Chinese have been market gardening in New Zealand from 1867 when they arrived as goldminers in Otago. Earning a living by tilling the soil was not a new enterprise for these men. Nearly all were from rural villages dotted around the fertile and densely populated Pearl River Delta where they and their forefathers had engaged in farming for hundreds of years.In New Zealand, market gardening became one of the key Chinese occupations; more than 40 per cent of Chinese were directly enga...

The diaries of the last British Governor of Hong Kong, published on the 25th anniversary of the handoverIn June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not (as other British colonies over the decades) for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. Over the next five years he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was ...

Discover a daughter's journey into her father's past in this Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the 2016 Costa Biography Award.Keggie Carew grew up under the spell of an unorthodox, enigmatic father. An undercover guerrilla agent during the Second World War, in peacetime he lived on his wits and dazzling charm. But these were not always enough to sustain a family.As his memory began to fail, Keggie embarked on a quest to unravel his story once a...

'Remarkable' Robert Macfarlane'Gorgeous' Amy Liptrot'Urgent and nourishing' Jessica J. LeeNina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London.

A major and controversial new biography of one of the most compelling and contradictory figures in modern British life. Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, to most of us he is just ‘Boris’ – the only politician of the age to be regarded in such familiar, even affectionate terms. Uniquely, he combines comedy with erudition, gimlet-eyed focus with jokey self-deprecation, and is a loving family man with a roving eye. He is also a hugely ambitious figure with seemingly no huge ambitions t...

For the first time in one volume: the bestsellers GREAT PIONEER WOMEN OF THE OUTBACK and HEROIC AUSTRALIAN WOMEN.Providing inspiration for today's women, in this book of profiles, Susanna de Vries examines what it takes to be a truly heroic Australian. Women of grit and courage, women of integrity, resilience and resourcefulness: the 21 individuals whose stories make up tHE COMPLEtE BOOK OF HEROIC AUStRALIAN WOMEN were a rare breed. they faced different tests - harshness as pioneers...

The author of Guarding Hitler tells the truly heart-rending stories of Caucasian and Eurasian children held captive inside Japanese internment camps.The Japanese treatment of Allied children was as harsh and murderous as that of their parents and military POWs, but this whole episode has been overlooked. Children were plucked from comfortable colonial lives and forced to mature hastily in terrible circumstances, where survival became a dai...

This is the story of a quest I began three decades ago the search for my Chinese identity. The path I travelled was not linear, and the years brought pain as well as joy. But, while this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life is universal. I hope that others in our culturally diverse society will find their own ways to embark on that same journey.'Helene Wong was born in New Zealand in 1949, to parents whose famil...

Until a few weeks before the fall of Rangoon, the British had not dreamt the Japanese would invade Burma. So in early 1942, British soldiers trained for desert warfare fought a Japanese Army trained and equipped for the jungle. Those who survived this fierce fighting faced malaria, air attack, and lack of food and water, on the long walk out through the Valley of Death. Ragged groups of soldiers and civilians were forced to trek out of Burma through some of the most inhosp...

Te Mahi Māra Hua Parakore: A Māori Food Sovereignty Handbook. Climate change, peak oil, food security, rampant consumerism, the struggle for Māori sovereignty – these issues can seem overwhelming for those of us who are primarily focused on the day-to-day task of caring for our whānau. This book makes explicit the connections between the global and the local, between the political and the personal. Jessica Hutchings (hua parakore gardener, activist, academic and certified Te Waka Kai Ora g...

"A moving and eye-opening account of the lives of second world war PoWs by the daughter of a man who was captured . . . a riveting collection of stories." — The GuardianFeature films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But, as Midge Gillies shows in this groundbreaking work of social history, the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicem...

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest prisoner of war escape in of the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy.In August 1944, the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place - 106 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the...