Victor Billot

Histories of Hate: The radical right in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley (Otago University Press, 2023), 444pp, $50

Histories of Hate starts at the end of the story so far—15 March 2019—the date when the radical right achieved its first notable twenty-first-century intervention in New Zealand politics and society, the terrorist attack in Christchurch. After a century or more of largely ineffective activity, the radical right has found a new lease of life in the last few years. Its incoherence meant it failed to capitalise on upsurges of social discontent at key moments in New Zealand’s history. But this incoherence has become an advantage in the contemporary post-COVID, post-truth era, as the radical right embeds itself in a nexus of conspiracy, paranoia and prejudice. [Read more…]

Nicholas Reid

A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects by Jock Phillips (Penguin Random House NZ 2022), 464 pp, $55

Can a country’s history really be told as a series of material objects? This question must nag at any historian who reads Jock Phillips’s A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects.

The concept of using objects to produce a historical narrative has been around for over a decade now. Jock Phillips tells us he was inspired by Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, published as a book in 2010 after having been a series of BBC broadcasts. Since then, there has been A History of Ireland in 100 Objects and a similar German production. Something of the same inspiration was produced in New Zealand in 2015 when Annabel Cooper, Lachy Patterson and Angela Wanhalla published their book The Lives of Colonial Objects, even if they stuck with the nineteenth century, unlike Phillips’s very broad swing through time. Phillips’s first ‘object’ is the fossil bone of a crocodile-like creature from forty-plus million years ago, cleverly reminding us of the very ancientness of these islands. His last objects are knitted dollies representing Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield curating public health in the time of Covid-19. Very up to date. [Read more…]