King, Michael

Moko - Maori tattooing in the twentieth century is the moving story of a Maori art form that underwent a brief resurgence and then died. It is also the story of the last generation of Maori women who wore the moko. to research this book, historian Michael King travelled thousands of kilometres through the hinterland of New Zealand to find and speak with those who were tattooed, or with people who had first-hand knowledge of the custom. He located over 70 women who had been given the moko in traditional circumstances. All but one are now deceased. Marti Friedlander's photographs illustrate with skill and compassion the moko itself, the women who wore it and the environments in which they lived." -- BOOK JACKET.

In Being Pakeha Now, Michael King carries the cultural debate forward. While recognising and respecting the place of Maori in New Zealand, he argues that Pakeha too belong inescapably to this country and have no other home. Just as imported East Polynesian ingredients were eventually transmuted into Maori culture, so the attitudes and values carried by Europeans have been transformed here in interaction with forest, mountain and sea, and with Maori. They have coalesced into a second indigenous culture, that of Pakeha New Zealanders. The wooden church and the macrocarpa, King asserts, are as much a part of the spiritual and physical landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand as the meeting house and the cabbage tree. ..."--Back cover.

"Michael King clears away all the nonsense, rumour and vilification that has surrounded the Moriori. He identifies who they were and where they came from. He reveals that Moriori people were not a race, and that they are far from extinct"--Publisher's description.

"Janet Frame, born in 1924, is New Zealand's most celebrated and least public author. Her early life in small South Island towns seemed, at times, engulfed in a tide of doom: one brother stillborn, another epileptic; two sisters dead of heart failure while swimming; Frame herself committed to mental hospitals for the best part of a decade. Later her surviving sister was temporarily felled in adulthood by a stroke, an uncle cut his throat and a cousin shot his lover, his lover's parents and then himself." "All this propelled Frame into a territory resembling that 'where the dying spend their time before death'. Those who return alive from such a place, she would say, bring a point of view 'equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighborhood of the gods and goddesses'.". "This is a biography of a woman who climbed out of an abyss of unhappiness to take control of her life and become one of the great writers of her time. And to enable her biographer to write this book scrupulously and honestly, Janet Frame spoke for the first time about her whole life. She also made available her personal papers and directed her family and friends to be equally communicative."--BOOK JACKET.

In 2004 John Money concluded a research career that spanned 50 years. He cleared his office at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA and returned to his near empty house. In preparation for retirement his massive book collection and many archives had been deposited with major academic institutions throughout the world. After all, these same institutions had honoured him over the years for his ground-breaking and often controversial work in the area of sexology. However, his remarkable art collection, one that encroached upon almost every surface and corner of his Baltimore house, was to find a very unlikely home... Splendours of Civilisation not only tells the heroic story of how the John Money collection came to be housed at the Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore, it also shows the collection in all its splendour. The late Michael King re-acquainted himself with John Money while carrying out research for his biography on Janet Frame. This in turn led him to explore the patronage of this particular expatriate, which began and ended in small town New Zealand. Here Michael King, in his last published work, documents Money’s life and places him within the generation of 20th Century artists, writers, composers and academics that helped weave the cultural fabric of New Zealand. This handsome book is illustrated throughout with b/w photographs and a 32-page section of colour plates. Includes photos of interior views of Money's house in Baltimore; as well as photos of noted New Zealanders Janet Frame, Michael King, Ralph Hotere and others. The colour plates include works by Rita Angus, Australian aboriginal artists, African carvings and Theo Schoon.

"This book [compresses] into words and pictures the extent to which war has affected New Zealand life over 200 years. ... It is [an] evocation of the taste and textures of war, how it disrupted New Zealanders' lives and the efforts they made to survive it. It tells also how others failed to survive. ..."--Book jacket.

Frank Sargeson (1903-82) was the first major New Zealand writer to remain in New Zealand. From the 1930s he turned New Zealand writing in a new direction, publishing short stories that 'moulded' the language and rhythm of everyday New Zealand speech into a literary form' and won acclaim throughout the English speaking world. Born in Hamilton, where his father was a leader in the Methodist church, Sargeson qualified as a solicitor, travelled to England and Europe, then spent nearly two years on an uncle's King Country farm before establishing himself as a writer on Auckland's North Shore in 1931. Sargeson lived in Takapuna for the next fifty years. There, in a primitive family bach and later in an asbestos cottage that still stands, he wrote the stories which earned him a world-wide reputation for their compression and power. Later he wrote plays, then novels that escaped the severe boundaries he had imposed on his stories. Sargeson was a man of contradictions. While rejecting the puritanism of his youth, he was puritan in his total commitment to his calling as a writer. In genuinely poor health much of his life, he was also a hypochondriac. At times quarrelsome and even malicious, he was generous and deeply compassionate as a mentor to younger writers, notably Janet Frame, and in caring for social derelicts. He was unflinchingly honest about most things, yet every aspect of his life and writing was touched by the need to conceal his homosexuality and a traumatic court case which arose from it.

"Michael King, half Irish, a quarter Scottish and a quarter English - was born in New Zealand. He grew up in the Pakeha New Zealand of the 1940s and 1950s, in which Britain was Home, families were Christian and nuclear, and demonstrations, inflation and racial unrest were things that occurred abroad... Unlike most New Zealands, however, he became dramatically involved in the Maori renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. He was forced to reassess his assumptions and Maori and Pakeha culture, and to examine his conscience and that of his country on racial issues. This book if the result of that reassessment, and the story behind his Maori histories, biographies and documentaries..."--Publisher description.