Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Tilted Playing Field

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David Eggleton

Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 256pp, $39.99

Behind the facade of ‘nice New Zealand’ racial discrimination festers away at every level of society, though often in subtle, circuitous, complex ways, and despite so-called affirmative action. One in every three complaints to the Human Rights Commission currently concerns racial discrimination. In November 2022, after his defeat at the polling booths, Auckland Mayoral candidate Efeso Collins, who is of Sāmoan and Tokelauan descent, and was for a time the front-runner, said polling research showed that ‘the race factor’ was a key reason for his loss to Wayne Brown, who implicitly played ‘the race card’. [Read more…]

Difficult Histories

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244

Emma Gattey

Kārearea by Māmari Stephens (Bridget Williams Books, 2021), 146pp, $14.99; Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, denial and New Zealand history by Joanna Kidman, Vincent O’Malley, Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 184pp, $14.99

One of Aotearoa’s swiftest birds of prey, the kārearea (New Zealand falcon or sparrowhawk), is beautiful, lethal and a threatened species. Māmari Stephens (Te Rarawa) named her blog after this bird because ‘the kārearea’s flight above has a comforting distance from the ground’, a distance she wished to gain through publishing her opinions anonymously. Thankfully, this initial anonymity gave way to self-identification. Her writing in Kārearea exemplifies the whakataukī, ‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini’ (‘My success is not mine alone, but is the strength of many’). As a legal scholar, writer, Anglican priest and wahine Māori, Stephens is incredibly aware of her social reproductive, intellectual and emotional debts to her community. This is a humble book. Through writing these pieces, Stephens realises the extent to which her ‘writing needs the people and experiences I come from, if my words are to make any sense at all’. [Read more…]

Revolution Matters

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Philip Matthews

Jumping Sundays: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, 2022), 408pp, $49.99

Nick Bollinger’s rich new history of New Zealand counterculture, Jumping Sundays, is named for the initially spontaneous weekly occupations or liberations of Albert Park in Auckland in the distant spring of 1969. Bollinger paints a picture and it is bucolic and innocent, like a scene from Tolkien: ‘A rock band played on the rotunda. Some people held hands, some danced alone, some sat under trees with guitars, flutes and bongos and made music of their own. They wore kaftans, ponchos and leather-fringed jerkins, floppy hats, headbands, beads and flowers’. It seems at first to be an unthreatening, inclusive and pleasant local imitation of similar scenes that unfolded a year or two earlier in less sedate countries, but there are police keeping watch on the edges of the park. [Read more…]

To Re-remember and Re-learn

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Rachel Smith

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2021), 256 pp, $35; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young (Otago University Press, 2021), 288pp, $60

Two very different books, one memoir and one non-fiction, The Forgotten Coast and Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate offer an invitation to look closely at the world we live in—to listen and learn, to understand and re-remember. 

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:

What stories do your dead tell you? How do you see your past? [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…]

I Am Here

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Shana Chandra 

Times Like These by Michelle Langstone (Allen & Unwin, 2021), 256pp, $36.99; The Commercial Hotel by John Summers (Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

I read to find my own hand in the pages of books. In the future, I want to keep holding books. To touch myself on each page saying, I am here, I am here, I am here. —Ocean Vuong

Just when I was trying to compose sentences to write about Michelle Langstone’s Times Like These and John Summers’ The Commercial Hotel, I happened upon this quote, from American poet Ocean Vuong. With words far better than mine, Vuong was able to encapsulate what it was like for me to read these two collections of non-fiction essays. Like him, in reading these authors’ words I too touched myself on their pages. Vuong reminded me of the exact alchemy of why we read and love books: it’s the magic of not finding ourselves alone. [Read more…]