Massey University Press

In 2025, the year in which the Otago medical school celebrates 150 years, 50 per cent of graduates are women. Back in 1891 when Emily Seideberg, who would go on to become the school’s first woman graduate, applied for entrance it was not at all clear that it would be granted. There was active hostility in many quarters to the very idea that women could be doctors. This book traces the paths of the women who, between the 1880s and 1967 (when the Auckland medical school opened), battled indifference and chauvinism and, later, many of the other challenges that faced women in the professions, to become New Zealand’s first women doctors. Their stories are often remarkable and the contribution to research, medical breakthroughs and improved patient care is to be honoured.

Art historian Mary Kisler grew up in the early 1950s with a father who talked little, whose affection she cherished and whose anger she feared. She later came to understand the trauma that lay behind his dark moods: rejection and violence in his childhood and the brutal experience of being a prisoner of war in Italy and then Germany from late 1941 to 1945.In this affecting memoir, she traces back through her father’s life and war record, discovering a man who had suffered but who ultimately found peace of mind among the people he loved most.

‘If I’d been asked to vote on it I would’ve said I’d landed at the centre of the universe. Standing on our corner of Sylvan Road and Victoria Street, with Te Mata Peak, the Tukituki River and the mad wilderness of Windsor Park to the back of me and the distinctly nonwilderness of Cornwall Park and the misty vista of the Ruahines in front of me, I was the master of all I could barely survey.’This charming memoir by one of New Zealand’s best-known painters is a love letter to his home town, Hastings, and the weirdly innocent world of the 1950s and early 1960s.

The sixth book in the remarkable korero series, edited by Lloyd Jones, features Jan Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner Whiti Hereaka and the acclaimed artist Peata Larkin, cousins who share the same whakapapa, in a collaboration based on the Fibonacci number sequence. In a feat of managed imagining, Hereaka’s words spiral out to the centre of the book and then back in on themselves to end with the same words with which the text began. As the pattern spools out and then folds back, Peata Larkin’s meticulous drawings of taniko and whakairo and her lush works on silk weave their own entrancing pattern. ‘It is my hope that by the time you have walked that path that you are now a different reader and will read those words in a new way,’ Hereaka says. You Are Here is a beguiling and important addition to the korero series.