In the mid-19th century a woman's place in society - or sphere - was dictated by very different standards and expectations. A Woman's Sphere is the story of Florence Pettigrew's marriage to Charles Spurway, the son of a transported convict and known as 'Cornstalk' - a name commonly given to children who grew taller and stronger than their convict parents. Florence, a free woman and talented artist, works in her father's store in Hobart Town, Tasmania. One day, with the jingle of the shop door bell, Charles appears, wanting to buy a gift for his grandfather, a remittance man. Gradually, a relationship, not encouraged by her father, develops and leads to marriage. Initially idyllic, the marriage encounters difficulties stoically borne by Florence. Charles, on the other hand, does not accept his lot and following his dreams and wanting to leave his 'cornstalk' label behind, decides to move to New Zealand. In the Wairarapa township of Masterton he sets up as a stock and station agent. Florence has no choice but to move with him. Trapped in a marriage she can't escape, Florence is consoled by her art, and her involvement in the temperance movement and the battle to gain women the vote. There are tragic consequences.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 216

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Reprint 2023 Charlie Douglas ranks as one of the great early European explorers of New Zealand. From 1867 to 1916 the Scottish-born Douglas lived on the west coast of the South Island, spending most of his time exploring, surveying and mapping the coast, the bush and the mountainous inland regions, in hazardous conditions, often for little or no pay. Many years later the noted mountaineer and writer John Pascoe rediscovered and preserved many of Douglas’s writings and sketches. The original book he wrote out of these has long been out of print, but Charlie Douglas’s accounts of discovery and recording difficult country continue to fascinate. Douglas recorded much of the geography and topography of South Westland, its ecology and conservation, at a time when this was scarcely known. He also demonstrated the determined qualities of Pakeha pioneering in New Zealand. As with the original edition, about a third of this book is devoted to an account of the life of Charlie Douglas, and about two thirds to his writings, which have been only lightly edited. Errors have been corrected, new information added, new illustrations added (including many in colour), people identified and the text re-edited for modern readership. Graham Langton’s revised edition of Pascoe’s 1957 book was first published in 2000 and reprinted with minor corrections in 2004, and with further corrections and a new cover design in 2016. It will continue to appeal to all with an interest in the New Zealand outdoors, nature and conservation.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 348

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-05-2016

This absorbing story is set in Greytown, in the Wairarapa, in the late 1860s. Greytown, a Small Farms Settlement, was the first inland township in New Zealand, but its beginnings were very like those elsewhere. A Better Place is a story about life in the township and on the area's small farms. A young wife from Devon, named Kate, arrives in Wellington with two children to meet their husband and father, who had sailed fom England two years previously and taken up land in Greytown. After a hazardous journey over the 'hill' she faces life in a rough cottage with earthen floor. She learns to milk cows, tend the garden and make a home for her family. Life is hard, but theirs are happy times too as settlers work together to ensure that they have, indeed, achieved 'a better place'.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 342

Dimensions: 150 x 240 mm

This is a story many New Zealand women - particularly those who grew up in the country - will identify with. Elspeth Biss was brought up on Hawke's Bay farms in the 1940s; attended boarding school in the 1950s; trained as a nurse, married, and brought up a family in the 1960s and 70s on farms in the Wairarapa. As she writes: "The 1960s may well have been 'the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius', as the popular song had it, with the Beatles, Mary Quant and the mini-skirt, but for me and most of my friends it was a decade of child raising, washing nappies, Plunket and kindergartens." In her absorbing memoir, Elspeth Biss evokes the way things were during 'all those yesterdays'. She is fiercely proud of her Scottish heritage, going 'home' for the first time in 1946. Passionate about horses and hunting, she is also always looking for a new challenge - 'retirement' is an opportunity to sell cosmetics and learn to kayak at an age when most prefer sedentary pursuits. All Those Yesterdays celebrates a life well lived away from the headlines and the city lights.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 205

A.C. (Archie) Barrington was a leading New Zealand pacifist during World War 2. 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. Such documents are exceptionally rare – until recent times prisoners were not allowed to keep any record of their experiences and many were illiterate anyway. 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 a fascinating 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? Why was New Zealand, with its ‘fair go’, egalitarian reputation, so intolerant and punitive? Pratt chronicles a history of intolerance, suspicion and deep-seated antipathies that may go some way towards explaining the current penal saturation in this ‘friendly’ land.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 280

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 19-02-2016

We know a lot about the early missionaries who came to New Zealand from 1814 and how Christianity developed through their complex interactions with Māori. Less well known are the ways in which settler churches of Aotearoa New Zealand reached out to engage in missionary activity in other parts of the world. Pushing Boundaries is the first book-length attempt to tell the story of the evolution of overseas missionary activity by New Zealand’s Protestant churches from the early nineteenth century up to World War II. In this thought-provoking book, Hugh Morrison outlines how and why missions became important to colonial churches – the theological and social reasons churches supported missions, how their ideas were shaped, and what motivated individual New Zealanders to leave these shores to devote their lives elsewhere. Secondly, he connects this local story to some larger historical themes – of gender, culture, empire, childhood and education. This book argues that understanding the overseas missionary activity of Protestant churches and groups can contribute to a more general understanding of how New Zealand has developed as a society and nation.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 340

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 19-02-2016

Rushing for Gold is the first book to take a trans-Tasman look at the nineteenth-century phenomenon that was the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand. It explores links between the rushes, particularly those in Victoria and Otago, to show that they were strongly intertwined affairs. The book brings together contributions from both experienced and newly emergent researchers, who together provide a close examination of miners’ migration patterns, ethnicities and merchant networks. The contributors’ insightful analyses and narrative accounts of the places, commerce and heritage of the rushes reveal a pantheon of characters, from merchants, hoteliers, financiers and policemen to vagrants, sly-groggers and entertainers, not to mention women, all of whom prompted and populate the mythology of the era, which this book does much to unravel and rewrite.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 344

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 18-03-2016

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. • Hundreds of sumptuous photographs of artefacts collected on the voyages of Captain Cook and by traders and missionaries who followed him • Cutting-edge scholarship • Large-format jacketed hardback

Bind: hardback

Pages: 348

Dimensions: 285 x 250 mm

Publication Date: 17-06-2016

A narrative history of the Burgess Gang and their greatest crime In the winter of 1866 New Zealand’s most notoriousbushranger, Richard Burgess, knelt at a small desk in his Nelson prison cell, took up his quill pen and began to write. His life, he knew, was beyond salvation but words were the last weapon at his disposal to consign his mortal enemy, gang turncoat Joseph Sullivan, to the gallows. The blood-soaked confession that followed was described by Mark Twain as ‘without its peer in the literature of murder’. Five bodies had been recovered from Maungatapu Mountain in the upper South Island, and another from the West Coast. But who had done the killing,and how many other victims were there? What had brought the ruthless Burgess Gang to this point? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including little-known original accounts by Sullivan, ‘Murder on the Maungatapu’ tells the fascinating full story of a dark episode in this country’s history. This is a superbly written tale of blood and gold, ofbetrayal and vengeance, and it draws some startlingconclusions about New Zealand’s crime of thenineteenth century.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 320

Dimensions: 150 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 24-06-2016

While other British settler societies – Australia, Canada, the US and South Africa – have states or provinces, New Zealand is a unitary state. Yet New Zealanders today hold firm provincial identities, dating from the time when the young colony was divided into provinces: 1853 to 1876. Why were the provinces created? How did settlers shape and change their institutions? And why, just over 20 years later, did New Zealand abolish its provincial governments? Acknowledge No Frontier, by André Brett, is a lively and insightful investigation into a crucial and formative part of New Zealand’s history. It examines the flaws within the system and how these allowed the central government to use public works – especially railways – to gain popular support for abolition of the provinces. The provincial period has an enduring legacy. This is the surprising and counterintuitive story of how vociferous parochialism and self-interest brought New Zealanders together.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 346

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 13-06-2016