Author(s): Tom Clarke

History

Our Untold Stories is a collection of interesting, informative, entertaining, amusing, inspiring, tragic and fascinating stories from New Zealand’s past — stories which have been largely forgotten or were unknown.
For more than 40 years, former journalist Tom Clarke has been gathering stories for a Today in History New Zealand series for use by radio station on-air hosts. Compiling that involved research into our past, digging deep into many old and forgotten sources, including long-gone magazines and newspapers, and even personal family stories from friends and associates, many of which presented tantalising hints of enchanting events and people from long ago, leading to extensive research to uncover the stories.
From tales of wartime to deeply moving human tragedies and disasters, maritime adventures and misadventures, stories of scandals and scoundrels, and all kinds of significant milestones and happenings, this is social history at its best, including a rich archive of photographic and illustrative material to complement the stories.
Chapter headers in the books are:
· All at Sea — including the first steamship to visit New Zealand and our close brush with Nazi war machines.
· Courage and Endeavour — the horror of cannibalism that deterred the first European settlers.
· Disasters and Accidents — including the Ngāti Tūwahretoa tragedy, a family tragedy at Brunner and a phantom canoe.
· Enterprise — wāhine whalers, New Zealand’s first export boom and international airship services.
· Firsts — including Christchurch’s reckless speedster and the bumpy history of state housing.
· Human Nature — immorality and our early settlers, and a newspaper editor’s lesson: don’t mess with the burlesque girls.
· Religion —heroic martyrdom in Kaiapoi and religious bigotry alive and well in New Zealand.
· Scoundrels, Rascals and Shysters - women pirates, convict mutineers and false prophets.
In writing Our Untold Stories Tom set out to find stories that had not be covered before. Where the stories have been told before — and there are very few of these — Tom concentrated on aspects of the tale that were not generally known, such as the incredible bravery of the desperate Auckland Island survivors of the General Grant shipwreck, who set off on an incredible voyage to seek help in a makeshift vessel with virtually no chance of success. Their courage and enterprise and the desperation that drove them, is almost inconceivable today.
Our Untold Stories clearly illustrates the profound and enormous changes that have occurred in our society and in the attitudes of New Zealanders over the years and will appeal to anyone with an interest in our past and what life was like in the early days of European settlement. It will also be of interest to students of social change as it illustrates the attitudes and beliefs that dominated European settlers which were vastly different to those of modern New Zealanders.