Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Ask that Mountain

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te_whiti_keenanGerry Te Kapa Coates

Te Whiti O Rongomai and the Resistance of Parihaka by Danny Keenan (Huia Publishers, 2015), 275 pp., $45

It is some time since I read Dick Scott’s Ask That Mountain, so Danny Keenan’s book is a welcome refresher, informed as it is by his ancestry, contacts and biography of Te Whiti in the Dictionary of NZ Biography. It is a readable, inspiring but ultimately sad tale about how colonial power and injustice was imposed on Māori. The book is well illustrated by present-day images of Parihaka, and a beautiful 1903 painting of Te Whiti by the artist and photographer James McDonald. The book starts slowly with a chapter on origins and whakapapa, and then gathers momentum. There are some minor quibbles regarding absences in the index and not quite enough mentions of dates to allow the reader to get a sense of chronological progress, but nevertheless this is a welcome addition to the canon of work on our greatest peaceful warrior, whose mana regarding ‘passive resistance’ equals that of Gandhi. [Read more…]

A Post-Quake City

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the_villa_at_the_edge_farrellAndrew Paul Wood

The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2015), 363 pp., $40

Fiona Farrell’s The Villa at the Edge of the Empire comes from a place of anger, though that doesn’t really become apparent until quite some way into the book. Part polemic, part psychogeography, part memoir, it consists of four, long, themed sections divided into a hundred very short – perhaps too short – chapters. It’s a response to quake-struck and post-quake Christchurch (a companion piece of sorts to her The Broken Book of 2011), which becomes the hub about which much intellectual and emotional meandering takes place, considering the ‘idea’ of cities.  [Read more…]

Blood and Guts in Wartime

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mclean_ricketts_penguin_book_of_nz_war_writingDavid Eggleton

The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (Penguin Random House, 2015), 602 pp., $65; Calls to Arms: New Zealand society and commitment to the Great War by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, 2014), 336 pp., $40; How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War, edited by Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, 2014), 289 pp., $40; The Anzacs: An inside view of New Zealanders at Gallipoli: Photographs from the Auckland War Museum, with essays by Damien Fenton and Shaun Higgins (Penguin Random House, 2015), 244 pp., $45; The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington: Dissent and conformity in Wartime New Zealand by John Pratt (Otago University Press, 2016), 204 pp., $39.95

Our overfamiliarity with the bromides – war is futile, war is hell, every war is like every other war, no soldier returns the same from the battlefield – means it’s difficult for the genre of war literature to make it new, or to be pertinent as literature to anyone beyond the specialist or the obsessive. The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing is an anthology that gets around this to a certain extent by concentrating on one particular truism and using that as a thematic thread: namely, war is the forge of national identity. The selections, chosen by literary historian Harry Ricketts and cultural historian Gavin McLean, are mostly crisply edited and tightly focused. Theirs is a hefty tome: a semi-chronological echo chamber of war stories, reportage, reminiscences, documentation and latter-day analysis covering nearly 400 years. It is a book aimed at the general reader, with brief endnotes, a basic bibliography and a serviceable index. [Read more…]

Perpetrator, Judge and Jury

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kupapa_the_bitter_legacy_crosbieGerry Te Kapa Coates

Kūpapa: The Bitter Legacy of Māori Alliances with the Crown by Ron Crosbie (Penguin Random House, 2015) 504 pp., $65

Ron Crosby is a barrister with a keen interest in Māori history, and a recent member of the Waitangi Tribunal. He also is the author of The Musket Wars (1999), which is about the conflict between Māori in the two decades before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. These violent conflicts were spurred by the introduction of firearms as a new weapon, allowing old grievances between iwi to be addressed at a level not seen before, and leaving their own ‘bitter legacy’, the precursor of the Māori alliances with the Crown resulting from the Land Wars from 1845 to 1870. These alliances with the Crown were as flexible and pragmatic as those between iwi or hapū. [Read more…]

Connecting Places, Ancestors, Gods with the Present

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the-lives-of-colonial-objectsEdmund Bohan

The Lives of Colonial Objects, edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (Otago University Press, 2015), 368 pp., $50

The inspiration for this beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated essay collection, described by its three editors as one ‘in which objects serve as pathways into New Zealand’s colonial history’, comes originally from Neil MacGregor’s celebrated best-selling book A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), itself based on a groundbreaking collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. The occasion for this book’s conception, however, was the 2013 conference on ‘Colonial Objects’ at Dunedin’s Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, whose themes were described as the ‘material circumstances’ of colonial life; and while there were 70 papers given, only 50 are included here, and of those, some were not actually presented at the conference. [Read more…]