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The latest in our New Zealand collection.

Artsenta: The First 30 Years. Kath Beattie
Originally established as Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital’s Creative Expression Unit by Dr Julia Faed, the unit moved to Dunedin in 1991 becoming Artsenta. Artsenta is a supportive arts studio for users of mental health services. Creative Arts Trust Board member Kath Beattie takes a look back at the history of the space and its users over the last 30 years.

Coral Route: Tasman Empire Airways Ltd, Flying Boats & the South Pacific. Gerry Barton and Philip Heath
NZ airline, Tasman Empire Airways Ltd (TEAL), flew giant flying boats across the Pacific during the 1950s, one of the last scheduled flying boat routes in the world, on what they marketed as the ‘Coral Route’. Among the destinations were Suva, Apia and Papeete. You can relive the romance in this lushly-illustrated history.

Henry White: The Self-styled Golden King. Ross Thorne
Born in Dunedin in 1876, Henry Eli White built and later designed many of New Zealand’s early theatres. As well as theatre work White was the contractor for the Waipori hydroelectric power station tunnel, which at the time established a world record for hard-rock drilling. He later moved to Australia, becoming a leading architect, where he created many spectacular buildings such as Sydney’s State Theatre.

Migrant Journeys: New Zealand Taxi Drivers Tell their Stories. Adrienne Jansen and Liz Grant
The New Zealand taxi industry is now a microcosm of our increasingly diverse society, with taxi drivers drawn from almost 70 different ethnicities recorded in the 2013 Census. Drivers, especially in the big cities, are often first generation immigrants and refugees, and their personal stories offer up a perfect opportunity to explore the migrant experience first-hand.

More Than Just a Place of Work: A History of Dunedin’s Hillside Railway Workshops. Ian Dougherty
The closure of Hillside in December 2012 marked the end of 137 years of railway engineering workshops on the South Dunedin site, and was a big blow to Dunedin industry. At its height Hillside employed up to 800 workers. The workshops had their own social and dining halls, a subscription library and the workers fielded their own sports teams, bands, clubs and political party branches. Dougherty has produced a fascinating history of this Dunedin landmark, illustrated with many wonderful photographs.

Polynesian Panthers: Pacific Protest and Affirmative Action in Aotearoa New Zealand 1971-1981. Ed. Melanie Anae with Lautofa Iuli and Leilani Tamu
The Polynesian Panthers were a Pacific Island self-defence group formed in Auckland in the early 1970s, modelled on the American black power group, the Black Panthers. They engaged in neighbourhood-based mutual aid activities and fought back against the systematic racism and discrimination of the state and justice system, most famously against the dawn raids to catch visa over-stayers first instituted by Norman Kirk’s third Labour government against Pacific Island immigrants.

True Grit: The Survival and Success of New Zealand Steel. Michael Larsen
Larsen tells the story of the development of a successful domestic steel industry that utilised the vast ironsand deposits on the North Island’s west coast. The New Zealand Steel Investigating Company was set up in 1960 but it took many years to discover the best processes to turn the ironsand into iron before the production of steel strip finally got underway in the late 1980s.