Māori-led, the book explores the spirit of whenua and how it is embedded in place through identity and naming. It confronts the pain of alienation and whenua loss for all indigenous peoples and looks at how that can be transformed.

We find ourselves in an era of significant engagement with the past: the NZ Wars and Raupatu land confiscations of the 1860s are of particular relevance to how we reconcile ‘Difficult Histories’ in Aotearoa. This NZ War history, its narratives, places and events are being revisited over 150 years on.

Outside Swansea, a city on the coast of South Wales in the British Isles, is a picturesque valley park, described as ‘a Victorian Paradise’. This long forgotten estate, formerly the family home and the creation of John Dillwyn Llewelyn between 1832 and about 1865, fell into neglected disrepair during the 20th century.

Australia is experiencing one of its cycles of drought across the east coast and floods in the far north. This leads to calls for more harnessing of rivers for industrial supply -an agribusiness culture supplanting one which knew how to exist with the environmental cycles.