Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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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Buried Prophets of the Future

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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Coal and the Coast: a Reflection on the Pike River Disaster, by Paul Maunder (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 112 pp., $25.
 
It might be uncomfortable to consider, but pressing in on me as I write this — and on whoever reads it — are the ghosts of hundreds of Chinese coal miners: those who die every week in unsafe mines to fuel the booming economy of the renascent Red Dragon and thus supply us in the West with almost all of our consumer goods. Every phase of the Industrial Revolution has had a human cost, in the blood of peasants driven or lured off the land into burgeoning urban centres to make a new life for themselves and a fat profit for the owners of the factories and the mines.

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Working out the Exercise Book

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Denis Harold
The Exercise Book, edited by Ken Duncum, Bill Manhire, Chris Price and Damien Wilkins (Victoria University press, 2011) 222 pp. $35.
 
The Exercise Book, the latest product of the International Institute of Modern Letters, the writing school at Wellington’s Victoria University, contains some stimulating activities for getting started on writing. There are a lot of ‘icebreaker’ activities that would not be out of place in a good English as a Second Language textbook for instilling confidence and unleashing the dynamics latent in a group of students. This is a kind of ‘Teaching Imagination as a Second Language’ book.
            The introduction has the disclaimer that though the book might look like a manual it is not — it is a selection of what turned up when a call was sent out for writing exercises from teachers, students and friends of IIML. The founding director Bill Manhire writes the introduction in a chatty and warm style in which he qualifies most statements with either ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘may’ or ‘possible’. He is not doctrinaire.

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Victoriana

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David Eggleton
Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf (Otago University Press, 2011), 208 pp., $50.
 
Susan Sontag characterised photographs as ‘invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’, while Roland Barthes asserted that the photograph was ‘a transparent envelope’ — that is, a paradoxical object at once visible and obvious but also sealed-off and enigmatic. Likewise, Walter Benjamin stated that the photographic image shows ‘dialects at a standstill’, meaning photographs can hold contradictory meanings in check. Benjamin also pointed out that: ‘Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its concerns threaten to disappear irretrievably’. Mindful then that this significant trio of twentieth-century photography critics regarded photographs as extremely ambiguous objects, attracting interpretations the way flypaper attracts flies, I launched into Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erica Wolf.

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Techno-obsessive

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Thomas Gough

 In the Absence of Heroes, by Anthony McCarten, (Vintage, 2012), 389 pp., $28.99.

A sequel to Death of a Superhero, Anthony McCarten’s new novel In the Absence of Heroes relocates the Delpes from New Zealand to Watford, North London to tell the story of a family playing out their grief in a techno-saturated reality. The novel begins with a list of statistics about contemporary internet usage which, depending on your own online savvy, will strike you as either alarming or taken-for-granted: 50% of the people online lie about their age, weight, job, marital status and gender; 20% of the people going online will experience negative impacts on their life; use of the internet is a contributing factor in nearly 50% of all relationships and family problems; 11% of people going online are becoming compulsive or addicted; women are now online more than men.  

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Against Fear of the New

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Nick Laird
New Zealand by Design: a History of New Zealand Product Design, by Michael Smythe (Godwit, 2011), 511 pp., $65.          
          
‘Design’ is a mercurial, not to say deceptive, term. Used as a verb to refer to a process, and used as a noun to the product of that process, it has become amongst the most ubiquitous and the most tortured of labels.  Often now lumped together with buzzfuzz feel-good notions of expressiveness, and used interchangeably with the tags ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’, it is constantly and lazily colonised, while the shades of discrimination it originally implied have become hidden or lost. Design only really takes on meaning with the words that surround it, as in types of design — and even then the implied associations can serve to obscure a deeper understanding.

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