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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Stories to Outlive Us

July 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Emma Espiner 

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface by Jacinta Ruru & Linda Waimarie Nikora (eds) (Otago University Press, 2021), 340pp., $60

Ngā Kete Mātauranga, a collection of stories from twenty-four leading Māori researchers, creates a virtual community for tauira, academics and whānau to experience whakawhanaungatanga with a constellation of scholars who speak to us in their own words. Edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora, this repository of knowledge is the result of a partnership initiative between Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga and the Royal Society Te Apārangi and was published this year by the Otago University Press.

It is moving to encounter so many Māori researchers in one place. Indigenous scholars are thinly spread, often isolated in institutions with little support or recognition, and the contributors to this book relate their personal experience of this lonely reality. In the kōrero whakamutunga which closes the book, the editors remark: ‘We would confidently guess that most university departments today employ maybe one fully tenured Māori academic staff member at best.’ We know from the published work of researchers Tara McAllister, Sereana Naepi, Joanna Kidman, Reremoana Theodore and Olivia Rowley that Māori make up only five percent of academics in our universities.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, politics, social sciences

‘The worst thing you can ever do’

July 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

Loss Adjustment by Linda Collins (Awa Press, 2020), 300pp., $40

‘I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you,’ writes 17-year-old Victoria. ‘Killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.’

Fifteen days later, and six pages into Loss Adjustment, that okay-ness shatters what should have been just another school day, when New Zealand journalist Linda Collins and her partner, photographer Malcolm McLeod, are driven the short distance from their Singapore apartment to find their daughter lying broken and lifeless on a concrete-tiled path. 

Their world stops; their lives slam into a wall of confusion, despair, irresolvable grief.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: memoir, social sciences

A Little Bridge 

November 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Breton Dukes

The Stories of Eileen Duggan edited by Helen J. O’Neill with an introduction by John Weir (Victoria University Press, 2019), 342pp, $35

 

Let’s start with a shallow dive. Here’s Duggan describing two siblings in ‘The Solvent’:

Both were tireless workers. Those great bones of theirs could bend to burdens that would cow others. And in them was a broody touchiness where others were concerned, combined with a cuttle-fish skin when they hurt others. They never forgot underneath. Their resentments were like eels rising and uncoiling when the waters were stirred again

Eileen Duggan. Irish, Catholic. Born 1894. Raised in Tua Marina, just north of Blenheim. In her time, New Zealand’s most famous poet. ‘The greatest woman poet of this age,’ said the Dublin Review; ‘Exceptional,’ said the New York Times; ‘Doing for us what Katherine Mansfield did for the short story,’ said Railways Magazine. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, social sciences

A Robot Stole My Economy

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Victor Billot 

Jobs, Robots and Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands by Kinley Salmon (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 304 pp., $39.95

My initial response to this book was one of relief that someone had finally bothered to write about automation from a New Zealand perspective. You would think that a technology shift like this would command strong interest in a small nation vulnerable to external shocks, but there seems to be a lack of accessible information on this topic for non-specialist readers, and this book fills a need.

Author Kinley Salmon is a bright young thinker, a Harvard graduate, an expat economist in Washington, DC, and a self-identified millennial. The cover features endorsements from international bigwigs. The style is conversational: his approach is humane, sensible, pragmatic, understated—relentlessly reasonable in that EnZed kind of way. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, politics, social sciences

He kura kāinga e hokia: he kura tangata e kore e hokia. The treasure of land will persist: human possessions will not

June 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Rebuilding the Kāinga: Lessons from te ao hurihuri by Jade Kake (BWB Texts, 2019), 155 pp., $15; #NoFly: Walking the talk on climate change by Shaun Hendy (BWB Texts ,2019), 130 pp., $15

Jade Kake was raised in Australia by a Māori mother and a Dutch father, and after gaining a Bachelor of Architectural Design from Queensland she moved back to Aotearoa in 2012, where she made contact with her whanaunga Rau Hoskin, a leader in the field of Māori architecture. He encouraged her to do a master’s degree at Auckland University of Technology on papakāinga—a literal embodiment of earth (papa) and kainga (home)—as a model for regeneration of communities in Aotearoa.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism, maori and pacific, politics, social sciences

#I am not a virus

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Mira Harrison 

The Dark Island by Benjamin Kingsbury (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 208pp., $39.99

As I read the final chapter of Benjamin Kingsbury’s history of Quail Island, New Zealand’s leprosy colony, news of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic began to break. Leafing back through the pages to Chapter 1, where Kingsbury describes the first suspicious case of leprosy in New Zealand in 1903, similar themes between these past and present stories of illness, suffering and infection control began to emerge. This prompted consideration of how we – as individuals, as health professionals and in our wider communities – respond to people infected with a contagious disease, and the possible consequences of our reactions for the health and wellbeing of societies across the world.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, social sciences

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