Mutuwhenua is the story of Ripeka, who leaves her extended family and its traditional lifestyle to marry Graeme, a Pakeha schoolteacher. In the strange world of the city, Ripeka discovers that she cannot make the break from her whanau, that the old ways are too strong. The first novel by a Maori woman ever published, Mutuwhenua is a powerful, mo...

Isaac runs a tearoom in the middle of nowhere where he watches life and cars pass by his window each day. When two of his customers share a chance meeting, he finds himself embroiled in something very sinister.

Covering the two decades from 1972, Swiss scholar Otto Heim presents detailed readings of the novels and short fiction by Heretaunga Pat Baker, Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Bruce Stewart, J. C. Sturm, Apirana Taylor, and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. His book places the fiction by Maori writers in the context of a culture of survival and traces its textual engagement with violence between empathy and sacrifice, from the privacy of domestic violence to the public arenas of systemic violence and war. He argues that out of this confrontation with violence emerges a distinctive ethnic world view created by the construction of individual experience, the development of an ideological stance and the expression of a spiritual orientation. Heim's analysis shows works of fiction by contemporary Maori writers as challenging explorations of the constraints placed on the literary imagination by the urgent facts of the human condition and the imperatives of culture.

Excerpt from The Maori Division of Time In his interesting work entitled Neolithic Dew-ponds and Cattleways A.J. Hubbard wrote as follows: Early man naturally measured the year from the ripening of the crops of one year to the corresponding period in the succeeding year.

Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity. This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers. It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind. The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research.

This study brings together three closely related aspects of Maori literature - myth, memory and identity. It examines selected novels by Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace in order to trace an ever-developing Maori identity that has changed considerably over three decades of the Maori novel. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the construction of identity in literature benefits from a close look at the importance of Maori mythology as well as associated cultural and individual memories. Indicating that Maori fiction has become what Homi Bhabha terms a third space, this book verifies the links between novel, myth and memory with the help of existing research in these areas in order to assess their importance for the reinterpretation of identity. The Maori novels that depict situations reflecting current issues are viewed as an experimental playground in which authors can explore a variety of solutions to tribal, societal and political issues. This study establishes the early novels as reinterpretations of the past and guides to the future, and characterises the more recent novels as representing a move towards empowerment and pioneering that has not yet come to a conclusion.

The first comprehensive history of how Maori have emerged from the silence of depictions by European writers to claim their own literary voice, with a focus on Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera

Hina, the Maori moon goddess, has 30 different faces to help illuminate life’s lessons - a different face and a different energy for each day of the month. And with her changing light, new insights are revealed. This book gives us the chance to connect to the ancient wisdom of the old people, who reach forward into our lives, with each of the moon’s names as their offerings. Their reminders are a source of strength in our strange modern world, where we have been stripped of much of the connection and relationships we need for our wellbeing through successive lockdowns. We now see just how important these things are! This book leads you through a full cycle of the moon, to consider 30 aspects of life. And lessons we thought we had learned come back around with each month's cycle and remind us of deeper layers and blind spots. And when we do find a growing awareness of place and harmony, there is a sense of release. A new kind of freedom starts to emerge, soothing our modern-day pain and suffering. This book is designed to open up our moon dreams, for a deeper affectionate connection with ourselves and others.

Vols. for 1892-1941 contain the transactions and proceedings of the society.