What's New McNab
Driving to Treblinka : a long search for a lost father. Diana Wichtel.
Wichtel is most well known for her work as the Listener’s long-running television critic but in this award-winning narrative she delves into her father’s haunting past, a Polish Jew who miraculously survived the Holocaust. Emigrating to New Zealand from Canada when she was thirteen, Wichtel lost contact with her father who was to follow but never arrived. Many years later as an adult she set out to find out what happened to him and in her quest uncovered the history of his large Warsaw family and the fate they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Ghost South Road. Scott Hamilton.
Independent historian Scott Hamilton takes a journey along the Great South Road, built in 1862 to carry the British army into the heart of the Waikato. The road’s history is brought to life with the aid of photographs by Ian Powell and Paul Janman. Hamilton looks at how the road’s tragic past affects its present and the ways in which the road connects as well as divides the communities that live alongside it in one of the most culturally diverse parts of Auckland.
Mataatua wharenui : te whare i hoki mai. Hirini Mead, Pouroto Ngaropo, Layne Harvey, Te Onehou Phillis.
Mataatua wharenui is the most travelled Māori meeting house in the country. It was built between 1872 to 1875 in Whakatāne by Ngāti Awa and named after the great waka Mataatua, to celebrate the ancestors and help unify the iwi after the raupatu they suffered for resisting Crown invasion of their lands. The wharenui was transported to the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 and subsequently taken to Melbourne, London, and Dunedin before finally ending up at the Otago Museum for 70 years. It was only restored to its place of origin in 2011.
Port to plains : over and under the Port Hills, the story of the Lyttelton Railway Tunnel. David Welch.
Welch celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Lyttelton Railway Tunnel, the largest single engineering project of colonial New Zealand. In this richly illustrated volume the characters behind this immense feat of skill and determination are brought to life.
Teenagers : the rise of youth culture in New Zealand. Chris Brickell.
Brickell utilises diaries, letter and photographs that teenagers have left behind to document the development of a distinct ‘youth’ culture. From “sealers and bushfellers, factory girls and newspaper boys to mashers and flappers, larrikins and louts”, the trajectory of young people in the broader history of New Zealand is traced. With the arrival of the category of ‘teenager’ in the 1940s from the US the idea of youth culture became firmly ensconced.
Wanted : the search for the modernist murals of E. Mervyn Taylor. Ed. Bronwyn Holloway-Smith.
During the post-war boom between 1956 and 1964 Taylor was commissioned to create twelve murals for major new government and civic buildings. Some have since been destroyed and other lost. In this volume several artists, archivists and historians have collaborated to bring these murals back from obscurity involving considerable detective work and perseverance. In doing so they have produced a wonderful document on the relation of modernism to nationalism, and the nature of public art and the collective memory.
The world’s din : listening to records, radio and films in New Zealand, 1880-1940. Peter Hoar.
Peter Hoar investigates how people’s sonic world was radically changed in the late 19th century with the arrival of new audio technologies – gramophone, radio, cinema - that revolutionised the way that we hear the world. With the ability to record, play back and transmit sounds human experience of the world was altered in a myriad of new and exciting ways. Hoar undertakes a kind of aural archaeology digging up and restoring the soundscapes of New Zealand’s past.