Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, No. 29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to skilfully channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy in this revealing and defiant BWB Text.

The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean challenges the structural opposition of indigeneity and creolisation through a historical and literary analysis of the connections between the 'First and Last of the New Worlds': Australia and the Caribbean. Dashiell Moore explores the continuities between indigenous and creole lifeworlds in the work of renowned Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Wynter, and Kamau Brathwaite, and prominent Aboriginal Australian writers including Alexis Wright, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Lionel Fogarty. Common to these authors is their reimagining of the inter-colonial other as a mirror image. This image, achieved through opacity and projection, visualises in creative ways both the movement to indigenisation in post-independence Caribbean literature and the inter-indigenous encounters of Aboriginal Australian literature. By upending the antipodean relationship of the Caribbean and Australia, this groundbreaking study offers radically new perspectives on the world generated by literary relation.

‘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 what they choose to remember and forget. In this BWB Text addressing ‘difficult histories’, a team of five researchers, several from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, reflect on these questions of memory and loss locally. Combining first-hand fieldnotes from their journeys to sites of conflict and contestation with innovative archival and oral research exploring the gaps and silences in the ways we engage with the past, this group investigates how these events are remembered – or not – and how this has shaped the modern New Zealand nation.

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 writers outline their vision for sustainable tourism, the barriers to achieving it and how they can be overcome. This BWB Text is a rallying call for a genuine tourism ‘reset’ that puts the environment first and creates more meaningful exchanges between visitors and their hosts.

In Everything Ancient Was Once New, Emalani Case explores Indigenous persistence through the concept of Kahiki, a term that is at once both an ancestral homeland for Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiians) and the knowledge that there is life to be found beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores. Kahiki is therefore both a symbol of ancestral connection and the potential that comes with remembering and acting upon that connection. Tracing physical, historical, intellectual, and spiritual journeys to and from Kahiki, Case frames it as a place of refuge and sanctuary, a place where ancient knowledge can constantly be made anew. It is in Kahiki, and in the sanctuary it creates, that today’s Kānaka Maoli can find safety and reprieve from the continued onslaught of settler colonial violence while confronting some of the uncomfortable and challenging realities of being Indigenous in Hawaiʻi, in the Pacific, and in the world. The book engages with Kahiki as a shifting term employed by Kānaka Maoli to explain their lives and experiences at different points in history. Case argues for reactivated and reinvigorated engagements with Kahiki to support ongoing work aimed at decolonizing physical and ideological spaces and to reconnect Kānaka Maoli to peoples and places in the Pacific region and beyond in purposeful, meaningful ways. By tracing Kahiki through pivotal moments in history and critical moments in contemporary times, Case demonstrates how the idea of Kahiki—while not always mentioned by name—was, and is, always full of potential. Intertwining personal narrative with rigorous research and analysis, Case weaves the past and the present together, reflecting on ancient concepts and their continued relevance in movements to protect lands, waters, and oceans; to fight for social justice; to reexamine our responsibilities to each other across the Pacific region; and to open space for continued dialogue on what it means to be Indigenous when at home and when away. Everything Ancient Was Once New journeys to and from Kahiki, offering readers a sanctuary for reflection, deep learning, and continued dreaming with the past, in the present, and far into the future.

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand. Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand's urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight. Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.