Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

When the Sun is Being a Bastard

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Lawrence Patchett 

Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders (Allen & Unwin, 2022), 288pp, $34.99

Early in Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm, Tim Saunders signals the twin issues that will preoccupy his narrative. The first relates to the elements. ‘Take any decision on the farm,’ the narrator says, ‘strip it back and you will find the weather’. The rain gauge is among the most discussed tools on the Glen Oroua farm, and in 2020 a searing drought makes it more important than ever. When the sun is ‘being a bastard’ day after day, and the seasons no longer behave the way they used to, it’s even more inevitable that your thoughts circle on the elements. Thus Under a Big Sky takes its structure from them, moving through sections themed on fire, air, water and earth.  [Read more…]

The Tilted Playing Field

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David Eggleton

Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 256pp, $39.99

Behind the facade of ‘nice New Zealand’ racial discrimination festers away at every level of society, though often in subtle, circuitous, complex ways, and despite so-called affirmative action. One in every three complaints to the Human Rights Commission currently concerns racial discrimination. In November 2022, after his defeat at the polling booths, Auckland Mayoral candidate Efeso Collins, who is of Sāmoan and Tokelauan descent, and was for a time the front-runner, said polling research showed that ‘the race factor’ was a key reason for his loss to Wayne Brown, who implicitly played ‘the race card’. [Read more…]

Challenging Racism, Imperialism, Exploitation

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Philip Temple

Comrade: Bill Andersen: A communist, working-class life by Cybèle Locke (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 412pp, $49.99

In the cover photograph for this book, Communist and union leader Bill Andersen, 50 years old, walks foursquare and determined at the head of a union battalion following his release from Mt Eden prison. On 1 July 1974, he had been sent to jail by Justice Peter Mahon, following an application by Waiheke Island ferries boss Leo Dromgoole to have the assets of Andersen’s Northern Drivers’ Union seized. This was prompted by his leadership role in wide union opposition to a long-rolling pay and conditions dispute. The following day, Andersen became ‘the man who stopped Auckland’ when 20,000 workers went on strike in protest, an event described by historian Bert Roth as ‘the greatest display of class solidarity in New Zealand history’. Nearly 10,000 marched with Andersen down Queen Street after his release on 3 July.  [Read more…]

Southern Gentry

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David Herkt

The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem by Luke Elworthy (The Wairau Division, 2022), 327pp, $35

‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ begins the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It is also an appropriate epigraph for Luke Elworthy’s The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem, a novel that explores a story of ‘families’, both happy and unhappy. The life history of a character in a familial setting has been a mainstay of fiction since the 19th century, and Elworthy is certainly not the first writer to address the primal mystery of parenthood, generational secrets, sibling relationships, and even the incest taboo itself.  [Read more…]

Where Is She From? Who Are Her People? Where Are They From?

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Elizabeth Heritage

A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura: A novel by Jessica Howland Kany (Quentin Wilson Publishing 2022), 413pp, $37.50

According to my spreadsheet, this is the one-hundredth arotake pukapuka (book review) I’ve written since I began about a decade ago, with a roughly even split between local and foreign pukapuka. It’s got me thinking about the ‘New Zealandness’ of writing, and this pakimaero (novel) is an excellent test case for trying to work out what I think that is, and isn’t. [Read more…]