Series: BWB Texts

'Poverty in Aotearoa is not accidental. It is designed into our systems, our institutions, and our policies.' Poverty is not the result of individual failure or misfortune. It is a product of the design of our economic and institutional systems. Pakukore brings together leading thinkers and practitioners to expose the systemic nature of poverty in Aotearoa and explore pathways for...

Decolonisation is a term that scares some and gives hope to others. It is an uncomfortable and bewildering concept for many New Zealanders, yet it is needed if we are going to build a country that is fair and equal for all who live there. Imagining Decolonisation sets out the case for decolonisation by illuminating—through anecdotal, real-life examples—what decolonisation might...

The content of this short book is derived directly from the larger illustrated publication, foregoing all illustrations to suit the BWB Texts format. In 1840, over 500 Maori leaders put their names to a significant new document: Te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Treaty of Waitangi. Through their signatures, moko or marks, they were making an agreement with the British...

The most recent NBR Rich List has revealed the biggest proportional increase in wealth since the list first appeared in 1986. But what do these figures mean and what else do we know about New Zealand's fortunes? Following his groundbreaking work on income inequality, Max Rashbrooke examines how wealth shapes our experience in Wealth and New Zealand. Drawing on previously...

In 2010, the Human Rights Commission found that Asian people reported higher levels of discrimination than any other minority in New Zealand. Yet although anti-Asian prejudice has a long history in New Zealand, it is seldom publicly acknowledged. Old Asian, New Asian by K. Emma Ng shines light onto the persistence of anti-Asian sentiment in New Zealand. Her anecdotal account...

'The idea of Māori privilege continues to be deployed in order to constrain Māori aspirations and maintain the power imbalance that colonisation achieved in the nineteenth century.' The 'idea of Māori privilege', as Peter Meihana describes it, is deeply embedded in New Zealand culture. Many New Zealanders hold firm to the belief that Māori have been treated better than other...

As new thresholds are breached, acclaimed Radio New Zealand science writer Veronika Meduna explores our future in a warmer world. Beginning with lessons from our ancient geological past, this BWB Text draws on current observations and increasingly sophisticated climate models to describe possible end-of-century scenarios for New Zealand. Distorted ecosystems, extreme weather, new landscapes and adapted foods are just some...

Our climate is changing, in ways that will have long-term impacts for us and for our children. Yet still we fail to take meaningful action. Why? And when will it be too late? Ralph Chapman argues that we have only 'a small and shrinking window of time' before the pressures from climate change become too great for us to address...

The gap between rapid scientific progress and public understanding faces unprecedented challenges. Leading research scientist Mike Berridge explores this troubled ground from a rare vantage point. His descriptions of stunning new advances in human health are offset by hard questions about society's ability to keep pace. This exploration brings us into contact with hotly contested public health issues, such as...

It is easy to look at the extremity of 'post truth' politics in the US and conclude that we must be doing something ok in New Zealand. But in many ways, the foundations of our media system are in worse shape. In the age of Trump, fake news and celebrity headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of...

Student Political Action in New Zealand

Shouting Zeros and Ones is a vital book that serves as a call to action: to reduce online harm, protect the integrity of our digital lives, and uphold democratic participation and inclusion. A diverse group of contributors reveals the hidden impacts of technology on society and individuals, exploring policy changes and personal actions to keep the internet a force for...

For novelist Stephanie Johnson, her relationship with Australia and Australians has been an ambivalent one. She has lived there for periods in her life, and her first book, a collection of short stories, was actually published in Australia. She was described then as a young Australian writer, something she says she agreed to 'for reasons that are complex and some...

Pesticides and Health by Neil Pearce explores New Zealand’s extensive use of pesticides, some of which have been contaminated with dioxin, a notorious toxic chemical. In this BWB Text, a leading epidemiologist uses the example of dioxin to illustrate how poorly New Zealand manages problems related to environmental pollutants and suggests how improvements can be made. The significance of public...

Albert Wendt crosses into new and deeply personal territory in this stirring BWB Text. Returning to his boyhood in the Vaipe, a suburb of Apia in Samoa, sees Wendt confront elemental questions: Is the Vaipe he has created in his stories, poetry and novels really the Vaipe that existed and exists in real life? Or is it real only in...

In 2013, there were over 66,000 more women between the ages of 25-49 living in New Zealand than there were men. This so-called 'man drought' is a hot topic for journalists and academics alike, who comment on how the situation might affect New Zealand women's chances of finding love. Yet they rarely stop to ask women their own opinions on...

Many of today's digital technologies inadvertently amplify the power structures and prejudices of wider society. By examining the way digital tools and platforms are designed, built, and maintained, this BWB Text aims to identify where and what we can do better for everyone in Aotearoa. Following on from the success of Shouting Zeros and Ones (BWB Texts), this fresh collection...

Migration and the movement of people is one of the critical issues confronting the world's nations in the twenty-first century. Going Places is about the economic contribution of migration to and from New Zealand, one of the most frequently discussed aspects of the debate. Can immigration, in economic terms, be more than a gap filler for the labour market and...

While global regulators grapple with tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook through evolving laws and regulations, the New Zealand government has held a laissez-faire stance. In From Paper to Platform, prominent New Zealand media scholar, Merja Myllylahti, scrutinises how major digital platforms exert ever-growing influence over news, journalism, our everyday lives, personal rights, and access to information. This analysis...

The myriad of the living in all of their many forms, defunct, mutant, revenant or otherwise; traversing memory's infinite field. Barefoot Years by Martin Edmond is a memoir in which the author attempts to re-inhabit the lost domain of childhood. It is evocative and poignant, detailed yet fragmentary, full of half-forgotten things: what may be recovered also reveals that which...

In ten years' time, will antibiotics still work? Have we let bacteria get the upper hand in the evolutionary arms race? In the 1920s, the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin started a golden age of medicine. However, experts warn that the end of that age may be just a decade away. In this BWB Text, microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles explores the...

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on New Zealand tourism, but the industry was already troubled by unchecked growth and questionable governance that has put pressure on the environment, infrastructure and communities. In this urgent collection of essays, nine authors outline their vision for sustainable tourism, the barriers to achieving it and how they can be overcome. This BWB Text...

Beyond These Shores reflects on New Zealand as it faces a turbulent world. Long-standing alliances are fracturing, nationalism is surging, and the oceans are rising. The contributors within these pages are not, as editor Nina Hall notes, conventional foreign policy voices, but these are far from conventional times. These contributors urge us to fundamentally rethink Aotearoa's role in the world,...

In August 2016, 40 per cent of the residents of Havelock North were suddenly struck down by a serious bacterial infection. The outbreak of campylobacter, caused by the contamination of the water supply with sheep faeces, hospitalised forty-five people and left at least three dead. Eminent public health researcher David Skegg argues that the Havelock North campylobacter outbreak was not...

The History of a Riot presents a compelling microhistory of collective revolt. In 1843, the New Zealand Company settlement of Nelson was disrupted by the revolt of its emigrant labourers. Over 70 gang-men and their wives united to resist their poor working conditions through petitions, strikes, and, ultimately, violence. Despite the significance of this struggle, it has often been overshadowed...

The world is heating up beyond the capacity of some countries to cope. Entire populations of Pacific Islands are at risk, jeopardising the sovereign rights of these countries and the security of the region. The Climate Dispossessed explores what a just response to climate change displacement in the Pacific could look like. It's a difficult conversation. For many Pacific Islands,...

The devastating summer of Australian bushfires underlined a terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic lurch away from business as usual. Some observers are worried that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many...

In an era of escalating global conflicts, Abolishing The Military challenges the conventional belief that nation-states need military forces to ensure their security and contribute to international peace. As academic discourse on non-violent methods of national defence and global peace promotion gains momentum, there is growing evidence supporting the viability of such policy approaches. Far from being a matter of...

'Behind the foreground narratives of justification, real or symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of cultural memory.' From curriculum to commemoration to constitutional reform, our society is in the grip of memory, a politics and culture marked by waves of loss, grief, absence, and victimhood. Why are certain aspects of the past remembered over others, and why does this...

Underneath the numbers, a philosophical judgement is always being made based on values, not facts. Thirty years ago, Marilyn Waring's groundbreaking book Counting for Nothing was released. Waring explained, through meticulous economic analysis, how the success of the global economy rests on women's unpaid work. Counting for Nothing became a phenomenon: it was read and discussed around the world, and...

In A Radically Different World: Preparing for Climate Change, Jonathan Boston provides an urgent exploration of our future in the face of climate change. Focusing on the challenges of adaptation, Boston’s insightful analysis assesses the scale of impact on communities, the need for robust policy for relocation, and the design of fair compensation schemes. He charts the changing landscape of...

New Zealand's dairy industry is big business. But what are the hidden and not so hidden costs of intensive farming? Evidence presented here by ecologist Mike Joy demonstrates that intensive dairy farming has degraded our freshwater rivers, streams, and lakes to an alarming degree. This situation, he argues, has arisen primarily through governmental policy that prioritises short-term economic growth over...

An understanding of the ways of our tupuna, coupled with the best of new thinking from New Zealand and abroad, has significant potential for sustainable housing models. Colonial settlement and the discriminatory policies of successive governments have challenged Māori connections to whenua and kāinga. Today, home ownership rates for Māori are well below the national average and Māori are over-represented...

The content of this short book is derived directly from the larger illustrated publication, foregoing all illustrations to suit the BWB Texts format. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world with universal suffrage: all New Zealand women now had the right to vote. This achievement owed much to an extraordinary document: the 1893 Women's Suffrage Petition....

Foreword by Damon Salesa. Story telling is an art deep within human nature. A timely collection of writings on history, from one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most distinguished scholars. These essays bring forth important questions for New Zealand history about autonomy, restoration and power that continue to reverberate today. They also serve as a pathway into the rigorous and imaginative...

'It strikes me with great clarity that if you look at the problems in isolation they each seem intractable; but when you grasp that there could be one single solution, then suddenly there is a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.' The state of New Zealand's freshwater has become a pressing public issue in recent years. From...

A thought-provoking set of Māori, Pasifika, and tangata Tiriti writers combine in this celebration of some of the best writing from E-Tangata. Traverse a landscape of contemporary and historical issues through the lens of a mother's loss, a man's hard-won expertise, a homesick student abroad and with the knowledge that all good things begin with ten guitars. These writings exemplify...

In a book that is both deeply personal and highly political, Melani Anae recalls the radical activism of Auckland's Polynesian Panthers - the movement modelled on the US Black Panther Party but without guns. The Polynesian Panthers was founded in response to the racist treatment of Pacific Islanders in the era of the Dawn Raids. Central to the group was...

The creation of new science requires moving beyond simply understanding one another's perspectives. We need to find transformative spaces for knowledge exchange and progress. Māori have a long history of innovation based on mātauranga and tikanga—the knowledge and values passed down from ancestors. Yet Western science has routinely failed to acknowledge the contribution of Indigenous peoples and their vital worldviews....

Haerenga: Early Maori Journeys Across the Globe by Vincent O'Malley offers a fascinating glimpse into the first encounters between Maori and Europeans, not only along New Zealand's shorelines but also in far-flung cities such as Melbourne, Liverpool, and New York. From the late eighteenth century, Maori travellers ventured from New Zealand to explore the world. Their journeys were prompted by...

Text Two Hundred And Fifty Ways To Start An Essay About Captain Cook

Despite our agrarian mythology, Aotearoa New Zealand is overwhelmingly a country of urban dwellers. Urban Aotearoa: The Future for Our Cities takes a critical look at the evolution of New Zealand's cities. Moving past the country's rural image, the book addresses the realities of its urban majority, questioning suburban spread and exploring options for smarter living. A range of contributors...

Dare we elevate kainga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe? Through his own experience and the stories of his tipuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kainga and whenua becomes a wider story of environmental...

Few books have had the global impact of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. An overnight bestseller, Piketty's assessment that inherited wealth will always grow faster, on average, than earned wealth has energised debate. Hailed as 'bigger than Marx' (The Economist) or dismissed as 'medieval' (Wall Street Journal), the book is widely acknowledged as having significant economic and political...

What a nation or society chooses to remember and forget speaks to its contemporary priorities and sense of identity. Understanding how that process works enables us to better imagine a future with a different, or wider, set of priorities. History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how, and...

Based on his investigative Newsroom series, Aaron Smale’s Tāirawhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone goes deep into the region’s struggle with colonial legacies and environmental mismanagement. Through personal stories, interviews and critical analysis, Smale uncovers the multifaceted impacts of pine plantations, land confiscation, and climate events of increasing severity on a landscape and its people. This BWB Text provides a...

Thousands of years ago, migrants from South China began the journey that took their descendants through the Pacific to the southernmost islands of Polynesia. Atholl Anderson's ground-breaking synthesis of research and tradition charts this epic journey of New Zealand's first human inhabitants. Derived from the multi-award-winning Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History, this text weaves together evidence from numerous sources: oral...

What do the economics of decolonisation mean for the future of Aotearoa? This question drives the work of Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman as they explore the complex relationship between tangata whenua and capitalism. By weaving together historical insights and contemporary analysis, this Text reveals the enduring influence of Ma ori economies and illuminates how these perspectives could radically transform...

The content of this short book is derived directly from the larger illustrated publication, foregoing all illustrations to suit the BWB Texts format. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni/The Declaration of Independence of New Zealand was signed by fifty-two rangatira from 1835 to 1839. It was a powerful assertion of mana and rangatiratanga, made after decades of Māori...

‘What does “good” look like – and how do we build it?’ Aotearoa New Zealand is grappling with tough economic questions. Inequality is rising, the cost of living is biting, and many feel left behind. Despite talk of recovery and progress, there’s a growing sense that the system isn’t working – at least, not for everyone. In The Good Economy,...

My journey into law and mātauranga is one more defined by absence, understanding of loss, whakamā, accident, and a sense of coming in from the cold, than by any programmatic acquisition of expertise. This collection of writing from Mamari Stephens (Te Rarawa) travels through introspection, loss, and doubt, to present striking moments of insight into the world around us. From...

The celebrated digital magazine e-Tangata is home to some of the most incisive and profound commentary on life in New Zealand. Māori, Pasifika, and Pākehā writers grapple with topics that range from politics and social issues to history and popular culture. The best of these are collected together here into this BWB Text by the magazine's editors, Tapu Misa and...

Most of the time I have no idea what to do with them or what to say in response to them. Award-winning New Zealand poet Glenn Colquhoun is also a doctor who works with struggling young people at the margins, painfully aware of the limits of his role. In this BWB Text, he offers penetrating insight into the little he...