Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Lost and Found, and Everything In Between

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Chris Tse

How to Take Off Your Clothes by Hadassah Grace (Dead Bird Books, 2019), 52 pp., $25; Night As Day by Nikki-Lee Birdsey (Victoria University Press, 2019), 122 pp., $30; The Black and the White by Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, 2019), 62 pp., $25

How to Take Off Your Clothes announces a striking new voice, one moulded by a life as an immigrant and sex worker, the daughter of ‘Christian celebrities’. This unapologetic, honest and often bracing debut lays bare the scars of Hadassah Grace’s past. It’s also the first book off the block from new publishing house Dead Bird Books, a venture set up by arts facilitator Samuel Walsh and writer Dominic Hoey. They’ve launched the book in suitably momentous fashion, with a nationwide poster campaign, artfully produced videos and a multi-city tour. It’s a sign of their commitment to, and belief in, Grace and her book, and one that will hopefully pay off in the long run for both parties. [Read more…]

In the Shadow of War

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Rebecca Styles

The Gulf Between by Maxine Alterio (Penguin, 2019) 299 pp., $38

Julia sits by her son’s hospital bed in Queenstown, sifting through memories and secrets as she tries to recall how her family fell apart in the Gulf of Naples. She had travelled there in the early 1960s with her husband Ben and their children Matteo (10) and Francesca (8). Julia’s husband grew up in Napoli and left after the war, but he’s been called back to look after his mother, Alessia, the matriarch of the family. [Read more…]

A History of Historicisation

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Caitlin Lynch

Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen by Annabel Cooper (Otago University Press, 2018), 322 pp., $49.95

Over the past few years in Aotearoa New Zealand there has been increasing demand from high-school students, iwi representatives, academics and musicians alike for a more nuanced, meaningful acknowledgement of the colonial conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their legacies. Annabel Cooper’s Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand wars on screen is part of the answer to that demand. Cooper’s book is not a war history; aside from a succinct, three-page overview of the New Zealand Wars in the introduction, the book’s focus begins in 1925, nearly a decade after their (debatably) final conflict. Instead, and equally as important, the book is a history of historicisation: of how the New Zealand Wars have been remembered, negotiated, re-enacted, represented, viewed, taught and mythologised through film and television over the last century – and by whom. [Read more…]

Witness Marks

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Jodie Dalgleish 

Kaitiaki o te Pō by John-Paul Powley (Seraph Press, 2018), 165 pp, $35

In his book of essays, Kaitiaki o te Pō, historian and teacher John-Paul Powley ruminates on self and a broader culture through the flow of his life, which eddies around the jut of histories and events that break a country’s current into caesurae. Each one is a stopping point full of personal refusals and tentative potentialities, poignant and sometimes rousing. [Read more…]

This Partial Way of Seeing 

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Francis Cooke

Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh (Lawrence & Gibson, 2018), 284 pp., $25

Midway through Women in the Field, One and Two, art writer and curator Ruth Bishops begins to assemble an exhibit based on the two titular paintings by her friend and frequent antagonist, Russian émigrée artist Irina Durova. Searching through the artist’s archive of paintings, she asks for work from 1912, the same year that the Women in the Field works were created, explaining to Irina that these will ‘give people a sense of how your work developed, what you were painting at the same time … explain Women in the Field’. ‘[T]hey don’t explain each other, they just happened,’ Irina retorts, ‘some at the same time, some later. Everything can’t be reduced to a straight line. Exhibitions like that are a lie.’ [Read more…]