Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Reeling Them In

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Helen Watson White

Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948–2000 by John Reid (Victoria University Press, 2018), 462pp, $60

Whatever It Takes is an apt title for John Reid’s story of the formation of Pacific Films, an enterprise that dared to dream in an age when dreaming was expensive. The No. 8 wire mentality, necessitated by insufficient funding for almost any part of independent film-making, is exemplified in countless ways in this account, from the building of a camera dolly with bicycle wheels, to the capture of the 1953 Royal Tour on three cameras simultaneously, by mounting them on the same frame, the results of the shoot destined for three different agencies, each paying for a share of news footage of the glamorous royal couple ‘abroad’. [Read more…]

Projects of Disclosure

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Michael Steven

This Thin Now by Jo Thorpe (Mākaro Press, 2018), 50 pp, $25; Her Limitless Her by Reihana Robinson (Mākaro Press, 2018), 82 pp, $25; Over There a Mountain by Elizabeth Welsh (Mākaro Press, 2018), 88pp, $25

Fifteen years ago an illness enabled me a spell on the sickness benefit. I had time on my hands. In lieu of a formal arts education, I decided to undertake my own immersion job studying the poetry of New Zealand/Aotearoa. I spent my days scouring shops like Moa Hunter, paperback exchanges, op-shops and book fairs, seeking out collections by well-known and obscure poets. At night I stayed up late reading the collection I was building. [Read more…]

Steaming Open the Archives 

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Briar Wood

Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 by Jared Davidson (Otago University Press, 2019), 296pp, $35

Reading the history of the years of the First World War and after through the experience of those who were outside the dominant political narratives of the time is a welcome step in presenting diversity, at a time when national borders in many places are being reinforced rather than opening up. Jared Davidson’s diligent research brings hitherto untold stories into the historical mainstream and extends our understanding of what life was like during these much-memorialised times. Although the subtitle seems broad, most of the evidence about censorship and the widespread resistance to it in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time of the First World War has come from government-censored letters: hence the book’s title. Some further discussion of newspaper, magazine, film and publishing restrictions might also have been set beside this intriguing discussion. [Read more…]

Earth’s Last Great Wilderness

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Neville Peat

Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica by Rebecca Priestley (Victoria University Press, 2019), 384pp., $40

Despite an inhospitable nature, or maybe simply because it’s a frozen desert, Antarctica attracts an array of superlatives – coldest, windiest, highest, driest, remotest and last-discovered of the planet’s seven continents. Yet another set of descriptors derives from the human activity of recent decades – most pristine, most peaceful, most collaborative.

Yes, collaboration, internationally. As New Zealand’s most famous Antarctic explorer, Sir Edmund Hillary, once said, Antarctica’s extreme environment ‘drives people together’. [Read more…]

Two Rooms in the House of Poetry

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Lynn Jenner

Working the Tang by Nicola Easthope (The Cuba Press, 2018), 86pp, $25; How I Get Ready by Ashleigh Young (Victoria University Press, 2019), 96pp, $25

Nicola Easthope’s poetry collection Working the Tang comes seven years after her first collection, leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts, 2011). The first impression of the book is that it is an object of beauty. The cover image by Kimbra Taylor shows two women harvesting seaweed, or ‘wirkin the tang’. The women stand on dark broody seaweed green and behind them is a pea-green sea. Wind blows the seaweed and one woman’s dress. The book is printed on a matt cream paper that is soft to the touch and the design and typeface are pleasing. [Read more…]