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 late Sir Toby Curtis lays out a wero to future generations in new book written with Lorraine Berridge McLeod

Toby Curtis
Unfinished Business – Ki hea āpōpō

Sir Toby Curtis with Lorraine Berridge McLeod

The late Te Arawa leader sets out his life from poverty to  knighthood with frank views on education and racism

Knowing that he was unwell, over the past year the late Sir Toby Curtis worked with long-time friend Dr Lorraine Berridge McLeod to record his life and views on key areas from his stellar career — especially Māori education and leadership, and his experience of racism. 

Toby Curtis – Unfinished business: Ki hea āpōpō follows Toby’s progress from his humble origins through family life and his mahi as a teacher and lecturer, government adviser in education and broadcasting, and leader of the Te Arawa iwi confederation. 

Interspersed throughout are text boxes that take a more academic approach to key issues like the loss of te reo, religious colonisation, educational underachievement and government policy.

The result is an engaging story of a life emerging from the shadows of a Pākehā-led model to a bicultural society, balanced with opinions that will challenge and inform thinkers for years to come. 

Sir Toby passed away on 17 August. This book stands as his legacy to the nation he cared about so passionately, and sets out a wero (challenge). 

As the subtitle indicates, Tā Toby felt his life’s work to be unfinished, with a long way to go to for Aotearoa. Ki hea āpōpō!

Moe mai, moe mai, moe mai rā e te rangatira. Rest in peace, chief. Your words carry forward the business for others to finish.

The authors

Sir Toby Curtis (Ngāti Rongomai, Ngāti Pikiao) had a distinguished teaching career before lecturing at AUT University. After retiring to Rotoiti, Rotorua, he led the Te Arawa Lakes Trust for 16 years, among many other roles. Sadly, he passed away before this book could be published. 

From a farming background, Lorraine Berridge McLeod was a teacher, principal lecturer at AUT, dean of early childhood education in Auckland and then associate professor of education in the United Arab Emirates. A long-time colleague of Sir Toby’s, she lives in Taranaki. 

Publication Date: 17 November 2022 |  ISBN: 978-1-99-004230-0  |  RRP $39.99

Paperback, 234 x 153 mm portrait, 180 pages, black & white with colour sections     

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

Book giveaway: New Zealand Tattoo (2012)

New Zealand Tattoo was one of Oratia’s first really big books, launched in October 2012 at Real Groovy in Auckland and showcased at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where New Zealand was guest of honour that year.

With photographer Chris Hoult we conceived of a book that, like many works in the field, showcased tattoo design — but unlike most, looked at it from the tattooists’ perspective. Chris joined journalist Steve Forbes to interview and photograph tattoo artists in their studios, creating an extended photo essay about the art as it was in late 2011/early 2012.

With its large (330 x 250 mm) hardback format and rich colour reproduction, New Zealand Tattoo — in the home of the tattooist’s art gave air to the works and words of tattooists representing the three main strands of ta moko (Māori tattoo), tatau (Pasifika tattoo) and European traditions. Steve contributed a concise history of the art form as well. The book has stood the test of the intervening years and remains a collectors’ item for followers of tattoo here and overseas. 

To be in to win a copy of New Zealand Tattoo go to our Fb Page 

Prize available to New Zealand residents only. 

Competition closes on Monday 24 June, and winner announced on Tuesday 25 June.

Special book giveaway! To the Gateways of Florence: New Zealand Forces in Tuscany, 1944 (2011)

Italy is in the blood at Oratia. Our media director Alessandra Zecchini is Italian and we volunteer and work closely with the Dante Alighieri Society in Auckland. The name for our first book imprint, Libro International, derived from the Italian word for book.  

So after Florence city councillor Stefano Fusi and his Kiwi wife Jill Gabriel hosted Alessandra, Peter and kids at Liberation Day commemorations in Tuscany in 2010 (on 25 April, the same day as Anzac Day), we knew we must publish an English edition of their fine book about how New Zealand troops helped liberate this part of Italy from German occupation during the Second World War.

To the Gateways of Florence: New Zealand Forces in Tuscany, 1944 follows the structure and layout of the original book I Giorni della Liberazione, first published by Editore NTE, edited by Stefano and translated by Jill. It collects writing by Italian and New Zealand historians, the latter represented by Christopher Pugsley, Monty Soutar and Jeffrey Plowman.

 Stefano, Jill and family visited New Zealand along with regional mayor Sestilio Dirindelli and his wife in September 2011. Together we launched the book in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland at some memorable gatherings of old soldiers, the Italian community and supporters.

We’re down to some of the last copies of this book, so get in now to secure yours.

Enter on our Fb Page to be in to win a copy of To the Gateways of Florence. Prize available to New Zealand residents only. 

Competition closes on Monday 17 June, and winner announced on Tuesday 18 June.

Win a copy of Te Ara — Māori Pathways: Past, Present, Future (2010)

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Te Ara started life as accompanying an exhibition of photographs and taonga relating to Māori leadership in the past, present and future, curated by academic and museum director Paul Tapsell with distinguished photographer Krzysztof Pfeiffer. 

This colourful paperback has gone on to become a valued reference to contemporary Māori issues, appearing in three editions — all with English and Māori text, and then variously Polish, German and Musqueam (the First Nations language from the Vancouver area), reflecting some locations where the exhibition travelled.

See: https://www.oratia.co.nz/product/te-ara

The book developed alongside Oratia’s ongoing partnership with Paul and Krzysztof in the charitable venture Māori Maps (www.maorimaps.com), which seeks to help descendants connect with their ancestral marae. 

Later this year we’ll also be publishing Paul’s next book, written with Merata Kawharu — Whāriki: The re-emergence of Māori kin community entrepreneurship.

To be in to win a copy of Te Ara — Māori Pathways: Past, Present, Future, go to our Fb Page. 

Prize available to New Zealand residents only.

Competition closes on Monday 10 June, and winner announced on Tuesday 11 June.

Oratia Books Catalogue 2019 out now

The Oratia Books Catalogue 2019 is now available in print and PDF formats.

We're pleased to present 11 new books for this year, along with a growing back list.

Here's what the introduction says; click here to view the entire catalogue.

In 2019 Oratia Media marks ten years of publishing our own books, and our nineteenth year as a publishing and media business. To celebrate, Oratia Books brings you at least ten titles that encompass outstanding writing and illustration in both new and revised editions.

There’s a maritime theme in adult hardbacks, with Sir Bob Harvey’s much-awaited Sea Edge celebrating the Waitematā Harbour, and Gavin McLean’s Shipwrecked: New Zealand maritime disasters, while the pensive Home Child follows a group of children shipped from the UK for adoption on the other side of the world.

Our commitment to te Ao Māori deepens with new editions of classic works by Sir Hirini Moko Mead and A.W. Reed, Merata Kawharu and Paul Tapsell’s seminal work on entrepreneurship, and Darryn Joseph’s Whakarongo ki ō Tūpuna, written in te Reo with English translation.

Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird put a new comic spin on the international bestseller I Need a New Bum! with a side-splitting sequel, and Tracy Duncan gives a makeover to the most popular of Melanie Drewery’s Nanny Mihi series. In July we launch the first two titles in The NZ Series, a new non-fiction collection for young adult readers, with works by Gordon Ell and Sarah Ell.

Heke Tangata: Māori in Markets and Cities

Eminent economist Brian Easton tracks the realities of Māori in the market economy in this statistically rich work. Heke Tangata provides the hard facts as to why Māori remain approximately a generation behind the living standards of other New Zealanders.

The book will be launched tomorrow in Parliament, in the meantime you can read this report on The National Business Review and watch the interview with John Tamihere, chief executive of West Auckland-based Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust.

Oratia Books - Catalogue 2018

Click here to see and download the catalogue PDF