Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

How to ease the realm of pain?

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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…]

Urgent Challenges

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Giovanni Tiso

Fair Borders? Migration policy in the twenty-first century, edited by David Hall (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 240 pp., $14; Sea Change: Climate politics and New Zealand by Bronwyn Hayward (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 120 pp., $14; Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific futures by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 256 pp., $14.99

The Texts series by Bridget Williams Books has come to occupy a distinctive place on the New Zealand publishing scene, putting out a steady stream of short, timely interventions on a wide range of social and political topics. The hallmark of these ‘short books on big subjects’ is their accessibility, both in terms of the price point and of the clear instruction to the authors to present their ideas to a broad, non-specialist public. In this review I consider three recent titles that exemplify the aims of the series and the vision of publisher Tom Rennie. [Read more…]

Disobedient Preaching

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Bernard Beckett

Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and creating change in education by Welby Ings (Otago University Press, 2017), 208 pp., $35

I sit firmly within the demographic of Welby Ings’ target audience. I am closing in on thirty years of working in secondary-school classrooms, and have not yet outgrown my knack of annoying management upon occasion. Schools are ridiculous, frustrating places, without a doubt, yet viewed through just the right lens, they are inspiring places too. Disobedient Teaching is largely an exercise in constructing just such a lens, not so that we can forgive schools their foolishnesses, but so that we can maintain our optimism and effectiveness in the face of them. This is a book that seeks to offer a warm hug of reassurance to teachers everywhere who lie awake at night wondering ‘Why do I bother?’ – and there are plenty of those. [Read more…]

Where the Four Winds Wend

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Vaughan Rapatahana

South D Poet Lorikeet by Jenny Powell (Cold Hub Press, 2017), 97 pp., $29.95; Walking to Jutland Street by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $27.50; The Light and Dark in Our Stuff by Mere Taito (MT Productions, 2016), 30 pp., $10; He’s So MASC by Chris Tse (Auckland University Press, 2018), 84 pp., $29.99

Four collections of poetry, four different Kiwi publishers; four disparate poetic gusts.

I alphabetise this review, for I found not a lot in common between the collections: there is no common seam that threads through all – although for several poets here, we will certainly see a great deal more of their work, such is their merit. [Read more…]

The Great Depression and Collective Memory

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Cybèle Locke

The Broken Decade: Prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand, 1928–39, by Malcolm McKinnon (Otago University Press, 2016), 556 pp., $49.95

In this magisterial account of the 1930s Depression, Malcolm McKinnon aims to disturb the historical orthodoxy which depicts a conflict between the powerless and powerful – ‘We and They’ – ‘in which the “little guy” finally wins’. The first Labour government transforms the conservative political climate of the early 1930s into a ‘collectivist and interventionist one’ after 1935. McKinnon begins in 1928, which enables an exploration of the continuities between Joseph Ward’s expansive pre-Depression policies and those rapidly introduced by the Labour government during its first term in office.  [Read more…]