Bridget Williams Books: 132 books

‘At 2.40pm Patu charged. A human tank. The first time during the tour that a protest squad charged police lines with the intention of breaking through ...’The Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 provoked the biggest mass protests in New Zealand history. For two months tens of thousands...

Science changes the world because the creation of knowledge opens up new pathways for us to explore new ways of doing things, and new questions to ask. My optimism lies in the fact that I think that the answer to why science is sexist does all of these things.In this eye-opening BWB Text, Nicola Gaston,...

The devastating earthquake that hit Christchurch in 2011 did more than rupture the surface of the city, argues historian Katie Pickles. It created a definitive endpoint to a history shaped by omission, by mythmaking, and by ideological storytelling.In this multi-layered BWB Text, Pickles uncovers what...

One of the country’s three official languages, New Zealand Sign Language evolved in the communities that grew from networks of Deaf children at three schools for the Deaf from the late nineteenth century. The Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language (1997) now an invaluable online resource at nzsl.vuw.ac.nz...

Our seas are literally rising, but under the surface of our politics too, something is also happening. Everywhere there is a growing mood for change, increasing unease and greater efforts to live more sustainably. World leaders and scientists agree that climate change is real, and around the...

The year 2014 was the hottest on record since we’ve begun collecting global temperature measurements in 1880. Even at its midway point, 2015 was already promising to take over this dubious record.As new thresholds are breached, acclaimed Radio New Zealand science writer Veronika Meduna explores...

New Zealand is proud of its human rights record with good reason. It was the first country in the world to give women the vote and it played a prominent part in the establishment of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New Zealand recently took a leading role in the creation...

The nuclear meltdown at Fukushima ... the Fonterra botulism scare ... the Christchurch earthquakes in all these recent crises the role played by scientists has been under the spotlight.What is the first duty of scientists in a crisis to the government, to their employer, or to the wider public desperate...

'Forget the label “free trade agreement”. The TPPA, under negotiation between New Zealand, the USA and ten other countries, is a direct assault on our right to decide our own future. In this hard-hitting BWB Text, Professor Jane Kelsey picks apart the current negotiations surrounding the...

The non-violent defiance of Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, Tohu Kakahi and their followers at Parihaka is one of the great New Zealand narratives. This extract from the book by journalist Dick Scott which brought the story to the wider Pākehā world describes what happened when troops and settler volunteers invaded the village of Parihaka on 5 November 1881.

Since its publication in 1987, Claudia Orange’s book has become the standard guide to one of the key documents in New Zealand history, selling over 40,000 copies.The complexities of the Treaty, which have done so much to shape New Zealand history for nearly 200 years, are thoughtfully explored as Orange...

How we think about income gaps, and how we decide to address them, will do much to alter New Zealand’s levels of inequality in the years to come.'The divide between New Zealand’s poorest and wealthiest inhabitants has widened alarmingly over recent decades. Differences in income have grown faster...

A monumental new account of the defining conflict in New Zealand history. It was war in the Waikato in 186364 that shaped the nation in all kinds of ways: setting back Māori and Pākehā relations by several generations and allowing the government to begin to assert the kind of real control over the...

So here I am walking again an old path made new by the very fact that I am upon it once more, accompanied by familiar hordes: the fecund majority of the dead, the myriad of the living in all of their many forms, defunct, mutant, revenant or otherwise, traversing memory’s infinite field.In the evocative...