Bridget Williams Books: 132 books
Te Tiriti o Waitangi
The Treaty of Waitangi, 1840
Language: English
Release Date: July 25, 2017
In May 2017 the exhibition He Tohu opened at the National Library in Wellington. This celebrates three founding documents in New Zealand’s history He Whakaputanga: The Declaration of Independence (1835), the Treaty of Waitangi: Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) and the Women’s Suffrage Petition (1893)....
Geering and God: 196571
The Heresy Trial that Divided New Zealand
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
‘Throughout his long life Lloyd Geering has wrestled with ‘God’, the deepest fundamental questions of human identity and making sense of living in this world in relationship with others.’ Allan K. DavidsonThe events surrounding the ‘trial’ of Lloyd Geering for heresy in the late 1960s were...
The Whole Intimate Mess
Motherhood, Politics, and Women's Writing
Language: English
Release Date: June 12, 2017
‘I began to pull the threads of my experience back together. Instead of divergent stories about public failure, private torment, and postnatal distress, I started telling myself a united story: the truth, or as close as I could get to it.’
A Rhodes scholar and former Green MP, Holly Walker...
by Paul Callaghan
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Acknowledged internationally for his ground-breaking scientific research in the field of magnetic resonance, Sir Paul Callaghan was a scientist and visionary with a rare gift for promoting science to a wide audience. He was named New Zealander of the Year in 2011. His death in early 2012 robbed New...
Home Truths
Confronting New Zealand’s Housing Crisis
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2015
The poor standard of current housing, and the inability of too many people on low incomes to access decent housing, is causing a cascade of problems that are avoidable.Housing affordability. Unhealthy homes. Wealth inequality. Environmental sustainability. Social mobility. The state of New Zealand...
by Rebecca Macfie
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2013
The grief sits like hot magma, held down by a crust of action…
Rebecca Macfies first-hand accounts of the Christchurch earthquakes in the New Zealand Listener provided an often searing account of the disaster. They were powerful and immediate because Macfie herself lived there, personally...
Boundary Markers
Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand
Language: English
Release Date: December 21, 2015
In a country where land disputes were the chief cause of conflict between the coloniser and the colonised, surveying could never be a neutral, depoliticised pastime.In a groundbreaking piece of scholarship, Giselle Byrnes examines the way surveyors became figuratively and literally ‘the cutting edge...
Being Chinese
A New Zealander's Story
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2016
This is the story of a quest I began three decades ago the search for my Chinese identity. The path I travelled was not linear, and the years brought pain as well as joy. But, while this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life...
The 9th Floor
Conversations with five New Zealand Prime Ministers
Language: English
Release Date: August 28, 2017
If you’re going to lead, you have to have certain values that are important to you, otherwise you can’t lead, you just flip-flop around the place. Jim BolgerNowhere is it written down what are the powers of the Prime Minister. . . . it’s your personality, it’s the skills that you’ve...
First Contact
Tasman’s Arrival in Taitapu, 1642
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2014
As the Dutch replied in darkness with shouts and trumpet calls from the decks of their ships, the warriors must have been mystified by these creatures who entered into their rituals, yet used exotic instruments and spoke an unintelligible tongue.With the publication of her book Two Worlds,...
by Tracey Barnett
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2013
‘This eloquent and passionate work documents how we have strayed from a humane policy towards asylum seekers, following the same sad and discredited path as Australia.’ Joris de Bres, Race Relations Commissioner 2002-2013Why would a country that has never had a boatload of asylum arrivals in modern...
by Rachel Buchanan
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2018
'Parihaka was a place and an event that could be lost and found, over and over. It moved into view, then disappeared, just like the mountain.'
In 1881, over 1,500 colonial troops invaded the village of Parihaka near the Taranaki coast. Many people were expelled, buildings destroyed, and chiefs...
A Punitive Society
Falling Crime and Rising Imprisonment in New Zealand
Language: English
Release Date: December 11, 2013
New Zealand has one of the highest levels of imprisonment in the Western world. Yet the growth of imprisonment in New Zealand has occurred when the crime rate here, as in most other Western societies, has been in significant decline. Why, then, the disjuncture?
In this penetrating BWB Text,...
A Woman of Good Character
Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth Century New Zealand
Language: English
Release Date: December 21, 2015
Between the 1840s and 1880s, thousands of young single women came to New Zealand as assisted migrants from Britain and Ireland. In this detailed study of forgotten lives, Charlotte Macdonald highlights the experiences and identities of a vitally important migrant group, one previously overshadowed by...