Pioneer poetry.

This critical examination of Maoriland literature argues against the former glib dismissals of the period and focuses instead on the era’s importance in the birth of a distinct New Zealand style of writing. By connecting the literature and other cultural forms of Maoriland to the larger realms of empire and contemporary criticism, this study explores the roots of the country’s modern feminism, progressive social legislation, and bicultural relations.

Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which European colonists to New Zealand discovered, created, propagated, and romanticised the Maori world summed up in a popular nickname describing New Zealand; Maoriland. But Blackley shows that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Maori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Galleries of Maoriland looks at Maori prehistory in European art; the enthusiasm of settlers and Maori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Maori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand's artistic and ethnographic economy, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

Pioneer poetry.

Did they come from space, from Egypt, from the Americas? From other ancient civilizations? These are some of today's most fanciful claims about the first settlers of the islands of the Pacific. But none of them correctly answer the question: Where did the Polynesians come from? This book is a thoughtful and devastating critique of such "new" learning, and a careful and accessible survey of modern archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and linguistics findings about the origins of Pacific Islanders. Professor Howe also examines the two-hundred-year-old history of Western ideas about Polynesian origins in the context of ever-changing fads and intellectual fashions.

This book builds on Claudia Orange’s award-winning Treaty of Waitangi, using a wonderful range of photographs, maps and paintings to bring the Treaty’s history to life. Depictions of key players and moments sit alongside a clear and informative text that helps explain the history of this key document. Two peoples meeting, agreements made and broken, claims and protests: all are a part of the story of the Treaty from before its signing to the present day. Never before have the Treaty’s varied stories been made so accessible the general reader.