Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

At War, At Sea

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Nicholas Reid

Tutu Te Puehu: New perspectives on the New Zealand Wars edited by John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (Steele Roberts, 2018) 524pp, $49:99; New Zealand and the Sea: Historical perspectives edited by Frances Steel (Bridget Williams Books, 2018) 384 pp, $59:99 

Basically, there are three types of history book. The poorly researched, opportunistic kind knocked off for the general reader. The well-researched, scholarly kind, written for the general reader. And the well-researched, scholarly variety, written for specialists. Tutu Te Puehu is definitely scholarly and well-researched, but I am not sure if it comes into the second or third category.  [Read more…]

Confronting the Dark Past

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Lachy Paterson

The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 272 pp., $39.99

Much of New Zealand history lies as yet untouched, and a topic once covered may sit for a generation before another historian picks through the archives again. New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonial wars are a notable exception, with Vincent O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa now added to a long list of titles, some of which are still in print. If, as suggested in the New Zealand Herald (6/12/2018), our ‘violent colonial past’ had been forgotten, this surely is hardly the fault of New Zealand historians. [Read more…]

A History of Historicisation

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Caitlin Lynch

Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen by Annabel Cooper (Otago University Press, 2018), 322 pp., $49.95

Over the past few years in Aotearoa New Zealand there has been increasing demand from high-school students, iwi representatives, academics and musicians alike for a more nuanced, meaningful acknowledgement of the colonial conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their legacies. Annabel Cooper’s Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen is part of the answer to that demand. Cooper’s book is not a war history; aside from a succinct, three-page overview of the New Zealand Wars in the introduction, the book’s focus begins in 1925, nearly a decade after their (debatably) final conflict. Instead, and equally as important, the book is a history of historicisation: of how the New Zealand Wars have been remembered, negotiated, re-enacted, represented, viewed, taught and mythologised through film and television over the last century – and by whom. [Read more…]

How to ease the realm of pain?

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Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Ko Taranaki te Maunga by Rachel Buchanan (BWB Texts, 2018) 152 pp., $14.99

In keeping with the concept of Bridget Williams Books (BWB) Texts as ‘short books on big subjects’, this book does not intend to be a comprehensive revisiting of the shameful – for Pākehā – Parihaka saga. Instead, Rachel Buchanan tells her deeply personal story of the effects on her family – and in particular her father – of the events leading up to the colonial government’s actions and subsequent denial of justice that was the Parihaka story. The book is both memoir and personal history – highlighting that the saying ‘the personal is political’ applies to decolonisation as well as feminism – sitting alongside factual information and analysis of the events and fallout from the Parihaka invasions, eventual Crown Treaty settlements and the many apologies to Taranaki iwi. I was reminded of Moana Jackson’s brilliant essay titled ‘Globalisation and the Colonising State of Mind’, in which he says, ‘Destroying the world-view and culture of indigenous peoples has always been as important as taking their lives, because the actual process of disempowerment, the key purpose of any colonisation, has to function at the spiritual and psychic level, as well as the physical and political.’1 [Read more…]

A Vocal Wiri

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Karyn Paringatai

Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori women poets in translation, edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis (Seraph Press, 2018), 40 pp., $20

He tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu. He tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa.
The starry hosts of heaven abide there for ever. The hosts of humans on earth pass away into oblivion.

tātai whetū: 1. (noun) constellation, cluster of stars

The ‘stars’ of Tātai Whetū, a collection of seven poems by seven Māori women poets, take the reader on a wistful journey that traverses the boundaries of the spiritual and physical realms. The poets who composed these poems will inevitably pass on from this physical world – he tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa – but their words and thoughts are hung in the metaphysical space of the heavens above as guiding lights never to be extinguished – he tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu.

A highly charged current of feminine strength underlies the poems in this collection. Māori history is rich with narratives featuring strong female figures who defy the odds and are a powerful force to be reckoned with: ‘I heard their karanga, the dawn voice, centuries of women rising up in a vocal wiri from the motu …’ Anahera Gildea reminds us that we are a continuation of those who have gone before us and our karanga will add to the resounding echoes of quivering voices that will be heard for generations to come. [Read more…]