Bøker utgitt av Otago University Press

The Pacific artefacts and works of art collected during the three voyages of Captain James Cook and the navigators, traders and missionaries who followed him are of foundational importance for the study of art and culture in Oceania. These collections are representative not only of technologies or belief systems but of indigenous cultures at the formative stages of their modern histories, and exemplify Islanders'' institutions, cosmologies and social relationships. Recently, scholars from the Pacific and further afield, working with Pacific artefacts at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA), have set out to challenge and rethink some longstanding assumptions on their significance. The Cook voyage collection at the MAA is among the four or five most important in the world, containing over 200 of the 2000-odd objects with Cook voyage provenance that are dispersed throughout the world. The collection includes some 100 artefacts dating from Cook''s first voyage. This stunning book catalogues this collection, and its cutting-edge scholarship sheds new light on the significance of many artefacts of encounter.

The Lives of Colonial Objects is a sumptuously illustrated and highly readable book about things, and the stories that unfold when we start to investigate them. In this collection of 50 essays the authors, including historians, archivists, curators and Maori scholars, have each chosen an object from New Zealand's colonial past. Some are treasured family possessions such as a kahu kiwi, a music album or a grandmother's travel diary, and their stories have come down through families. Some, like the tauihu of a Maori waka, a Samoan kilikiti bat or a flying boat, are housed in museums. Others - a cannon, a cottage and a country road - inhabit public spaces but they too turn out to have unexpected histories. Things invite us into the past through their tangible, tactile and immediate presence: in this collection they serve as 50 paths into New Zealand's colonial history.

Dunedin-born artist Grace Joel (1865--1924) exhibited to acclaim in London and Paris, yet she and her art are relatively unknown today. Joel excelled at portraiture and mother and child studies and was skilled in portraying the nude. She received her artistic training in Melbourne and lived for the mature years of her career in London, where her work appeared at the prestigious Royal Academy, as well as the Paris Salon and the Royal Scottish Academy. One possible reason why Joel''s work has not remained visible is that few details of her personal life survive; only three letters have been found, and they reveal little of the person who wrote them. Undaunted, author Joel Schiff has pulled together from the words of her contemporaries, various newspaper accounts, scraps in other historical archives, and close study of her extant paintings a portrayal of this talented woman that is as intimate and engaging as her work.

Maurice Gee''s fiction for younger readers blends exciting stories with serious issues. Told through a range of genres, from fantasy to realism, adventure to science fiction, mysteries, psychological thrillers and gangster stories, they offer a distinctive body of work that shows New Zealand to children and young adults. This book is the first of two that pays tribute to Maurice Gee''s distinctive contribution to New Zealand literature. It argues that the depth and excitement of Gee''s fiction for young readers makes for an impressive introduction to New Zealand culture, history and storytelling. Overview chapters explore the motivations, themes, contexts and reception of Gee''s work, from the fantasy novels Under the Mountain , The World Around the Corner and the O and Salt trilogies, to the five realist and historical novels, including The Fat Man , The Champion and The Fire-Raiser . This volume will appeal to students, teachers, readers and writers of New Zealand literature, children''s literature and fantasy literature. A second book, by Lawrence Jones, will discuss Gee''s fiction for adult readers.

This engrossing history of the domestic kitchen in New Zealand covers 10 decades that saw culinary traditions accommodate extraordinary changes in technology and the irresistible process of globalization. Each chapter surveys the external influences on households and their kitchens, samples the dishes prepared during the decade, and discusses the structure of meals. A study of kitchen equipment and design then closes each chapter, cumulatively revealing more innovation in these aspects than in what people ate. Kitchens is the culmination of a 10-year research and writing project by anthropologist Helen Leach, supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, focusing on the material culture of cooking by New Zealanders.

This is a story of how ordinary people created a movement that changed New Zealand's foreign policy and our identity as a nation. The story of peace activism from our pre-recorded history to 1975 was told in Peace People: A history of peace activities in New Zealand by Elsie Locke. In this new book her daughter Maire Leadbeater takes the story up to the 1990s in an account of the dramatic stories of the colorful and courageous activist campaigns that led the New Zealand government to enact nuclear-free legislation in 1987. Politicians took the credit, but they were responding to a powerful groundswell of public opinion.

Delving both into ''the worlds of the mind'' and ''where he happens to be'', Owen Marshall brings us poetry that is steeped in the Classics, history and literature, and yet is alive with the vivid particulars of damp duffle-coats and hot-air balloons, beer and bicycles, willows and skylarks, kauri gum and limestone tunnels.

Michael Harlow's poems are small detonations that release deeply complex stories of psychological separations and attractions, of memory and desire. Frequently they slip into the alluring spaces just at the edges of language, dream and gesture, as they carefully lower, like measuring gauges, into the ineffable: intimations of mortality, the slippery nature of identity, longing, fear ... This is a beautifully honed new collection.