arts and culture

Bridgehead and Beacon

August 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Simon Cunliffe

Dawn Raids by Oscar Kightley (Playmarket, Victoria University Press, 2017), 103 pp., $18

Twenty years on from its premiere in 1997, and more than 40 from the events it depicts, Oscar Kightley’s seminal play, Dawn Raids, continues to resonate – and perhaps for more than the obvious reasons.

The raids, a shameful episode in this country’s history, were initiated under the Labour government of Norman Kirk from about 1973 and carried out with renewed zeal by the National government of Robert Muldoon from 1975. They were aimed at finding and repatriating Pacific Islanders who had overstayed their work permit visas. The searches were typically executed in the early hours of the morning and were carried out by immigration officials and squads of police with dogs. Pasifika people were woken from their beds, randomly stopped in the street or singled out at their work places, and asked to show proof of identity and immigration status. Those failing to produce the requisite paperwork were deemed to be ‘overstayers’ and summarily deported. [Read more…]

Forgotten Giants

May 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Norman Franke

Poetry and Exile: Letters from New Zealand 1938–1948 by Karl Wolfskehl, edited and translated by Nelson Wattie (Cold Hub Press, 2017), 464 pp., $45

Now virtually unknown in New Zealand, the German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869–1948) made a great personal impression on the first generation of postcolonial writers. Frank Sargeson, writing about his first encounter with the physical and intellectual giant in an Auckland cinema, said:

I was astonished by the slow entry of a giant figure who, accompanied by a small and slight woman, made his way to the front row of seats … Karl Wolfskehl could immediately be recognised as a figure from a previous century: dark clothes, cravat or great bow, a crop of hair, artist’s wide-brimmed hat, immense: poet scholar patrician-bred Jew. [Read more…]

The Tragic Sense of Life

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Denys Trussell

Notes from the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper by Pat White (Frontiers Press,

2017), 202 pp., $40

Peter Hooper (1919–1991) spent most his life in Westland, but travelled far by means of literature. His adult life was lived alone, but he was not a loner. He embedded himself (with reservations) in the community of the Greymouth district and had a professional life as a conscientious and imaginative secondary teacher. In this role he mentored many students, nudging them in the direction of literature and ideas. One of these was Pat White, the author of this portrait.

White has done us a favour by placing Hooper before us. Despite having lived (almost literally) to one side of the main literary developments here, Hooper was and still is of interest and relevance. To the generations born after 1945 he might seem a bit prim, even conservative in personal style, and definitely not up with the game of postmodern critical theory. As a writer he was in the main a Modernist with Romantic antecedents, and he was happy to acknowledge the prophetic American, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), as the most powerful influence on him philosophically. [Read more…]

Custom-made for the Stage

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Best Playwriting Book Ever by Roger Hall (Playmarket, 2016), 108 pp., $22; Shift: Three plays by Alison Quigan, Vivienne Plumb and Lynda Chanwai-Earle (Playmarket, 2016), 280 pp., $35

When Roger Hall set out on what he didn’t know would be a long and fruitful theatre career, he knew only one rule (‘one of the few useful rules there are’): ‘Write about what you know.’ Like all aspiring writers, he was also reading – at the beginning – Neil Simon, to see what made him ‘the most successful playwright in the world’. You read, you write, and the characters arrive … but slowly. From its genesis in his Public Service experience, through five or six drafts and read-throughs to first production, it took his first hit, Glide Time, 15 years. You almost certainly don’t have to wait that long now, if you follow his rules-that-aren’t-rules. [Read more…]

Private Admissions Between Friends

June 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

David Herkt

Jay To Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilus Brown, edited by Denis Harold (Counterpoint, Berkley, California, 2016), 464 pp., $45.20

All letters are performances. There is a writer and there is an audience. The relationship between the two is never static, but it turns in line with time and circumstance. Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilius Brown is, very simply, a unique and continuous revelation. It is a correspondence which provides an intimate, extended perspective on Frame that exists nowhere else. There are opinions, descriptions, comments and perceptions that illuminate both her life and her work. [Read more…]