politics – Page 3

Maoriland

March 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Nicholas 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…]

Fanny and Fitz

August 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Edmund 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

May 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Edmund 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…]

Why we are in Afghanistan

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Adam Gifford

Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton Publishing, 2011), 439 pp., $49.99.

New Zealanders may feel anger and betrayal at reading Nicky Hager’s latest installment of their country’s secret history. But for those described by the former United States ambassador to New Zealand Charles Swindells as ‘first worlders’ – the military and foreign affairs officials, business people and politicians who regard New Zealand as a US ally – the anger will stem from the fact that the lid has been lifted on their activities so comprehensively.

The rest of us, those who applauded then-prime minister Helen Clark’s decision to stay out of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, will feel betrayed to find we went anyway, as the diplomatic and military establishment took every opportunity to suck up to the US.

[Read more…]