Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Morphing From Exploration to Conservation

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Tim Saunders

Home is an Island: A writer’s tribute to the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand by Neville Peat (Potton & Burton, 2022), 200pp, $39.99   

You can see an island from wherever you stand in Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe it is one of the islands we live on—‘fish’ or ‘waka’ or ‘anchor’. Perhaps it is one of the offshore islands that surround us, constantly battered by southerly swells, or an island on one of our inland lakes. It could be an island of remoteness and isolation or an island of complex communities. An island of habitation or wilderness. This imagery of islands is central to the sense of ourselves as a nation. [Read more…]

To Re-remember and Re-learn

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Rachel Smith

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2021), 256 pp, $35; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young (Otago University Press, 2021), 288pp, $60

Two very different books, one memoir and one non-fiction, The Forgotten Coast and Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate offer an invitation to look closely at the world we live in—to listen and learn, to understand and re-remember. 

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:

What stories do your dead tell you? How do you see your past? [Read more…]

Earth’s Last Great Wilderness

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Neville Peat

Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica by Rebecca Priestley (Victoria University Press, 2019), 384pp., $40

Despite an inhospitable nature, or maybe simply because it’s a frozen desert, Antarctica attracts an array of superlatives – coldest, windiest, highest, driest, remotest and last-discovered of the planet’s seven continents. Yet another set of descriptors derives from the human activity of recent decades – most pristine, most peaceful, most collaborative.

Yes, collaboration, internationally. As New Zealand’s most famous Antarctic explorer, Sir Edmund Hillary, once said, Antarctica’s extreme environment ‘drives people together’. [Read more…]

An Empty Tent Flapping in the Wind

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cover image for 45 southKathryn Mitchell
45 South: A journey across southern New Zealand, by Laurence Fearnley with photographs by Arno Gasteiger, (Penguin, 2013), 191 pp., $65.00

Our journey in this book begins at Hilderthorpe, where a large boulder marks an invisible line laid down by map-makers: 45 degrees south, halfway between the equator and the south pole. 45 South documents a strong sense of place and time as author Laurence Fearnley, avid kayaker and lover of solitude, takes to the road. Through a dry blustery nor-wester that stirs dust and stings the eyes, past barren hills and valleys punctuated by fresh, green spring growth, and alongside the author, we make camp to gaze at the Orion constellation. Before long we tour on to marvel at the jagged peaks of the Remarkables; kayak down the Eglinton River; and eventually arrive in Fiordland, where we are told a tale of two Te Anau locals who made an unexpected discovery in the caves of Lee Island. The invisibility and yet navigational dependability of the line of the 45th parallel is echoed in Fearnley’s travels as she recounts stories and histories that have left their own ineradicable traces. [Read more…]

Happiest When Specimen Hunting

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Anne Else
The Owl that Fell from the Sky: Stories of a Museum Curator, by Brian Gill
(Awa Press, 2012), 152pp. $35; Flashback: Tales and Treasures of Taranaki, by Andrew Moffat, (Huia Publishers, 2012), 321 pp., NZ$55.
 
In 2013, a museum looks like an increasingly strange idea.  Get together various collections of still, silent objects. These may not be rare or even attractive. Some were once living creatures but are now dead; others were once useful but no longer have a purpose. Put them into a special building where they can be set up in large rooms on mostly still, silent display to the general public. Doesn’t sound much like the twenty-first century, does it?
            Today, up-to-date museums may offer plenty of all-singing, all-dancing computer-generated illusions, but Hollywood always does it better. The museum’s real claim to our attention is simple: what its staff so carefully store, study, catalogue and present to us is not a simulacrum or a hologram, but the real thing. This real thing has unique and remarkable connections to the otherwise unreachable foreign country of the past, or the seemingly familiar but still barely known country we now live in — and off. Faced with our uncomprehending, tech-fed, impatient gaze, the curator’s game is to make these objects and their connections spring to life. And it’s a game still played mostly with words.

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Packaging the Land

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Philippa Jamieson
Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve (Otago University Press) 224 pp. $45; Making Our Place: Exploring Land-use Tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jacinta Ruru, Janet Stephenson and Mick Abbott, (Otago University Press), 243 pp. $45.
 
Although we are becoming an increasingly indoor nation, our wild and natural landscapes, our ‘clean, green’ image, and our agricultural heritage all remain strong in the identity of most New Zealanders. The topics discussed in these two books have wide appeal. Both books address current and contested questions about our use of and relationship with the land, and provide glimpses into history. My concern is that they may be read by only a narrow range of potential readers – mostly by academics and professionals over 40, I suspect, unless interviews, magazine articles, blog posts and so on can draw other readers in.

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