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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Neither Just Nor Fair

September 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Tom Brooking

The Fate of the Land Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori political struggle in the Liberal era 1891–1912 by Danny Keenan (Massey University Press, 2023), 328pp, $65

This is a timely book because it adds much to the distressing story of the concerted Māori effort to slow the alienation of their land and reveals more about this key tussle than has formally been available. Keenan builds on, critiques and extends the work of several Pākehā historians including Keith Sorrenson, Alan Ward, W.H. Oliver, Judith Binney, Graham Butterworth, Paul Moon, Richard Hill, the legal historians David Williams and Richard Boast, and the geographer J.S. Duncan, all of whom criticised Keith Sinclair for claiming that the Liberals paid a ‘fair’ price for Māori land. Ranginui Walker’s major biography of Āpirana Ngata and Joe Pere’s work on farming on the East Coast also added much useful information on the continued battle waged by Ngata on behalf of Ngāti Porou. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

A Trojan Horse

June 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

Proof Positive

May 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: fiction, maori and pacific, Uncategorized

The Tilted Playing Field

May 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: essays, maori and pacific, social sciences

We Were the Wall of a Pātaka

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

Matrix of Shape-Shifting

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: art and photography, maori and pacific

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