After a career in social and environmental research, Di Buchan retired to Otaki and became a historian. She previously published a history of the Otaki Children’s Health Camp – Sun, Sea & Sustenance, and Triumphs, Tribulations & Tragedies: The Low family of saddlers in Otago and Southland, a history of her maternal ancestors. Aiming High is her third book and, like the previous works, is very much a social history of a particular time in Aotearoa.

Di was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal as part of the King’s Birthday and Coronation Honours 2023 for her community and environmental work.

She is a firm believer in the importance of recording the stories of the past to help us understand the world we have inherited.

About the book:

This is a biography of two amazing people – one, a man of enormous drive and ideas who combined being a man of business with being a politician, a community leader, broadcaster, poet, environmentalist, philanthropist and an internationally recognised expert on the works of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. He can be described as the father or modern Otaki and as such was buried as a rangatira. The other amazing person was his granddaughter, Mary-Annette Hay (nee Burgess) who grew up using the skills, knowledge, and confidence she had absorbed from her dearly loved grandfather to become an artist and an actress and to play a defining role in the development of New Zealand’s wool industry. She was also a broadcaster and philantropist.