Australasian & Pacific history: from c 1900 - Books

All royalties from the book are being donated to the Christchurch Family Help Trust. The Christchurch earthquake of 22 February 2011 was one of the worst natural disasters in New Zealand's history. The quake devastated New Zealand's second biggest city and caused significant damage to infrastruc...

The late Michael King was one of New Zealand's most respected and popular historians. The author of the bestselling The Penguin History of New Zealand and many other significant works, he was a writer of remarkable skill, sensitivity and importance. The Silence Beyond is a wide-ranging and often p...

Published in conjunction with the New Zealand Herald, AUCKLAND HARBOUR BRIDGE - 50 YEARS OF A CITY ICON is a wonderful celebration in photographs of the bridge's creation, development and anniversary. Broken into sections, the book covers construction; the opening; extension (the clip-ons); toll boo...

The technical side of what happened on Mt Erebus on that fateful November day back in 1979 has been brilliantly explained by Justice Mahon, the Royal Commissioner appointed to investigate the crash of the Air New Zealand DC-10. His magnificent investigation and conclusions were rubbished by a Prime ...

This lively survey tells the story of a major New Zealand city, the capital of Canterbury province and the South Island's largest metropolitan centre. Why was the city established in the middle of a swamp? What was it like to live in Christchurch in the 1850s, the 1870s or the 1940s? What has change...

Why revisit Minqar Qaim? Some writers ignore it; some regard the action as merely part of a broader canvas. Others, using it as an example of unrestrained brutality, seek to place it in a context from which to make a political argument. The artillery battle at Minqar Qaim on 27 June and subsequent ...

Maori form a significant proportion of the modern New Zealand Army, and Maori officers have achieved the very highest commands, Their unique culture is deeply embedded in its tradition and daily routines; celebrated by Maori (indigenous) and pakeha (non-indigenous) soldiers alike. The exploits of...

Now the inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC. This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands...Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944 as twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge can only try ...

Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years is an unauthorised biography by Investigate magazine Ian Wishart. What you are about to read will go further than anyone has gone before – digging up a Prime Minister you didn’t even know existed. The Helen Clark we see today is a carefully ma...

In A Fair Sort of Battering, thirteen New Zealanders tell of their experiences and reactions in the Italian campaign of World War Two. Day-to-day life and major historical events are described from the perspective of members of the army, including the Maori Battalion, engineers, artillery, nurses an...

David Lange's Fourth Labour Government was a watershed in New Zealand history. Whether it was international politics (ANZUS, Mururoa tests, Oxford Union debate) or domestic economics (Roger Douglas's reforms), New Zealand was a vastly different country in 1990 than it had been when Lange won in 1984...

 This Volume is the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War and was originally published in 1957 by the Government of New Zealand, through the Department of Internal Affairs,. This is a reprint of that original title, which was printed in the United States of America 1998 with i...

Judith Binney's work spans nearly forty years of historical endeavour that began with the award-winning biography of the missionary Thomas Kendall, The Legacy of Guilt (1968). Her magisterial publication of 2009, Encircled Lands, is the culmination of many years' work on the history of the Urewera -...

New Zealand's Vietnam War provides a comprehensive and authoritative account of New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War, one that will remain the standard reference work on the subject for decades. Its publication will complete the programme of official war history production that began in 1945...

While their loved ones left to serve overseas, most New Zealanders spent the Second World War at home. This book tells the stories of those who stayed behind. Based on frank, in-depth interviews, Home reveals the reality of civilian wartime life in New Zealand during the watershed years from 1939 to...

How We Saw The War tells a new generation of New Zealanders how their mothers and grandmothers learned where their loved ones were and what they were doing during World War II. Includes newspaper stories from the time reporting on the activities of New Zealand soldiers in the Middle East and the Pac...

River of Blood takes us deep into the heart of the Waiatoto Valley on New Zealand's savage southern coast. This is truly our own Wild West: a place which may never really be 'won'.Transporting us from the nineteenth century to the present day, this book shows us that the men and women pioneers, must...

A pictorial parade of New Zealand since European settlement, showing the vast changes; the unbelievable growth of some towns and the demise of others. Over 850 photographs tell the story of the early pioneer spirit that gave the country a solid base which generations have built on to make it a count...

Reprinted for the 50th Anniversary. Opo: The Hokianga Dolphin records the amazing events at Opononi in the summer of 1955-56. It tells the story of Opo, a dolphin with a difference; a dolphin that came in from the sea and stayed in the Hokianga harbour with no inducement beyond an appreciative and g...

This book describes one of the most extraordinary and fascinating stories in NZ history. In the early part of the last century several thousand runaway seamen and escaped convicts settled in Maori communities. Jacky Mamon, John Rutherford, Charlotte Badger and many others - this is their largely unt...

With the endorsement of the New Zealand Rugby Union, this is a book about the All Blacks of a type never before published. It will trace the history of rugby's most notable and most successful team over more than a century entirely in pictures. Drawing on archives and contemporary sources in New Zea...

Featuring interviews from the large numbers of WAAFs, WRENs and WAACs serving in New Zealand, as well as women in the Women's War Service Auxiliary and land girls. Plus sample interviews with men in the Army, Navy and Air Force who were stationed in New Zealand, along with some who served in the Hom...

Tells the story of New Zealand and its contribution to World War II, as well as the effects of the war on New Zealand itself.

Since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by Maori chiefs and Governor Hobson in 1840 it has become the defining document in New Zealand history. From the New Zealand Wars to the 1975 Land March, from the Kingitanga to the Waitangi Tribunal, from Captain Cook to Hone Harawira, The Treaty of Waitang...

For New Zealand, World War One was wholly avoidable, wholly unnecessary and almost wholly disastrous. Stevan Eldred-Grigg believes that the enormous cost of the war to our people was way too high - and that we still feel the effects of this cost, socially and culturally, today. This is excellent nar...

Honouring the Contract provides a novel perspective on the distinctive foundations of New Zealand's welfare state. It raises issues concerning modern-day concepts of citizenship as the welfare state comes under challenge. Government policy is linked to an evolving 'social contract' between wage earn...

Fascinating stories of some of the bravest people this country has ever produced Kiwi Heroes brings together the tales of 50 of New Zealand’s bravest people. Some of the people featured are household names-some are barely known outside their own households. Some have become hero...

'On the last day, we flew out to Manono aboard an RNZAF Iroquois. The doors were open and the beauty of Samoa was literally beneath our feet. I have always known it to be a fragile kind of place: tsunamis, like all the other disasters, big and small, show that we have a pact with nature to enjoy 'pa...

Written by bestselling author, William McInnes, with contributions from people right around the country, THE MAKING OF MODERN AUSTRALIA is an affectionate journey through the postwar years in Australia. Filled with stories from regular Australians about life since World War Two and woven throughout ...

In 1906, at just 16 years of age, Angelina Criscillo left the tiny volcanic island of Stromboli, off Sicily, to travel to an even remoter island on the other side of the world. From the age of eight she had been betrothed to her cousin, Vincenzo Moleta, who was now twice her age and taking her to a ...

In the first book of its kind, author Jenny Haworth shows World War II through the eyes of five of New Zealand's commissioned war artists - Peter McIntyre, Austen Deans, Russell Clark, Allan Barns-Graham and John McIndoe. Stationed to the areas where New Zealand soldiers were fighting in the Mediter...

In April 1916, John Cullen, the Commissioner of the New Zealand Police Force, personally led a raid on the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana's spiritual community at Maungapohatu, deep in the Urewera mountains. The raid, which was based on trumped-up charges, left two of Rua's followers dead and a number of ...

A treasure from the wild West Coast beaches - a richly illustrated history in a beautiful, limited print run (1000 copies). The Iron-Bound Coast was destined to disappear without a trace until, following a chance meeting shortly before his death, Wally Badham entrusted it to Bob Harvey. Wal...

Promised Land is an illustrated history of Central Otago's settlement by one of the region's most vocal advocates, artist Grahame Sydney. Before gold was discovered there in 1862, Central Otago was known as the 'Wasteland' and was home to no more than 40 to 50 pastoralists. However as soon as two pr...

An entertaining account of New Zealand's constant, sometimes troubled, always fascinating and often humorous encounters with alcohol, from the early days of European contact to the present day. Many anecdotes from colourful characters - Sly Groggers, hooch makers, main trunk drunks, mo...

Beyond the Battlefield by Gerald Hensley is the dramatic unknown story of New Zealand's involvement in World War II told for the first time here in an accessible, popular and enjoyable read. Savage, Nash, Fraser, Freyberg, Churchill, Roosevelt, Menzies, all great names from New Zealand and world his...

The New Zealand Wars of the 1840s and 1860s, other nineteenth-century military encounters, the South African War, the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, the Gulf War, modern-day peacekeeping ...The Penguin Book of New Zealanders at War contains the best, widest range of published a...

The Battle of Beersheba, a redeeming win for the Anzacs who lost at Gallipoli, has slipped through the cracks of Australia's historical consciousness. Why are Australians so much more content to commemorate a glorious defeat than we are to celebrate such a resounding, against-the-odds, victory? The ...

NZSAS: The First Fifty Years is the first and only official history of New Zealand's elite Special Forces, the New Zealand Special Air Service (NZSAS). From their first ever engagements in the jungles of Malaya in 1956, through to the Vietnam War and on to modern conflicts in East Timor and Afgh...