Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Paerau Warbrick
The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 736pp, $69.99
Ned Fletcher’s The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi had its genesis in his colossal law PhD thesis. By and large I did not find the resultant book, given gravitas by sheer bulk, the easiest prose to read. It is a lengthy work organised into four parts, seemingly intended as a general reference for academics. [Read more…]
Michael O’Leary
Kāwai: For such a time as this by Monty Soutar (Bateman Books, 2022), 372pp, $49.99
Takina ou kāwai, kia mohiotia ai ou tupuna—E kimi ana I ngā kāwai i toro ki tawhiti (‘Of a man looking up relatives at a distance’). I begin with a quotation from William Williams’ 1844 Māori-language dictionary definition of the term ‘kāwai’ to emphasise the layered meaningfulness and the aptness of this title for Monty Soutar’s novel, his first. Beginning this way also parallels the author’s approach of using phrases and words in te reo Māori, followed by their English translation. [Read more…]
David Eggleton
Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 256pp, $39.99
Behind the facade of ‘nice New Zealand’ racial discrimination festers away at every level of society, though often in subtle, circuitous, complex ways, and despite so-called affirmative action. One in every three complaints to the Human Rights Commission currently concerns racial discrimination. In November 2022, after his defeat at the polling booths, Auckland Mayoral candidate Efeso Collins, who is of Sāmoan and Tokelauan descent, and was for a time the front-runner, said polling research showed that ‘the race factor’ was a key reason for his loss to Wayne Brown, who implicitly played ‘the race card’. [Read more…]
Andrew Paul Wood
Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan (Bridget William Books, 2022), 256pp, $49.99
Wind the clock back to the early 1800s, when Pākehā have just started establishing a significant presence in Aotearoa. Te Ātiawa hapū has occupied Taranaki for generations, but a new menace has arrived to disturb the peaceful equilibrium: European muskets, and with them, nearly a century of intertribal warfare in North Taranaki.
Te Ātiawa rushed to dismantle the most precious taonga from their carved buildings and hide them in Peropero swamp, intending to retrieve them later. Alas, that did not happen. Those who knew where they were hidden were captured or killed. [Read more…]
David Eggleton
Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022), 392pp, $65
‘The Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea’, the late Moana Jackson writes in his foreword to the book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art. The book is based on the blockbuster exhibition of the same name presented by Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, between December 2020 and May 2021, which took over the entire Gallery building and also spilled out into areas in the downtown Britomart precinct. [Read more…]
This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244
Laura Toailoa
Sweat and Salt Water: Selected works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa edited and compiled by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson and Terence Wesley-Smith (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 221pp, $40
How does one begin to describe the enormity of Teresia Teaiwa? How does one begin to describe the history of this great thinker, writer, teacher, activist and poet? How does one pay a worthy tribute to the woman who made us laugh and cry and feel and fight, in a place where too many Pasifika minds go to die? How does one begin? [Read more…]