maori and pacific

Ask that Mountain

November 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Te Whiti O Rongomai and the Resistance of Parihaka by Danny Keenan (Huia Publishers, 2015), 275 pp., $45

It is some time since I read Dick Scott’s Ask That Mountain, so Danny Keenan’s book is a welcome refresher, informed as it is by his ancestry, contacts and biography of Te Whiti in the Dictionary of NZ Biography. It is a readable, inspiring but ultimately sad tale about how colonial power and injustice was imposed on Māori. The book is well illustrated by present-day images of Parihaka, and a beautiful 1903 painting of Te Whiti by the artist and photographer James McDonald. The book starts slowly with a chapter on origins and whakapapa, and then gathers momentum. There are some minor quibbles regarding absences in the index and not quite enough mentions of dates to allow the reader to get a sense of chronological progress, but nevertheless this is a welcome addition to the canon of work on our greatest peaceful warrior, whose mana regarding ‘passive resistance’ equals that of Gandhi. [Read more…]

Have I Got Time to Look at This?

October 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

A Beautiful Hesitation by Fiona Pardington, with Kriselle Baker and Aaron Lister and others (Victoria University Press, 2016), 264 pp., $70

Have I got time to look at this? Books of pictures always seem to have a time signature built into them, and from that point of view Fiona Pardington’s A Beautiful Hesitation is a very long book. The ‘score’ is clearly Adagio. You have to give it the time to unfold, to enable you to engage with at least some of the layers of meaning and beauty it contains. A Beautiful Hesitation has, for me, a whole weave of significations; it must be approached slowly and with respect. There is no quick spasm of ecstasy here; we’re in for the long haul.

Peter Ireland remarks in a slightly bitchy review of the accompanying exhibition on the EyeContact website that it is unusual and possibly dangerous to do mid-career survey exhibitions, feeling that they can ‘suddenly clarify nagging doubts about an artist’s general approach, and begin to settle questions about the depth of the philosophic and conceptual claims made for their work’. Seems a good idea to me here, actually, as it does mark a kind of mid-career milestone in this artist’s chequered and varied output. As for the book, sumptuous and well made it certainly is, with immaculate reproductions, good editorial calls, and an important typographic contribution by the artist’s brother (and also a photographer) Neil Pardington. [Read more…]

Awa, Maunga, Iwi, Waka

September 1, 2016 1 Comment

David Eggleton

Māori Art: History, architecture, landscape and theory by Rangīhiroa Panoho (Bateman, 2015), 352 pp., $89.99

Māori Art: History, architecture, landscape and theory is, as the book’s convoluted subtitle might suggest, a somewhat lumpy assemblage: an idiosyncratic if entertaining gathering of themes and examples lashed together raft-like in support of its aim, which is to construct a Māori-centric art history. A book long in the gestation – it was originally commissioned in 1993 – and then, it seems, almost as long in finding a sympathetic publisher, it has an undeniably epic quality, a grandeur of conception, supported by high production values. It’s a solid, substantial volume. [Read more…]

Perpetrator, Judge and Jury

March 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Gerry 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

December 1, 2015 2 Comments

Edmund 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…]