Heartlands - New Zealand Historians Write About Where History Happened

Published by the Penguin Group, Auckland, 2006, 266 pages. Fading to spine, otherwise good secondhand copy.

In this unusual book a number of New Zealand's leading historians write about their own favourite 'historic' places where the past comes alive. Special events or times in our history are linked with their own personal memories and the physical presence of these 'places' today. Anne Salmond muses on her home town of Gisborne, with its rich intersection of Maori and European history. Erik Olssen ponders a lifetime of change in Dunedin; the stories that ooze from its streets and alleyways, brick and bluestone making life here a bit like living in the text of a favourite poem or novel. Jock Phillips visits Wanganui, the 'war memorial capital of the world', musing on how its war memorials sum up the uneasy history of the racial frontier in New Zealand, and what we can learn from them about a society. The fate of the Kiwis at Gallipoli are relived by Ian McGibbon, who walks, we are told, where New Zealand's national identity was forged ninety years ago...