First published as a special issue of Robin Dudding’s literary magazine Islands (Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 1976), Dick Seddon’s Great Dive won the 1977 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and was republished in The Shirt Factory and other stories by VUP in 1981.

Dick Seddon’s Great Dive traces the story of a love affair through 1970s New Zealand counterculture, traveling between the poles of Bethells Beach and Port Chalmers. Parties and drugs fill daily life, while the land’s true history and the dispossession of its original owners press the story to its tragic conclusion.

‘These stories are striking in their originality and their versatility.’ —Elizabeth Caffin, NZ Listener