Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

This is the Path of Glory

Leave a Comment

cover image for images of warMax Oettli
Images of War: New Zealand and the First World War in photographs, by Glyn Harper, (Harper Collins, 2013), 399 pp., $99.99

‘You were in the Great War?’ I said. ‘Tell me about that.’

‘I’ve been in all the wars,’ Johnston said, ‘but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.’
‘You won’t talk about it?’
‘I couldn’t tell you anything even if I did. It wasn’t anything. You wouldn’t understand unless you saw it. Even if you did see it you wouldn’t understand it.’
Man Alone (1939), by John Mulgan

Images of War, a tombstone-sized book, a coffee-table tester, is the overgrown bastard brat of a rather better publication by the same author that came out five years earlier, primarily re-issued, we assume, to cash in on the Great War nostalgia market. A ‘stunning’ large-format book, says the blurb. I am duly stunned. This tome weighs in at 3 kilos (according to our bathroom scales), and has a grey cover that looks thick enough to stop bullets. The cover design is of a singular unattractiveness, with lettering masking a fine photo of Kiwi soldiers looking out at us, which has been combined with a design of another photo of men scampering across a battlefield to their grey death.

The book’s archive of photographs was largely made largely possible because the technology of the time had recently enabled the vest-pocket-sized camera, placed in the hands of any untrained operator, to produce photos of an acceptable quality. Kodak’s slogan ‘You press the button, we do the rest’ had been around for a while and had beome a practical reality around the time the ‘Great War’ began.

Many soldiers involved in World War I set out to document their experience, at least partially, usually without authorisation or censorship (by the time of World War  II regulations were far stricter). So this work pays tribute to a unique and epic collective effort; it’s a combined personal view of the disastrous 1914–18 conflict. [Read more…]

The Misshapen Tea Cosy Head

Leave a Comment

cover for green with envyMary Macpherson
Green with Envy, by Layla Rudneva-Mackay, (Clouds and Starkwhite, 2012), 120 pp., $59.95

Green with envy, red with rage, white with fear – in Western culture these are some of the human emotions we’ve associated with particular colours. Colour psychology also pairs colours with qualities, like yellow with emotion, green with balance (in contradiction to envy) blue with the intellect, and so on. In Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s photographic work Green with Envy her subjects literally wear their colours as paint or masks, or conceal themselves behind stretches of fabric, in a way that seems to point to their inner states, or suggests the need for protection from the world.

The book opens with solo portraits of individuals, mostly indoors, their skin lightly dusted with a variety of colours. While the staging is varied, the feeling from the works is remarkably consistent – the sitters looking serenely at camera, or off to the side, with a sense of inner life in their eyes. As photographs they’re contemplative, cerebral works inviting the viewer to think about the choices of props and staging and what the colours employed might symbolise, rather than providing immediate emotional engagement. With the direction of the book’s title in mind, is the red-haired woman in the blue-patterned dressing gown, with a pale green face, starting to feel a tinge of jealousy? Is the yellow-faced woman sitting in front of a vibrant yellow backdrop wearing a blue top and red skirt, an emblem of the positivity that’s associated with yellow? [Read more…]

An Empty Tent Flapping in the Wind

Leave a Comment

cover image for 45 southKathryn Mitchell
45 South: A journey across southern New Zealand, by Laurence Fearnley with photographs by Arno Gasteiger, (Penguin, 2013), 191 pp., $65.00

Our journey in this book begins at Hilderthorpe, where a large boulder marks an invisible line laid down by map-makers: 45 degrees south, halfway between the equator and the south pole. 45 South documents a strong sense of place and time as author Laurence Fearnley, avid kayaker and lover of solitude, takes to the road. Through a dry blustery nor-wester that stirs dust and stings the eyes, past barren hills and valleys punctuated by fresh, green spring growth, and alongside the author, we make camp to gaze at the Orion constellation. Before long we tour on to marvel at the jagged peaks of the Remarkables; kayak down the Eglinton River; and eventually arrive in Fiordland, where we are told a tale of two Te Anau locals who made an unexpected discovery in the caves of Lee Island. The invisibility and yet navigational dependability of the line of the 45th parallel is echoed in Fearnley’s travels as she recounts stories and histories that have left their own ineradicable traces. [Read more…]

Smugglers’ Contraband

3 Comments

promoting prosperity coverDavid Eggleton
Promoting Prosperity: The art of early New Zealand advertising, by Peter Alsop and Gary Stewart (Craig Potton Publishing, 2013), 440 pp., $79.99; From Earth’s End: The best of New Zealand comics, by Adrian Kinnaird (Godwit, 2013) 447 pp., $59.99

You approach Promoting Prosperity: The art of early New Zealand advertising as if through a cheering crowd. The back cover and cover flaps are decorated with encomiums and endorsements by figures ranging from Martin Snedden to Al Brown to Gareth Morgan. And in a way the cheerleading is not misplaced, as meticulous production values do indeed render its images ‘luscious and valuable’ as Brian Sweeney, one of the book’s essayists, exclaims. But if the book is a celebration, what exactly is it celebrating? Is it period-era graphic art? Is it New Zealand as a little industrial powerhouse in the South Pacific? Or is it the power of persuasion and propaganda? Do values all come down to marketing, best profile forward?

Containing around 750 images, most of them in full colour, exquisitely rendered, this heavy tome is not quite a history of commercial poster illustration between 1920 and 1960, because it only partly fills in a complex narrative and doesn’t attempt much in the way of cultural contextualisation. (What else was going on at the time?) Instead, it’s a decorous sampling of graphic design that complements Alsop and Stewart’s 2012 book Selling the Dream: The art of early New Zealand tourism. The new book is fundamentally volume II of the same project, showcasing place-specific commercial art.

Eleven essays by various specialists tackle aspects of the familiar story: New Zealand as an exotic South Seas location with jungle-like rainforests, active volcanoes, snow-covered mountains, geysers and lakes – and a friendly indigenous population. But New Zealand is also ‘the Empire’s orchard’, ‘white and British’, ‘a Dominion … (and no longer just) one of the colonies’. So this is a revisitation of an old world-view, but the aim seems to be to suggest a new world continuity of catchy slogans and polished graphics. ‘The New Zealand Initiative’ began, we are told, with Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the first salesman, painting a verbal picture of desirable real estate, pitching a concept, selling a vision. Victorian posters however were largely monochrome, based on blocks of lettering. [Read more…]

The Orient and Elsewhere

Leave a Comment

cover image for horrocksAndrew Paul Wood
Incomplete Works, by Dylan Horrocks, (Victoria University Press, 2014), 192 pp., $35; A Rainbow Reader, by Tessa Laird, (Clouds, 2013), 192 pp., $25

Dylan Horrocks’ Incomplete Works tidily fills a gap in the published oeuvre of one of our greatest living comic strip auteurs, snapping up the unconsidered trifles of his shorter comics lest they vanish forever into the oblivion of a disposable society where things go out of print at an alarming rate. I love Horrocks’ work – it never disappoints with its sheer imaginative creativity. It’s a shame he isn’t more celebrated in the mainstream. The nice thing about collections like Incomplete Works is that it lets us see certain themes resolve, which thread right through the oeuvre – fantasy, love, the creative process, and not a little procrastination. What we get is a potted creative history – possibly quasi-autobiographical, but not overbearingly so – of the years 1986 to 2012. The character of cartoonist Sam Zabel, like a subverted Wagnerian hero against all odds trying to get some work done, surely birthed from the true life experiences of the artist responsible for Hicksville and a writer on DC’s Hunter: The Age of Magic, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and Batgirl. [Read more…]

Eclectic Styles

Leave a Comment

cover image for ra lawsonDavid Eggleton
R.A. Lawson: Victorian architect of Dunedin, by Norman Ledgerwood (Historic Cemeteries Conservation Trust, 2013), 256 pp., $74.99
New Zealand’s Lost Heritage: The stories behind our forgotten landmarks, by Richard Wolfe (New Holland, 2013), 192 pp., $49.99
Converted Houses: New Zealand architecture recycled, by Lucinda Diack, (Penguin, 2012), 207 pp., $65
On a Saturday Night: Community halls of small-town New Zealand, by Michele Frey and Sara Newman, photography by John Maillard and John O’Malley, (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 295 pp., $45
Athfield Architects, by Julia Gately, (Auckland University Press, 2013), 310 pp., $75

Now that central Christchurch has been characterised by a signature architecture of collapsed masonry, around which the quarrel about whither the Garden City? is as yet so much hot gravel shovelled into a void, the New Zealand city with the best claim to the finest extant chunk of Victoriana is Dunedin, and the most remarkable of the soaring spires at Dunedin’s stony core are the work of one architect: Robert Arthur Lawson (1833–1902).

In R.A. Lawson: Victorian architect of Dunedin, Norman Ledgerwood’s well-paced and nicely-illustrated monograph, which also has a succinct contextualising Foreword by Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, justice is done to Lawson’s vast oeuvre, following on from detective work by art historian Peter Entwisle which helped establish that Lawson was involved in designing about 445 building projects, mostly in Otago and Southland but also in Melbourne. [Read more…]