Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Voyaging Waka

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Heke_nuku_mai_nga_iwi_BusbyGerry Te Kapa Coates

Heke-nuku-mai-nga-iwi Busby: Not here by chance by Jeff Evans (Huia Publishers, 2015), 288 pp., $45

This is the book of a life spent in discovery. It’s about Hec Busby – who he is and what he has done, from becoming a leader within Te Rarawa and a successful businessman, to helping the nascent waka voyaging resurgence become a reality. It is the tale of a life filled both with intent and chance events, and of Busby’s dogged determination to finish things that he began. His conviction that he is ‘not here by chance’ is obvious. The book chronologically follows his life, to the building and voyaging of Te Aurere, the first wooden double-hulled voyaging waka hourua built in Aotearoa in recent times, and his increasing knowledge and prominence in the art of traditional navigation that allowed his ancestors to arrive here, also not by chance. [Read more…]

Bookplates, Stamps and Signatures

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hocken_prince_of_collectors_donald_kerrIain Sharp

Hocken: Prince of Collectors, by Donald Kerr (Otago University Press, 2015), 424 pp., $60

The first thing one notices about Donald Kerr’s handsome new appreciation of Dunedin bibliophile Thomas Morland Hocken is its expanse: 300 pages of body text, followed by 100 closely printed pages of appendices, notes and bibliography. In Otago University Press’s previous excursion into this territory – The Fascinating Folly: Dr Hocken and his fellow collectors (1961) – Eric McCormick dealt not only with the doctor’s bookish fixations but also those of the country’s other two pre-eminent library donors, Sir George Grey and Alexander Turnbull (i.e. the entire ‘Holy Trinity’, to employ Kerr’s reverential phrase), in just 40 wryly worded pages. Where McCormick was content with a mandarin overview, however, Kerr probes steadily into the details of how Hocken chose, acquired and arranged his collection.

In his introduction Kerr apologises for the selective nature of his study. Considerations of space prevented him from providing data on each of the 5200 books, 2800 pamphlets and 650 manuscripts that Hocken bequeathed to the nation. In an ideal world, blessed with readers of unyielding stamina and publishers with limitless resources, Kerr would have furnished us, I am sure, with a multi-volume work.  [Read more…]

The Tovey Generation and After

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Maria de jong Fred_GrahamDamian Skinner

Fred Graham: Creator of forms – Te Tohunga Auaha, by Maria de Jong and others, (Huia Publishers, 2014), 200 pp., $49.99

Thanks to books like Fred Graham: Creator of forms, we are beginning to know so much more about the kaumātua of contemporary Māori art. A generation of artists who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s are slowly but surely receiving the art historical treatment that makes their work available to both specialists and general audiences. With their contextualising essays, biographical information, chronologies and catalogues of artworks, monographs are the building blocks of the larger stories of art that societies tell to themselves and others. As these artists get their monographs, their work and their achievements become visible, changing national and international stories – which in some cases need to be reconsidered based on new evidence, or at the very least nuanced as new objects and ideas force their way into consideration.

Graham certainly hasn’t been invisible: as part of the Tovey generation, selected by Gordon Tovey to be an art adviser, and a key player in many exhibitions of contemporary Māori art held over the last four decades, Graham’s name and examples of his work have been written into the existing histories of Māori art. As well, his prominence as a public sculptor making commissions for highly visible sites means that his art is widely encountered. But these highlights don’t give a sense of the texture of a life, or an art practice. Without the other parts it is easy to misunderstand the things we do know, and to remain unaware of how the art might challenge the way we currently tell stories of Māori and New Zealand art. [Read more…]

Architect of a Compassionate Society

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Tom Brooking Richard SeddonEdmund Bohan

Richard Seddon, King of God’s Own: The life and times of New Zealand’s longest-serving prime minister by Tom Brooking (Penguin Books, 2014), 584 pp., $65

At a mayoral reception during my first visit to St Helens in Lancashire in 1966, I was, when identified as a New Zealander, proudly ushered by the mayor into his parlour to admire the vast portrait over its fireplace of the town’s most famous son: Richard John Seddon, Premier of New Zealand from 1893 until his death in 1906, renowned throughout the British Empire and subsequently regarded by many as our greatest prime minister; a gigantic figure in our historiography but one around whom myths and legends clustered to all but obscure the real man.

In modern times he has earned equal obloquy for both his racism and his jingoistic imperialism from revisionists who insist on evaluating historical personalities – especially nineteenth-century ones – in the light of their own currently fashionable assumptions. In this superbly researched biography, however, Tom Brooking places Seddon firmly inside his own time and has stripped away many of the myths to reveal the man to be an even greater figure, in so many ways, than legend has hitherto claimed; and he has done that through sound, common-sense and objective analysis of facts. He has undoubtedly thrown down the gauntlet to fellow academics. Fierce, and characteristically vituperative, academic debate about this ‘King Dick’ is likely to enliven our university history departments for some time. [Read more…]

The Canvas that Ripples

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Edward Hanfling mervyn williams: from modernism to the digital ageJodie Dalgleish

Mervyn Williams: From Modernism to the digital age by Edward Hanfling, with essays by Leonard Bell and Michael Dunn (Ron Sang Publications, 2014), 336 pp., $135

Mervyn Williams: From Modernism to the digital age is a large and well-illustrated monograph that seeks to chronicle the life-long artistic journey of Mervyn Williams. It contains a series of essays as chapters linked by many full-colour photographs of Williams’ works. Edward Hanfling is the primary writer, and Michael Dunn and Leonard Bell each contribute a shorter essay: Dunn, a précis of Williams’ years in Whanganui; Bell, an overview of the artist’s influences. This structure works well, even though the Dunn and Bell essays interrupt Hanfling’s chronological flow. With an emphasis on argument around Williams’ works, Mervyn Williams is not a chronicle of the artist’s life per se, although an illustrated chronology and a double-page photo of the artist’s family appear at the back of the book. It is a book for the art world, focused on analysing Williams’ practice.

Edward Hanfling obviously cares about and is dedicated to his subject, and I found his writing to be often candid, concise and poetic. At times, however, his repeated justification of the artist’s commitment to abstraction was a little overdone. I also found Hanfling’s associated and overriding separation of ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ to be problematic, including his distinction between the gesture of expressive ‘high art’ versus the more exact, mechanical and ‘social’ nature of Williams’ abstraction. But it’s true that Williams himself is quoted in support of this distinction, referring, for example, to the American abstract painters John McLaughlin and Ellsworth Kelly, who took ‘the spleen out’ of painting. [Read more…]