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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Refugees in Time of War

October 2, 2023 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

A Message for Nasty by Roderick Fry (Awa Press, 2022), 282pp, $40

World War II created some 20 million displaced people in Europe; Asian figures are harder to find. One Chinese historian mentions a million Chinese leaving Hong Kong out of a population of about 2.5 million after the Japanese conquest of 1941. There are no readily available statistics for the Europeans living in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese army’s invasion, nor many details about what happened to them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, history

Neither Just Nor Fair

September 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Tom Brooking

The Fate of the Land Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori political struggle in the Liberal era 1891–1912 by Danny Keenan (Massey University Press, 2023), 328pp, $65

This is a timely book because it adds much to the distressing story of the concerted Māori effort to slow the alienation of their land and reveals more about this key tussle than has formally been available. Keenan builds on, critiques and extends the work of several Pākehā historians including Keith Sorrenson, Alan Ward, W.H. Oliver, Judith Binney, Graham Butterworth, Paul Moon, Richard Hill, the legal historians David Williams and Richard Boast, and the geographer J.S. Duncan, all of whom criticised Keith Sinclair for claiming that the Liberals paid a ‘fair’ price for Māori land. Ranginui Walker’s major biography of Āpirana Ngata and Joe Pere’s work on farming on the East Coast also added much useful information on the continued battle waged by Ngata on behalf of Ngāti Porou. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

The Past Is Never Dead

August 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: history

Enlightening People Who Have Been Fed False Stories

July 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: history

Women Active at Every Level of Photography

July 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Mary Macpherson

Though Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell (Te Papa Press, 2023), 368pp, $75

I searched online for nineteenth-century New Zealand photography. The first link that came up was Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand’s page on photography in the 1840s to 1880s. It covered the role of photography in recording the colonial narrative of progress, portraiture and carte de visite prints and listed the Burton and Tyree Brothers, William Meluish, James Bragge and several other male photographers. This otherwise well-informed entry only mentioned one woman, Elizabeth Pulman, for her role in photographing Māori, with the comment that she was probably New Zealand’s first woman photographer. In the section about photography from the 1880s to 1960s, seven women were referenced, compared with around seventeen male photographers. [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, history

A Trojan Horse

June 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Paerau Warbrick

The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 736pp, $69.99

Ned Fletcher’s The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi had its genesis in his colossal law PhD thesis. By and large I did not find the resultant book, given gravitas by sheer bulk, the easiest prose to read. It is a lengthy work organised into four parts, seemingly intended as a general reference for academics. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

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