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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

We Were the Wall of a Pātaka

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan (Bridget William Books, 2022), 256pp, $49.99

Wind the clock back to the early 1800s, when Pākehā have just started establishing a significant presence in Aotearoa. Te Ātiawa hapū has occupied Taranaki for generations, but a new menace has arrived to disturb the peaceful equilibrium: European muskets, and with them, nearly a century of intertribal warfare in North Taranaki.

Te Ātiawa rushed to dismantle the most precious taonga from their carved buildings and hide them in Peropero swamp, intending to retrieve them later. Alas, that did not happen. Those who knew where they were hidden were captured or killed. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

No Turning Back

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Culture in a Small Country: The arts in New Zealand by Roger Horrocks (Atuanui Press, 2022), 512pp, $45; A Book of Seeing by Roger Horrocks (Atuanui Press, 2022), 224pp, $38

A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep, wrote W.H. Auden; and so, as Aotearoa New Zealand dreams, Roger Horrocks, in Culture in a Small Country, strolls into frame and begins to weave connections across the national cultural output that go back decades, to his childhood and youth in the 1940s and 1950s. He plucks quotations from a wide variety of local sources to illustrate his state-of-the-nation thesis. His account stops in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, and his point, in the end, is to warn us of the dangers of cultural amnesia, stating: ‘this book has dealt mainly with the construction of our pre-digital culture as a creation story or whakapapa that all New Zealanders should value and recent New Zealand governments are not doing enough to safeguard the best of that tradition (prizing it as our taonga).’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: history

The Past as Possibility

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

By the Green of the Spring by Paddy Richardson (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 312pp, $37.99; Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2022), 326pp, $37

A Listener review of The Luminaries charged Eleanor Catton with being ‘another New Zealand writer escaping into the past’. It’s true that many of our authors have been drawn to write at least one novel set in history, but with such variety of intent that the actual escape seems the least of their motives. There are novels that shed light on past injustice, both societal and individual; that give new life to voices marginalised or erased at the time; that aim to provide a more nuanced context for the present; or that simply can’t wait to share an absolute cracker of a tale. There are novels that are sweeping in scope and those that are intimate and personal. Some are based on scrupulous research, while others play fast and loose with the facts. The past is less a foreign country than an entire universe of possibility. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, history

Beyond Biography

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sarah Christie

Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The many histories of Charlotte Badger by Jennifer Ashton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 191pp, $35

At first glance, the life of Charlotte Badger does not seem an obvious choice as a subject for a biography. As author Jennifer Ashton describes, Badger was an ‘ephemeral, fleeting player in the story of modern New Zealand’. She left no first-person narratives of her life; previous accounts offer wildly different versions of significant events in her past and large parts of her story are irretrievable to us. Yet, it is Ashton’s keen eye for a good historical mystery and her ability to expertly weave together a multifaceted piece of writing—that also challenges what biography can be—that makes this both an expert piece of historical writing and a truly delightful read.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history

Dawn Disservice 

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean 

Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia by Rowan Light (Otago University Press, 2022), 262pp, $50 

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16 was intended to unlock indirectly the bloody attritional stalemate in Europe. Whilst not quite desperate, it was certainly risky. But the geo-strategic rewards of success could have eventually proved decisive for the Entente. So the New Zealand Expeditionary Force combined with its Australian counterpart to form the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) as part of the allied expedition sent to capture the Gallipoli peninsula and open the Dardanelles to the allied navies. The Ottoman adventure ended in abject failure: the invasion force was withdrawn after eight months of fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side. And the Western Front meat mincer kept grinding for another two years. But as part of what has come to be considered a murderous folly characterised by Churchillian grandiosity and bigoted incompetent command, desperate privation and selfless martyrdom or sacrifice, Australian and New Zealand forces fought their first major military action of World War I at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Over a century later, each country marks the anniversary to remember not only those who died at Gallipoli but all who have served their country in times of war. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history

Revolution Matters

October 1, 2022 1 Comment

Philip Matthews

Jumping Sundays: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, 2022), 408pp, $49.99

Nick Bollinger’s rich new history of New Zealand counterculture, Jumping Sundays, is named for the initially spontaneous weekly occupations or liberations of Albert Park in Auckland in the distant spring of 1969. Bollinger paints a picture and it is bucolic and innocent, like a scene from Tolkien: ‘A rock band played on the rotunda. Some people held hands, some danced alone, some sat under trees with guitars, flutes and bongos and made music of their own. They wore kaftans, ponchos and leather-fringed jerkins, floppy hats, headbands, beads and flowers’. It seems at first to be an unthreatening, inclusive and pleasant local imitation of similar scenes that unfolded a year or two earlier in less sedate countries, but there are police keeping watch on the edges of the park. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, social sciences

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