New Zealand (504)

Fearless and Outspoken : The larger-than-life Alfred W Renall

ISBN: 9780995123205

Publisher: Wairarapa Archive

As A.W. Renall’s 1902 obituary noted: “For a quarter of a century he was the most notable personage in Masterton; and on the public platform swayed people a...


As A.W. Renall’s 1902 obituary noted: “For a quarter of a century he was the most notable personage in Masterton; and on the public platform swayed people as no other man could move them”. Alfred Renall, an early settler in the Hutt Valley and then in the Wairarapa, was a successful miller, father of 16 children and at various times a Provincial Council member, elected to the first Parliament, he was also a Masterton borough councillor and twice the mayor as well as a leading figure in the Small Farms Association and subsequent Masterton Trust Lands Trust. As his friend Alexander Hogg M.P. said: “An energetic and industrious settler, a public man, fearless and outspoken for over a half century he made his influence felt in the wider Wellington province”. Fearless and Outspoken is the story of Alfred W. Renall from his birth in Heybridge, Essex, England in 1813 to his and his family’s voyage to Port Nicholson aboard the Martha Ridgway late in 1840, followed by his rich, varied and sometimes controversial life during the next six decades. It provides a fascinating portrait of one pioneer and how he and his family succeeded in a very different land at the bottom of the world.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 146


Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm


Publication Date: 03-06-2019


Tags: Biography   History   New Zealand
$30.00
Kuwi & Friends Maori Picture Dictionary

ISBN: 9780994136497

Authors: Kat Merewether, Pania Papa    Publisher: Illustrated Publishing

Christmas 2020 - Comes with complimentary Christmas decorations (Available November 2020) Beginners Maori Language Picture Dictionary, for the Whole Family. Fro...


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


$34.99
Kiwicorn's Flurry of Feelings

ISBN: 9780995124608

Authors: Kat Merewether, Kat Quin    Publisher: Illustrated Publishing

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 chan...


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


$19.99
Queer Objects

ISBN: 9781988531663

Author: Chris Brickell    Publisher: Otago University Press

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 an...


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


$50.00
A Communist In The Family

ISBN: 9781988531601

Author: Elspeth Sandys    Publisher: Otago University Press

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 wit...


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


Tags: Biography   History   New Zealand
$40.00
Two Or More Islands

ISBN: 9781988531625

Author: Diana Bridge    Publisher: Otago University Press

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 ...


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


$27.95
Women Mean Business

ISBN: 9781988531762

Author: Dr Catherine Bishop    Publisher: Otago University Press

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 expe...


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


Tags: Business   Biography   History   New Zealand
$45.00
My Life In Public Health

ISBN: 9780473470913

Author: Dr Murray Laugesen    Publisher: Health New Zealand

Dr Murray Laugesen’s long career as a public health specialist has seen him involved in some of the major public health initiatives, both global and national,...


Dr Murray Laugesen’s long career as a public health specialist has seen him involved in some of the major public health initiatives, both global and national, of the latter part of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. While working in India early in his career, Murray played an important role in popularising the immunisation of children in the Punjab and other states. He vaccinated and treated cholera, and lent his efforts to vaccinating against smallpox, polio and tetanus. Today, India is free of these diseases. Back in his home country of New Zealand, Murray, now working in the Department of Health, resumed work and research into child health. Then, in 1984, he launched the first serious campaign to reduce smoking in New Zealand, and it is this work that has most engaged him in the decades since. With Minister of Health Helen Clark, Murray was the architect of the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990, which abolished tobacco advertising and sponsorship, and, when amended in 2003, abolished all remaining smoking at work. In 2007, while working for his own company, Health New Zealand, Murray was the first person outside of China to research and advocate the new electronic cigarette as an alternative to smoking. Murray’s account of his and his colleagues’ efforts to curb smoking in New Zealand serves as a blueprint for other countries wanting to end this major health hazard, while his story of his life, both personal and professional, reveals a person of compassion and commitment whose work has benefited the health of a great many people at home and abroad.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 344


Dimensions: 163 x 235 mm


Publication Date: 23-08-2019


$45.00
The Only Way Is Up : Reflections on a Life in Opera

ISBN: 9780995105331

Author: Sir Donald McIntyre    Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing

Until the age of twenty, Donald McIntyre hoped to play for the All Blacks, and was on his way to achieving that aim. As a young man, however, he acknowledged hi...


Until the age of twenty, Donald McIntyre hoped to play for the All Blacks, and was on his way to achieving that aim. As a young man, however, he acknowledged his exceptional voice and opted for a career in singing. After leaving New Zealand and arriving in London, McIntyre set his sights on the world of opera. His spectacular musical life saw him conquering the stages of two London companies in the 1960s and 70s: Sadler’s Wells and ROH Covent Garden. His increasing command of Wagner roles brought him to the notice of Richard Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang Wagner, and in 1967 he made his debut appearance in Lohengrin. For the next seventeen years he sang in every Festival cycle and became the first “British” musician to sing the role of Wotan in Wagner’s mighty, four-opera Ring. Recognised for nearly three decades as the definitive Flying Dutchman, McIntyre also starred in the Bayreuth Centennial Ring in a production by Patrice Chéreau that completely revolutionised Wagner opera, and shot him to lasting fame, and in 1992, a knighthood. In this fascinating memoir “Sir Don” looks back over a huge slice of operatic history and his role in it. Mixing fun and gossip with judgement and insight, he brings to life a teeming gallery of the world’s most famous musicians – singers, conductors, directors, teachers, designers, sponsors … all the movers and shakers in the opera world of two generations. Edited by music professor and well-known New Zealand Wagnerian and radio personality, Heath Lees, this book is a fitting monument to Sir Donald’s magnificent half century in opera.


Bind: hardback


Pages: 240


Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm


Publication Date: 19-05-2019


Tags: Biography   Music   New Zealand
$49.99
The Braided River

ISBN: 9781988531533

Author: Diane Comer    Publisher: Otago University Press

The Braided River explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countrie...


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.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 304


Dimensions: 150 x 230 x 20 mm


Publication Date: 01-04-2019


$35.00
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