History

The compelling new novel from bestselling author Erica James

'I just closed my eyes and drifted away. I drifted away to the music but I don't think I'd ever experienced anything quite so soothing and magical. It was like I was in a magical space. It was beautiful.' - Jim Mahoney, reformed drug addict Pot, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, grass, has...h, green, hooch, herb, ganja, reefer. New Zealand loves weed. It's the most popular illegal drug in our country and third most popular drug overall, behind alcohol and tobacco, yet it also represents a troubled relationship. In Weed, award-winning journalist James Borrowdale dives in deep to understand why, meeting a fascinating cross-section of New Zealand along the way - a nineteenth-century nun who allegedly grew pot, a bystander to the Mr Asia syndicate, a convicted heroin dealer turned criminologist, people both using and offering the drug for medicinal relief, politicians and law-makers old and new. What's revealed is an engrossing, heady and sometimes surprising account of New Zealand and weed. Fusing insightful, personal stories with analysis and historical research, Weed lays out the facts as they are - about an issue that can no longer be ignored.
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This is the story of New Zealand's most racist town. From 1952 to 1964, Pukekohe housed the only segregated Maori school in the history of the country. Tragically, hundreds of Maori infants and children died as a result of their segregation in slums where they were forced to live... on the edge of town. No Maori Allowed looks at what happened at Pukekohe and the extent of racial intolerance across the country. Using records from the National Archives and firsthand interviews, chapters cover the extent of racial intolerance across the country in housing and employment during the segregation period from 1925 to the early 1960s. Did you know that on 'K Road' in Auckland, shops had signs reading 'No Credit for Maori,' in Hamilton stores refused to let them try on pants, hospitals had segregated maternity wards and gave them less expensive cutlery, while many stores and major banks had official policies of not hiring 'coloureds'. When a New Zealand University Press insisted that I modify the text as it was too pro- Maori, I decided to publish it myself, because the true history of Maori cannot be censored.
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In the early 1900s, 130 young Anglo-Indians were sent to New Zealand in an immigration scheme from Kalimpong, India. They were the mixed-race children of British tea planters and local women, and were placed as workers with New Zealand families. Jane McCabe here tells this compel...ling and little-known story, in pictures.
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What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history? But when Svenja impulsively visits this windswept Baltic city, something unlocks in Inge and, finally, she begins to tell her story.