From Kaitaia in Northland to Oban on Stewart Island, New Zealand’s nineteenth-century towns were full of entrepreneurial women. Contrary to what we might expect, colonial women were not only wives and mothers or domestic servants. A surprising number ran their own businesses, supporting themselves and their families, sometimes in productive partnership with husbands, but in other cases compensating for a spouse’s incompetence, intemperance, absence – or all three. The pages of this book overflow with the stories of hard-working milliners and dressmakers, teachers, boarding-house keepers and laundresses, colourful publicans, brothelkeepers and travelling performers, along with the odd taxidermist, bootmaker and butcher – and Australasia’s first woman chemist. Then, as now, there was no ‘typical’ businesswoman. They were middle and working class; young and old; Māori and Pākehā; single, married, widowed and sometimes bigamists. Their businesses could be wild successes or dismal failures, lasting just a few months or a lifetime. In this fascinating and entertaining book, award-winning historian Dr Catherine Bishop showcases many of the individual businesswomen whose efforts, collectively, contributed so much to the making of urban life in New Zealand.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 400

Dimensions: 170 x 240 x 20 mm

Publication Date: 10-10-2019

Darkly comic, surreal and full of perceptiveness about human vulnerability and eccentricity, Frankie McMillan’s small fictions often duck and dive away from the reader’s expectations. With a poet’s sense of how single words or phrases ripple out with alternate meanings, and a dramatist’s feeling for how apparently small gestures reveal character, and how sudden, cataclysmic change can wrench us out of comfort, routine and unthinking assumptions, the author leaves us ransacking the language for finer genre definitions. This collection teems with both the animal world and a vivid circus of quirky human individuals. The pieces globe-trot all over the planet: from Russia to America to New Zealand; and yet often their piquant wisdom comes from how they bear down into ‘micro-geography’ of intimate relationships: the troughs, peaks, cliff-sides, the warm, still pools of recognition. Frankie McMillan is like a quietly outrageous Zen master, showing us human folly and idiocy, steering us carefully over the dark river of vulnerability that swells under it all. "The Father of Octopus Wrestling, and other small fictions" is an artisan production, designed and printed by Ilam Press, Ilam School of Fine Arts and is published with the support of Creative New Zealand.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 146

Dimensions: 165 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 23-08-2019

Ces Gledhill hired on with New Zealand Railways in 1925. Forever the rolling stone in search of better money, overtime and promotion, Ces transferred around New Zealand seeking out opportunities within the railway service. Starting as a cleaner, he worked his way up through the ranks of fireman and eventually first-class enginedriver. Working through the Depression years and the boom of war-time rail traffic, Ces recounts with interest his time living at the various towns and cities, working on both isolated sections, branch lines and main trunk trains. Told with passion are many of his footplate escapades. After a wartime absence, he returned from railway military service in the Middle-east, he settled down on the West Coast of the South Island, both operating and keeping operational, run-down locomotives on the post-war railway. This work is well illustrated with images of the period, many taken by the author.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 115

Dimensions: 210 x 296 mm

Publication Date: 16-08-2019

Christmas 2020 - Comes with complimentary Christmas decorations (Available November 2020) Beginners Maori Language Picture Dictionary, for the Whole Family. From the #1 bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator of the Kuwi the Kiwi series, Kat Merewether, comes a large scale, stunningly illustrated visual dictionary. Full of over 1000 basic words in te reo Maori and English, perfect for every New Zealander.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 64

Dimensions: 260 x 340 mm

Publication Date: 20-01-2020

This gorgeous book explores a wide array of feelings. No emotion lasts forever and each situation brings something new. The simple story gives children the chance to identify the feeling, and opens up a discussion about what makes them feel that way. The theme of the story overall is ‘resilience’, not giving up when things get a bit tough.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 28

Dimensions: 216 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 23-05-2021

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? The 63 chapters in Queer Objects consider this question in relation to lesbian, gay and trans­gender communities across time, cultures and space. In this unique international collaboration, well­known and newer writers traverse world history to write about items ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman artefacts to political placards, snapshots, sex toys and the smartphone. Fabulous, captivating, transgressive.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 400

Dimensions: 210 x 250 mm

Publication Date: 11-10-2019

This is my story of the man, Rewi Alley – family member, writer, humanitarian, activist and unwitting myth-maker. It is also the story of his relationship with a country, China, about which I now know enough to acknowledge how little I know. A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley is a beautifully written multi-layered narrative centred on New Zealander Rewi Alley and his part in the momentous political events of mid-twentieth-century China. Part-biography, part-travel journal, part-literary commentary, A Communist in the Family brings together Alley’s story and that of his author cousin, Elspeth Sandys. In 2017, Sandys travelled to China with other family members to mark the ninetieth anniversary of Rewi’s arrival in Shanghai in 1927. One strand of this book follows that journey and charts Sandys’ impressions of modern China. Another tells the story of Rewi’s early life, in an insightful meditation on the complex and always elusive relationship between memory and writing. By placing the man, Rewi, and his work in the context of his time, Sandys is able to illuminate the life of this extraordinary New Zealander in a way that is both historically vivid and relevant to the world of today. Her focus on the role poetry played in his life – both his own and that of the Chinese poets he translated so prolifically – provides moving glimpses of the man behind the myth. Threaded through A Communist in the Family are Sandys’ evolving insights into a nation that looms ever larger in the day-to-day realities of New Zealand and the world. The strange – and strangely intimate – link between the two countries Rewi regarded as home is one in which he played, and continues to play, a crucial role.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 324

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 12-07-2019

Diana Bridge’s subjects are reflected through a range of cultural lenses. To engagement with Western and New Zealand literature should be added her immersion in the great Asian cultures of China and India. Her poetry is an intricate meshing of realities and possesses a remarkable depth and richness of perspective. These are poised, elegantly wrought poems, full of lively intelligence and verbal deftness. Since Baxter, most New Zealand poets have shied away from the use of myth in their poetry. In this collection, Bridge mines this vein for its deeply traditional and personal resonances. She knows, as firmly as did Jung, that ‘myths give us pictures for our emotions’. Here, the poems that openly glance off myth are brief, fresh takes that centre on the heroines of Western Classical legend. They begin in an irony that is needed to cope with the sometimes shocking stories, then range through time to alight with radical brevity on Shakespeare and English history. The refrain of the past narrows down to the notion of the family, No one of us today is of the House of Atreus – Just meet the Family, I say. The book concludes with ‘The Way a Stone Falls’, 22 poems set in Southeast Asia. The sequence takes on board the Cambodian tragedy of last century by way of headless statues – taking a sideswipe at French colonialism. It confronts the hardest decision in the whole Hindu tradition, that of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This is how Bridge finds her way in the world – a place of trees and people and noise and contingency – with the assurance that myth tells her story as well as its own.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Publication Date: 01-06-2019

This book introduces children and young adults to the political career of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Engaging infographics, thought-provoking discussion questions, and eye-catching photos give the reader an invaluable look into New Zealand and the office of its current leader. The World Leaders series introduces readers to some of today’s most powerful political figures. From the leaders’ roles on the global stage to the history of the nations and communities they lead, these informative narratives connect readers with current events by covering everything they need to know about the leaders impacting their world.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 48

Dimensions: 178 x 230 x 5 mm

Publication Date: 01-04-2019

The Book: Bishops, Boozers, Brethren &Burkhas uses cartoons from 1860s to the present day to discuss the way religion in New Zealand has been represented by our cartoonists. There is no general history of religion in New Zealand so this book is a unique contribution in providing not only a cartoon history of religion in this country but also a history via cartoons. From the 1860s, settlers viewed issues of religion and politics as problematic, but in the main, religion remained part of the fabric of society. However, religion was more of a concern for our cartoonists as New Zealand became an increasingly secular nation from the 1970s onwards. This not only reflects the generation of cartoonists whose work was published from the 1970s but also a shift in New Zealand society more generally. Overall, when religion was less of a contested identity and influence, cartoonists tended to leave religion – and the church alone. However, as the country became, very quickly, a secular society from the 1970s onwards, religion was a target of cartoonists. Religion and the religious were increasingly presented as representing religious and social attitudes and beliefs regarded as out of step with a modern society. The Author: Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is Associate Professor in Sociology at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. A founding series editor for Radical Theologies and Philosophies (Palgrave Macmillan) and founding co-editor of Continental Thought & Theory:(http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz/about-ctt/), he toils at the intersections of radical theology, continental thought and cultural and social theory. He also has a focus on New Zealand religious and intellectual history; recently publishing a book of interviews with the New Zealand radical religious thinker Sir Lloyd Geering(Geering Interviews, Polebridge, USA, 2018) and edited the letters of the noted New Zealand philosopher Arthur Prior (Arthur Prior, ‘a young progressive’, Canterbury University Press, 2018).

Bind: paperback

Pages: 200

Dimensions: 200 x 260 mm

Publication Date: 10-05-2019