Books published by Victoria University Press

'I'd wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place - to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air.' Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, th...en abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether - one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom? Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellin, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals - sheep and cows, whales and manatee, elks and ibises. 'Where We Swim is a book about family that travels by water in the body of a swimmer. Horrocks is someone with an appetite for adventure but she is also the mother of young children and daughter of older parents. She brilliantly contrasts heady plunges of bodily experience with chilling alarms about family. This book is filled with wanderlust, but also homesickness for a past when our waterways didn't have high coliform counts and Wellington's bays weren't soupy with saIp, and for the whole swimmable world it so vividly remembers.' -Elizabeth Knox
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Kneel like a prayer full of lynching This is my God-given white 'Savage is as savage does. And we're all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world - outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish w...it, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you'll feel your pulse anew.' -Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2017-19 The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence.
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It's 1994. Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches.

Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherin...e Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there's a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.
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Includes more than 120 paintings, written accounts, and photographs from the time, following the English invasion in 1881. This work chronicles the story of brave leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, and celebrates the strength and spirit of the Parihaka community, even u...nder colonial rule.
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