Migration, Ethnicity, Madness: New Zealand 1860–1910 provides a social, cultural, and political history of migration, ethnicity, and madness in New Zealand between 1860 and 1910. Its key aim is to analyse the ways that patients, families, asylum officials, and immigration authorities engaged with the ethnic backgrounds and migration histories and pathways of asylum patients and why. Exploring such issues enables us to appreciate the difficulties that some migrants experienced in their relocation abroad, hardships that are often elided in studies of migration that focus on successful migrant settlement. Drawing upon lunatic asylum records (including patient casebooks and committal forms), immigration files, Surgeon Superintendents’ reports, Asylum Inspectors’ reports, medical journals and legislation, the book highlights the importance of examining antecedent experiences, the migration process itself, and settlement in the new land as factors that contributed to admission to an asylum. The study also raises broader themes beyond the asylum of discrimination, exclusion, segregation, and marginalisation, issues that are as evident in society today as in the past.

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Publication Date: 20-05-2015

The Braided River explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages. The first book to examine migration through the lens of the personal essay, The Braided River presents migration as a lifelong experience that affects everything from language, home, work, family and friendship to finances, citizenship and social benefits. Like migrants themselves, The Braided River crosses boundaries, working at the intersections of literature, history, philosophy and sociology to discuss questions of identity and belonging. Throughout, Diane Comer, both migrant and essayist herself, demonstrates the versatility of the personal essay as a means to analyse and understand migration, an issue with increasing relevance worldwide.

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Pages: 304

Dimensions: 150 x 230 x 20 mm

Publication Date: 01-04-2019

Are women past caring? Care is essential to social relationships and individual well-being. It is woven into New Zealand’s key social institutions, such as the family, and is also embedded in societal expectations around state provision of health and welfare. Care is so vital, in fact, that it is often taken for granted and goes unnoticed and unrewarded. Historical and philosophical enquiry have largely ignored the issue of care, yet it raises profound questions about gender, justice and morality. The essays in this volume raise those questions directly – at the level of abstraction where prominent New Zealand women philosophers grappled with the political implications, and on the ground at the level of family relationships. Understanding the history of care requires attention to personal narratives, such as a Māori grandmother’s story, a Rarotongan leader’s concept of duty to her people, or the sense of service that drove a long-term social worker. Memories of childhood night-time care are carried across the ocean from North East India. The depiction of sole-carer mothers in New Zealand film suggests a ‘caring’ alternative to the celebrated concept of ‘man alone’. The case studies examined focus on the everyday nature of care operating across domestic, institutional and political spaces, and build upon areas of strength in women’s history with its interest in family, motherhood, health, welfare, education and employment. The foundations of Past Caring? lie with Making Women Visible, a national conference on women’s history held at the University of Otago in February 2016. This important volume opens up a set of perspectives and experiences of caring to begin a conversation about urgent questions facing New Zealand society. How do we recognise, reward and do justice to those acts that hold our society together?

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Pages: 286

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-02-2019

In My Body, My Business, 11 former and current New Zealand sex workers speak frankly, in their own voices, about their lives in and out of the sex industry. Their stories are by turns eye-opening, poignant, heartening, disturbing and compelling. Based on a series of oral history interviews by Caren Wilton, My Body, My Business includes the stories of female, male and transgender workers; Māori and Pākehā; street workers, workers in massage parlours and upmarket brothels, escorts, strippers, private workers and dominatrices, spanning a period from the 1960s to today. Two of the 11 interviewees still work in the industry. Several have been involved with the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective, including long-time national co-ordinator Dame Catherine Healy. Four transgender interviewees tell their stories here, helping to demystify the history of New Zealand’s transgender community, about which little has been published. Caren Wilton prefaces the book with an introductory essay about the New Zealand sex industry, which in recent times has seen a lot of changes, the most profound being the decriminalisation of prostitution in 2003. Fifteen years on, New Zealand remains the only country in the world to have decriminalised its sex industry. This engaging and highly readable book looks at what the changes have meant for the nation’s sex workers. Wilton’s interviews are here complemented by the work of Wairarapa-based photographer Madeleine Slavick. My Body, My Business allows the women, men and transgender workers of New Zealand’s sex industry to speak for themselves, telling vivid, compelling stories in fresh, lively voices.

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Pages: 286

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2018

Five notable twentieth-century New Zealanders who made their lives in Australia are the subject of this fascinating biographical investigation by award-winning author Stephanie Johnson. Roland Wakelin, Dulcie Deamer, Jean Devanny, Douglas Stewart and Eric Baume had little in common in personality, proclivities and politics. Yet they all experienced fame and/or notoriety in the ‘West Island’ while being largely forgotten in their country of origin. They also occasionally crossed paths in the course of eventful lives. The works of painter Roland Wakelin place him as a founder of Australia’s Modern Movement, while his modest and affable personality was the opposite of the stereotypical artist. Dulcie Deamer was a writer and libertine known for her leopardskin attire and associations with the larger-than-life characters of the Sydney bohemian set – including the ‘Witch of Kings Cross’, fellow New Zealander Rosaleen Norton. The forthright feminism and creative integrity of novelist Jean Devanny led to bitter battles with the same communist movement she devoted decades of her life to. Douglas Stewart was one of the most famous ‘Australian’ writers of his period. He was a long- term gatekeeper for Australian letters as the literary editor of the Bulletin, and then editor for publishers Angus and Robertson. Born into an unusual and unorthodox Jewish family, Eric Baume gained prominence in Australia as an early prototype of the modernday ‘shock jock’ and at one stage one of the country’s highest-earning media personalities and bestselling authors. A lifelong gambling addict, he died in debt. Stephanie Johnson restores these striking New Zealanders to our national narrative, engaging their life stories to illuminate the curious lacuna that exists at the heart of the complex relationship between the two nations. As a writer with strong connections to both countries, Johnson draws on her own experiences of life on both sides of ‘the ditch’ in her reflections on the trans-Tasman diaspora and the subtle differences and cultural divide that set apart the two countries.

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Pages: 288

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

This blacked-out, bourgeois, boarding-house life – God in Heaven, how I really loathe it! The smell of evening cooking in the passages, the businessmen’s faces, the church clock chiming the polite quarters down the street – the whole couchemar d’une incessante mise en scène. Pfui! Am I alive or dead? What I want is to get drunk, to lie in the hot and generous sun, to sleep with wild boys – yes, that is more like it. – James Courage, Diary, 24 Jan 1941. New Zealand author James Courage was born in Christchurch in 1903, and he became aware of his homosexuality during his adolescent years. He moved to London in 1927 and began writing novels, plays, poems and short stories. He was much more sexually open than most of his homosexual writer contemporaries – Frank Sargeson, Eric McCormick, Charles Brasch and Bill Pearson. A Way of Love, published in 1959, was the first gay novel written by a New Zealander, and some of his other seven novels (including Fires in the Distance and The Call Home) contain queer characters. Between 1920 and 1963, Courage confided his innermost thoughts to a private diary. He wrote about leaving New Zealand, the men he met in London’s streets, and forging friendships in the literary scene. He was an evocative chronicler of landscapes and indoor settings: life on long ocean voyages, air raid shelters during the war, and the psychiatrist’s clinic at a time when society was deeply ambivalent about homosexuality. Courage recorded his personal triumphs and struggles with an engaging honesty, a lively intelligence, and a whimsical sense of humour. Chris Brickell’s selections from the 400,000 words of diary entries reveal Courage to be a truly engaging man, a complex personality and an astute observer with a gentle, whimsical sense of humour, an acerbic wit and an artist’s appreciation of art. Courage’s diaries are a delightful surprise … James Courage is revealed to be both a significant writer and a sensitive, brave and engaging New Zealander we should be proud to own and celebrate. – Paul Millar What a wealth of contemporary detail is here about the shadow world (to many readers) of covert sexual engagement, and the sharp and engaging portrait of a middle-class privileged life, with its travel and its civilian experience of war. I also found of great interest his gradual change from an almost copy-book privileged aesthete, to a late in the day socialist. – Vincent O’Sullivan

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Pages: 416

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 04-06-2021

If you’ve ever walked along a beach or rocky shore and peered, poked or wondered at the things cast upon it by the waves, this book is for you. Sea foam, ambergris, giant squid, stranded whales, seaweed, shells, plastic, dead birds, shoes and pieces of planes or rockets … Beaches are our windows to the ocean, and the objects we find on them tell stories about life, death and dynamic processes in the sea. Beachcombing looks at waves and tides, the connectivity of Southern Hemisphere coastlines, and the life cycles of marine plants and animals. It will help you understand the objects and organisms you find on beaches, and the intriguing reasons they have come to be there.

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Pages: 116

Dimensions: 170 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-05-2021

New Zealanders started hearing things in new ways when new audio technologies arrived from overseas in the late 19th century. From the first public demonstration of a phonograph in a Blenheim hall in 1879, people were exposed to a succession of machines that captured, stored and transmitted sounds – through radio, cinema and recordings. In The World’s Din, Peter Hoar documents the arrival of the first such ‘talking machines’, and their growing place in New Zealanders’ public and private lives, through the years of radio to the dawn of television. In so doing, he chronicles a ‘sonic revolution’ in how New Zealanders heard the world. The change was radical, signifying a defining break from the past. Human experience of the world changed forever during the late 19th and early 20 centuries because we learned to capture, store, and transmit sounds and moving images. ‘Audio’ since then has been a continued refinement of the original innovation, even in the contemporary era of digital sound, with iPods, streaming audio and Spotify. The World’s Din is a beautifully written account that will delight music-lovers and technophiles everywhere. Without further ado, it is time to crank the gramophone, or tune the wireless, or open the Jaffa box as the cinema lights dim, and hearken to the richness and variety of listening in New Zealand’s past soundscapes.

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Pages: 288

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 15-03-2018

Hudson & Halls: The food of love is more than just a love story, though a love story it certainly is. It is a tale of two television chefs who helped change the bedrock bad attitudes of a nation in the 1970s and 80s to that unspoken thing – homosexuality. Peter Hudson and David Halls became reluctant role models for a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ generation of gay men and women who lived by omission. They were also captains of a culinary revolution that saw the overthrow of Aunty Daisy and Betty Crocker and the beginnings of Pacific-rich, Asian-styled international cuisine. Their drinking, bitching and bickering on screen, their spontaneous unchoreographed movements across the stage that left cameras and startled production staff exposed broke taboos and melted formalities. They captivated an unlikely bunch of viewers, from middle-aged matrons to bush-shirted blokes. Hudson and Halls were pioneers of celebrity television as we know it today: the naughty, not-quite-normal boys next door who rocketed to stardom on untrained talent and a dream. When Peter Hudson became seriously ill with prostate cancer, David Halls was inconsolable. What remained unchanged through it all was their abiding love for each other. In this riveting, fast-paced and meticulously researched book, New York Times bestselling author Joanne Drayton celebrates the legacy of the unforgettable Hudson and Halls.

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Pages: 304

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 19-10-2018

Revised and Updated 2019 Edition Dunedin city and its environs are home to an amazing range of habitats and landscapes, of plants, animals, birds, insects and geological features. From the ocean, with its albatrosses and penguins, to the high alpine zone of inland ranges, this book introduces a magnificent natural environment. This revised edition of Wild Dunedin includes new and updated information and stunning new images, including a look at the jewel in Dunedin’s natural history crown, Orokonui Ecosanctuary. An essential guide to the natural beauty of this stunning southern city.

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Pages: 156

Dimensions: 189 x 246 mm

Publication Date: 12-07-2019