biography

Beyond Biography

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sarah Christie

Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The many histories of Charlotte Badger by Jennifer Ashton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 191pp, $35

At first glance, the life of Charlotte Badger does not seem an obvious choice as a subject for a biography. As author Jennifer Ashton describes, Badger was an ‘ephemeral, fleeting player in the story of modern New Zealand’. She left no first-person narratives of her life; previous accounts offer wildly different versions of significant events in her past and large parts of her story are irretrievable to us. Yet, it is Ashton’s keen eye for a good historical mystery and her ability to expertly weave together a multifaceted piece of writing—that also challenges what biography can be—that makes this both an expert piece of historical writing and a truly delightful read. [Read more…]

Stone House & Straw Houses

September 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

A Rich, Layered Sense of Context

September 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Helen Watson White

Helen Kelly: Her life by Rebecca Macfie (Awa Press, 2021), 410pp, $49.99

‘We don’t need low wages in this country,’ said Helen Kelly in 2007 on becoming president of the Council of Trade Unions (CTU). ‘There’s no excuse for it. People should be able to go to work, work their hours and have a decent standard of living at the end of the week.’

It sounds so simple, and to the Kellys it was. Rebecca Macfie’s action-packed and deeply thoughtful biography, Helen Kelly: Her life, is less one person’s story and more the biography of a radical family. Macfie shows us how, in the Wellington setting of parliamentarians, publicans and pundits, Helen and her parents, Cath and Pat, always knew what they wanted but also what they were up against. Knowing where the trade union movement came from made their joint trajectory sure, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new millennium, Helen continued the work for another sixteen years until her death from cancer when she was in her prime. [Read more…]

Telling His Story

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Alan Roddick

James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell (Otago University Press, 2021), 416pp, $45

James Courage’s name may be little known to younger generations today, but in 1955 he was hailed as ‘the best living New Zealand novelist’. Seven years later, the importation of his novel about a homosexual love affair, A Way of Love, was notoriously banned by New Zealand Customs.

Courage kept a diary for some forty-three years, starting in 1920 when he was sixteen, and in this book, editor Chris Brickell reproduces almost a quarter of his diaries’ estimated 400,000 words. In his very useful Introduction, Brickell states that he has excluded ‘some long transcriptions of other authors’ writing—pieces of novels and poetry—which Courage often copied into his own diaries’. [Read more…]

What a Human Muddle

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was originally published in Landfall 242 and is republished here in memory of Stephen Stratford (1953–2021). A fine editor and reviewer, Stratford made an invaluable contribution to Aotearoa literature over many years.

Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt, Volume 2 1973–2004 by Philip Temple (David Ling Publishing Limited, 2021), 352pp, $44.99

Another marvellous performance from Philip Temple with multiple plots and time-lines expertly interwoven. As with Volume 1, it is a triumph of research and narrative skill. But what is missing is a subtitle. Perhaps this quote from Shadbolt: ‘What a human muddle I leave in my wake.’

God, this book is grim reading. Not the author’s fault—it is entirely the subject’s. There are many upsetting passages but none more so than when Shadbolt’s daughter Tui came up from Wellington by train, on her own, and he refused to see her. She was twelve. [Read more…]