Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

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…]

Hornby, Dinky, Tonka and Torro

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hello-girls-and-boysNicholas Reid

Hello Girls and Boys! A New Zealand Toy Story, by David Veart (Auckland University Press, 2014), 314 pp., $65

When I was a kid I lived next door to a boy who loved trolleys. He did not have just one homemade trolley, but a small fleet of them. Because he lived on a generous-sized property (or at least generous by the standards of suburban Auckland) he was able to play with his fleet down a long tree-lined driveway, on a grass sward next to his big brother’s vegetable patch and on a concrete path in front of his parents’ house. In fact he called his trolleys his bus company. He had drawn up schedules and timetables for the different routes his ‘buses’ took, and had given each trolley a destination board and number. Once or twice I remember being a passenger on one of his ‘buses’ as he pushed me on a bus route, puffing and making engine noises and the occasional anachronistic tram-sounding clang-clang.

Not surprisingly, the boy grew up to spend part of his adult life as a bus-driver. [Read more…]

Bookplates, Stamps and Signatures

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hocken_prince_of_collectors_donald_kerrIain Sharp

Hocken: Prince of Collectors, by Donald Kerr (Otago University Press, 2015), 424 pp., $60

The first thing one notices about Donald Kerr’s handsome new appreciation of Dunedin bibliophile Thomas Morland Hocken is its expanse: 300 pages of body text, followed by 100 closely printed pages of appendices, notes and bibliography. In Otago University Press’s previous excursion into this territory – The Fascinating Folly: Dr Hocken and his fellow collectors (1961) – Eric McCormick dealt not only with the doctor’s bookish fixations but also those of the country’s other two pre-eminent library donors, Sir George Grey and Alexander Turnbull (i.e. the entire ‘Holy Trinity’, to employ Kerr’s reverential phrase), in just 40 wryly worded pages. Where McCormick was content with a mandarin overview, however, Kerr probes steadily into the details of how Hocken chose, acquired and arranged his collection.

In his introduction Kerr apologises for the selective nature of his study. Considerations of space prevented him from providing data on each of the 5200 books, 2800 pamphlets and 650 manuscripts that Hocken bequeathed to the nation. In an ideal world, blessed with readers of unyielding stamina and publishers with limitless resources, Kerr would have furnished us, I am sure, with a multi-volume work.  [Read more…]

Kia Ora, Everybody!

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Gardiner_Kia_Ora_ChiefMichael O’Leary

Parekura Horomia – ‘Kia Ora Chief’, by Wira Gardiner (Huia Publishers, 2014), 448 pp., $45

If there was ever an Apt Phrase Award about its subject in the title of a book, then this biography of Parekura Horomia, with its ringing ‘Kia ora, Chief’, would have to be in the running for top prize. However, I would also add that there is an equally appropriate catchphrase provided by ‘the Chief’ himself, in the way he readily greeted people with ‘Kia ora, everybody!’ For Horomia may have been the Chief, but he also stood with the ordinary people from whom he came. In the book, Gardiner invokes Māori politician Hekia Parata, when she worked for the ‘Chief’: ‘She remembered that he would give the same speeches over and over again, and they seemed to be well received every time – even on the third and fourth hearings, not unlike the time-honoured Monty Python skit: ‘Who’d a-thought 30 years ago …!’ [Read more…]