A
New Zealand Toy Story
David Veart
Hardback,
240 x 195mm, colour illustrations
344pp
approx, 978 1 86940 821 36
Hardback - AUP 12 November 2014, $65.00
A seriously fun New Zealand toy story! This
beautifully illustrated book is perfect for Kiwiana, collectors and nostalgic
markets, providing an alternative history of New Zealand.
Toys are made for playing with, but they are also serious business,
as this remarkable story of New Zealanders and their toys makes clear. In Hello Girls and Boys! David Veart digs
through a few centuries of pocket knives and plasticine to take us deep into
the childhoods of Aotearoa – under the eye of mum or running wild at the end of
the orchard, with a doll in the hand or an arrow in the ear, hula hooping or
assembling kit sets.
Veart tells a big story of how our two peoples made their fun on the
far side of the ocean – Māori and Pākehā learned knucklebones from each other,
young Aucklanders established the largest Meccano club in the world, and Fun
Ho! and Torro, Lincoln and Luvme helped to build a successful local toy
industry under the shade of import protection. But the book also covers little
things and little people – homemade dolls and cereal toys, miniatures and
marbles. From double happys and golliwogs to Buzzy Bees, tin canoes, Meccano and Tonka trucks – Hello Boys and Girls! revisits the crazes and :ollecting, playtimes and preoccupations of big and
little New Zealand kids for generations.
About the author
David Veart worked as a
Department of Conservation historian and archaeologist for over twenty-five
years. He belongs to the Auckland Heritage Committee of the Institute of
Professional Engineers and has been appointed as a member of the Auckland
Council’s Heritage Advisory Panel. An expert on various Auckland landmarks of
historical or archaeological significance, he is well-known for his public
guided walks of these areas, about which he has also written film scripts and
narrated interpretative films.
David Veart is author of First
Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking (AUP, 2008) (Montana Book
Awards 2009, finalist for History category and for E.H.McCormick Best First
Book) and Digging up the Past:
Archaeology for the Young and Curious (AUP, 2011) (New Zealdand Post
Children’s Book Awards 2012, Non-fiction finalist). He was the recipient of a
Ministry for Culture and Heritage History Research Trust Award and a CLNZ
Writers Award in 2012 for work on this book. He is now a full time writer.
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