Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

An Unstoppable Force

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Helen Watson White 

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, 2021), 276pp, $39.99

When Kate Edger (1857–1935) won a scholarship to enter university, her studies took the form of night classes in a building that was part of Auckland College and Grammar, described by the chairman of the local Education Board as ‘a disused military hut, the floor of which is not quite safe to tread on, the roof of which is open to the sky’. 

Diana Morrow’s richly textured biography of Edger reveals how a few holes in the roof, like notions of male superiority and other forms of bigotry, were never going to deter this young woman from the journey she purposed through higher education and beyond. It is a tale of hopes nurtured, words wielded, values tenaciously held and obstacles overcome. Kate Edger was an unstoppable force, it seems—optimistic, prodigiously hardworking and deeply principled: an evangelical version of the ‘New Woman’, as the liberated female was called in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…]

Paradoxes, Mysteries and Obsessions

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241.

David Eggleton

Ralph Hotere: The dark is light enough by Vincent O’Sullivan (Penguin, 2020), 368pp, $45

The artistic achievement of Ralph Hotere (Te Aupōuri) towers like a great lighthouse above the pure harbour. It’s as if he illuminates, with a delicate precision and a sweeping blade of light, New Zealand’s brooding darkness, spiritual as well as topographical. Born near Mitimiti, Northland, in 1931 and baptised into the Roman Catholic church as Hone Papita Raukua Hotere, he was an art prodigy almost from the beginning and drew at every opportunity—even with a stick in the sand on the beach near his childhood home, content to watch the waves wash away his efforts. His most remarkable and significant period of artistic production, though, lasted for around forty years between about 1962 and 2002. He died in Dunedin in 2013. His was a busy, restless, crowded existence, as Vincent O’Sullivan tells it in his fascinating ‘biographical portrait’, which succeeds in synthesising a colourful, gossipy, anecdotal narrative out of the many paradoxes, mysteries and obsessions of this energetic and prolific New Zealand artist’s life. [Read more…]

A Magnifying Glass to Enormity

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Helen Watson White

Searching for Charlie: In pursuit of the real Charles Upham VC & Bar by Tom Scott (Upstart Press, 2020) 368pp, $49.99

I have to confess that I wanted to review Searching for Charlie not because of its subject—a war hero both famous and infamous for his unstoppable aggression—but because of its author, Tom Scott, a cartoonist and columnist both famous and infamous for his satirical zeal.

Scott’s urge to make satire is equalled only by his enthusiasm for storytelling. At the end of his engaging and agonising study of his own family life, Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir, he acknowledges: ‘I am indebted to a legion of editors on the New Zealand Listener, the Evening Post, the Auckland Star and the Dominion Post for giving me the freedom to leave my office desk in pursuit of stories I thought worth telling.’ The Upham story is one of those, and in March 2019 Scott left the Dominion Post altogether to pursue it. The search for ‘the real Charles Upham’, like his pursuit of Sir Edmund Hillary (for a TV series, a book and a documentary), involved extensive travel in New Zealand and overseas. [Read more…]

In the Footsteps of Robin Hyde

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Sally Blundell

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima (Massey University Press, 2020), 95pp, $45 

The ghost of Robin Hyde shifts in the shadows of our history: poet, novelist, journalist; invalid, mother, drug addict; lady editor at the Wanganui Chronicle, war correspondent during the early months of the Sino-Japanese War in China. A dreamer, she wrote of herself, ‘and a lover’. Hyde, the pen name of Iris Guiver Wilkinson, stands tall in the New Zealand literary canon, but Wilkinson herself, Cape Town-born and immigrating to New Zealand when she was a baby, appears only dimly in the male-led literary world of the 1930s—a ‘trying thing’, wrote the acerbic Frank Sargeson, a ‘silly bitch’.1 [Read more…]

A Unique Point of View

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Helen Watson White

The Girl from Revolution Road by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh (Allen & Unwin, 2020), 240pp., $36.99

What seems at first to be a book about difference—cultural, religious, social—is actually, in the end, about what holds people together. At every point where these real-life stories of Iranian-born filmmaker Ghazaleh Golbakhsh find resonance with a reader, a bond is formed that comes from the sense of a shared humanity. While I’m aware that that generalisation can be used to override the particular, or the individual, in The Girl from Revolution Road there is no danger of our not recognising difference as a positive value. This is a varied and accessible set of human stories, told from a unique point of view, and the effectiveness of the writing is all in the detail. [Read more…]

The Air Up Here

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Sally Blundell

High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod (Massey University Press, 2020), 96pp., $45

The air up here is clear. High above the clamour of the city and the rush and roar of the ocean, above the islands, the headlands and the setting sun, a solitary figure slouches towards Australia on the single drawn line of a high-wire cable. 

In James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire, a New York bystander, anchored to the footpath by a heavy coat and bags of shopping, wept as she watched the impossibly frail figure of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walk, kneel and wheel on a cable drawn 411 metres above ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. [Read more…]