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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Revolution Matters

October 1, 2022 1 Comment

Philip Matthews

Jumping Sundays: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, 2022), 408pp, $49.99

Nick Bollinger’s rich new history of New Zealand counterculture, Jumping Sundays, is named for the initially spontaneous weekly occupations or liberations of Albert Park in Auckland in the distant spring of 1969. Bollinger paints a picture and it is bucolic and innocent, like a scene from Tolkien: ‘A rock band played on the rotunda. Some people held hands, some danced alone, some sat under trees with guitars, flutes and bongos and made music of their own. They wore kaftans, ponchos and leather-fringed jerkins, floppy hats, headbands, beads and flowers’. It seems at first to be an unthreatening, inclusive and pleasant local imitation of similar scenes that unfolded a year or two earlier in less sedate countries, but there are police keeping watch on the edges of the park. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, social sciences

Stone House & Straw Houses  

September 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Ravenscar House: A Biography by Sally Blundell (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 224pp, $59.99; Road People of Aotearoa: House truck journeys 1978–1984 by Paul Gilbert (Rim Books, 2021), 184pp, $50    

While these two books have a common theme of shelter, their inhabitants are poles apart. We are looking, I suppose, at high culture with millions of bucks behind it and a kind of DIY counterculture, where one manages to make a picturesque home with few bits from the tip, cadging some car cases (carcasses?) from an importer and bolting the whole caboodle on the back of an old truck to take to the dusty road.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: architecture, art and photography, arts and culture, biography, history

Writing Decolonisation, Rewriting Sovereignty

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Emma Gattey

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 120pp, $14.99; Imagining Decolonisation by Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Rebecca Kiddle, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 184pp, $14.99

Until relatively recently, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) seemed like one of literary and academic Aotearoa’s best-kept secrets. Whether parsing the poetry of Robert Sullivan, tracing the genealogical and creative connections between Māori and Pacific peoples, reformulating methodologies for Indigenous biography, history and literary scholarship, or dissecting the alienation of not-quite-belonging in either the English Department or Māori Studies, she is some kind of genius. And then she was awarded a Marsden Fund grant, published Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, contributed a heartrending chapter to Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface (Otago University Press, 2021) and delivered the 2021 Michael King Memorial Lecture. Irrepressible. With the publication of this accessible BWB Text alongside her other projects, Te Punga Somerville will be recognised as an invaluable public intellectual for so-called ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific, reviews and essays

A Stubborn Kind of Integrity

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Enough Horizon: The life and work of Blanche Baughan by Carol Markwell (The Cuba Press, 2021), 324pp, $40

Logs, at the door, by the fence; logs, broadcast over the paddock;

Sprawling in motionless thousands away down the green of the gully,

Logs, grey-black. And the opposite rampart of ridges

Bristles against the sky, all the tawny, tumultuous landscape

Is stuck, and prickled, and spiked with the standing black and grey splinters,

Strewn, all over its hollows and hills, with the long, prone, grey-black logs.

—from ‘A Bush Section’, B.E. Baughan (1870–1958)   [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history

The Enchantments of Uncertainty

February 1, 2022 1 Comment

Emma Gattey

Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2020), 176pp., $30; Love America: On the trail of writers & artists in New Mexico by Jenny Robin Jones (Calico Publishing, 2020), 211pp., $36.95

Having read Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquillity and Ruin, I more completely understand why Kim Hill is such a fan; he’s erudite (verging on the polymathic), darkly hilarious, self-deprecating, supremely uncertain—and willing to excavate the depths of those uncertainties. These winning traits feature not only in his frequent Saturday Morning appearances, but also in his comic noir novels and now this essay collection. He’s a superb thinker and writer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, politics, reviews and essays, social sciences

The Decade That Never Dies

December 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s by Murray Edmond (Atuanui Press, 2021), 360pp, $38

My father, who served on the Hamilton City Council, told me Council had two rules: the first, ‘Spend No Money’ and the second, if you really had to spend money, ‘Give the Job to your Mates.’

Murray Edmond’s cultural history Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, crammed full of anecdotes like the above, is really a story of two decades. It charts the seismic shift in New Zealand from the monoculturalism, conformism and emotional repression of the 1950s to the participatory happenings, internationalism and upbeat optimism of the late 1960s. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. [Read more…]

Filed Under: arts and culture, history

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