‘At 2.40pm Patu charged. A human tank. The first time during the tour that a protest squad charged police lines with the intention of breaking through . . .’ The Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 provoked the biggest mass protests in New Zealand history. For two months tens of thousands of New Zealanders took to the streets every week to register their opposition to the tour. In When the Tour Came to Auckland, Geoff Chapple, author of 1981: The Tour, describes the dramatic events in Auckland as a light aircraft flour-bombed Eden Park and protesters battled police in the streets of Mt Eden in the tour’s violent conclusion. Includes a new introduction prepared especially for this BWB Text by Geoff Chapple.

Award-winning writers Geoff Chapple, Claudia Orange, Anne Salmond and Dick Scott explore pivotal moments in New Zealand’s history in this bundle of BWB Texts. These four works are combined into one easy-to-read e-book, available direct and DRM-free from our website or from international e-book retailers. In When the Tour Came to Auckland Geoff Chapple describes the startling scenes as the Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 comes to a violent conclusion. In What Happened at Waitangi? Claudia Orange explains the events on the ground that led to the signing of the Treaty on 6 February 1840. Anne Salmond’s First Contact details the dramatic visit of Dutch ships led by Abel Tasman to Golden Bay at the top of the South Island in 1642, and the meeting of Māori and European worlds. Dick Scott’s Parihaka Invaded describes the non-violent defiance of Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, Tohu Kakahi and their followers at Parihaka and is one of the great New Zealand narratives. BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Commissioned as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing.

The declamatory return; a homeland as a ‘wearying enigma’. This all makes sense to me. The New Zealand that’s home to me may be a place of sheep and rugby and number-eight wire, whatever that is, but it’s also none of those things. Am I still a New Zealander? Award-winning writer Paula Morris confronts long-standing fears of what it means to return home. Is ambition and adventure being traded for a ‘forever home’ of commitments and compromises? Will she still belong? And will the belonging impose its own restrictions? Seeking answers in the words of writer exiles, Morris’s returning takes us back to her childhood streets and ancestral voyages and on, beyond, to the lost New Zealand worlds of her writing.

Leading New Zealand anti-apartheid campaigner Trevor Richards has written this history of New Zealand's contribution to the fight against racism and apartheid in South Africa. The story of the protests is vividly told - but it is not an account of one man's battle against the system - "it is a serious history of a crucial part of our recent past."