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…]

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 The Ottoman adventure ended in abject failure: the invasion force was withdrawn after eight months of fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side.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…]