‘John has written an account that had me alternately laughing and crying as I read it. … A fascinating introduction to the sport of triathlon, its personalities and its progression to the Olympic sport it is today.’ Erin Baker. In Never, Ever Give Up? John Hellemans looks back on his long career in triathlon, initially as a successful competitor, and subsequently as a coach, sports medicine doctor and advisor for some of New Zealand’s best-performing triathletes, including Erin Baker, Kris Gemmell and Andrea Hewitt. In this frank, entertaining and often poignant account he provides a fascinating insight into the professional triathlon world and its personalities, including athletes and other coaches. His exploration of the compulsive attraction of one of the toughest sports, which has kept him hooked into his 60s, will appeal to anyone with an interest in human nature as well as to sports enthusiasts. Adding context and subtext to his sporting career, Hellemans relives significant episodes from his family life in Holland where he grew up under the threat of the Cold War, and his adventures as a young doctor in rural New Zealand, adjusting to a different culture and its customs. A former competitive swimmer, he was captivated by a TV broadcast of the 1979 Les Mills New Zealand Ironman Championships in Auckland and his passion for the new sport was ignited. Along with Erin Baker, whom he coached in her early career, Hellemans competed at the forefront of triathlon as it swept the world, experimenting with training strategies and technical innovations. Struggling to balance his medical and family responsibilities with professional competition, he made a successful move into coaching and mentoring. As well as relating his own trials, triumphs and tribulations in the sport, Hellemans describes the courage and determination of athletes he has coached, as they overcame injury and other setbacks to compete at world level, and he shares the excruciating intensity of watching when they sometimes came to grief. Never, Ever Give Up? explores the motivation that kept Hellemans going back for more and that saw him completing the gruelling Hawaii Ironman in searing heat at the age of 60. Less than two years later, he suffered an exercise-induced cardiac event after a local cross-country run. Was his body telling him that it was time to give up?

Bind: paperback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 152 x 228 mm

Publication Date: 20-08-2018

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?

Bind: paperback

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.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 286

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2018

‘Slippery, and exciting … The stories come at youdirectly, and then turn askance, and then slap youin the face’ Allan Drew ‘Bonsai’ brings together a pioneering collection of flash fiction and associated forms (prose poetry and haibun) from 165 writers in Aotearoa New Zealand, along with intriguing essays on this increasingly popular genre. In 200 small stories of no more than 300 words, where the translucent boundaries between prose and poetry are often transgressed, we discover a vast array of human experience. Here, children race snails, shoot tin cans, learn to fly, and look for Antarctica in a drain pipe, while Schrödinger’s cat dreams of life and death, a dog licks away a woman’s tears, and a peacock guards its human family. Family tensions spill over during trips to the beach, couples get together and fall apart, babies are born – or not born – and parents die. You might find yourself dancing like the cool kids, listening to a neighbour sing in the dark, or watching a tractor catch fire. There are perfect moments in miniature as dew falls on a spider’s web and strangers make eye contact. Composed with precision in a form where every word counts, these carefully chiselled works are provocative, tender and endlessly surprising. About the editors Michelle Elvy is a writer and editor of flash fiction whose recent work appears in ‘New Micro Fiction’(WW Norton, 2018). Among her many editing roles she is editor at ‘Flash Frontier’. Frankie McMillan has been called ‘our maestro of flash fiction’.Her book ‘My Mother and the Hungarians, and other small fictions’ (CUP, 2016) was long-listed for the Ockham Book Awards. James Norcliffe is a poet, editor and writer for children. He is editor at ‘Flash Frontier’and has published nine collections of poetry, including ‘Dark Days at the Oxygen Café’(VUP, 2016).

Bind: paperback

Pages: 296

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 24-08-2018

The first comprehensive history of New Zealand newspapers since Guy Scholefield’sNewspapers in New Zealand in 1958, Lasting Impressions is a social history that places newspapers and their vital importance in New Zealand’s development as a nation in the context of life in the communities they prospered or failed in. There are detailed descriptionsof the beginnings of the newspaper business in New Zealand, the papers that spread throughout the countryclose behind the first settlers, the daily press’s leap of faith, the proliferation of provincial papers, early twentieth century challenges, and the difficulties faced by World War One newspapers. For the first time in a newspaper history there are also sections on the burgeoning weeklies phenomenon, the distinctive goldfields’ press and the numerous Maori newspapers. The book is both a valuable reference resource and a social history brimming with colourful extracts from newspapers and stories of remarkable personalities. Fraser Books in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Bind: paperback

Pages: 676

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 01-10-2018

This is a novel of insights, bold assessments and revelations told by four contrasting characters from the generation whose adult lives were affected forever by World Wars I and II, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the domestic upheaval that accompanied the waterfront lockout and protests against the war in Vietnam. It is an account to treasure, not simply because of its narrative power, its superb interweaving of the real and the imagined, and its huge and contrasting canvases, but because of its brilliant and meticulous archival research and its compassionate yet rigorous re-evaluation of some of New Zealand’s most bitter and wounding military, social and political battles, and of the officers, soldiers, nurses, trade unionists, conscientious objectors and political leaders involved. No New Zealand novel about the harrowing experience of our growth towards nationhood has a broader sweep and more detailed grasp of events. It is a masterpiece of times that must never be forgotten - Kevin Ireland The war to end wars ended in 1918. It is, however, still early in the twentieth century and Nelle, the World War I nurse who patched up the remnants of men who ‘survived’, fears for her fighter-pilot son; disastrously, Frank, the intellectual, has fallen in love with a German refugee; World War I sniper hero, Harry, the Christian, now fights for peace; and left-wing activist, Jim, goes to war in Spain to fight Fascism. In Province of Danger, our four narrators tell of their lives and loves during the years of a bitterly divided New Zealand; in the pitiless Spanish Civil War; in the six long years of World War II, and then its aftermath. We learn from them that when soldiers of the New Zealand division are sent to participate in what became the disasters of Greece and Crete, Crete was lost to the vastly outnumbered Germans through a combination of failure by senior officers to exercise initiative or to obey orders – their believing they were still fighting World War I. Thrown then into the North African battles the New Zealanders, at great cost, become a formidable fighting force. Thereafter, against the considered judgement of their general, they are shipped to the bloodshed and torment of the futile Italian campaign. Province of Danger brings to life a rich tableau of characters who, when forced to confront the most demanding circumstances, respond in various ways: many with courage, integrity and resilience. Not all of those at a higher level, however, reacted so positively when military and political blunders – too often glossed over by historians – were committed. Province of Danger, like its predecessor, March to the Sound of the Guns, is a story that vividly recreates the turbulence of the years in which New Zealand stumbled towards nationhood.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 448

Dimensions: 153 x 234 mm

Publication Date: 16-08-2018

The story of tiny Niue’s involvement in the Great War has captivated people since an account was first published by Margaret Pointer in 2000. In 1915, 160 Niuean men joined the New Zealand Expeditionary Force as part of the Maori Reinforcements and set sail to Auckland and then Egypt and France. Most had never left the island before, or worn shoes before. Most spoke no English. Most significantly, they had no immunity to European disease. Within three months of leaving New Zealand, over 80 per cent of them had been hospitalised and the army authorities withdrew them. Margaret Pointer became involved in research to trace the lost story of Niue’s involvement in World War I while living on the island in the 1990s. The resulting book, Tagi Tote e Loto Haaku: My Heart is Crying a Little, was published in 2000. Her research has continued since, and Niue and the Great War contains much new material together with new photographs. This moving story has now been set in a wider Pacific context and also considers the contribution made by colonial troops, especially ‘coloured’ ones, to the Allied effort.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 216

Dimensions: 156 x 220 x 20 mm

Publication Date: 10-07-2018

Those of you who want financial freedom and/or have a need to create a legacy to leave a secure money machine behind for your children, need to read this book. Herein you will learn the tools needed to invest in the commercial property sector, be it a building of your own or a share in one. No longer is this investment vehicle an exclusive domain for the rich, many mums and dad’s are learning how to play and making substantial gains to secure their future. “This is a well-written and interesting close view of investing in the Commercial Sector with some really good advice for a beginner and some good guidance to those people already involved with investing in property. I learned a lot and in the main it is a straightforward, helpful manuscript.” Rae McGregor – Editor

Bind: paperback

Dimensions: 155 x 234 x 15 mm

Publication Date: 10-08-2018

Wildbore: A photographic legacy explores the world of Pohangina Valley farmer Charles E. Wildbore through his remarkable photographs. Wildbore captured the unprecedented environmental change that, by the beginning of the 20th century, had transformed a densely forested valley into farms and orderly settlements. Wildbore’s photographic legacy enables us to visualise the forests that have been almost entirely extinguished from the lowlands of the Manawatū region and, indeed, throughout New Zealand. More than that, it allows us to imagine a future where forests and wetlands are restored – to coalesce with landscapes of human endeavour.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 210 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 20-07-2018

The sea-level mountain railway has a long story of dramatic moments and events. The men who completed it in the 1930s and 1940s always referred to it as "The Kaikoura Job". This is the story of the scenic coastal line, from its early beginnings through to the reconstruction efforts following the devastating 2016 earthquake. Lavishly illustrated with historical photos and those taken recently in 2018.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 134

Dimensions: 210 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2018