"A little boy has made friends with the taniwha in his river, but no-one believes him. The taniwha takes the boy on a journey through time and myth where he meets some amazing characters, gathering the earth's treasures as he goes"--Publisher information.

This collection assembles Robyn's selection of more than 100 works that represent her artistic career over 35 years.

A book to treasure for young and old, Robyn Kahukiwa's Ngā Atua - Māori Gods takes the reader on a stunning visual journey while imparting simple and effective explanations of the major Māori gods. Robyn introduces the pantheon of Māori deities and explains the arena of life for which each one is responsible. For example: Tumatauenga is the greatest warrior. His powers are extreme strength and courage. He fights for truth and justice. This new paperback version is fully bilingual, incorporating a superb translation by Kiwa Hammond, building on the popular hardback edition in English (published by Oratia Books in 2017). The vibrant paintings bring the gods to life and help this beautiful book to affirm their continued relevance to today's world.

Long ago, Matatuhi, a fabulous weaver and a woman with special powers, dreams of making a special cloak, and of encountering a young girl with fair hair and green eyes. Many years later, in modern times, a girl named Mata is adopted by Pakeha parents. She has fair hair, but brown skin. On a class visit to an ancient meeting house at a museum one day, Mata is entranced by a beautiful cloak, and a carved woman figure with a moko chin tattoo who seems to speak to her. Later, she dreams of feathered cloaks and an old Maori woman with a moko. Mata s life is now changed. She is taken to meet her Maori family, and she reclaims her original Maori name Matatuhi. Soon she even finds an old kuia who is happy to teach her to weave her goal is a beautiful cloak, like that of her kuia, Matatuhi.

This is Kahukiwa's resplendent retelling of the age-old myth (popularised by Witi Ihimaera in his The Whale Rider, in which the protagonist, Paikea, travels from Hawaiki, and atop a whale, to Aotearoa - indicating, in many ways, the genesis of so many other great Maori folktales.

Poems.

An unusual tuna with a magic throat leaps out of his stream and visits a number of children in Champion Street. To each he gives an article of clothing for dancing, or a musical instrument. The children are all from different ethnic communities living in New Zealand. On Champion Street the children all come together and dance all day and all night. Age 4+ 32 pages

Children’s books seek to assist children to understand themselves and their world. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature demonstrates how settler-society texts position child readers as citizens of postcolonial nations, how they represent the colonial past to modern readers, what they propose about race relations, and how they conceptualize systems of power and government. Clare Bradford focuses on texts produced since 1980 in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and includes picture books, novels, and films by Indigenous and non-Indigenous publishers and producers. From extensive readings, the author focuses on key works to produce a thorough analysis rather than a survey. Unsettling Narratives opens up an area of scholarship and discussion—the use of postcolonial theories—relatively new to the field of children’s literature and demonstrates that many texts recycle the colonial discourses naturalized within mainstream cultures.