For the men and women of the skilled trades in the early 20th century, the skills and knowledge of their respective crafts were a source of identity and pride. Together with the so-called unskilled, who built the infrastructure for the new society, these workers laid the cultural and social foundations of a new and fairer society.
This book uses photographs to show two processes fundamental to creating a new society: the transformation of swamp into farmland then cityscape, and the transplantation of the knowledge and skill acquired in the Old World that were essential to building a new world.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 176

Dimensions: 200 x 270 mm

Publication Date: 18-08-2014

Writer Elspeth Sandys was born during the Second World War, the result of a brief encounter between two people who would never meet again. The first nine months of her life were spent in the Truby King Karitane Hospital in Dunedin, where she was known by her birth name, Frances Hilton James. This would change with her adoption into the Somerville family. A new birth certificate was issued and Frances James became Elspeth Sandilands Somerville.

Tom and Alice Somerville, Elspeth's new parents, lived with their son John in Dunedin's Andersons Bay. While Elspeth was happy among the ebullient and welcoming Somerville clan, she had a difficult relationship with her adoptive mother, who was frequently hospitalised with mental health problems.

Elspeth's search for her birth parents did not begin until much later in her adult life. What she discovered after an exhaustive search provided answers that were both disturbing and, ultimately, rewarding.

What Lies Beneath is a searing, amusing, and never less than gripping tale of a difficult life, beautifully told.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 15-09-2014

Explorer Jules-Sebastien-Cesar Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) is sometimes called France's Captain Cook. Born less than a year after the beginning of the French Revolution, he lived through turbulent times. He was an erudite polymath: a maritime explorer fascinated by botany, entomology, ethnography and the diverse languages of the world. As a young ensign he was decorated for his pivotal part in France's acquisition of the famous Venus de Milo.

D'Urville's voyages and writings meshed with an emergent French colonial impulse in the Pacific. In this magnificent biography Edward Duyker reveals that d'Urville had secret orders to search for the site for a potential French penal colony in Australia. He also effectively helped to precipitate pre-emptive British settlement on several parts of the Australian coast. D'Urville visited New Zealand in 1824, 1827 and 1840. This wide-ranging survey examines his scientific contribution, including the plants and animals he collected, and his conceptualisation of the peoples of the Pacific: it was he who first coined the terms Melanesia and Micronesia.

D'Urville helped to confirm the fate of the missing French explorer Laperouse, took Charles X into exile after the Revolution of 1830, and crowned his navigational achievements with two pioneering Antarctic descents.

Edward Duyker has used primary documents that have long been overlooked by other historians. He dispels many myths and errors about this daring explorer of the age of sail and offers his readers grand adventure and surprising drama and pathos.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 664

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 15-09-2014

White Ghosts, Yellow Peril is the first book ever to explore all sides of the relationship between China and New Zealand, and the peoples of China and New Zealand, during the whole of the seven or so generations after they initially came into contact.

The Qing Empire and its successor states from 1790 to 1950 were vast, complex and torn by conflict. New Zealand, meanwhile, grew into a small, prosperous, orderly province of Europe. Not until now has anyone told the story of the links and tensions between the two countries during those years so broadly and so thoroughly.

The reader keen to know about this relationship will find in this book a highly readable portrait of the lives, thoughts and feelings of Chinese who came to New Zealand and New Zealanders who went to China, along with a scholarly but stimulating discussion of race relations, government, diplomacy, war, literature and the arts.

White Ghosts, Yellow Peril for some years to come will be the key general text in the field of the early history of New Zealand and China.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 384

Dimensions: 195 x 255 mm

Publication Date: 15-09-2014

Annie's War is a remarkable book. There have been many published collections of soldiers' diaries and letters from the First World War, but never a first-hand account of one New Zealand family's life in England during these challenging and frightening years.

When her sons, Oswald and Seton, decided they wanted to serve as pilots, which meant enlisting in Britain, Annie Montgomerie decreed that the whole family would go too. So from 1916 to 1919 they lived in London, facing Zeppelin attacks, giving hospitality to young New Zealand friends who left to fight (and sometimes never came back), watching Oswald and Seton go off to war, and suffering in the influenza epidemic.

Through all this Annie kept a diary, in which she recorded her deep love and concern for her family, her hatred of the war, her forthright, amusing an proudly Kiwi views on the English and myriad fascinating details about wartime London life. Annie's granddaughter, Susanna Montgomerie Norris, has transcribed and edited this extraordinary account, along with many letters and diary excerpts from her pilot father, Seton. Richly illustrated with contemporary photographs and other memorabilia, Annie's War offers a unique and compelling view of a crucial time in world history.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 256

Dimensions: 175 x 228 mm

Publication Date: 10-11-2014

Cilla McQueen was New Zealand Poet Laureate 2009-11. One of her writing projects during her time as laureate was "Serial", which she described as'exploring a space between prose and poetry'. It was published in chapters on the Poet Laureate website.
Retitled "Edwin's Egg and other poetic novellas", this work is now published for the first time in hard-copy format, combining McQueen's evocative text with wonderful images from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

8 slim volumes in a slipcase.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 264

Dimensions: 108 x 150 mm

Publication Date: 27-03-2014

"Cloudboy" is a deep-mulling, richly sensitive account of a mother's adjustments to the needs of an autistic child.
This prize-winning suite of poems grows out of extremes of love and frustration, as the poet introduces a bright, unpredictable, markedly individual boy to the rigid, often airless routines of the school system.
Any empathetic parent knows the fears and anxieties of sending a young child into the world of other children, their casual cruelties and dreamy naivety. Each concern in exponentially increased when a child's educational and emotional needs set them apart.
Cloudboy writes his own version of Genesis, he invents a new language; he sketces intricate maps; he reads Aristotle and develops an obsession with Dr Who; he interrupts; he sways; his 'fists come clenched and swinging'. To onlookers, Cloudboy seems troubled, trouble.
Cirrus, cumulus, arcus, stratus: cloud forms speak to Harvey of the phrases of the mother-child bond; the mood-swings and leaps of her child's mind; the mutability of personality; the attraction and evaporation of human kindness; presence and absence; reverie and forgetfulness; the intensity and yet bittersweet transience of early childhood.
With a limber, gorgeously metamorphic sense of sculptural and sonic aspects of poetic form, this book is a tender and detailed atlas of a child's imaginative potential. Yet one of the most remarkable gifts it reveals for us readers is Cloudmother's own finely calibrated perceptions.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles of song lines and spans more than four decades.
Laconic, wry, subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke's new collection carries us from her rural Southland girlhood in the 1950s and 60s to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, and to her present as grandmother, mother, wife and author.
A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity tot he natural world, a gentle humour, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography.
"Born to a Red-Headed Woman" is documentary, vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life and job. Yet at times the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major, formative losses.
If Cooke's observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, how to live a life true to oneself, and to familial love.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 72

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

‘You could say that the 1930s saw the highpoint of Macaroni Cheese.’

‘New Zealand kitchens of the late twentieth century became increasingly spacious, as the average number of household members declined.’

This engrossing history of the domestic kitchen covers 10 decades that saw our culinary

traditions accommodate extraordinary changes in technology and the irresistible process of globalisation. Each chapter surveys the external influences on households and their kitchens, samples the dishes prepared during the decade, and discusses the structure of meals. A study of kitchen equipment and design then closes each chapter, cumulatively revealing more innovation in these aspects than in what we ate.

Kitchens is the culmination of a 10-year research and writing project by anthropologist

Helen Leach, supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, focusing on the material culture of cooking by New Zealanders living in the past two centuries. The project has led to the publication of From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen (2010), The Pavlova Story (with Mary Browne, 2008), The Twelve Cakes of Christmas (with Mary Browne and Raelene Inglis, 2011) and this book.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 264

Dimensions: 215 x 285 mm

Publication Date: 20-11-2014

Dunedin-born artist Grace Joel (1864–1924) 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.

One possible reason why Joel’s work has not remained visible is that few details of her

personal life survive. Only three letters have been found, and they reveal little of the person who wrote them. Undaunted, author Joel (no relation) Schiff has pulled together from the words of her contemporaries, various newspaper accounts, scraps in other historical archives and close study of her extant paintings a portrayal of this talented woman that is as intimate and engaging as her work. He also sets Grace Joel and her work in the times in which she lived, and the artistic communities of which she was a part.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 244

Dimensions: 200 x 270 mm

Publication Date: 10-12-2014