Maori Boy

This is the first volume of Witi Ihimaera's enthralling, award-winning memoir, packed with stories from the formative years of this much-loved writer. Witi Ihimaera is a consummate storyteller — one critic calling him one of our ‘finest and most memorable’. Some of his best stories, however, are about his own life. This honest, stirring work tells of the family and community into which Ihimaera was born, of his early life in rural New Zealand, of family secrets, of facing anguish and challenges, and of laughter and love. As Ihimaera recounts the myths that formed his early imagination, he also reveals the experiences from real life that wriggled into his fiction. Alive with an inventive, stimulating narrative and vividly portrayed relatives, this memoir is engrossing, entertaining and moving, but, more than this, it is also a vital record of what it means to grow up Maori. Winner of the Ockham New Zealand Book Award 2016 for the General Non Fiction category.

!--[if gte mso 9] 800x600 ![endif]-- New York Times bestseller Boys can be anything they want to be! This timely book joins and expands the gender-role conversation and gives middle-grade boys a welcome alternative message: that masculinity can mean many things. You won't find any stories of slaying dragons or saving princesses here. In Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different, author Ben Brooks-with the help of Quinton Wintor's striking full-color illustrations-offers a welcome alternative narrative: one that celebrates introverts and innovators, sensitivity and resilience, individuality and expression. It's an accessible compilation of 75 famous and not-so-famous men from the past to the present day, every single one of them a rule-breaker and stereotype-smasher in his own way. Entries include Frank Ocean, Salvador Dali, Beethoven, Barack Obama, Ai Weiwei, Jesse Owens, and so many more-heroes from all walks of life and from all over the world.

The Conversion of the Maori is the latest volume in the Studies in the History of Christian Missions series, which explores the significant, yet often contested, impact of Christian missions around the world. Timothy Yates introduces the history of missions among the Maori people of New Zealand in the mid-1800s. On the basis of painstaking archival research, Yates charts the change in society and religion over the course of nearly thirty years in detail, describing the historical development of the conversion process. The Conversion of the Maori is ecumenical and historically informed to give a balanced presentation of the conversion of a whole people.

Twelve-year-old Niko lives in Pohe Bay, a small, rural town with a sacred hot spring – and a taniwha named Taukere. The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko’s grandfather is busy protesting. People call him pōrangi, crazy, but when he dies, it’s up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whānau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the New Zealand government took more than 100,000 children from experiences of strife, neglect, poverty or family violence and placed them under state care in residential facilities. In homes like Epuni and Kingslea, Kohitere and Allendale, the state took over as parent. The state failed. Within institutions, children faced abysmal conditions, limited education and social isolation. They endured physical, sexual and psychological violence, as well as secure cells, knock-out sedatives and electro-convulsive therapy. This book tells the story of 105 New Zealanders who experienced this mass institutionalisation. Informed by thousands of pages of Child Welfare accounts, letters, health reports, legal statements as well as interviews, Stanley tells the children’s story: growing up in homes characterised by violence and neglect; removal into the State’s ‘care’ network; daily life in the institutions; violence and punishment; and the legacy of this treatment for victims today. The state masqueraded as a good parent, but its violence and negligence made things worse for children. This book is a moving account of the experiences of those placed into state care, and a powerful call for redress and change. It was over and over, it wasn’t just one night, it was many drunken nights, you know the smell of alcohol and stuff like that. I was often beaten . . . I got so used to the beatings that I never used to cry any more . . . I hid under the cot, and every time I knew they were coming I’d have to come out and just be prepared for anything – Ed He said to me ‘You’re going somewhere’. He said it with glee. ‘You’re going somewhere where they know how to treat people like you’. It was like he knew what the place [Hokio] was like and what was in store for me and it gave him a great deal of pleasure. I find that really cruel – Ray . . . I remember looking out the window and said ‘There’s police out there, what’s going on?’ Yeah and they’d come to pick me up, to put me in the girls’ home . . . I was just in shock . . . they wanted to take me. ‘What have I done? . . . The police just took me down to the station...and then the social worker took me from there to Bollard and then I was chucked in the cells. – Nanette

This study is the fruit of five years' work by a group of Dunedin scholars into the complex ways in which gender operated as a social structure and a shaping force in the lives of the inhabitants of southern Dunedin in the years from 1890 to World War II.