Warm congratulations to Dr Rosemary Baird on being named a debut author on the longlist for non-fiction in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, for her richly illustrated book The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of working on the Manapouri hydro project (Canterbury University Press, 2025). Rosemary is an alumna in History who completed all her degrees at UC and is now a Senior Outreach Adviser with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
From her undergraduate years Rosemary was a top student, who always showed a lively interest in people and social history. At the postgraduate research stage, Prof Peter Hempenstall and I supervised Rosemary’s MA thesis on Australian and NZ peacekeeping in the Pacific (2008), while I and Assoc Prof Lyndon Fraser supervised her PhD on NZ migrants to Australia, 1965-95 (2012). Both theses drew on oral history through interviews, the PhD extensively as Rosemary’s enthusiasm for people’s stories and life histories deepened, and it was a particularly compelling interview at the start of her PhD, with Frank Pawson in Melbourne, that sparked Rosemary’s interest in the Manapouri hydro scheme and the people who built it: the subject of her book. Frank’s interview for the PhD thesis – and Canterbury University Press as the book publisher – link The Middle of Nowhere academically to UC as does Rosemary herself. As well as fascinating photographs, the book contains multiple surprises, both amusing and grim. I acknowledge my bias as a former supervisor, but this is a gem of a book replete with insights into 1960s-70s New Zealand.
Philippa Mein Smith, Emeritus Professor of History
