Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Hear Our Voices

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Giovanni Tiso 

The Broken Estate by Mel Bunce (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 224pp., $14.99; Student Political Action in New Zealand by Sylvia Nissen (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 168pp., $14.99

To receive reliable information about the world; and to be able to act on this information to change how society works. These basic conditions for democracy are the subject of two new books in Bridget Williams’ Texts series. Mel Bunce’s The Broken Estate explores the state of contemporary journalism, asking whether it is still (or ever was) equipped to fulfil its dual role of informing the public and helping to produce imagined communities. Sylvia Nissen’s Student Political Action in New Zealand examines the realities faced by young people undertaking university education and how these shape or constrain their political expression.  [Read more…]

Confronting the Dark Past

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Lachy Paterson

The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 272 pp., $39.99

Much of New Zealand history lies as yet untouched, and a topic once covered may sit for a generation before another historian picks through the archives again. New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonial wars are a notable exception, with Vincent O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa now added to a long list of titles, some of which are still in print. If, as suggested in the New Zealand Herald (6/12/2018), our ‘violent colonial past’ had been forgotten, this surely is hardly the fault of New Zealand historians. [Read more…]

In the Front Seat

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Helen Watson White

Women Equality Power: Selected speeches from a life of leadership by Helen Clark (Allen & Unwin, 2018), 430 pp., $45

On the eve of Labour’s candidate selection meeting in April 1980, Helen Clark was preparing to present herself, in competition with six men, as a possible successor to Warren Freer in Mount Albert. Some 20 years on, in Brian Edwards’ book Helen: Portrait of a prime minister (Exisle, 2001), Mike Williams describes her practising her speech in the kitchen that night: ‘There’s a phrase in that speech that sticks in my mind, which was, “I don’t think you should select me because I’m a woman. However, I don’t think you should not select me because I’m a woman.” It was a very, very good speech.’ [Read more…]

Suspended Dreamlike

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Simone Kaho

The Farewell Tourist by Alison Glenny (Otago University Press, 2018), 77 pp., $27.50; Night Music by Harvey Molloy (Black Giraffe Press, 2018), 88pp., $25

Two collections, two worlds; Alison Glenny’s first book and Harvey Molloy’s third. The books connected by a centering of natural forces, use of a narrative frame and their characters’ attempts to reconcile the cosmic with the real, to grasp at glimmers of divinity with an animal derived mind.

The world Glenny creates in The Farewell Tourist is as complete and consistent as one would expect from a novel, calling to mind proponents of fragmented narrative poetry: Charles Simic, Lynn Jenner and Selima Hill. While the collection sustains a narrative, it is a mysterious and unknowable one, built around the waning love between a nameless ‘she’ and ‘he’. [Read more…]

Rescuing Sex Work from Stigma

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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…]