Tommy Tui’s Journey
Reviews of the book
Tommy Tui’s Journey is the subject of a full-page review by Diana Dekker in the Dominion Post of Saturday 9 February 2008.
Here is an excerpt from it:
Taffy’s journey
Way out the back of Plimmerton is a 10-hectare block of bush dripping with native flowers and teeming with birds.
Taffy Parry, with an uncanny skill for long-range spotting of kingfishers, tui, native wood pigeons and every other sort of bird, has lived there for more than 30 years.
For most of that time he was far too busy with business to do more than establish a garden and appreciate the beauty of his surroundings.
Parry, a Welshman who came to New Zealand more than 40 years ago, was the founder of the Wellington company that produced the Gelart Xtra, a multi-functional all-in-one seating and standing system designed for use by children with movement disorders such as cerebral palsy and spina bifida. The device has been sold all over the world.
Two years ago, he left them to it at the manufacturing/import/export business and took a new direction. He bought a camera, and with the same energy he had put into his innovative company, he began taking photographs — of the wildlife in his garden and further afield, of people, of Wellington places, of sunsets, ships, of characters old and young. He estimates he has taken 11,000 images.
About 80 of these colourful pictures have been collated into Tommy Tui’s Journey, an engaging story set largely in his garden. It concerns Tommy Tui, but also Winnie Waxeye, Mr and Mrs Kereru, Fanny Fantail who cleaned the window using her tail as a feather duster, Clacking Chloe the Kingfisher and many others.
Tommy Tui’s Journey is a publishers’ reject. After months of careful photography and a little help with editing, Parry sent the quirky project to several publishers who all promised to reply and — arrogantly, he thought — never did. So he did it
himself, researching Hong Kong publishers and trying out the glossy finished project in the local pharmacy. If they sold well there, he reasoned, bookshops would likely be more inclined to stock them. They did. The pharmacy was soon ringing for more. He now has several stockists, is having an official launch at Pataka this month and is working on a sequel, Tommy Tui Comes Home. 
