Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

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…]

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…]