Peter Walker is a writer and his book The Fox Boy tells the story of Ngataua Omahuru, a Maori child remade as a mini-English 19th Century gentlemen. Emily Perkins in her review of The Fox Boy for The Guardian wrote: “The title suggests one of those books about a feral child abandoned by its parents and raised by surprisingly tender beasts: a fairy-tale mix of the salacious and anthropological that strikes a chord as far back as Romulus and Remus. Peter Walker’s book tells a different version of this story: not of abandonment but of abduction, not of survival despite the forces of wilderness but survival despite the forces of “civilisation”. His story is that of the child taken as hostage of war, as trophy and potential slave – with the British-empire spin of improving it through exposure to an allegedly superior culture.”

I, personally, have always interpreted artist Lisa Reihana’s Dandy (from her Digital Marae series) in the mould of Walker’s Fox Boy. Bloomsbury Publishing now presents Peter Walker’s Some Here Among Us. In doing so, the publisher presents us with a book release as a film trailer! We start to wonder if with the imminent inauguration of 048per_ in Auckland in January 2015, an architectural opening could be transformed away from the cutting of ribbons towards the animated story of ‘how a building come into being’.

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