Black Sheep

Can you imagine if 20 per cent of the people you know suddenly died? How would you feel if the people in charge blocked doctors from helping them? For Samoans in 1918 this wasn't a hypothetical question.

In the 1880s Austrian naturalist and ethnographer Andreas Reischek stole four mummified Maori corpses and secretly smuggled them out of the country so they could be displayed at a museum in Vienna. He also shot hundreds of native New Zealand birds.

The worst kind of villain in New Zealand history was... an Auckland property speculator.

Did you know that after the First World War New Zealand established an official eugenics board? We tend to think of eugenics as being something the Nazis invented but really it was embraced all around the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was particularly popular among the intellectual classes. Some of our most progressive institution, the National Council of Women, Federated Farmers and the Plunket Society all either promoted some form of eugenics or had members which did...

Hongi Hika is a man with a difficult legacy. He's one of the greatest figures in New Zealand history, but he's also often held responsible for starting the Musket Wars.

Arthur Worthington was a con artist who travelled the USA, marrying rich women then abandoning them and stealing all their money. Eventually with private detectives hot on his tail in 1890 he jumped on a ship bound for Christchurch where he set up his own religion and his own church.

In 1916 John Cullen led a small army of police deep into the misty forests of Te Urewera to arrest the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana - his crime? Preaching that his followers shouldn't sign up to fight in the First World War. But the raid is a complete disaster. Cullen oversees the shooting of two men in cold blood and the whole case against Rua unravels due to a huge legal blunder...

"Four shots, and then another one" - that's how the story of Alice Parkinson begins as the 25 year old waitress guns down her fiancé, Bert West, in the middle of Nelson street in Napier in 1915. The first four shots hit Bert in the face, head, neck and chest. The final shot is fired point blank into Alice's own temple. She had planned it this way, a murder/suicide to get vengeance on the man who promised to marry her when she got pregnant and then deserted her when that child was stillborn...