Australasian & Pacific History

In Down South, writer Bruce Ansley goes on a journey of rediscovery, back to his beloved South Island. From Curio Bay in Southland to Totaranui in Golden Bay, this is both a provocative history and a vast expedition across the land once known as Middle Island, as Ansley visits th...e places and people who hold the clues to the South's famous character. Not so very long ago, the South Island had most of New Zealand's people and just about all of the money. Gold miners found fortunes in the hills and rivers, sheep barons bestrode mountains, valleys and plains. Wealthy southerners ruled the embryonic government. Where now lies the South Island's golden fleece? And what is its future? Bruce Ansley has spent much of his life in the South Island. He was raised in New Brighton, Christchurch, and has lived in Dunedin, Christchurch, the Marlborough Sounds and Golden Bay. He has grown up with the south's people, its cities, towns, rivers, mountains, rivers, bush and plains. He has picked tobacco in Motueka, been a commercial fisherman in Fiordland and a deer farmer on Banks Peninsula. He has worked in radio, television and newspapers there and for almost quarter of a century was the Christchurch-based writer for the NZ Listener magazine. As a writer, tramper and traveller, and being professionally nosey, he has poked into many corners of the island, although nowhere near all of them: He finds the south and its people endlessly fascinating. There's always something new, or fresh, or interesting, or just reassuring to discover. He now lives on Waiheke Island to be close to his family, but his heart remains in the south.
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* Long-awaited short and reorganised version of The Musket Wars * Brilliantly written and clearly explained, with fact boxes * Detailed maps and plentiful illustrations Ron Crosby brilliantly rewrites his seminal The Musket Wars on a thematic basis, simplifying it to a concise wo...rk full of maps and illustrations for the general reader.
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'A Long Time Coming' depicts the history of the Ngai Tahu settlement and shows how the two sides, Ngai Tahu and the Crown, led by Tipene O'Regan for Ngai Tahu and the Minister of Treaty Negotiations Douglas Graham, managed to negotiate one of the country's longest legal document.

In a book that is both deeply personal and highly political, Melani Anae recalls the radical activism of Auckland's Polynesian Panthers - the movement modelled on the US Black Panther Party 'but without guns'.

One of the British Empire's most troubling colonial exports in the 19th-century, James Busby is known as the father of the Australian wine industry, the author of New Zealand's Declaration of Independence and a central figure in the early history of independent New Zealand as its... British Resident from 1833 to 1840. Officially the man on the ground for the British government in the volatile society of New Zealand in the 1830s, Busby endeavoured to create his own parliament and act independently of his superiors in London. This put him on a collision course with the British Government, and ultimately destroyed his career. With a reputation as an inept, conceited and increasingly embittered person, this caricature of Busby's character has slipped into the historical bloodstream where it remains to the present day. This book draws on an extensive range of previously-unused archival records to reconstruct Busby's life in much more intimate form, and exposes the back-room plotting that ultimately destroyed his plans for New Zealand. It will alter the way that Britain's colonisation of New Zealand is understood, and will leave readers with an appreciation of how individuals, more than policies, shaped the Empire and its rule.
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