Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Architect of a Compassionate Society

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Tom Brooking Richard SeddonEdmund Bohan

Richard Seddon, King of God’s Own: The life and times of New Zealand’s longest-serving prime minister by Tom Brooking (Penguin Books, 2014), 584 pp., $65

At a mayoral reception during my first visit to St Helens in Lancashire in 1966, I was, when identified as a New Zealander, proudly ushered by the mayor into his parlour to admire the vast portrait over its fireplace of the town’s most famous son: Richard John Seddon, Premier of New Zealand from 1893 until his death in 1906, renowned throughout the British Empire and subsequently regarded by many as our greatest prime minister; a gigantic figure in our historiography but one around whom myths and legends clustered to all but obscure the real man.

In modern times he has earned equal obloquy for both his racism and his jingoistic imperialism from revisionists who insist on evaluating historical personalities – especially nineteenth-century ones – in the light of their own currently fashionable assumptions. In this superbly researched biography, however, Tom Brooking places Seddon firmly inside his own time and has stripped away many of the myths to reveal the man to be an even greater figure, in so many ways, than legend has hitherto claimed; and he has done that through sound, common-sense and objective analysis of facts. He has undoubtedly thrown down the gauntlet to fellow academics. Fierce, and characteristically vituperative, academic debate about this ‘King Dick’ is likely to enliven our university history departments for some time. [Read more…]

Maoriland

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sorrenson ko te whenua te utu: land is the priceNicholas Reid
Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99

Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays on Maori history, land and politics’, as his collection Ko Te Whenua Te Utu is subtititled. For over 30 years a leading light in the University of Auckland’s history department, he was also for 25 years a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, weighing submissions and contributing to those voluminous reports which, in his Epilogue, he calls New Zealand’s ‘largest exercise in public history ever undertaken’ (p. 299). Considering the matter of whether Pākehā can ever validly write Māori history, Sorrenson concedes in his introduction that ‘the most outstanding Maori history written in recent years’ was written by a Pākehā, Judith Binney. Nevertheless, being himself of mixed Māori and Pākehā descent, Sorrenson also claims to have a ‘personal motive’ in his long scholarly engagement with Māori politics and land ownership, ‘since I had been nurtured on stories of the alienation of the last remnants of my mother’s Maori land’.

Ko Te Whenua Te Utu comprises 13 essays, public lectures and commissioned reports, which Sorrenson has written over more than half a century, between 1956 and 2011. The earliest, from 1956, is ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’. It is modified section of Sorrenson’s MA thesis, and argues that the loss of land and disruption of the social cohesion of tribes were major causes of the decline in Māori population in the late nineteenth century. The most recent, from 2011, is ‘Folkland to Bookland’, examining the career of the nineteenth-century bureaucrat F.D. Fenton (first chief judge of the Native Land Court), who likened the loss of Māori customary tenure of land, and its transference into personalised title, to the loss of the ‘commons’ in Tudor England. [Read more…]

The Meteor of New Zealand and the Red Star of China

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White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Zeng DazhengDenis Harold
White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Zeng Dazheng (Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2014), 384 pp., $55

The subject of White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 is vast, even daunting, a fable of an elephant and a flea, yet this book succeeds not only because of the thoroughness of the research but also because it has the virtues of good fiction: vivid particularisation, the density of lived lives.

Stevan Eldred-Grigg (with Zeng Dazheng) interweaves events and significant actors, treatises and opinions, treaties, acts of parliaments and statistics. Overarching theories are set up only to be undermined by counter evidence, by competing voices. By the third chapter I was caught up in the dynamic process of a text that is interleaved with well-chosen images. The authors engage with the scholarship on the topic, referencing James Ng’s work and acknowledging the Otago University academic Brian Moloughney’s ‘valuable feedback’. They also have ‘drawn heavily’ on the works of a further nine authorities, including Charles Sedgewick whose ‘thesis remains to this day the only serious work looking closely at the politics within Cantonese New Zealand’. [Read more…]

Fanny and Fitz

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cover of FitzEdmund Bohan
Fitz: The colonial adventures of James Edward FitzGerald, by Jenifer Roberts (Otago University Press, 2014), 392 pp., $40

This is a first-rate and welcome biography of one of the most interesting of all New Zealand’s nineteenth century celebrities and his equally fascinating, multi-talented and adored wife, Fanny Erskine Draper. Jenifer Roberts is an accomplished and experienced English author, and also happens to be one of their numerous direct descendants – a great-great-granddaughter. But rest assured: this is no reverential hagiography. Far from it. This is very much a true ‘warts and all’ life of a man, some of whose legacies are still with us; and perhaps her most interesting reassessment of the ancestor she and other FitzGerald descendants had been taught to idolise, has been to establish that he was certainly bipolar – which explains not only his spectacular mood swings and bouts of depression, but much else about his character. [Read more…]

A White Collar and a Red Tie

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cover image for white collar radEdmund Bohan
White-Collar Radical: Dan Long and the rise of the white-collar unions, by Mark Derby, (Craig Potton Publishing, 2013), 302 pp., $39.99

White-Collar Radical: Dan Long and the rise of the white-collar unions reveals its author Mark Derby writes well, though this is hardly surprising because he is an experienced writer and historian, whose colourful and absorbing Kiwi Companeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War I especially enjoyed. This book, different in every respect, is, although generally admirable, somewhat less satisfying. Commissioned by the Dan Long Memorial Trust and written with the cooperation of the Long family, it doubles as a biography and as a quite detailed history of the Public Service and associated white-collar unions during the often stormy years of the 1950s and 1960s as their size and influence greatly increased. For those of us who maintain that the biographer must put the subject of the biography firmly at the centre of attention throughout the entire work, Dan Long himself is often regrettably absent for far too many pages, as Derby traces with admirable clarity and exhaustive detail the tortuous chronicles of union conflicts, aspirations and reforming campaigns. In doing so, of course, he certainly fulfils the promise of the book’s sub-title, but at the risk of creating a certain imbalance. And commissions themselves, however amicably and generously intended by both those who commission and those who accept them, invariably pose problems of objectivity for any author, as this reviewer knows well from personal experience. [Read more…]