history

Steaming Open the Archives

November 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Briar Wood

Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 by Jared Davidson (Otago University Press, 2019), 296pp, $35

Reading the history of the years of the First World War and after through the experience of those who were outside the dominant political narratives of the time is a welcome step in presenting diversity, at a time when national borders in many places are being reinforced rather than opening up. Jared Davidson’s diligent research brings hitherto untold stories into the historical mainstream and extends our understanding of what life was like during these much-memorialised times. Although the subtitle seems broad, most of the evidence about censorship and the widespread resistance to it in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time of the First World War has come from government-censored letters: hence the book’s title. Some further discussion of newspaper, magazine, film and publishing restrictions might also have been set beside this intriguing discussion. [Read more…]

Confronting the Dark Past

September 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Lachy Paterson

The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 272 pp., $39.99

Much of New Zealand history lies as yet untouched, and a topic once covered may sit for a generation before another historian picks through the archives again. New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonial wars are a notable exception, with Vincent O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa now added to a long list of titles, some of which are still in print. If, as suggested in the New Zealand Herald (6/12/2018), our ‘violent colonial past’ had been forgotten, this surely is hardly the fault of New Zealand historians. [Read more…]

In the Front Seat

September 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Women Equality Power: Selected speeches from a life of leadership by Helen Clark (Allen & Unwin, 2018), 430 pp., $45

On the eve of Labour’s candidate selection meeting in April 1980, Helen Clark was preparing to present herself, in competition with six men, as a possible successor to Warren Freer in Mount Albert. Some 20 years on, in Brian Edwards’ book Helen: Portrait of a prime minister (Exisle, 2001), Mike Williams describes her practising her speech in the kitchen that night: ‘There’s a phrase in that speech that sticks in my mind, which was, “I don’t think you should select me because I’m a woman. However, I don’t think you should not select me because I’m a woman.” It was a very, very good speech.’ [Read more…]

A History of Historicisation

August 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Caitlin Lynch

Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen by Annabel Cooper (Otago University Press, 2018), 322 pp., $49.95

Over the past few years in Aotearoa New Zealand there has been increasing demand from high-school students, iwi representatives, academics and musicians alike for a more nuanced, meaningful acknowledgement of the colonial conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their legacies. Annabel Cooper’s Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen is part of the answer to that demand. Cooper’s book is not a war history; aside from a succinct, three-page overview of the New Zealand Wars in the introduction, the book’s focus begins in 1925, nearly a decade after their (debatably) final conflict. Instead, and equally as important, the book is a history of historicisation: of how the New Zealand Wars have been remembered, negotiated, re-enacted, represented, viewed, taught and mythologised through film and television over the last century – and by whom. [Read more…]

Honour and Honesty

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman by Alexander Aitken (Auckland University Press, 2018), 264 pp., $39.99; The Anzac Violin: Alexander Aitken’s story by Jennifer Beck and Robyn Belton (Scholastic, 2018), 36 pp., $27.99

For the ordinary infantryman in World War I, a period of ‘active service’ was lived in two modes: you were either engaged in fighting at close range, or you were waiting. In waiting mode you could be travelling to a battle site, the location of which was a mystery, or you had arrived, and remained mystified. This is the much-repeated scenario in Alexander Aitken’s memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman, first published in 1963 and now re-issued with an introduction, chronology, notes and commentary by Alex Calder. [Read more…]