Dick Scott is a journalist, writer, historian and publisher and the author of a number of important works of New Zealand history. These include 151 Days (1954), his account of the 1951 Waterfront Dispute; The Parihaka Story (1954); and Ask That Mountain (1975), from which the extract republished in his BWB Text is taken. He is also the author of Seven Lives on Salt River (1987), an account of seven families who settled in the Kaipara district, which won the 1988 New Zealand Book Award, and his autobiography, A Radical Writer's Life (2004).