• Home
  • About
  • Landfall
  • Subscribe
  • Essay competition
  • Kathleen Grattan Award

Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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

Prating in Alien Tongues 

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

ināianei/now by Vaughan Rapatahana (Cyberwit, 2021), 170pp, $25; Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith (The Cuba Press, 2022), 86pp, $25

Among those who care about poetry in Aotearoa, Vaughan Rapatahana should be known particularly for two things. First, he is the most daring poet we have when it comes to seasoning his work with sesquipedalian lingo (that is, million-dollar words). Second, he has a more developed practice than anyone else when it comes to writing translingual poems in te reo Māori and English. His new collection, ināianei/now, offers plenty of examples of both modes, in poems that explore our fractured geopolitics, the dispossession and cultural losses of Māori, and the experience of dividing a life between different countries, as Rapatahana does. [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

Stories to Outlive Us

July 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Emma Espiner 

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface by Jacinta Ruru & Linda Waimarie Nikora (eds) (Otago University Press, 2021), 340pp., $60

Ngā Kete Mātauranga, a collection of stories from twenty-four leading Māori researchers, creates a virtual community for tauira, academics and whānau to experience whakawhanaungatanga with a constellation of scholars who speak to us in their own words. Edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora, this repository of knowledge is the result of a partnership initiative between Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga and the Royal Society Te Apārangi and was published this year by the Otago University Press.

It is moving to encounter so many Māori researchers in one place. Indigenous scholars are thinly spread, often isolated in institutions with little support or recognition, and the contributors to this book relate their personal experience of this lonely reality. In the kōrero whakamutunga which closes the book, the editors remark: ‘We would confidently guess that most university departments today employ maybe one fully tenured Māori academic staff member at best.’ We know from the published work of researchers Tara McAllister, Sereana Naepi, Joanna Kidman, Reremoana Theodore and Olivia Rowley that Māori make up only five percent of academics in our universities.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, politics, social sciences

Gardens for the People! 

May 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

James Beattie 

Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris (Otago University Press, 2020), 284 pp., $45

In Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa, Matt Morris writes affectionately of our love affair with gardens through time. In it, expect to find stories of your uncle and aunty digging spuds or planting kūmara in the back garden, rather than details of the wealthy real estate developer and her husband quaffing cocktails on their mansion’s manicured lawn. Morris draws from wide-ranging archival and published sources, as well as interviews. The result is a fine-grained and touching history of our relationship with gardens. [Read more…]

Filed Under: environment, history, maori and pacific

The Slow Wheels of Justice 

October 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Justice & Race: Campaigns against racism and abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand by Oliver Sutherland (Steele Roberts, 2020), 288pp., $34.99

Professor Emeritus David Williams, in his foreword to this important book, says it ‘is not an easy read’. The book deals with issues around systemic racism in the justice and policing jurisdictions from 1969 to 1986. Heavy topics, yes, but the book, thanks to Oliver Sutherland’s masterful handling of the material, reads like a thriller, peppered with well-known names and events highlighted by newspaper clippings and photographs.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, law, maori and pacific, politics

A Tool of Hope

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Jessica Thompson Carr

Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of resistance, persistence and defiance by Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns (Te Papa Press, 2019), 416 pp., $70

The survival of the objects in these pages has depended on many factors—some exist because of their careful owners, others through luck. – Preface

Growing up, I didn’t have much access to my Māori taonga. Most of the treasures of our whānau were either lost or had disintegrated in the bush, or are now kept in a museum. We learned what we could, and our connection was limited to our mum returning from trips up north with Ngāpuhi T-shirts and bumper stickers. Those were my taonga. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Recent reviews

  • Hug Your Mother, Hold Her
    Vincent O’Sullivan on What Fire by Alice Miller; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman
  • The Killer Gene 
    Erik Kennedy on A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton; Surrender by Michaela Keeble
  • Matrix of Shape-Shifting
    David Eggleton on Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell
  • Parade of Humanity
    Helen Watson White on To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge by Rosemary Riddell
  • Writing Ourselves into Existence
    Laura Toailoa on Sweat and Salt Water: Selected works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa edited and compiled by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson and Terence Wesley-Smith

Subscribe to Landfall Review Online via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to Landfall Review Online and receive notifications of new reviews by email.

Review archive

Reviews by genre

© 2018 Otago University Press. All Rights Reserved. Website by Arts Net

 

Loading Comments...