From bird to New Zealanders to Chinese gooseberries — new book tracks the worldwide flight of 'Kiwi'

Kiwi: A Curious Case of National Identity
Richard Wolfe

How did the Māori name for a flightless bird come to mean a New Zealander and a fruit that originated in China, while morphing into the badge for the national rugby league team and the air force? Not to mention becoming the brand name for everything from rabbit traps to a bank, and a term for pilots who are no longer flying? 

Kiwi: A Curious Case of National Identity tracks this unlikely evolution. Diving into the natural history of this unique bird and its significance to Māori, the story spreads its wings to relate how ‘kiwi’ came to symbolise the emerging nation during the First World War – thanks in part to a brand of boot polish originating in Australia. 

 

By the mid-twentieth century, while the bird population steadily declined, ‘kiwi’ was propagating everywhere from the Golden Kiwi lottery to the new 20-cent coin. 

 

After 1959, with the coining of ‘kiwifruit’ to replace the Chinese gooseberry, the emergence of this export industry has taken the national symbol into a fruit salad of uses worldwide. Along the way there’s been Kiwi the Melbourne Cup-winner, a couple of Kiwi airlines (neither of which flew for long) and TV’s beloved Goodnight Kiwi.

 

Richard Wolfe’s decades of Kiwiana collecting furnish the book with an array of colour photos, art and ephemera, making this a visually stimulating work for Kiwis and kiwi fans of all feathers. 

 

The Author

Richard Wolfe is a cultural historian and curator who has written or co-authored over 40 books on themes from the moa to New Zealand art, including Footprints on the Land: How Humans Changed New Zealand (Oratia Books, 2022), Hellhole of the Pacific and New Zealand’s Lost Heritage. He was a display artist at the Auckland and Canterbury museums, and co-curated the first major exhibition of Kiwiana (a term he helped invent). Richard lives with his artist wife Pamela in Auckland.

Publication Date: 10 October 2024 |  ISBN: 978-1-99-004264-5 |  RRP $45

Paperback, 250 x 185 mm portrait, 208 pages, colour

The human impact on New Zealand revealed in captivating new book

Footprints on the Land
How Humans Changed New Zealand 

Richard Wolfe

It must have been a hell of a shock. After millions of years of isolation, New Zealand’s unique flora and fauna suddenly felt the stir of human footprints just over 800 years ago. 

In the blink of an eye in terms of the Earth’s history, the last large landmass to be settled by humans changed in ways impossible to reverse. 

 

Footprints on the Land narrates those changes, taking in the destruction of forests, draining and flooding land, building railways and roads, farming and mining, and the inexorable spread of towns and cities. 

Some of the more dramatic changes, carried out in the name of progress, appear very differently through a modern lens. 

 

Richard Wolfe accompanies his even-handed account of the effects of human settlement with an astute selection of paintings and photography befitting a curator and art writer. 

He also charts the growth of the environmental movement, with a number of high-profile national campaigns. 

That heightened awareness has helped to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, but Wolfe shows compellingly that we are not yet — as it were — out of the woods. 

Habitat destruction, pollution, species introductions and (above all) climate change threaten the short history of people on these islands. When will the shock be absorbed?

The Author

Richard Wolfe is a cultural historian and curator who has written or co-authored some 40 books on themes from the moa to New Zealand art, including Hellhole of the Pacific and New Zealand’s Lost Heritage. He was a display artist at the Auckland and Canterbury museums, and co-curated the first major exhibition of Kiwiana (a term he helped invent). Richard lives with his artist wife Pamela in Auckland.

Publication Date: 12 October 2022 |  ISBN: 978-1-99-004220-1 |  RRP $45

Paperback, 250 x 185 mm portrait, 184 pages, b/w with colour sections