Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Disobedient Preaching

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Bernard Beckett

Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and creating change in education by Welby Ings (Otago University Press, 2017), 208 pp., $35

I sit firmly within the demographic of Welby Ings’ target audience. I am closing in on thirty years of working in secondary-school classrooms, and have not yet outgrown my knack of annoying management upon occasion. Schools are ridiculous, frustrating places, without a doubt, yet viewed through just the right lens, they are inspiring places too. Disobedient Teaching is largely an exercise in constructing just such a lens, not so that we can forgive schools their foolishnesses, but so that we can maintain our optimism and effectiveness in the face of them. This is a book that seeks to offer a warm hug of reassurance to teachers everywhere who lie awake at night wondering ‘Why do I bother?’ – and there are plenty of those. [Read more…]

The Beginnings of Provincial Identities

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Jane McCabe

Acknowledge No Frontier: The creation and demise of New Zealand’s provinces, 1853–76, by André Brett (Otago University Press, 2016), 346pp, $45

The provincial system is undoubtedly an aspect of New Zealand history that was overdue for scholarly attention. The lack of close historical treatment to the semi-federal system that divided the colony into six provincial legislatures is surprising given the formative phase that it represents – where colonial administration moved beyond a formal treaty with Māori and into the complicated business of the development of land, infrastructure and economy. The violence and conflict that attended appropriation of land has rightly preoccupied historians of this period. In contrast, the blind spot around provincial politics can be attributed to a kind of common-sense consensus about this short-lived system. In a field where histories have (until recently) been primarily framed around the nation, the provinces are regarded as a brief and explainable blip on the road to a strong central government.   [Read more…]

How to Inhabit a Place

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extraordinary_anywhere_horrocks_and_laceyPat White

Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on place from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Ingrid Horrocks and Cherie Lacey (Victoria University Press, 2016), 222 pp., $40

Extraordinary Anywhere consists of sixteen essays, a ten-page introduction jointly signed by the editors, and a response essay by Martin Edmond: 222 pages of prose in all.

Edmond writes that in order ‘to investigate something properly we need … archives, dreams, memories’. That was expressed in another way some decades ago by the American author Wendell Berry, who suggested that ‘we have to know where we are before we know who we are’ – in other words develop a sense of deep culture, human or otherwise. An individual, he is saying, needs to explore the physical, historical and ‘storied’ environment of a place before he/she can truly place themselves there. We can use either of these statements as parameters with which to consider the contents of the volume, because they suggest a movement beyond the superficial from the essayist. [Read more…]

Raising the Standard

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The Interregum Morgan GodferyDenis Harold

The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand, edited by Morgan Godfrey, with Andrew Dean, Max Harris, Lamia Imam, Chloe King, Daniel Kleinsman, Edward Miller, Courtney Sina Meredith, Carrie Stoddart-Smith, Wilbur Townsend, and Holly Walker (Bridget Williams Books Texts, 2016), 172 pp, $14.99

This roughly hewn gem of a book of essays is not a primer for revolution but it is a flyer for the transformation of New Zealand’s dominant neoliberal economic and social order into a state more equal and just. The title The Interregnum, borrowed from a famous quote by the pre-Second World War Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, though somewhat obscure, is apt. In this in-between time, following the withering of the welfare state and the rampant growth of inequality, there is a need for and prospect of radical changes. [Read more…]

A Post-Quake City

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the_villa_at_the_edge_farrellAndrew Paul Wood

The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2015), 363 pp., $40

Fiona Farrell’s The Villa at the Edge of the Empire comes from a place of anger, though that doesn’t really become apparent until quite some way into the book. Part polemic, part psychogeography, part memoir, it consists of four, long, themed sections divided into a hundred very short – perhaps too short – chapters. It’s a response to quake-struck and post-quake Christchurch (a companion piece of sorts to her The Broken Book of 2011), which becomes the hub about which much intellectual and emotional meandering takes place, considering the ‘idea’ of cities.  [Read more…]