First published in Paris as Journal d’un balenier, this translation focuses on Dr Thiercelin’s travels and does not include chapters on whaling operations. It takes the reader to New Caledonia, the Chatham Islands, the South Island of New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. Thiercelin made two voyages in the Pacific, twenty years apart, on the Ville de Bordeaux 183741 and the Gustave 186164. He provides a rare point of view  that of a well informed, educated European who was neither a missionary nor a government official. While his ideas were limited by the ethnocentricity of the time, his commentary on the French and English colonisation of the Pacific is insightful and often critical. Thiercelin had an unusual perspective on the Pacific because he visited many places twice, with a twenty-year gap in between. There are moments of great poignancy in the text, especially when he describes the before’ and after’ of colonisation, none more so than in his description of Akaroa Bay.

Travels in Oceania: Memoirs of a Whaling Ship's Doctor, 1866

History

Thiercelin, Dr Louis

Australia & Oceania

Otago University Press

Phoney Wars looks at the lives of New Zealanders during the greatest armed struggle the world has ever seen: the Second World War. It is not a political, economic or military history; rather it explores what life was like during the war years for ordinary people living under the New Zealand flag. Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg explore New Zealanders’ hopes and fears, beliefs and superstitions, shortages and affluence, rationing and greed, hysteria and humor, violence and kindness, malevolence and generosity, to argue that New Zealand need not have involved itself in the war at all.

Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War

Eldred–Grigg, Hugh

Eldred–Grigg, Stevan

The first 10 Dominican sisters arrived in Dunedin in 1871. The congregation expanded rapidly, establishing schools throughout Otago and Southland, and eventually reaching as far north as Auckland. For most of their first century in New Zealand the Dominican sisters were teaching nuns, living in large enclosed convents cut off from the outside world. In the mid-1960s the Second Vatican Council ushered in a period of radical change. Susannah Grant was given full access to the congregation’s rich archives in order to write this book, from the point of view of an ‘outsider’.

Windows on a Women's World: The Dominican Sisters of Aotearoa New Zealand

Grant, Susannah

<p>When Dr Ron Jones joined the staff of National Women's Hospital in Auckland in 1973 as a junior obstetrician and gynecologist, Professor Herbert Green's study into the natural history of carcinoma in-situ of the cervix (CIS) – later called 'the unfortunate experiment' – had been in progress for seven years. By the mid-1960s there was almost universal agreement among gynecologists and pathologists worldwide that CIS was a precursor of cancer, requiring complete removal. Green, however, believed otherwise, and embarked on a study of women with CIS, without their consent, that involved merely observing, rather than definitively treating them. Many women subsequently developed cancer and some died. In 1984 Jones and senior colleagues Dr Bill McIndoe and Dr Jock McLean published a scientific paper that exposed the truth, and the disastrous outcome of Green's experiment.</p>

Doctors in Denial: The Forgotten Women in the 'Unfortunate Experiment'

Medical Books

Jones, Ronald W.

Administration & Medicine Economics

A poem is a vote. It chooses freedom of imagination, freedom of critical thought, freedom of speech. A collection of political poems in its very essence argues for the power of the democratic voice. Here New Zealand poets from diverse cultures, young and old, new and seasoned, from the Bay of Islands to Bluff, rally for justice on everything from a degraded environment to systemically embedded poverty; from the long, painful legacy of colonialism to explosive issues of sexual consent. Communally these writers show that political poems can be the most vivid and eloquent calls for empathy, for action and revolution, even for a simple calling to account.

Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

<p>Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energizing power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love. This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; about sowing, tending and reaping. Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest.</p>

The Yield

Wootton, Sue

Featured Artists: Chris Corson-Scott, Heather Straka, Jenna Packer, Samuel Harrison Writers Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Nick Ascroft, Claire Baylis, Miro Bilbrough, Victoria Broome, Iain Britton, Owen Bullock, Christine Burrows, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Joanna Cho, Stephanie Christie, Makyla Curtis, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Riemke Ensing, Ciaran Fox, Michael Gould, Sarah Grout, Shen Haobo, Paula Harris, René Harrison, Stephen Higginson, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Amanda Hunt, Anna Jackson, Ted Jenner, Anne Kennedy, Erik Kennedy, Jessica Le Bas, Wes Lee, Michele Leggott, Carolyn McCurdie, Robert McLean, Fardowsa Mohamed, Kavita Ivy Nandan, Emma Neale, Piet Nieuwland, Claire Orchard, Bob Orr, Jenny Powell, Chris Price, Helen Rickerby, Ron Riddell, L.E. Scott, Iain Sharp, Charlotte Simmonds, Peter Simpson, Tracey Slaughter, Laura Solomon, Barry Southam, Matafanua Tamatoa, Philip Temple, Dunstan Ward, Elizabeth Welsh, Sue Wootton, Mark Young, Karen Zelas.

Landfall 233: Aotearoa New Zealand Arts and Letters, Autumn 2016

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Archaeology of the Solomon Islands

Politics & Social Sciences

Walters, Richard

Archaeology

<p><div>How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a 'ravishing, immersing read', <i>A Strange Beautiful Excitement</i> is a 'wild ride' through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield's childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska, himself raised in Karori, retraces Mansfield's old ground: the sights, sounds and smells of the rickety colonial capital, as experienced by the budding writer.</div></p>

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington

Biographies & Memoirs

Yska, Redmer

Arts & Literature

In 1966 Michael Illingworth, whose oil painting Adam and Eve appears on the front cover of this book, was awarded the inaugural Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. For the first time in New Zealand a practicing artist was given a studio and paid a salary to make art for a whole year. Fifty years later, the Frances Hodgkins is still going strong, one of five arts fellowships offered through the University of Otago’s Humanities Division. This sumptuous book brings together the art and the stories of half a century of Frances Hodgkins fellows. Arts commentator Priscilla Pitts writes about their work, while journalist Andrea Hotere interviews the artists about their lives and sources of inspiration. The result is a vibrant celebration of the talent fostered through New Zealand’s foremost visual arts residency.

Undreamed of ...: 50 Years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship

Hotere, Andrea

Pitts, Priscilla

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