Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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…]

Overseas Experience

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Flying Kiwis: A history of the OENicholas Reid
Flying Kiwis: A history of the OE, by Jude Wilson (Otago University Press, 2014), 295 pp., $45

I have a confession to make. It must colour my review of Jude Wilson’s Flying Kiwis, a generously illustrated history, in part based on oral interviews, of young New Zealanders going off on their ‘Overseas Experience’ from the 1950s to the present.

Unusually for a middle-class, university-bound New Zealander of my generation, I never took the OE. As an adult I have made five separate trips to Europe, but they were all after marrying and settling down to a job, so none of them really counts as an OE. But the OE was so pervasive in New Zealand that in reading through this book, I was startled to find photos of younger versions of people I know, boozing at the Oktoberfest or lounging about scruffily at London tourist spots. I read Flying Kiwis as somebody who heard all about the OE at second hand, from friends. And there’s another element of personal memory in my reading. When I was a child in the early 1960s, I travelled to Europe with my parents and a selection of siblings. I recognised much of the early1960s milieu that parts of this book evoke: sea-travel, the Overseas Visitors Club, Earl’s Court. But it was because I experienced these things as a child, not as an OE-er.
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Improvers in Trousers

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Lindsay Rabbitt
Unpacking the Kists:The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking and Jim McAloon (Otago University Press, 2013), 412 pp., $70

In the nineteenth century John Polson, my maternal great-great-grandfather, downed tools as a cooper in the herring trade in West Helmsdale and said goodbye to his family at their croft in Marrel, a neighbouring village in Sutherlandshire, Highland Scotland, and sailed for New Zealand/Aotearoa. He arrived in Lyttelton in 1862 and sailed on to Port Chalmers. By chance a fellow passenger, contracted to walk a mob of sheep to Morven Hills Station, fell ill during the journey, and John, with apparently little experience in shepherding, manned up for the gig. Perhaps he travelled the Pig Route to the Maniototo Plains, or alternatively on a track the miners took to the goldfields, starting in Outram, West Taieri, on to the Lammermoor Range at Rocklands, and across the Rock and Pillar and over the Knobby Range, descending to cross the Manuherikia River near Alexandra, then on to Tarras and the Lindis Pass to meet John (Jock) McLean, one of the first leaseholders of Morven Hills who, according to John’s grandson Ian Polson, ‘saw his mettle and employed John as a boundary rider on the spot’. [Read more…]

Dear Antarctica

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Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, by Veronika MedunaAlice Miller
Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, by Veronika Meduna (Auckland University Press, 2012), 225 pp., $59.99; These Rough Notes, by Bill Manhire, Anne Noble, Norman Meehan, and Hannah Griffin (Victoria University Press, 2012), 64 pp., $40.<

A Canadian band I once loved sang an unlikely song about an Antarctic explorer meeting Foucault in Paris. The explorer, having noted Foucault’s resemblance to Shackleton, concludes the meeting with the lines:

thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida
but I must be getting back to dear Antarctica. 

This was my unlikely refrain as I kept returning to these two books, which approach dear Antarctica in very different ways – both trying to haul forth its expansive, freezing mass, its strange inhabitants, searing winds, and wild force of questions. [Read more…]

Smile, Smile, Smile

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Raewyn Alexander

A Woman’s Place: Good Wives, Happy Husbands and Why a Woman’s Work Is Never Done, compiled by Redmer Yska (Penguin, 2013), 128 pp., $24.99; Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890—1975, by Frances Walsh (Godwit Books, 2010), 375 pp., $49.99.

Yellowing and faded ephemera, whimsy, oddities, out-dated information and gender-specific beliefs feature extraordinarily in these two publications. In say 1957, a real woman with three or four children under five, how would she take the cheery ad-world housewife, zooming away chores with a new vacuum cleaner, fresh as a daisy due to castors on her fashionable furniture? 

As a youngster, I wondered in those days what women said during morning teas. Children were always herded outside to play whenever a swish of visitors settled in to sip and chatter. They were fine secret-keepers, the coterie of women my mother cultivated and belonged to. She also mentioned, emphatically, after she’d, ‘Helped with an an old lady who’d passed away’s house, cleaned it up. The things we found.’ I anticipated revelations. But Mum snapped, ‘I went straight home. Cleared out everything I didn’t want left behind, of mine.’
My disappointment was as heavy as any teetering stack of magazines given to charity. (My mother loved the Woman’s Weekly). 
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The Ties that Bind

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Patricia McLean
New Zealand’s London: A Colony and its Metropolis, by Felicity Barnes, (Auckland University Press, 2012), 344 pp., $49.99

Felicity Barnes’s engaging book maps the history of New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ relationship with London, from the first colonial journeys back ‘Home’ to the long-prevalent Big OE. Her study introduces the appealing concept of ‘recolonisation’, the process by which New Zealanders have, since the beginning of European settlement, appropriated London as their metropolis.
            In Barnes’s refreshing take, the New Zealander in London does not play an inferior role in the colonised/coloniser binary equation. But while Barnes argues that the relationship was a reversal of the usual one between colonial subject and the imperial centre, the uncritical gaze of the early New Zealand pilgrims is nevertheless deeply rooted in pro-imperial patriotism. Her study focuses on Pakeha New Zealand, which she argues has the power to imagine London as it pleases, and to name the terms of the relationship.

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