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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Rootful Cosmopolitans

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Lucy Sussex

The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand writers and the colonial world by Helen Bones (Otago University Press, 2018), 248pp., $35

In New Zealand it is common to talk about ‘OE’: Overseas Experience. Living in what is termed the antipodes, far from the centres of finance, population and power, fosters an attitude where travel is a rite of passage for the young. For those working in the arts it has been presented as imperative: how else would the aspiring find an audience and sufficient remuneration to survive while pursuing their calling? The siren call of London, Paris etc. began with white settlement, and it has persisted ever since. [Read more…]

Filed Under: arts and culture, history, literature

The Importance of Rivers

December 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Graeme Wynn

The Waikato: A history of New Zealand’s greatest river by Paul Moon (Atuanui Press, 2018), 456 pp., $69.99; New Zealand’s Rivers: An environmental history by Catherine Knight (Canterbury University Press, 2016), 324 pp., $49.99

‘Rivers compel attention and invite stories.’ These words open an intriguing doctoral dissertation completed in 1999 in the Department of English in the University of British Columbia by New Zealander Charles Dawson.1 They introduce a twisting, tumbling, rippling, glinting, eddying and surging torrent of ideas and observations that washes over an impressively varied array of personal essays, novels and poetry, brushes the banks of theory, and entrains contemporary anxieties along the way. Most of the authors Dawson considers engage, as he does, in ‘river reflection’ – a ‘process of articulation, born of contemplation and engagement with mental and physical streams’. Their physical streams are almost entirely North American, but their articulations emphasise interconnections through memory and myth, ecology and community, damage and loss, to produce particular ways of seeing and understanding.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: history

Float, Float On …

September 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

David Geary

Floating Islanders: Pasifika theatre in Aotearoa by Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell (Otago University Press, 2017), 284 pp. $39.95

Our quest should not to be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania.–Albert Wendt

The beauty of this book is that apart from being an entertaining and comprehensive summary of the birth and rise of Pasifika theatre in New Zealand, it also serves as a compelling social history.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: arts and culture, history, maori and pacific, plays

A Superb Scrutiny

August 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Briar Wood

Tuai: A traveller in two worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 288 pp., $39.99

James Barry’s fine 1818 portrait, Tooi, a New Zealand Chief, on the cover of this book, gives an indication of why the authors must have chosen to set out on this voyage of research about the northern Ngare Raumati rangatira, and of the taonga of information they reveal along the way. Tuai’s mana is evident in the painting. He looks away from the viewer towards some distant focus, possibly aware of being observed, but seeming to appear vigilant, spiritually aware and detached all at once.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history, maori and pacific

The Godwit Guys

June 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Nelson Wattie

The Expatriates by Martin Edmond (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 328 pp., $49.99

People – such as the four men discussed in this book – get passionate about many different things, but what matters most to everyone is life itself – our own lives and those of others – and that’s where biography comes in. Once the genre is in, it stays in, despite the frequent battering it gets from brilliant critical minds. It’s true that biography is neither science nor literature, and yet neither could exist if people didn’t live first; that’s fundamental. Writers like James McNeish and Martin Edmond dive deeply into that underlying reality and report to the rest of us about what they have found. As I read them both I am sometimes troubled by a lack of rigorous scholarship that would characterise comparable kinds of non-fiction, and by the uncertainty of creativity that is also characteristic of biography, but when I have finished reading and have set the book aside, I am filled with gratitude for the enrichment of life that such writing gives its readers. [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history

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