Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Trembling Beauty of Life

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David Eggleton

Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2023), 272pp, $50

Was Katherine Mansfield a poster child for every kind of wild? If each generation seeks to define Mansfield anew, and every interpreter has their own Mansfield in mind, Redmer Yska in Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station chooses to emphasise Mansfield as a wild colonial girl, a bohemian, an instinctive rebel—a proto-punk who dabbled in drugs, carried a pistol for self-protection and spent her last days on a commune guided by a Russian guru, all the while writing the incandescent prose that has made her a literary immortal. [Read more…]

Chasing Ghosts

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David Herkt

Downfall: The destruction of Charles Mackay by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press, 2022), 327pp, $45

Triumphantly juxtaposing Edwardian Whanganui and Weimar Berlin in granular detail by retailing the life experiences of an apparently minor historical figure requires considerable skill. Paul Diamond’s Downfall: The destruction of Charles Mackay is the absorbing study of one man and his peregrinations through these two vastly different territories: one repressed and provincial, the other hedonistic and metropolitan. [Read more…]

Challenging Racism, Imperialism, Exploitation

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Philip Temple

Comrade: Bill Andersen: A communist, working-class life by Cybèle Locke (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 412pp, $49.99

In the cover photograph for this book, Communist and union leader Bill Andersen, 50 years old, walks foursquare and determined at the head of a union battalion following his release from Mt Eden prison. On 1 July 1974, he had been sent to jail by Justice Peter Mahon, following an application by Waiheke Island ferries boss Leo Dromgoole to have the assets of Andersen’s Northern Drivers’ Union seized. This was prompted by his leadership role in wide union opposition to a long-rolling pay and conditions dispute. The following day, Andersen became ‘the man who stopped Auckland’ when 20,000 workers went on strike in protest, an event described by historian Bert Roth as ‘the greatest display of class solidarity in New Zealand history’. Nearly 10,000 marched with Andersen down Queen Street after his release on 3 July.  [Read more…]

Beyond Biography

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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  

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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…]

A Rich, Layered Sense of Context

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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…]