Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Owning Nothing

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Denys Trussell

Love & Money: The writer’s cut by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2023), 252pp, $37.99

This novel is serious in its social and political insights, but it lays them out with a comic and satiric vision. Now in its third incarnation, the work was born as a screenplay and became a novel in 2012. It is here published as a rewrite, with the author-as-editor acting as ‘the brute wielding the scalpel’ to make a text that, in this case, is shorter than the original. This is ‘The Writer’s Cut’. [Read more…]

Challenging Racism, Imperialism, Exploitation

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Philip Temple

Comrade: Bill Andersen: A communist, working-class life by Cybèle Locke (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 412pp, $49.99

In the cover photograph for this book, Communist and union leader Bill Andersen, 50 years old, walks foursquare and determined at the head of a union battalion following his release from Mt Eden prison. On 1 July 1974, he had been sent to jail by Justice Peter Mahon, following an application by Waiheke Island ferries boss Leo Dromgoole to have the assets of Andersen’s Northern Drivers’ Union seized. This was prompted by his leadership role in wide union opposition to a long-rolling pay and conditions dispute. The following day, Andersen became ‘the man who stopped Auckland’ when 20,000 workers went on strike in protest, an event described by historian Bert Roth as ‘the greatest display of class solidarity in New Zealand history’. Nearly 10,000 marched with Andersen down Queen Street after his release on 3 July.  [Read more…]

The Enchantments of Uncertainty

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Emma Gattey

Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2020), 176pp., $30; Love America: On the trail of writers & artists in New Mexico by Jenny Robin Jones (Calico Publishing, 2020), 211pp., $36.95

Having read Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquillity and Ruin, I more completely understand why Kim Hill is such a fan; he’s erudite (verging on the polymathic), darkly hilarious, self-deprecating, supremely uncertain—and willing to excavate the depths of those uncertainties. These winning traits feature not only in his frequent Saturday Morning appearances, but also in his comic noir novels and now this essay collection. He’s a superb thinker and writer. [Read more…]

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…]