Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Confronting the Dark Past

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Lachy Paterson

The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 272 pp., $39.99

Much of New Zealand history lies as yet untouched, and a topic once covered may sit for a generation before another historian picks through the archives again. New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonial wars are a notable exception, with Vincent O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa now added to a long list of titles, some of which are still in print. If, as suggested in the New Zealand Herald (6/12/2018), our ‘violent colonial past’ had been forgotten, this surely is hardly the fault of New Zealand historians. [Read more…]

The Constantly Turning Reel 

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Ted Jenner

Postcard Stories by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books, 2019), unpaginated, $35; How We Talk to Each Other by Victoria Broome (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 32pp., $19.95; Other by Ruth Hanover (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 48pp., $19.95

Postcards (eighty-three of them to be exact) are the means von Sturmer uses in his latest book to generate haiku-like poems with fragmentary narratives as their guiding principle. These postcards though are not of the conventional ‘Skytower’ or ‘Downtown’ variety, the kind we send to friends overseas bearing an immediately recognisable landmark of the locality they have left behind. Von Sturmer admits to an ‘eccentric and subversive’ interest in the genre whereby a postcard is appreciated for its own ‘oddness’; he doesn’t flinch from gaudy runs of colour or biliously roseate sunsets, and favours features such as tombs, canyons, or forest paths that induce ‘a small reverie’ – the baths at Pompeii then rather than the Grand Canal in Venice. [Read more…]

A Non-Person in Certain Quarters

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Ruth Brown

From Cairo to Cassino: A memoir of Paddy Costello by Dan Davin, ed. Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, 2019) 94 pp., $25

When Clive Reading says he’s planning to kill himself, his fellow officer feels sorry for him but can’t help thinking he could do worse. For Reading has broken the sacred code that binds men together in time of war – he has deserted his men on the eve of battle: ‘Cleared out. Ratted. Buggered off. Said he had to report back to battalion.’

These men are characters in Dan Davin’s short story ‘Coming and Going’ in Breathing Spaces (1975), and the ethos that underpins the story also shapes Davin’s memoir of Paddy Costello. [Read more…]

How Long Does It Take to Unravel a Life?

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Giovanni Tiso

Shirley Smith: An examined life by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2019), 464 pp., $40

How long does it take to unravel a life? In the case of Shirley Smith, the answer is eight years. That’s how long biographer Sarah Gaitanos spent poring over the vast documentary archive left by the academic, criminal lawyer and social justice campaigner, talking to the people who knew Smith and then compiling her findings into a book. This undertaking was made possible above all by Smith’s own writings, chief among them the countless letters she wrote over her lifetime – from her teenage years at a boarding school in Marton to her travels in retirement. The author describes this output as the manifestation of Smith’s ‘prodigious engagement with the world’, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that this engagement is the true subject of the book. [Read more…]

In the Front Seat

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Helen Watson White

Women Equality Power: Selected speeches from a life of leadership by Helen Clark (Allen & Unwin, 2018), 430 pp., $45

On the eve of Labour’s candidate selection meeting in April 1980, Helen Clark was preparing to present herself, in competition with six men, as a possible successor to Warren Freer in Mount Albert. Some 20 years on, in Brian Edwards’ book Helen: Portrait of a prime minister (Exisle, 2001), Mike Williams describes her practising her speech in the kitchen that night: ‘There’s a phrase in that speech that sticks in my mind, which was, “I don’t think you should select me because I’m a woman. However, I don’t think you should not select me because I’m a woman.” It was a very, very good speech.’ [Read more…]