history – Page 3

‘Most Dismal is our Doom’

June 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Lucy Sussex

Cleansing the Colony: Transporting convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land by Kristyn Harman (Otago University Press, 2017) 247 pp., $35

Borders, even if marked by walls, such as those in China, Berlin and the increasingly unlikely US–Mexico fence, are seldom impermeable. Certainly, upon close examination, national myths of containment or purity tend to be, if not actually spurious, then rather more nuanced and complex than propaganda would permit. One of these myths, and a persistent one too, is the exceptionalism of New Zealand being free from the convict taint that blights Australia. [Read more…]

Embracing Complexity

May 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Alison Wong

You Do Not Travel in China at the Full Moon: Agnes Moncrieff’s letters from China 1930–1945 edited by Barbara Francis (Victoria University Press, 2017), 295 pp., $50; Old Asian, New Asian by K. Emma Ng (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 104 pp., $14.99

When we consider New Zealanders who have lived in China and had a significant impact on that country and/or on our literary or cultural imagination, we easily call to mind Rewi Alley, Robin Hyde and James Bertram. But many others went to China as missionaries, medical or humanitarian workers, including Kathleen Hall, Mary Moore, Alexander Don, George McNeur, Annie James, Dr Kathleen Pih and Agnes Moncrieff. [Read more…]

Serious in Intent, Playful in Manner

April 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Simone Oettli-van Delden

Sleeps Standing Moetū by Witi Ihimaera with Hēmi Kelly (Vintage, 2017), 221 pp., $35

This book defies simple definition. Its inputs are multiple. Primarily it is a book about the Battle of Ōrākau, the final and decisive onslaught of the Waikato land wars, in which 300 Māori men, women and children are estimated to have fought with outstanding bravery against 1700 or more British Imperial troops. The Māori warriors withstood constant bombardment by artillery for three days, from 31 March to 2 April 1864. Witi Ihimaera adds a contemporary touch by having the narrator Papa Rua and his sister, Hūhana, recount the tale to their nephew, a young Māori named Simon who lives in Australia and is keen to hear stories about his ancestors. Simon is particularly interested in Moetū, a nineteenth-century sixteen-year-old boy from the Rongowhakaata Iwi in Tūranga (Gisborne), because he and his pregnant wife want to name their unborn son after him. [Read more…]

Admirable Navigational Skills

March 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Fletcher of the Bounty by Graeme Lay (HarperCollins, 2017), 304 pp., $36.99

Arr I like a good sea yarn. In my tender youth I took the bus on a weekly basis to the Hamilton Public Library (Young Adults Section) and took out a novel to read for the week. I coasted through Arthur Ransome, sailed through both Showell Styles and Ronald Symes, and was agreeably pressganged into C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. [Read more…]

Mobile Weather

February 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95

In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter of a millionaire businessman ‘would leverage [her] stock to the maximum’. Wellington with its ‘ridgy, clasped terrain, its mobile weather’, and the ‘frontier’ experiences that shaped the girl Kathleen, were – in a different metaphor – ‘the seedbed, the blood and bone fertiliser of everything that came later’. Wellington-born himself, and growing up in Karori, Yska is well qualified to describe the streets walked by the writer in her time, the atmosphere she sensed, the world she knew. [Read more…]