Landfall

Waiting for the Fires in the Hills to Go Out

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Bernadette Hall

The Darling North, by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2012), 87 pp., $24.99.

‘Ah! Those good old times, when I first came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this now.’ With these words, Frederick Maning opens his 1863 publication, ‘Old New Zealand’. His account of scenes and incidents is given, he claims, ‘exactly as they occurred’. His writings ‘owe nothing to fiction.’ Anne Kennedy on the other hand, who acknowledges Maning as a source for her new work, makes no such disclaimer. She seems delighted to plunge once again into the heart of fiction. Yet, even as she does so, she’s re-presenting ‘facts’, the kind of things we thought we knew as islanders living among other islanders all on our own little islands in the big bath tub of the Pacific.

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Bystander in her Own Past

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

The Girl Below, by Bianca Zander (Penguin, 2012), 324 pp. $30.00.

Notting Hill, London. Famous for its race riots, Portobello market and the 1999 film that pitched Julie Roberts and a simpering Hugh Grant into a romantic entanglement. For Suki Piper, newly arrived from a decade in New Zealand, the suburb she called home for the first eight years of her life is now a joke, ‘part tourist bauble, part film set’, a neighbourhood sighing ‘with so much privilege that I felt shut out’.

Jobless, near homeless, apparently friendless and increasingly disenchanted by a city she naively assumed, as part of her birthright, ‘would always take you back’, Suki is the deeply chaotic protagonist of this, the first novel by Auckland writer Bianca Zander.

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The Heavy Tin Hat Box

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Christine Johnston

The Day She Cradled Me,by Sacha de Bazin (Random House, 2012), 319 pp., $37.99.

Minnie will swing – there’s no doubt about it. If you pick up this book, unaware of Williamina Dean’s claim to notoriety, you have only to turn it over and read: ‘A fascinating novel based on the life of the infamous baby farmer Minnie Dean, the only woman in New Zealand history ever to be hanged.’ The Day She Cradled Me is a novel based on a true story with a protagonist based on an un-knowable historical figure. Convicted of the murder of a baby in her care, she is condemned on the first page of this narrative and confirmed as well and truly dead 300 pages later. ‘To comply with the law the body had to remain hanging for one hour …’

Minnie Dean was hanged in the yard of the Invercargill Gaol on 12 August 1895. On the advice of her lawyer (the illustrious Alfred Charles Hanlon) she did not testify in her own defence, but while in gaol wrote her version of the events that lead to her arrest. This (unpublished) account informs much of this book, which also quotes ‘verbatim’, according to de Bazin, from documents such as letters and newspaper reports. ‘My intent in writing this book was simple:’ she explains in her Author’s Note, ‘to bring Minnie Dean’s last statement to a public forum as she intended, and to challenge the many previously held beliefs that surround her, even to this day.’

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Shop Talk

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Richard Dingwall

Singing Historian: A Memoir, by Edmund Bohan (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 236 pp., $30.

As an eight year old Edmund Bohan’s wanted to be both a singer and an historical writer. This is the story of how, by talent, hard work and self-belief, that childhood ambition was realised. It is full of detail and incident from the author’s life, but it lacks any sense of intellectual direction.

Edmund Bohan’s mother’s was eager for him to have the academic training that was denied her, and he gained entry to Canterbury University where he studied History. Her encouragement of his love of singing meant that by the time he graduated he was immediately able to embark on a career as a professional singer, a career that took him to Australia in the early 1960s, and then to Europe where he established himself as a reliable and popular concert tenor. He also sang opera, most notably with Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group and Kent Opera, but preferred to think of himself as a ‘general practitioner of singing’, able to take on a wide range of repertoire rather than specialising. [Read more…]

Why we are in Afghanistan

December 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Adam Gifford

Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton Publishing, 2011), 439 pp., $49.99.

New Zealanders may feel anger and betrayal at reading Nicky Hager’s latest installment of their country’s secret history. But for those described by the former United States ambassador to New Zealand Charles Swindells as ‘first worlders’ – the military and foreign affairs officials, business people and politicians who regard New Zealand as a US ally – the anger will stem from the fact that the lid has been lifted on their activities so comprehensively.

The rest of us, those who applauded then-prime minister Helen Clark’s decision to stay out of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, will feel betrayed to find we went anyway, as the diplomatic and military establishment took every opportunity to suck up to the US.

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