history – Page 22

Buried Prophets of the Future

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Coal and the Coast: a Reflection on the Pike River Disaster, by Paul Maunder (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 112 pp., $25.

It might be uncomfortable to consider, but pressing in on me as I write this — and on whoever reads it — are the ghosts of hundreds of Chinese coal miners: those who die every week in unsafe mines to fuel the booming economy of the renascent Red Dragon and thus supply us in the West with almost all of our consumer goods. Every phase of the Industrial Revolution has had a human cost, in the blood of peasants driven or lured off the land into burgeoning urban centres to make a new life for themselves and a fat profit for the owners of the factories and the mines.

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Victoriana

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf (Otago University Press, 2011), 208 pp., $50.

Susan Sontag characterised photographs as ‘invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’, while Roland Barthes asserted that the photograph was ‘a transparent envelope’ — that is, a paradoxical object at once visible and obvious but also sealed-off and enigmatic. Likewise, Walter Benjamin stated that the photographic image shows ‘dialects at a standstill’, meaning photographs can hold contradictory meanings in check. Benjamin also pointed out that: ‘Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its concerns threaten to disappear irretrievably’. Mindful then that this significant trio of twentieth-century photography critics regarded photographs as extremely ambiguous objects, attracting interpretations the way flypaper attracts flies, I launched into Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erica Wolf.

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Against Fear of the New

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Nick Laird

New Zealand by Design: a History of New Zealand Product Design, by Michael Smythe (Godwit, 2011), 511 pp., $65.

‘Design’ is a mercurial, not to say deceptive, term. Used as a verb to refer to a process, and used as a noun to the product of that process, it has become amongst the most ubiquitous and the most tortured of labels. Often now lumped together with buzzfuzz feel-good notions of expressiveness, and used interchangeably with the tags ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’, it is constantly and lazily colonised, while the shades of discrimination it originally implied have become hidden or lost. Design only really takes on meaning with the words that surround it, as in types of design — and even then the implied associations can serve to obscure a deeper understanding.

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Vile Crime in Cathedral Town

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Anna Rogers

So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World, by Peter Graham (Awa Press, Wellington, 2011), 341 pp., $42.00.

Even now, my sister and I, who grew up in Christchurch in the 1950s and 1960s, have an ambiguous attitude towards Victoria Park, high on the hills above the city. It was the scene of happy family picnics, and the views to sea and alps were glorious, but there was also a hint of menace and fear. ‘That’s the path,’ we would whisper to each other as we looked over the low stone wall not far from the tea kiosk. ‘That’s where they did it.’

Everyone knew about the terrible murder that had occurred in this lovely place on 22 June 1954, only a few months before I was born. Teenagers Juliet Hulme and her friend Pauline Parker battered the latter’s mother, Honorah, to death. The case riveted media and shocked readers far beyond New Zealand.

The three had gone to the park for afternoon tea about 2.30. By three o’clock they had left for a walk that led down a steep slope near the caretaker’s house. Half an hour later the two girls, spattered with blood, ran into the kiosk screaming that Nora, as she was called, was ‘terribly hurt’, that she was dead. Once the caretaker and his assistant found the appallingly damaged body – head smashed, eyes closed and bulging, hair matted with blood – and saw a half-brick nearby covered with blood and hair lying only centimetres away, it did not take long for the girls’ claim of an accident to be dismissed. The machinery of police, doctors and lawyers wound into action and Hulme and Parker were arrested.

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Four Women of the Hall Family

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Nicky Chapman

Letters to Grace: Writing Home from Colonial New Zealand, edited by Jean Garner and Kate Foster (Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2011), 224 pp., $40.00.

This ‘found’ collection of Victorian-era letters is moving in a way no carefully crafted writing could be, primarily because they are real and private documents. The letters are only grouped together because they survived a tidying binge after their recipient’s death, but together they provide a fascinating insight into their writers’ lives. Part of this fascination is that we can read the same stories from different angles and over time (most are from 1862 to 1871). The often raw emotions and ongoing struggles are made all the more powerful when couched in the genteel and affectionate language of a Victorian lady.

Grace was the sister-in-law of two sisters, Agnes Emma and Rose who married two brothers, and moved to Canterbury in 1853 and 1861. These three women were close friends before they were tied through marriage, and most of the book consists of letters from Agnes Emma and Rose to Grace. There are also a few letters from another New Zealand-based sister-in-law, Sarah, and a beloved niece, Agnes Mildred, who was Agnes Emma’s daughter but who looked upon Grace as a mother. None of Grace’s letters to New Zealand have survived, but it is clear she wrote regularly and her letters were hugely important to these women.

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Nature Study Man

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Seabird Genius: the Story of L.E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross and the Yellow-eyed Penguin, by Neville Peat (Otago University Press, 2011), 288 pp. $45

The establishment of the albatross colony at Tairoa Head on Otago Peninsula is iconic, but not so the individual largely responsible. Lance Richdale, born just days into the beginning of the twentieth century, saw his first albatross egg in November 1936 and was later devastated when he learned that vandals had stolen it. In fact, because of predators, no chick had successfully fledged in many years. He lobbied for the building of a protective fence, and the following season camped in his spare time near the nest of a single surviving chick. When after eight months it flew out to sea, local and foreign newspapers reported this exceptional event.

Prior to his contact with albatross, Richdale had begun intensive observations of yellow-eyed penguins on Otago Peninsula. After five seasons encompassing 800 visits to the colonies, he produced a two-volume manuscript, which unfortunately was not published because of the Second World War. He also began a twenty-year study of petrels on tiny Whero Island off the coast of Stewart Island.

Richdale was the first person in New Zealand to band seabirds systematically over time, and the second in the world to band penguins. His close observations of seabirds enabled him to debunk various fallacies, and to make many discoveries. He disproved the widely held notion that albatross deliberately starved their chicks in the later stages of rearing; and in regard to penguins he identified ‘14 types of behavior when pairs interacted’. Long-term studies of seabirds are still a rarity.
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