Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

On O.E Middleton & Maurice Shadbolt

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R.A. Copland
This month’s out of the archive post is a review if the short stories of O.E Middleton and Maurice Shadbolt by R.A. Copland from Landfall 56 (1960).


The New Zealanders, by Maurice Shadbolt (Gollancz, 1959), 18s. The Stone and Other Stories, by O.E. Middleton (The Pilgrim Press, 1959), 12S. 6d.

 
These stories of Maurice Shadbolt’s are so good in so many ways that it is a delight to read them. One is struck almost at once with the range of the author’s sympathies and understanding; for Mr Shadbolt is mercifully determined to be the author, not the subject, of his stories. In his first story, told in the first person, he presents the situation of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, groping towards love; and in another he has convincingly explored the plight of an aging man grasping back at love from the grave’s brink. There are women growing frantic as youth fades, boys who are blundering or brutal, Maoris and farmers, artists, poets, working men and business men. They are nearly all contemporary New Zealanders, and they behave and speak not merely in character, but to the point of the story.
          Each of these stories has a planned meaning and direction. To illustrate this we may consider the shortest of them all, ‘Thank you Goodbye’. An episode is related with ease and the conversation and gestures are almost idly supplied, so that the ‘design’ (to employ a useful ambiguity), is tactfully involved in the detail. Yet it is the achievement of the story to get something painful and indeed tragic said about the present predicament of humanity in general, at the very moment when it is being most faithful to the particular crisis. It is this relevance of Mr Shadbolt’s stories which, when successfully managed, constitutes their distinction. He sees and shows us the wider allusion in the situations he has chosen. Actually I suspect that he sometimes proceeds the other way round, and from the wider idea works down to a representative case. It is clear, in any event, that he looks upon this country with an educated intelligence and with an awareness of its history as strongly developed as his observation of its forms and manners.

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Who Remembers the Barouder SE 5000?

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 Richard Reeve
Fly Boy, by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Steele Roberts, 2010) 64 pp, $19.99

A poetry collection exhibiting a long-term obsession with planes, especially fighter-planes from World War II, planes, planes, and more generally, flight, Fly Boy is filled with evocative replications of Canterbury poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s basic, vigorous and deeply rooted song of boyhood, imaginative freedom and time past. A bit like Seamus Heaney’s nostalgic paeans to household items, Paparoa Holman’s poems show an art of linking vivid, musical phrases into small lyrical vignettes that read like private memorative recitations: revisitations of a formative aviation manual which the poet evidently pored over as a boy, meditations on birds and bird flight, pilot death, gliders, Antarctic Austers, Fokkers, Constellations, Vulcans, Barouders and Sunderlands.

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By Word of Mouth

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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Stories Without End: Essays 1975–2010, Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books, 2009), 424 pp., $49.99
 
 

i.m.  Dame Judith Binney, DNZM, FRSNZ, 
1.7.1940–15.2.2011
 
Weighing in at a substantial 1.2 kilogrammes, this solid volume carries within its wrist-twisting four hundred plus pages, the freight of a lifetime’s scholarship. Reviewing it now, a few weeks after Judith Binney’s early death at seventy – when she might easily have worked on fruitfully for another decade – it is difficult to avoid a valedictory note in a review that should legitimately be solely concerned with the text itself, a work that must now earn its keep independently of its author’s life, or death. That said, it will be necessary – and fitting – at the conclusion of this article to utter a poroporoaki in Te Reo Māori, the language of the world she set out to map some forty years ago. And it is the connection between the concept of oral history and its relation to the written word – a linkage that is central to Binney’s project – that will be the necessary focus here.
           The book is a chronological series of collected articles that trace her intellectual development, through a Pākehā revision of Māori histories from 1975 until 2010. It begins with a close examination of missionary lives, goes on to discuss Māori Christianity, the rise of Te Kooti and Tūhoe prophets, Tūhoe and the land, oral histories and women’s stories. In what must surely now be seen as something of a Festschrift in her honour, the collection begins with a 1975 paper revealing the Rev. William Yates’ homosexuality, and his inner torments in attempting to reconcile his evangelical faith with a prediliction for Māori boys. The Māori Renaissance and the parallel rise of a new generation of Pākehā baby-boom historians began to coalesce at the time of these early publications.  Binney was taught by Keith Sinclair, and while born in 1940 – and so not exactly in the same cohort as James Belich, Matthew Wright and Paul Moon – she is charged with the power of the same deconstructive zeitgeist that actively dethroned old Pākehā ‘saints’ while resurrecting and sanctifying many old Māori ‘sinners’.

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Touching Earth

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Lindsay Pope
How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging, Pat White (Victoria University Press, 2010) 239 pp., $35.00


The eye, the ear,
The mind in action,
these I value.
– Heraclitus, from Fragments
 
In 2009, as a member of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters Writing for the Page group, I had the privilege of previewing many of the initial drafts of the essays which form the substance of White’s How the Land Lies. A year later it’s a pleasure to see these collected to form a cohesive record of a man’s personal journey, offering the opportunity to immerse oneself in another’s fascinating mindscape.

            While each of these seventeen essays has a central topic – from music, to dam building, to fishing, to heroes — it is its echoes of family history, of a dislocated childhood, and of growth into self-aware maturity, that unify this work and the consciousness it displays. You are introduced to White’s world-view as it is now, which then leads back into the formative years: his recollection of childhood experiences on the South Island’s West Coast with all their anxieties and turbulence. But White is not so much concerned here with memoir, rather with attempts to get to the nucleus of the forces that have influenced and shaped him, and to locate the nub of things, a centre. He reflects on parents, on siblings, on communities, on relationships, on both Pakeha and Maori ways of telling stories of place. He comments on the many places he has lived, on his various means of employment, and on his personal struggles with physical health and psychological well-being.

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Trigger-happy

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David Eggleton
Brian Brake: Lens on the World, edited by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press,  2010) 352 pp., $99.99

Photojournalism is politics by other means, a form of persuasion, a type of propaganda, where photographs might proselytise on behalf of a world-view. Brian Brake (1927–88) was, as this book tells us, ‘New Zealand’s best-known photographer’, certainly during the latter part of his lifetime. But, as Athol McCredie, the book’s general editor, goes on to point out in his lucid and succinct introduction, though Brake had a successful international career and was a media legend in New Zealand, ‘the generation of “art” photographers who had emerged during his absence overseas largely ignored him’ — there is no School of Brian Brake, and meanwhile his images which once featured so prominently in international anthologies, such as Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s Thames and Hudson survey A Concise History of Photography, have disappeared from more recent authoritative publications, such as 2004’s Magnum Stories: Sixty-One Photographers (edited by Chris Booth for Phaidon).
            The Te Papa Brian Brake project, which combines this book selection of over 300 photographs and six essays – ranging from McCredie’s overview, to Lissa Mitchell’s examination of his early years, to Peter Ireland’s assessment of the best-seller New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (1963, revised edition 1973, new version 1990), to Damian Skinner’s revisionist reading of his museum and gallery object photographs — with a 2010 major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, also extends to include an ongoing online cataloguing of selected Brake images in an attempt to do justice to the critical mass of around 115,000 photographs that were donated by Brake’s partner Wai-man Raymond (Amau) Lau to the Museum in 2001. That donated collection in turn doesn’t quite encompass Brake’s entire oeuvre — things have gone missing over time. (Various originals of a number of key colour images are also missing from the book, represented instead by barely adequate magazine reproductions.)

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