Bridget Williams Books (BWB) is an award-winning New Zealand publisher publishing physical and digital books on New Zealand history, Māori history, women’s issues and contemporary topics.
With your library card, you can gain access to this wonderful body of knowledge to learn more about the people, places and histories that continue to shape modern New Zealand. The digital books can be accessed and read directly on your preferred device, whether that's a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone.
Our full digital Bridget Williams Books collection includes:
The Treaty of Waitangi Collection
Brings together leading thinking on this foundational document, including works by acclaimed scholars such as Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, Vincent O’Malley, Alan Ward and Aroha Harris.
The New Zealand History Collection
Provides complete online access to a major, authoritative resource – over thirty years of award-winning history and biography publishing from Bridget Williams Books.
BWB Texts Collection
Provides complete online access to this acclaimed series of short books on big New Zealand subjects. Packed full of fresh thinking, ideas and critical analysis.
The Critical Issues Collection
Provides complete online access to high-quality books addressing the big issues facing New Zealand today. The Collection’s authors make this an unprecedented guide to New Zealand’s future in a turbulent world.
The New Zealand Sign Language Collection
Provides online access to BWB’s reference publishing and accounts of Deaf experience.
The Women’s Studies Collection
Provides complete online access to a rich area of New Zealand publishing– ground-breaking books on women’s issues, lives and histories. Significant biographies enrich the historical narrative, alongside key works on politics, economics and feminism.
Te Pouhere Kōrero 10
Focuses on the new history curricula launched across all schools in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2023. A number of Pouhere historians have been involved in this process as advisors, writers and developers. The editors of this volume had a particular engagement throughout, and other contributors bring significant expertise in different areas, from knowledge in place-based pedagogy and iwi approaches to the teaching of the past, citizenship education and Te Tiriti.
If you need help we suggest visiting the Help tab of each collection (once you have logged in) or you can watch this Niche Academy tutorial.
The Treaty of Waitangi by Claudia Orange was first published in 1987 to national acclaim, receiving the Goodman Fielder Wattie Award. This widely respected history has since advanced through several new editions. The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi: An Illustrated History is the most comprehensive account yet, presented in full colour and drawing on Dr Orange’s recent research into the nine sheets of the Treaty and their signatories.
Tangata Whenua: A History presents a rich narrative of the Māori past from ancient origins in South China to the twenty-first century. The authoritative text is drawn directly from the award-winning Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History.
Negotiating a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal can involve troubling challenges to an iwi’s legitimacy, sometimes from unexpected places. In this unique behind-the-scenes account of the negotiation of the Ngāi Tahu’s Waitangi Tribunal claim, Sir Tipene O’Regan describes what happened when claims of New Age mysticism attempted to undermine traditional whakapapa and academic scholarship.
‘This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā – and other New Zealanders – curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori.’
A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pākehā and Māori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.
Reprinted several times since it was first released in 1990, this 2015 new edition features a new Preface by Adrienne Jansen.
I have in my arms both ways. I can see my Tokelau way, it’s good. I can see the papalagi way, it’s good. I don’t want to put one down, and life the other one up, or put the other one down and lift that one up. I can carry them both. Novena Petelo, Tokelau Islands
Immigrant women bring to New Zealand rich experiences of lives spent in other cultures. But their stories are rarely told. In this book ten women, who have come to New Zealand through three decades from the 1960s, speak in depth about growing up in their first countries, and their lives in New Zealand.
They talk about childhood, marriage, discrimination, language, their aspirations for their children, and the role of women in their first culture and in New Zealand. They also, often poignantly, point to what they cannot speak about.
The ten women come from India, the Philippines, Tonga, Tokelau Islands, Chile, Iran, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam and Laos.
Increasing numbers of young New Zealanders rent, rather than own, their homes. In some places house prices are simply too expensive relative to incomes. For this generation of renters, the dream of home ownership is often beyond reach.
This BWB Text assesses the scale of the problem and what it means for this country's pervasive culture of home ownership. In advocating greater rights and responsibilities for renters, Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub propose rethinking priorities that have guided New Zealand for generations.