What's New McNab

Crafting Aotearoa: A Cultural History of Making in New Zealand and the Wider Moana Oceania. Eds., Karl Chitham, Kolokesa U Māhina-Tuai, Damian Skinner
From Te Papa Press, Crafting Aotearoa is a very wide-ranging exploration of craft and its cultural significance in the lives of the peoples of Aotearoa, that situates us clearly in our geographical location in the South Pacific. The book is divided into eight thematic sections with many individual essays by a range of scholars and practitioners on particular objects, crafts and craftspeople, and the social and cultural context they are part of.

Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance. Eds. Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams, Puawai Cairns
Another Te Papa book, produced by three curators, Protest Tautohetohe, is a rich and exciting collection of objects – flags, posters, leaflets, badges, petition scrolls, sculpture, even a chainsaw – produced by New Zealand’s most vital social and labour movements. Interspersed with the illustrations there is a series of excerpts from the accounts of participants in these movements, helping to contextualise the curators’ excellent choices.

Richard Emerson: The Hopfather.Michael Donaldson
Local boy makes good, making good beer.

Rottenomics: The Story of New Zealand’s Leaky Buildings Disaster. Peter Dyer
The story of how successive Governments created the moving disaster known as the ‘leaky buildings crisis’, estimated in one report to have cost the nation in the region of 47 billion dollars. The dismantling of regulations, traditional apprenticeships and organised labour through the neoliberal polices of both Labour and National led to a building regime that prioritised short-term profit over the long-term interests of citizens as consumers and workers and produced an economic disaster still impacting on New Zealanders lives today.

Southern Nights: The Story of New Zealand’s Night Sky from the Southern Lights to the Milky Way. Naomi Arnold
Arnold weaves together the stories and knowledge of ancient Polynesian navigators, traditional Māori astronomical knowledge and contemporary astronomy to produce a beautiful book about the southern night sky. The book ends with a plea to conserve our relatively unpolluted night sky and to promote the formation of more Dark Sky Reserves in New Zealand like the one in the Mackenzie Country.

The Star of the South: A History of the Evening Star Newspaper: Daily Since 1863. Ron Palenski
Not so long ago, Dunedin supported two daily newspapers. The Evening Star finally stopped publication on 3rd November 1979 after 116 years. Now the Star’s old competitor the Otago Daily Times occupies the old Star building on Cumberland Street. Prolific local historian Ron Palenski has produced an engaging account of the many interesting personalities involved in the production of the Evening Star.

Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New Zealand. Catherine Bishop
A surprising number of women in colonial New Zealand were fully engaged in commercial enterprises, running their own businesses or effectively running the businesses of their spouses. Bishop delves into the fascinating lives of the many and varied entrepreneurial women who have been ignored and sidelined by conventional histories, showing that their contribution to the urban fabric of nineteenth century New Zealand is much more substantial than is usually assumed.