Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

An Unstoppable Force

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Helen Watson White 

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, 2021), 276pp, $39.99

When Kate Edger (1857–1935) won a scholarship to enter university, her studies took the form of night classes in a building that was part of Auckland College and Grammar, described by the chairman of the local Education Board as ‘a disused military hut, the floor of which is not quite safe to tread on, the roof of which is open to the sky’. 

Diana Morrow’s richly textured biography of Edger reveals how a few holes in the roof, like notions of male superiority and other forms of bigotry, were never going to deter this young woman from the journey she purposed through higher education and beyond. It is a tale of hopes nurtured, words wielded, values tenaciously held and obstacles overcome. Kate Edger was an unstoppable force, it seems—optimistic, prodigiously hardworking and deeply principled: an evangelical version of the ‘New Woman’, as the liberated female was called in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…]

Stories to Outlive Us

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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…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

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Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

Te Tiriti Then and Now

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Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Waitangi: A Living Treaty by Matthew Wright (Bateman Books, 2019), 296pp, $39.99 

Professor Paul Moon says of the Treaty of Waitangi in his Foreword to this book: ‘The intricate web of colonial policy that was spun in years leading to its signing requires disentangling.’ He notes the Treaty’s evolution and its ‘layers of interpretations and meanings’. Te Tiriti o Waitangi can be seen as a shared idea—or plurality of ideas—one that began in 1840 with 176 words in te reo Māori, 226 words in English; a modest document compared with other founding documents such as the US Declaration of Independence (1337 words) or England’s Magna Carta (4478 words). Today Te Tiriti has morphed into a resolution process dealing with historical grievances as well as more recent issues such as the place of concepts like kaitiakitanga rights in the Exclusive Economic Zone. Te Tiriti has always been attributed with interpretations that stretch beyond the mere meanings of the words. [Read more…]

The Slow Wheels of Justice 

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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…]

A Robot Stole My Economy

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Victor Billot 

Jobs, Robots and Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands by Kinley Salmon (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 304 pp., $39.95

My initial response to this book was one of relief that someone had finally bothered to write about automation from a New Zealand perspective. You would think that a technology shift like this would command strong interest in a small nation vulnerable to external shocks, but there seems to be a lack of accessible information on this topic for non-specialist readers, and this book fills a need.

Author Kinley Salmon is a bright young thinker, a Harvard graduate, an expat economist in Washington, DC, and a self-identified millennial. The cover features endorsements from international bigwigs. The style is conversational: his approach is humane, sensible, pragmatic, understated—relentlessly reasonable in that EnZed kind of way. [Read more…]