Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Honour and Honesty 

Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman by Alexander Aitken (Auckland University Press, 2018), 264 pp., $39.99; The Anzac Violin: Alexander Aitken’s story by Jennifer Beck and Robyn Belton (Scholastic, 2018), 36 pp., $27.99

For the ordinary infantryman in World War I, a period of ‘active service’ was lived in two modes: you were either engaged in fighting at close range, or you were waiting. In waiting mode you could be travelling to a battle site, the location of which was a mystery, or you had arrived, and remained mystified. This is the much-repeated scenario in Alexander Aitken’s memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman, first published in 1963 and now re-issued with an introduction, chronology, notes and commentary by Alex Calder. [Read more…]

Rescuing Sex Work from Stigma

Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton, (Otago University Press, 2018), 286 pp., $45

Oral history took off from the 1970s as a way of recording the lives of those who were absent from the written record. Prostitution has, in fact, never been absent from the written record: in nineteenth-century Britain there was an explosion of interest in the subject, particularly aroused by W.T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon. Debates raged over licensing, regulation and ‘instrumental rape’ – the latter referring to compulsory examination of women under the notorious Contagious Diseases Act (also introduced in New Zealand), which focused on women only while male clients went scot-free. But while much ink was split on the issue, prostitutes themselves were rarely given a voice: others spoke for them, whether anti-C.D. Act campaigners such as Josephine Butler, or those medical men who believed that venereal diseases could be better controlled through regulation. [Read more…]

The workings of memory

Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee (Victoria University Press, 2018), 336pp., $35

The title Memory Pieces in its starkness is ambiguous, suggesting both an offering of autobiographical fragments and an active process of piecing (or being pieced) together. Gee states on the first page: ‘In writing these pieces I’ve relied on memory, mine and other people’s, rather than research. Where the two conflict I’ve usually gone with memory.’ Memories can be raw and unchanging, but mostly are evolving and unreliable, necessary material for the stories that individuals and families feel compelled to make of their lives.  [Read more…]

How to ease the realm of pain?

Leave a Comment

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…]

Is it me or is it us?

Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an age of loneliness by Jenny Robin Jones (Saddleback, 2018), 248 pp., $39.99

… I grew up without a community, You went to school, you joined Girl Guides, later on the Brethren, But they never felt like communities, or at least not communities that I really belonged to, What would a community you ‘really belonged to’ look like, Utopia? I must admit, I’m interested in utopias. So how come you didn’t belong to the communities you joined? Perhaps I didn’t understand the rules or perhaps I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted. 

In this book Jenny Robin Jones has invited you into her living room, where she has pulled every book out of her well-cultured bookshelf. They fall open on the floor – history, sociology, poetry, some old photo albums. She makes you a cup of coffee. She makes a new and willing friend of you. You sit down in the midst of it all and she starts talking … [Read more…]