Nicholas Reid Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99 Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays […]
The Meteor of New Zealand and the Red Star of China
Denis Harold White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Zeng Dazheng (Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2014), 384 pp., $55 The subject of White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 is vast, even daunting, a fable of an elephant and a flea, yet this book succeeds not only […]
Addressing and Naming the Unknown
David Herkt The Naturalist by Thom Conroy (Vintage, 2014), 381 pp., $37.99 The German mid-nineteenth-century scientific explorers of New Zealand conducted an extraordinary project of revealing a new colony in the midst of a great transition. They described the natural and indigenous social environments of an isolated archipelago, the last country in the world before […]
Brimming with Hopeful Settlers
David Eggleton Encounters: The Creation of New Zealand. A History, by Paul Moon (Penguin, 2013), 432 pp., $55; Changing Times: NZ since 1945, by Jenny Carlyon and Diana Morrow (Auckland University Press, 2013), 520 pp., $50; The Mighty Totara: The life and times of Norman Kirk, by David Grant (Random House, 2014), 512 pp., $50; […]
The Roll of Honour
Nina Seja ANZAC: Photographs by Laurence Aberhart, with an introduction by Jock Phillips (Victoria University Press, 2014), 108 pp., $60 What are the implications of cultural remembrance? As theorist Marita Sturken points out in her book Tangled Memories, the ‘process of cultural memory is bound up in complex political stakes and meanings.’ The output of […]
Three Years at Sea
Brian Clearkin James Cook’s New World, by Graeme Lay (HarperCollins, 2014), 368 pp., $37 Ah – if only we could have had such literary works in schooldays, when our prescribed textbooks fiercely competed against each other for dryness and boredom. Graeme Lay has done a masterful re-creation of James Cook’s late-eighteenth-century world and given us […]
Overseas Experience
Nicholas Reid Flying Kiwis: A history of the OE, by Jude Wilson (Otago University Press, 2014), 295 pp., $45 I have a confession to make. It must colour my review of Jude Wilson’s Flying Kiwis, a generously illustrated history, in part based on oral interviews, of young New Zealanders going off on their ‘Overseas Experience’ […]
The Dispossessed
Brian Clearkin Andris, Where Are You? From Latvia to New Zealand: The family story of Andris Apse, by Ron Crosby, (Craig Potton Publishing, 2013), 254 pp., $39.99 The story of our lives cannot be told without some recounting of the lives of those closest to us. Thus, the story of Andris Apse begins with the […]
This is the Path of Glory
Max Oettli Images of War: New Zealand and the First World War in photographs, by Glyn Harper, (Harper Collins, 2013), 399 pp., $99.99 ‘You were in the Great War?’ I said. ‘Tell me about that.’ ‘I’ve been in all the wars,’ Johnston said, ‘but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.’ ‘You won’t talk about […]
Fanny and Fitz
Edmund Bohan Fitz: The colonial adventures of James Edward FitzGerald, by Jenifer Roberts (Otago University Press, 2014), 392 pp., $40 This is a first-rate and welcome biography of one of the most interesting of all New Zealand’s nineteenth century celebrities and his equally fascinating, multi-talented and adored wife, Fanny Erskine Draper. Jenifer Roberts is an […]
An Empty Tent Flapping in the Wind
Kathryn Mitchell 45 South: A journey across southern New Zealand, by Laurence Fearnley with photographs by Arno Gasteiger, (Penguin, 2013), 191 pp., $65.00 Our journey in this book begins at Hilderthorpe, where a large boulder marks an invisible line laid down by map-makers: 45 degrees south, halfway between the equator and the south pole. 45 […]
Improvers in Trousers
Lindsay Rabbitt Unpacking the Kists:The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking and Jim McAloon (Otago University Press, 2013), 412 pp., $70 In the nineteenth century John Polson, my maternal great-great-grandfather, downed tools as a cooper in the herring trade in West Helmsdale and said goodbye to his family at their croft in […]
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