Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Packaging the Land

Leave a Comment

Philippa Jamieson
Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve (Otago University Press) 224 pp. $45; Making Our Place: Exploring Land-use Tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jacinta Ruru, Janet Stephenson and Mick Abbott, (Otago University Press), 243 pp. $45.
 
Although we are becoming an increasingly indoor nation, our wild and natural landscapes, our ‘clean, green’ image, and our agricultural heritage all remain strong in the identity of most New Zealanders. The topics discussed in these two books have wide appeal. Both books address current and contested questions about our use of and relationship with the land, and provide glimpses into history. My concern is that they may be read by only a narrow range of potential readers – mostly by academics and professionals over 40, I suspect, unless interviews, magazine articles, blog posts and so on can draw other readers in.

[Read more…]

Buried Prophets of the Future

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.

[Read more…]

Victoriana

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.

[Read more…]

Against Fear of the New

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.

[Read more…]

Vile Crime in Cathedral Town

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.

[Read more…]