Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Superb Scrutiny

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Briar Wood

Tuai: A traveller in two worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 288 pp., $39.99

James Barry’s fine 1818 portrait, Tooi, a New Zealand Chief, on the cover of this book, gives an indication of why the authors must have chosen to set out on this voyage of research about the northern Ngare Raumati rangatira, and of the taonga of information they reveal along the way. Tuai’s mana is evident in the painting. He looks away from the viewer towards some distant focus, possibly aware of being observed, but seeming to appear vigilant, spiritually aware and detached all at once.  [Read more…]

The Godwit Guys

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Nelson Wattie

The Expatriates by Martin Edmond (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 328 pp., $49.99

People – such as the four men discussed in this book – get passionate about many different things, but what matters most to everyone is life itself – our own lives and those of others – and that’s where biography comes in. Once the genre is in, it stays in, despite the frequent battering it gets from brilliant critical minds. It’s true that biography is neither science nor literature, and yet neither could exist if people didn’t live first; that’s fundamental. Writers like James McNeish and Martin Edmond dive deeply into that underlying reality and report to the rest of us about what they have found. As I read them both I am sometimes troubled by a lack of rigorous scholarship that would characterise comparable kinds of non-fiction, and by the uncertainty of creativity that is also characteristic of biography, but when I have finished reading and have set the book aside, I am filled with gratitude for the enrichment of life that such writing gives its readers. [Read more…]

A Previously Unsung Life

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Jane Westaway

Polly Plum: A firm and earnest woman’s advocate: Mary Ann Colclough 1836–1885 by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2017), 296 pp., $39.95

Polly Plum was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Colclough – née Barnes – who lived and worked in Auckland and Melbourne during the period of first-wave feminism. Author Jenny Coleman suggests that her largely unknown subject’s contribution to the women’s movement, as well as to girls’ education and to countless individual women and girls, was at least equal to that of Kate Sheppard.

An article published fifteen years after her death claimed Mary Ann ‘went down to her grave a blighted woman’. Certainly her life, as Coleman recounts it, wasn’t easy: it included personal loss, public opprobrium, bankruptcy (through no fault of her own) and ill-health. She was dead by 49.  [Read more…]

Forgotten Giants

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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…]

Mobile Weather

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Helen Watson White 

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95

In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter of a millionaire businessman ‘would leverage [her] stock to the maximum’. Wellington with its ‘ridgy, clasped terrain, its mobile weather’, and the ‘frontier’ experiences that shaped the girl Kathleen, were – in a different metaphor – ‘the seedbed, the blood and bone fertiliser of everything that came later’. Wellington-born himself, and growing up in Karori, Yska is well qualified to describe the streets walked by the writer in her time, the atmosphere she sensed, the world she knew.  [Read more…]

The Nation-Building Dutch

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Redmer Yska

Astride a Fierce Wind by Huberta Hellendoorn (Mākaro Press, 2017), 360 pp., $38

There’s a moment in Astride a Fierce Wind when Dutch migrant Huberta Hellendoorn, finally, mostly, settled in Dunedin, opens a telegram from home. Her mother is dead. She cries: ‘I can’t even go to the funeral.’ The cohort of Dutch washing up on these shores in the postwar era came to know such sudden wrenches out of a blue sky. In an era before jet travel, flights to Europe were measured in days, not hours. Even in 1960 when Huberta arrived by sea at Port Chalmers, flights to Europe took three or four days, with endless stopovers. And that was all before the prohibitive fares.  [Read more…]