Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Matrix of Shape-Shifting

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David Eggleton

Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022), 392pp, $65

‘The Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea’, the late Moana Jackson writes in his foreword to the book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art. The book is based on the blockbuster exhibition of the same name presented by Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, between December 2020 and May 2021, which took over the entire Gallery building and also spilled out into areas in the downtown Britomart precinct. [Read more…]

‘Disobedience and Bravery’: The Power of Female Image-Making

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Mary Macpherson

Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 367pp, $40; droplet by Sheryl Campbell (self-published, 2022), 96pp, $80

Cinema and its close relative, the still image, are among the important ways we understand the world in the twenty-first century. Whether they’re staged fiction or taken from the world, images tell us stories about ourselves and society. But what shapes the narratives is the sensibility behind the lens and the intention of the storyteller. In these two books, Gaylene’s Take, a memoir by Dame Gaylene Preston, and droplet, a photobook by Sheryl Campbell, we see the power of work by female image-makers and feel the influence of feminism, which has helped rewrite society’s behaviour toward women since the nineteenth century and earlier. [Read more…]

A Principled Resistance

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Erik Kennedy

The Other Way by David Trubridge (David Trubridge Press, 2022), 317pp, 128 colour plates, $99

Renowned designer David Trubridge has always demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and the environment in his work, whether in furniture, lighting or other media. The Other Way, a book of travel essays and photographs, allows him to articulate his ideas on these subjects in new ways.

The ‘other way’ of the title refers to Trubridge’s favoured travel itinerary: if a place attracts ‘teeming crowds’, he will instinctively go the other way, to the land. ‘Humans once had a close and balanced relationship with all the natural world around them’, he writes. ‘This instinctive respect and empathy formed the basis of spirituality. I want to reclaim that spirituality and gently place it back where it belongs in the centre of our connection to the whole of “Life”.’ His desire to foreground nature—and his corresponding wariness of humanity, especially Westerners—characterises the book. It is deep ecology, a principled resistance to the instrumentalisation of the natural world.  [Read more…]

Stone House & Straw Houses  

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Max Oettli

Ravenscar House: A Biography by Sally Blundell (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 224pp, $59.99; Road People of Aotearoa: House truck journeys 1978–1984 by Paul Gilbert (Rim Books, 2021), 184pp, $50    

While these two books have a common theme of shelter, their inhabitants are poles apart. We are looking, I suppose, at high culture with millions of bucks behind it and a kind of DIY counterculture, where one manages to make a picturesque home with few bits from the tip, cadging some car cases (carcasses?) from an importer and bolting the whole caboodle on the back of an old truck to take to the dusty road.  [Read more…]

To Re-remember and Re-learn

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Rachel Smith

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2021), 256 pp, $35; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young (Otago University Press, 2021), 288pp, $60

Two very different books, one memoir and one non-fiction, The Forgotten Coast and Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate offer an invitation to look closely at the world we live in—to listen and learn, to understand and re-remember. 

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:

What stories do your dead tell you? How do you see your past? [Read more…]

Art and the Environment in Photobooks

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Mary Macpherson

The Near Future by Hannah Watkinson (self-published), 158 pp, softcover $45/hardcover $80; Conversātiō – in the company of bees by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown (Massey University Press, 2021), 272 pp, $60

At the end of her book The Near Future, photographer and writer Hannah Watkinson asks: ‘How do you love the land, as well as what’s buried beneath it?’ and then, ‘How do you make a living, if ignoring what is to come?’ These two questions underpin The Near Future as Watkinson takes us on a socioeconomic journey, using text and photographs, through the extractive industries of the West Coast, juxtaposed with the threat of climate change. [Read more…]