For decades, whenever a heritage building in Christchurch has been under threat, especially in the aftermath of the 2010–11 earthquakes, one woman has consistently defended this city’s architecture and history against shortsightedness and the threat of bulldozers – Dame Anna Crighton. Fearless and articulate, she has fought tirelessly and passionately, not only for the heritage of her hometown, but for the built past of Aotearoa New Zealand. But behind this well-known persona, the city councillor and heritage advocate, lies an extraordinary and unexpected life story, now told publicly for the first time. In Still Standing, Anna recounts, with her usual unflinching honesty, a childhood bereft of parental affection, a wild adolescence that included a stay at the Mount Magdala Convent ‘to straighten her out’, unsuitable relationships clung to in a desperate search for love, an unplanned pregnancy that led to adoption, and a violent marriage. Not many people would survive all this, let alone rise above it, to bring up a beloved son, to restore a magnificent Victorian home, to begin university study as an adult and end up with a PhD, to travel the world and, in 2020, to be appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to heritage preservation and governance. Still Standing will delight anyone interested in history, architecture and the arts, but, even more than that, it is a riveting story of a life lived with courage, and of triumph over adversity. About the author History, classics, art and architectural history have been at the heart of Anna Crighton’s careers in the public and private sector. Before graduating in these subjects later in life at Canterbury and Otago universities, she was registrar of Christchurch’s Robert McDougall Art Gallery for 20 years. She then embarked on a career in local politics as a Christchurch city councillor for 12 years and a member of the Canterbury District Health Board for a further 12. Over three decades, she was a trustee and director of many trusts and companies. Anna has lived in Wellington, Sydney and England but has always returned to the city of her birth. In 2020 she was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to heritage preservation and governance.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 152 x 228 mm

Publication Date: 01-01-2024

Recognised internationally as one of the twentieth century's great modernist innovators, New Zealand artist Len Lye is most famous for his avant-garde experimental films and for his astonishing and playful kinetic sculptures. Always fascinated by the interplay of movement and light, this extraordinary artist also expressed himself in photography, drawing, painting and poetry. During his lifetime he was better known in the art capitals of North America and Europe than in the country of his birth, but that has changed since the establishment of the foundation dedicated to his works at New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and particularly following the opening, in 2015, of the impressive and much-admired Len Lye Centre. In this timely collection of essays, New Zealand and overseas writers consider Lye’s assured place in modern art from a variety of fascinating and thought-provoking angles. He thought of his creations as emerging from ‘the long dream of waking’. And thanks to this richly illustrated collection of essays, we too can be drawn into his long dream and come to see his remarkable achievements through fresh eyes.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 10-10-2017

John Robert Godley, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, James Edward FitzGerald - these are the names that usually come to mind as the founders of Canterbury. But there was a fourth vitally important individual, arguably equal in importance to FitzGerald, whose story remains largely unknown. William Guise Brittan led the first Canterbury Pilgrims, chaired the Society of Canterbury Colonists and controlled the Land Office in early Christchurch. The 'bell-wether man' of the Canterbury project, he was the first to pay for land land in the settlement, inspiring others to follow his example. William Guise Brittan was also known as 'the Father of Cricket' in Canterbury and established three churches in Christchurch. The city's cathedral was built with stone from his Halswell quarry. His elder brother Joseph, who joined him in 1852, had a significant influence on local politics, as a provincial secretary, and was expected to follow FitzGerald as superintendent, though he lost the 1857 election. A former newspaper owner, he also founded the "Canterbury Standard" in 1854 as a rival to the "Lyttelton Times". He too, was a cricket enthusiast. The Brittan brothers were leading figures in the Canterbury settlement, and made substantial contributions to the province, yet they were unpopular, both their careers ended in failure and disappointment and they have been mostly forgotten. This timely and fascinating account seeks to explain why, exploring their work and family lives (and their bank accounts), and along the way providing a richly detailed panorama of life and politics in early Chistchurch.

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Pages: 350

Dimensions: 155 x 228 mm

Publication Date: 20-08-2015

From its earliest days in a cold, rented room in a former Christchurch warehouse, the Canterbury Workers' Educational Association has been a pioneering provider of adult education, enriching, and sometimes even transforming, the lives of thousands of men and women. Through its box and travelling library schemes, inspired by the charismatic James Shelley, it took adult education to nearly every nook and cranny of the Canterbury and Westland provinces from the 1920s, Its wider horizons programme revolutionised adult education for retired people from the 1970s. In The People's University, widely published historian Ian Dougherty tells the fascinating and important story of this resilient association over its first 100 years and of the enthusiastic and committed involvement of students, tutors, volunteers and staff.

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Pages: 256

Dimensions: 215 x 250 mm

Publication Date: 10-03-2015

The Pacific Islands remain for most people a region of obscurity or puzzlement. The attention of news media is attracted by atypical events such as political violence that contradict the peaceful tourist image of sun, sea and smiling faces. Journalists, travellers, business people and the general public have few paths to access specialised knowledge about the complex and changing 'neighbourhood' to New Zealand's north and Australia's northeast. Ian Campbell's History of the Pacific Islands, first published in 1989, served this purpose for many years, and its successor, Worlds Apart, has proved to be equally serviceable, bringing into focus the past and present of this diverse and endlessly misunderstood region. For the second edition this concise and readable narrative was revised to bring the story of the island world - from its first settlement by raft and canoe voyagers, through the period of western contact and acculturation - up to 2010. As with its earlier versions, this book was written not for fellow academics, but for the many people who want to know 'what happened'.

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Pages: 392

Publication Date: 01-06-2015

There are many messages in this book: Never go drinking using your passport for ID. Make sure to apply lidocaine before ripping out your toenails. Magic might be real, but it never fixes the worst of your problems. Try to fall in love with bastards. You or someone you know may be gayer than previously thought. We’re not going to make it to Mars. A locked psychiatric ward needs more books than a single copy of Jane Eyre. Asking time travellers for advice on your exams is considered cheating. It’s not just human houses that become haunted. The key message is this: Life in the early 21st century is often very strange. So are these stories. With a crisp insouciance and gliding charm, Jack Cottrell’s fiery, fey, finely-tuned fictions leap from sci-fi to fantasy, comedy to horror, literary realism to romance, and to hybrids of all of these. Featuring sport, friendship, love, health, family, climate change, artificial intelligence, desire, magic, Greek gods, ghosts, peanut butter, cyber pranks, racial prejudice, and creepy medical advances, his stories play with the allure of the past, the disturbances of our own times, and the dangerous idealism of our future technologies – each one in fewer than 300 words. Jack is a writer and volunteer rugby referee who knows how to pack a lot into a small space, whether a story or an extremely organised sports bag. With ‘Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson’, has he worked out how to cram an entire universe into a pocket-sized capsule? Jack Remiel Cottrell (Ngāti Rangi) grew up in Wellington and now lives in Auckland. His flash fiction collection was awarded the Wallace Prize for best manuscript in the University of Auckland Master of Creative Writing class of 2020. He has been published in numerous anthologies and online magazines, and his novella-in-flash ‘Latter Day Saints’ was published in 2018 by Ad Hoc Press.

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Pages: 136

Dimensions: 165 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 01-08-2021

This book provides a concise introduction to the history of South Polynesia during the period typically defined as the ‘Middle Ages’ by western historians, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, Rēkohu (Chatham Islands), and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Written in response to a wider global approach to medieval history, it offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region during that period. The comparative study of the southern Polynesian islands and Rapa Nui provides a thematic examination in order to avoid forcing the region’s history into a linear Western chronology. Themes of movement and migration, adaptation and change, and development and expansion offer an optimal means of understanding Polynesia during this period, in an account that incorporates oral traditions, historical analysis and archaeology. Drawing together a wide range of research from past and present scholars the book provides an accessible introduction both for students and for the general reader interested in the long history of these islands. Madi Williams (Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, Rangitāne o Wairau) is a lecturer at the University of Canterbury where she researches the boundaries of history and the inclusion of Indigenous and non-Western perspectives in Aotearoa New Zealand and South Pacific histories. Madi is the recipient of a 2021 Judith Binney Writing Award, which will help her prepare a book based on her PhD thesis on the histories of Ngāti Kuia.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 94

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 01-08-2021

In 1863 Henry Whitcombe, a young civil engineer and Canterbury's Provincial Road Surveyor, led an expedition to find a route across the Southern Alps in advance of the West Coast gold rushes. Jakob Lauper, a hardy Swiss goldminer, was hired to accompany him. The journey turned to tragedy. Dogged by appalling weather and half-starved, the two men traversed the Main Divide by a pass that now bears Whitcombe's name, and struggled down to the western beach. There the exhausted Whitcombe drowned while attempting to cross the flooded Taramakau River. Against extraordinary odds, Lauper survived and made his way back to Christchurch. His report on the expedition was translated into English and published mid-1863. Pushing His Luck provides for the first time an accurate translation of Lauper's vivid account, and explains the significance of new information brought to light. Nearly 150 years after the event, the truth about this journey is finally told.

Pages: 144

Young Geoff Palmer from Nelson, son of a crusading newspaper editor, was a serious and purposeful child who latched onto the idea of being a lawyer when it was put to him by his well-read mother. He absorbed progressive ideas at the University of Chicago law school and planned to use legal means to effect social reform when he entered parliament in 1979.\nIn 1984 Palmer became deputy prime minister in the radical fourth Labour government, his organisational and diplomatic skills a good foil for David Lange's disordered brilliance. Through hard work and high intelligence, Palmer compiled a record of reform unmatched in this country's history, concerning parliamentary procedures, the voting system, the environment, longstanding Maori grievances, the Bill of Rights, economic reform and many other matters, big and small. He also shaped the legislative programme of the most reforming government in New Zealand's history.\nAfter five turbulent years Lange resigned, and Palmer became New Zealand's 33rd prime minister. His government made major and controversial decisions, but Palmer stepped down after only 13 months, after a challenge from within his own party.\nWritten for a wide audience, Palmer: The Parliamentary Years is the product of research involving more than 200 linear metres of archives, as well as interviews with Palmer, his family and associates, some now deceased. It is a fascinating warts-and-all, authorised biography of the political career of one of New Zealand's brightest sons.\n\nPublishing November 2010.

Pages: 472

Dimensions: 234 x 153 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2010

Historian, biographer, novelist, broadcaster, lecturer and international singer Edmund Bohan is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Edward Stafford, James Edward FitzGerald and Sir George Grey; the general histories of New Zealand: The Story So Far and Climates of War: Conflicts in New Zealand 1859-1869; and the O'Rorke series of historical novels. The Stafford and Grey biographies were Montana Book Award finalists. During his long singing career - much of it based in Britain - he sang more than 170 different major choral, operatic and orchestral works, and broadcast regularly. This light-hearted memoir, richly anecdotal and enlivened with pen-portraits of memorable personalities - musical, literary and academic - chronicles with wit and a sharply observant eye a lifetime of achievement as singer and writer. Following childhood in wartime Invercargill inside a close-knit family, he enjoyed schooldays at Christchurch Boys' High School and defining years at Canterbury University. After teaching for a period he left for Sydney and then London, establishing a career as a versatile 'general practitioner' of singing, mainly in concerts but enjoying memorable times with Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group and Kent Opera. A tour home with the NZSO prompted a permanent return as the end of 1987, where he resumed his 19th-century studies. He has concentrated on writing since then; though he continued to play character roles for Canterbury Opera, Wellington City Opera and the State Opera of South Australia for another dozen years. A dedicated family man, he now tends his Opawa garden - and plans new projects.

Pages: 228

Publication Date: 01-06-2012