Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Stone House & Straw Houses  

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Max Oettli

Ravenscar House: A Biography by Sally Blundell (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 224pp, $59.99; Road People of Aotearoa: House truck journeys 1978–1984 by Paul Gilbert (Rim Books, 2021), 184pp, $50    

While these two books have a common theme of shelter, their inhabitants are poles apart. We are looking, I suppose, at high culture with millions of bucks behind it and a kind of DIY counterculture, where one manages to make a picturesque home with few bits from the tip, cadging some car cases (carcasses?) from an importer and bolting the whole caboodle on the back of an old truck to take to the dusty road.  [Read more…]

A Rich, Layered Sense of Context

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Helen Watson White

Helen Kelly: Her life by Rebecca Macfie (Awa Press, 2021), 410pp, $49.99

‘We don’t need low wages in this country,’ said Helen Kelly in 2007 on becoming president of the Council of Trade Unions (CTU). ‘There’s no excuse for it. People should be able to go to work, work their hours and have a decent standard of living at the end of the week.’

It sounds so simple, and to the Kellys it was. Rebecca Macfie’s action-packed and deeply thoughtful biography, Helen Kelly: Her life, is less one person’s story and more the biography of a radical family. Macfie shows us how, in the Wellington setting of parliamentarians, publicans and pundits, Helen and her parents, Cath and Pat, always knew what they wanted but also what they were up against. Knowing where the trade union movement came from made their joint trajectory sure, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new millennium, Helen continued the work for another sixteen years until her death from cancer when she was in her prime. [Read more…]

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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Wendy Parkins

Raiment: A Memoir by Jan Kemp (Massey University Press, 2022), 255 pp, $35; Things I Learned at Art School by Megan Dunn (Penguin, 2021), 352 pp, $35

In 1971, the Canadian author Alice Munro wrote: ‘There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women … All women have had up till now has been their connection with men.’ Two years later, the US Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v Wade—a decision that has recently been reversed. It is difficult, sometimes, not to feel that Munro’s optimism was misplaced, that women’s connection with men is still too often the defining condition of their existence. 

These memoirs by Jan Kemp and Megan Dunn provide an opportunity to reflect on the changing lives of girls and women during the past fifty years in Aotearoa. Though wildly different in tone and style, as well as the time frames on which they focus—the counter-culture of the late 60s and early 70s in Kemp’s Raiment; 1990s postmodernism in Dunn’s Things I Learned At Art School—both memoirs recount their author’s quest for self-expression and independence within creative sub-cultures in Auckland. [Read more…]

Grief and Growing Up

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Claire Lacey

Meat Lovers by Rebecca Hawkes (Auckland University Press, 2022) 92pp, $24.99; Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021) 96pp, $25.00; mō taku tama by Vaughan Rapatahana (Kilmog Press, 2021) 32pp, $38.50

Content warning: This review contains mention of suicide, disordered eating, and meat production. 

Here are three collections of poetry, each devastating in its own way. Rangikura by Tayi Tibble and Meat Lovers by Rebeccas Hawkes each confront coming-of-age sexually in a complicated adult word. Rangikura is situated in the urban landscape, while Meat Lovers is a ‘hardcore pastoral’ that gets into both the grit and the wonder of growing up on a farm. Both books use the sensuality of food as thematic vessels and have a contemporary urgency. And both collections reflect how the romantic imaginations of girls are shaped and constrained by social expectations of who and how those girls will eventually love. mō taku tama, by Vaughan Rapatahana, is a different type of emotional gut punch: a series of poems that reflect on losing a son and how grief matures, though never lessens, over sixteen years.  [Read more…]

Muses in a Hall of Mirrors

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Rachel O’Connor

The Birds Began to Sing: A memoir of a New Zealand composer by Dorothy Buchanan (Cuba Press, 2021), 240pp, $40; Unposted, Autumn Leaves: A memoir in essays by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, 2021), 340pp, $30

Reflections on our own past are unavoidably narcissistic, and the motivations and justifications for writing a memoir are always complicated. As Jesse Mulligan pointed out on Radio NZ earlier this year, when discussing Charlotte Grimshaw’s explosive memoir, The Mirror Book, we don’t want to read about just anyone’s life. To make your life story worth paying for and perusing by strangers, it needs to be remarkable.

Christchurch-born Dorothy Buchanan’s life certainly qualifies. Her long career as a musician and composer has been exceptionally productive and has left an indelible mark on New Zealand’s musical development and canon. Her compositions and their recordings are numerous and celebrated (though Peace Song perhaps remains most widely loved and known), and a string of awards is testimony to the professional regard in which she is held. In 2001, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for a lifetime’s involvement in music.  [Read more…]