Giovanni Tiso

Shirley Smith: An examined life by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2019), 464 pp., $40

How long does it take to unravel a life? In the case of Shirley Smith, the answer is eight years. That’s how long biographer Sarah Gaitanos spent poring over the vast documentary archive left by the academic, criminal lawyer and social justice campaigner, talking to the people who knew Smith and then compiling her findings into a book. This undertaking was made possible above all by Smith’s own writings, chief among them the countless letters she wrote over her lifetime – from her teenage years at a boarding school in Marton to her travels in retirement. The author describes this output as the manifestation of Smith’s ‘prodigious engagement with the world’, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that this engagement is the true subject of the book. [Read more…]

Laurence Simmons 

Theo Schoon: A biography by Damian Skinner (Massey University Press, 2018), 336 pp., $59.99

Émigré artist Theo Schoon, whose life intersected with important cultural moments in New Zealand’s art history, made occasionally impressive, dominantly weird and sometimes godawful art. Vainglory and vanity, the hokey and the profound, independence and jealousy combined in Schoon’s character in such unexpected ways that one despairs of sorting them out. In his new biography Damian Skinner has valiantly attempted to do so and has drawn extensively on a rich resource of interviews and archival materials from here and elsewhere. But reading Skinner’s tale of Schoon’s tale of himself, you feel that Skinner has never been able to warm to his subject and there is a certain perversity involved in the undertaking. It is as if Skinner gritted his teeth and said to himself ‘I just have to finish this despite …’ [Read more…]

Stephen Stratford

Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt by Philip Temple (David Ling Publishing, 2018), 328pp., $44.99

Would anyone under 60 be interested in a two-volume life of Maurice Shadbolt? Should they be? One volume sufficed for Maurice Gee. On the other hand, the other Maurice led a startlingly rackety life, so there is much gossip. Between the sheets, and also two sheets to the wind.

I had thought my generation was pretty frisky but we were nothing like this lot – at it like knives, all of them. For example, ‘earlier in the year Maurice and [then girlfriend] Beverly Richards had witnessed [Dick] Scott in bed with his wife-to-be and with the relieved co-operation of her current husband’. What complicated lives they led. ‘Maurice,’ notes Temple, ‘was never short of sexual partners, temporary, medium or long-term.’ The Barbara Magner/Marilyn Duckworth overlap of 1969 is dizzying, with girlfriend Beverly and wife Gill still part of his life.  [Read more…]

Chris Brickell

I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika by Sharon Mazer, with a foreword by Witi Ihimaera (Auckland University Press, 2018), 288 pp., $59.99

It all began in Timaru. Neil Gudsell, who later transformed himself into the drag artist, activist and performer Mika, started his life in the provincial South Island town. A Māori child adopted by Pākehā parents, he had to ride the ‘swings and roundabouts of identity’ in a not-always bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand. As a ‘reflexively daring’ child he invented a sense of himself through performance. I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika is a lively tale of all of these things: biculturalism and the everyday expectations and politics that surround it; self-fashioning; enactments of culture, gender and sexuality; and a society that has changed – mostly a lot, although not wholly – since Mika’s birth in 1962. Biographer Sharon Mazer provocatively suggests that Mika’s life offers a useful perspective on the liberations and repressions of the 1960s, the slowly waning homophobia of the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s. Mika’s awakenings tell of broader patterns of social change. [Read more…]