity, with people of many different dialects and traditions.

Tuhituhi

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.

UNDREAMED OF... 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship

This sumptuous book brings together the art and the stories of half a century of Frances Hodgkins fellows.

Wanaka

Neville Peat describes the scenic splendour of Wanaka and the myriad activities and attractions for visitors in this updated edition of a book that serves as both a guide to one of New Zealand’s tourism hotspots, and as a souvenir. The book covers the history of the Wanaka area and its progress into a contemporary centre renowned for an exciting range of outdoor activities and regular events, including the internationally recognised Warbirds Over Wanaka air show. Further material offers a guide to local walking and cycling tracks, local flora and fauna, and Mt Aspiring National Park.

Wanaka

Wanaka is a gem. In summer, visitors outnumber the resident population by as many as ten to one as boating, fishing, climbing, walking and cycling absorb large numbers of holiday makers into the terrain. In winter, snowboarders and skiers gather to take advantage of snow capped peaks.

Wellington

Wellington is a great place for a holiday, whether for a weekend or two weeks. The city has energy, as the home of many of New Zealand's cultural institutions, and a wonderful location on high hills around a dramatic harbour.

Women of the Catlins

A haunting, off-the-beaten-track destination, the little-known Catlins region of New Zealand is as mysterious today as it ever was. In this first in-depth look at the lives of its inhabitants, award-winning writer Diana Noonan and photographer Cris Antona collaborate to capture the thoughts and feelings of 26 women from this remote outpost. As the subjects speak for themselves on topics as diverse as family, work, isolation and their relationship with the environment, there is, at last, an opportunity for readers to enter into the heart of this rugged, unknown landscape where few venture and only the strongest make it home.