Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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…]

In Yellow Shoes Walking through a Field of Daffodils

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Kay McKenzie Cooke

The Wandering Nature of Us Girls by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 127pp, $29.99

To read Frankie McMillan’s The Wandering Nature of Us Girls is to read a collection of short fiction about the familiar and the factual constantly being reimagined, or at least given a twist of the fantastic stirred with a swizzle stick. Even before you open the book, the cover’s subtle, sparkly, pleating effect evokes a trick of the light, a puzzling refraction, a sense of things mischievously folded in on themselves. It’s like a warning. Approach this dizzying assortment at your own peril: do not expect any safety net under the flying trapeze acts it performs. [Read more…]

The Person is Fashioned and the Poem is Shaped until Poem and Person are One

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Piet Nieuwland

Albatross Neck: Landings by the Ancient Mariner and Romanticism in Aotearoa New Zealand 1770–2022 by Nigel Brown and Denys Trussell (Arcology Publishing, 2022), 247pp, $90; The Wanderer: Book Two by Ron Riddell (Casa Nueva Publishers, 2022), 117pp, $20; Songs to the Unsung by Kayleen M. Hazlehurst (Blue Dragonfly Press, 2023), 141pp, $26.50

In high school, we studied the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge with the help of a teacher who had sailed around the world. It was an influential poem but the question that dogged me was, why are we reading this English poem from a bygone era? We were also introduced to a suite of Romantic poets and later to William Blake in The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. At the time, I was a huge fan of the Ecologist magazine, edited by Edward Goldsmith, which provided challenging and stimulating essays on the global environmental crisis that was becoming increasingly apparent.  [Read more…]

Difficult Histories

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244

Emma Gattey

Kārearea by Māmari Stephens (Bridget Williams Books, 2021), 146pp, $14.99; Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, denial and New Zealand history by Joanna Kidman, Vincent O’Malley, Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 184pp, $14.99

One of Aotearoa’s swiftest birds of prey, the kārearea (New Zealand falcon or sparrowhawk), is beautiful, lethal and a threatened species. Māmari Stephens (Te Rarawa) named her blog after this bird because ‘the kārearea’s flight above has a comforting distance from the ground’, a distance she wished to gain through publishing her opinions anonymously. Thankfully, this initial anonymity gave way to self-identification. Her writing in Kārearea exemplifies the whakataukī, ‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini’ (‘My success is not mine alone, but is the strength of many’). As a legal scholar, writer, Anglican priest and wahine Māori, Stephens is incredibly aware of her social reproductive, intellectual and emotional debts to her community. This is a humble book. Through writing these pieces, Stephens realises the extent to which her ‘writing needs the people and experiences I come from, if my words are to make any sense at all’. [Read more…]