Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Decade That Never Dies

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David Eggleton

Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s by Murray Edmond (Atuanui Press, 2021), 360pp, $38

My father, who served on the Hamilton City Council, told me Council had two rules: the first, ‘Spend No Money’ and the second, if you really had to spend money, ‘Give the Job to your Mates.’

Murray Edmond’s cultural history Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, crammed full of anecdotes like the above, is really a story of two decades. It charts the seismic shift in New Zealand from the monoculturalism, conformism and emotional repression of the 1950s to the participatory happenings, internationalism and upbeat optimism of the late 1960s. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. [Read more…]

An Unstoppable Force

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Helen Watson White 

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, 2021), 276pp, $39.99

When Kate Edger (1857–1935) won a scholarship to enter university, her studies took the form of night classes in a building that was part of Auckland College and Grammar, described by the chairman of the local Education Board as ‘a disused military hut, the floor of which is not quite safe to tread on, the roof of which is open to the sky’. 

Diana Morrow’s richly textured biography of Edger reveals how a few holes in the roof, like notions of male superiority and other forms of bigotry, were never going to deter this young woman from the journey she purposed through higher education and beyond. It is a tale of hopes nurtured, words wielded, values tenaciously held and obstacles overcome. Kate Edger was an unstoppable force, it seems—optimistic, prodigiously hardworking and deeply principled: an evangelical version of the ‘New Woman’, as the liberated female was called in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

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Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

Gardens for the People! 

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James Beattie 

Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris (Otago University Press, 2020), 284 pp., $45

In Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa, Matt Morris writes affectionately of our love affair with gardens through time. In it, expect to find stories of your uncle and aunty digging spuds or planting kūmara in the back garden, rather than details of the wealthy real estate developer and her husband quaffing cocktails on their mansion’s manicured lawn. Morris draws from wide-ranging archival and published sources, as well as interviews. The result is a fine-grained and touching history of our relationship with gardens. [Read more…]

A Magnifying Glass to Enormity

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Helen Watson White

Searching for Charlie: In pursuit of the real Charles Upham VC & Bar by Tom Scott (Upstart Press, 2020) 368pp, $49.99

I have to confess that I wanted to review Searching for Charlie not because of its subject—a war hero both famous and infamous for his unstoppable aggression—but because of its author, Tom Scott, a cartoonist and columnist both famous and infamous for his satirical zeal.

Scott’s urge to make satire is equalled only by his enthusiasm for storytelling. At the end of his engaging and agonising study of his own family life, Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir, he acknowledges: ‘I am indebted to a legion of editors on the New Zealand Listener, the Evening Post, the Auckland Star and the Dominion Post for giving me the freedom to leave my office desk in pursuit of stories I thought worth telling.’ The Upham story is one of those, and in March 2019 Scott left the Dominion Post altogether to pursue it. The search for ‘the real Charles Upham’, like his pursuit of Sir Edmund Hillary (for a TV series, a book and a documentary), involved extensive travel in New Zealand and overseas. [Read more…]

Flaxroots Theatre Made By All 

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David Eggleton 

Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole days 1974–1980 by Martin Edmond (Otago University Press, 2020), 274pp, $39.95

On the book’s cover they have the stance of a rock band; they bristle like hip young gunslingers tuned into the New Wave zeitgeist. They are the Red Mole theatre troupe, the magnificent inner core of seven, photographed in black and white at Coney Island, New York, during an 18-month sojourn performing overseas towards the end of the 1970s. In Bus Stops on the Moon, Martin Edmond remembers, celebrates and eulogises a generation, an era, a mood—and in the main chronicles a few hectic years, the glory days, to tell us what it was like to be part of New Zealand’s foremost avant-garde theatre group that was itself the product of a particular historic moment. [Read more…]