Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Let Me Through, I’m a Journalist

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Adam Gifford
Scooped: The Politics and Power of Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Martin Hirst, Sean Phelan and Verica Rupar (AUT Media, 2012) 232 pp. $39.99.
 
As universities have moved to take over journalist training, a rift has developed between the expectations of traditionally trained journalists and the culture of the academy. Old-school newspaper sub-editors and reporters are likely to grit their teeth in rage as they hear members of university journalism departments pontificate about their industry in a simplified, deterministic and reductive way that packages journalism into ‘concepts’.
            Scooped, however, does acknowledges that rift, and its presentation illustrates it nicely. It mixes the turgid and insular prose of academics trying to rack up research credits with tales by working journalists who have learned to see behind the story by pounding pavements or making phone calls, and talking to the people involved.

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Packaging the Land

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Philippa Jamieson
Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve (Otago University Press) 224 pp. $45; Making Our Place: Exploring Land-use Tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jacinta Ruru, Janet Stephenson and Mick Abbott, (Otago University Press), 243 pp. $45.
 
Although we are becoming an increasingly indoor nation, our wild and natural landscapes, our ‘clean, green’ image, and our agricultural heritage all remain strong in the identity of most New Zealanders. The topics discussed in these two books have wide appeal. Both books address current and contested questions about our use of and relationship with the land, and provide glimpses into history. My concern is that they may be read by only a narrow range of potential readers – mostly by academics and professionals over 40, I suspect, unless interviews, magazine articles, blog posts and so on can draw other readers in.

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Gujurat, the Punjab and Bollywood on Location

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Dieter Riemenschneider
India in New Zealand: Local Identities, Global Relations, edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Otago University Press, 2010) 226 pp., $49.95
 
Maintaining that ‘Indians are now a visible minority in New Zealand’s public life’ and commenting upon the comparative scarcity of thorough and comprehensive studies on their presence in the country, Bandhopadhyay and his contributors set out to have a fresh look at the three aspects of ‘migration and settlement’, ‘local identities’ and ‘global relations’: temporal as well as spatial dimensions relevant to our understanding of the present Indian New Zealand community. Subdivided accordingly into three parts, essays written from various perspectives by historians, anthropologists and scholars in religious, cultural, media and health studies draw attention to these issues. We encounter Jacqueline Leckie, Ruth D’Souza, Arvind Zodgekar and Henry Johnson, who have done research on Indian migration and settlement dating back three decades to when Zodgekar published an essay in Indians in New Zealand: Studies in a Sub-Culture (1980) – a collection of essays edited by Kapil N. Tiwari – and to when Leckie presented her Ph.D. thesis at Otago University in 1981. Indeed, the university and Otago University Press have promoted studies of India in New Zealand not only with the present publication but also with Jacqueline Leckie’s magisterial book Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community, released in 2007.
            The dozen chapters that together make up the three sections of India in New Zealand focus respectively on historical and demographic characteristics of the diasporan community as a whole, on its heterogeneity — which results in problematic perceptions of a single cultural identity — and on the community’s international political, economic and cultural links. The reader thus is guided along a historical trajectory from the nineteenth century to the immediate present and thence to the possible future of Indian people in New Zealand. Tony Ballantyne, professor of history at Otago University, critically analyses ‘the important role that India played in the development in New Zealand between the 1870s and 1920s’. 

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Diasporic Problems

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Areezou Zalipour
Localizing Asia in Aotearoa, edited by Paola Voci & Jacqueline Leckie (Auckland: Dunmore Publishing, 2011) 248 pp., $44.99.
 
Localizing Asia in Aotearoa takes a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the contemporary experience of New Zealand in relation to Asia and Asians. The book mainly investigates and examines the ways that Asia and Asians have been and can be ‘localized’ in the New Zealand context. That is, its combination of essays and personal narratives seeks to document the cultural and social presence of Asia in New Zealand as registered from various perspectives and analytical standpoints. The diversity of the book’s approaches reflects its ambitious scope in relating Asia to New Zealand and, more importantly, its goal of making the multicultural dimensions of contemporary New Zealand society more widely sensed, acknowledged and recognised.
        The gradually accumulating presence of Asian immigrants who have settled in New Zealand — mainly Chinese, Indians, and Koreans — has now created a relatively large Asian diaspora in what is after all a relatively small nation. Some of the chapters of the book focus acutely on aspects of Asian diaspora in New Zealand so as to emphasise its particular cultural expressions. However, overall the book does not make a clear theoretical distinction between the relevance of Asia and Asians who live outside New Zealand (under discussion in Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight), and the Asians who have left Asia and settled in New Zealand: the most obvious difference being that this latter group of Asians have New Zealand permanent residence, and therefore a sense of belonging. They, like any other diaspora, generally conceive of themselves as active members of the social and political construction that is ‘New Zealand’. On the other hand, those Asians who do not live here do not — obviously — have that sense of belonging. The gap that exists between these two groups of Asians and their issues, though, is highly significant to discussions on localising Asia in New Zealand. One may ask what ‘Asia’ is being referred to, and who are Asians within the context of this book? This lacuna has not been highlighted by the introduction, nor by the book’s structure, with the lucid exactness that it demands.

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