Montana New Zealand Book Awards - History - 2006 finalists

The Award went to Thrift to Fantasy: Home Textile Crafts of the 1930s - 1950s by Rosemary McLeod (HarperCollins Publishers)

Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand Geoffrey W Rice (Canterbury University Press)
How would you feel if you woke one morning to find your partner lying dead beside you, not just still and cold, but their skin turned purple-black?Or if your neighbour's children came to ask for food because their parents had been 'asleep' for two days?

Too horrible to think about? Yet such things happened all over New Zealand in November 1918 when the country was swept by the so-called 'Spanish' influenza pandemic.

This book details New Zealand's worst public health crisis, and its worst natural disaster: over 8,500 New Zealanders died from influenza and pneumonia in just six weeks. Nearly a quarter of the victims were Maori, who died at seven times the death rate of European New Zealanders.

First published in 1988, Black November now has three new chapters to bring it up to date, over forty first-hand eyewitness accounts, and over 200 photographs and cartoons, many here published for the first time.
(description from Canterbury University Press)

Thrift to Fantasy: Home Textile Crafts of the 1930s - 1950s Rosemary McLeod (HarperCollins Publishers) Winner
Rosemary McLeod has one of this country's largest collections of women's handcrafts. When she was exhibited at the Dowse gallery, almost 40,000 women of all ages came to see it, and the idea for this book was born. "My collection began when I held onto items made by women in my own family when they died. I still have items made by my great grandmother, grandmother and my mother. I began collecting other objects about 20 years ago. I found them in thrift shops and bought them because they seemed to tell a story I knew from my own background."
(description from HarperCollins)

We Call it Home: A History of State Housing in New Zealand Ben Schrader (Reed Publishing)
We Call It Home is an accessible and highly illustrated history with a difference it re-tells the experiences of the designers and tenants of New Zealand state houses from the 1940s to the present. The author conducted numerous interviews, discovering stories from the remotest parts of the West Coast, to state house kids growing up in Taumaranui in the 1950s, through to city-centres and African migrants living in Mt. Roskill, Auckland in the 1990s.

These human stories challenge many stereotypical views surrounding state housing.

We Call It Home begins in the 19th century, when the private sector failed to provide affordable housing for the poor. This led the Liberal government to build the first state houses in 1905: workers dwellings. It moves on to examine the state house styles the archetypal state house of the first Labour Government is well known, but this wasnt the only kind of state house. Schrader asks why the government seemed so keen on housing nuclear families at the expense of other family groups, and through his interviews finds out who did the chores, what they ate, and what they did together, and charts the changing structure of state house families. Finally, Schrader looks at the changing public perceptions of state housing. In the 1930s securing a state house was viewed as a 'step up', but by the 1970s it had come to be seen as a 'step down'. Why the change?
(description from Reed Publishing)