Blog Archives

Best of all possible worlds? Stephen Levine

Promises Promises: 80 Years Of Wooing New Zealand Voters
Claire Robinson
Massey University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780995109544

When Jacinda Ardern stated in 2017 that, if elected, Labour would move to “abolish child poverty”, this resonated as an ambitious goal, enlightened, compassionate and long overdue. It is among the many strengths of Claire Robinson’s book that we are able, with perspective (and evidence), to see that the first Labour government had accomplished this task – and more – over 70 years earlier.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

“The play’s the thing”, Sarah Ross

Ngaio Marsh’s Hamlet: The 1943 Production Script
Polly Hoskins (ed)
Canterbury University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781988503134

In August 1943, as New Zealand troops in Europe began the Italian campaign, the Canterbury University College Drama Society (CUCDS) performed Hamlet to sell-out audiences at the Canterbury College Little Theatre. Hamlet had not been seen in New Zealand “for a generation”, and it was a roaring success: students were straddling the beams in the rafters, and CUCDS was reproached by the City Council for overfilling the space. The acclaimed season was produced and directed by Ngaio Marsh, the celebrated crime novelist who went on to direct several Shakespearean plays. Marsh embraced the war-time context for the production, featuring modern, military dress. Owing to its success, Hamlet returned for a second season at the Little Theatre, November–December 1943, after university exams were over for the year; and after CUCDS mounted a season of Othello in 1944, both productions toured nationally.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Plays, Review

Imperial identities, Tim Cook

For King And Other Countries: The New Zealanders Who Fought In Other Services In The First World War
Glyn Harper
Massey University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780995102996

New Zealand, like Australia, Canada, India, Newfoundland and South Africa, contributed enormous numbers of citizen soldiers to serve in response to the British Empire’s call to fight the Great War. Some 124,211 served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), drawn from a population of around one million. Forty-two per cent of the men eligible to enlist did so. And yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that even more New Zealanders served, possibly as many as 3,000, in other dominion or imperial forces. As this cleverly titled book indicates, this is the story of those other New Zealanders – now calculated at 12,000 – who served the King, but in other national armed forces. This significant re-evaluation of New Zealanders at war is quite remarkable, and this new figure has been drawn from research into census, newspaper, archival and genealogical sources.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review, War

“New Zealand’s leading public historian”, Tom Brooking

Making History: A New Zealand Story
Jock Phillips
Auckland University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781869408992

Jock Phillips has written an engaging memoir of his challenge to his father’s Anglophile and Eurocentric view of history, and transition from an academic to a public historian. This crisply written account is of particular interest to someone whose career has overlapped with Phillips’s, but should appeal to anyone concerned about how New Zealand history can be made available to a wide audience in stimulating ways. Whoever reads about this journey will also quickly learn that New Zealand history is anything but dull.

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Posted in History, Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

Watching the watchers, Ian F Grant

Dead Letters: Censorship And Subversion In New Zealand 1914–1920
Jared Davidson
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781988531526

Dead Letters contains intriguing detail about a random cast of now-forgotten people who were considered likely subversives in New Zealand during WWI. For their stories to be told at all, we have to thank both the pedantically plodding public-servant compilers of long-buried files and author Jared Davidson, an archivist by trade, for his skill in researching and giving human faces to the consequences of a government obsessively prying into private lives at times of perceived national crisis.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review, War

Well packaged history, Anna Mackenzie

Amundsen’s Way: The Race To The South Pole
Joanna Grochowicz
Allen and Unwin, $19.00,
ISBN 9781760637668

The Telegram
Philippa Werry
Pipi Press, $23.00,
ISBN 9780473462826

Amundsen’s Way delivers exactly what it promises on the cover: the story of Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole, and the manner in which it was shaped by his single-minded determination to lead the first polar exploration team to reach it.

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Posted in Children, History, Non-fiction

Doors and mirrors, Alex Mitcalfe Wilson 

The Chosen One
Joy H Davidson
DHD Publishing, $27.00,
ISBN 9780473448301

Harsu and the Werestoat
Barbara Else
Gecko Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781776572199

The World of Greek Mythology
Ben Spies
Spies Publishing, $20.00,
ISBN 9780473455866

Fantasy has always mattered to me. I first sensed this around the same time I realised I was completely ill-adapted to my 1990s New Zealand childhood. I was a fat kid, a nervous perfectionist who was frightened of rugby and wanted to wear dresses. Most days, it felt like the sky was going to fall on my head. Luckily, I knew a few adults who were sensitive enough to notice my constant unease, and thoughtful enough to feed me stories. Those books were a magic door at the back of my wardrobe, the escape-hatch every lonely kid needs.

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Posted in Children, Fiction, History, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

Speaking frankly, Margaret Sparrow

My Body, My Business: New Zealand Sex Workers In An Era Of Change
Caren Wilton (Madeleine Slavick photographer)
Otago University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781988531328

As I write this review, I hear a news item that Dame Catherine Healy DNZM and Julie Bates AO, a leading Australian sex worker, are presenting a submission on the decriminalisation of prostitution to Members of the South Australian parliament. It demonstrates how far New Zealand has progressed on this issue. Sixteen years ago, in 2003, when the law changed, this scenario would never have been envisaged. In June 2018, both women received Queen’s Birthday Awards from their respective governments. In Healy’s case, she was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Bates became an Officer of the Order of Australia. Both awards were richly deserved for many years dedicated to improving the health and safety of sex workers.

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Posted in Essays, History, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

And on the strangest sea, Paul Moon

New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives 
Frances Steel (ed)
Bridget Williams Books, $60.00,
ISBN 9780947518707

Ocean: Tales of Voyaging and Encounter that Defined New Zealand
Sarah Ell
Penguin Random House, $70.00,
ISBN 9780143772675

Most histories of nations tend to be terrestrial-bound in their focus, and those of New Zealand are no exception. The land, after all, is where people live, where their social, cultural, and political institutions exist and evolve, and into which the roots of their sense of belonging are sunk. Yes, the sea gets a mention at times, usually as having served in an earlier era as some vast aquatic highway bringing migrants to the shore. Yet, even in this context, the sea tends to be portrayed more often as something that separates New Zealand from other countries – a generally bland oceanic backdrop to where all the “real” history takes place. Two books have now appeared which, in different ways, address aspects of the country’s relationship with the sea, and which both serve as antidotes to those many works which depict New Zealand as a place of forests and farms, cities and towns.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review

Heroic lives, Bruce Babington

Whatever it Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948-2000
John Reid
Victoria University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9781776562114

Many years ago, I was invited by the New Zealand Film Archive to try to order the mass of material in its John O’Shea/Pacific Films collection. The plan fell through, but I often wondered whether the project would be resurrected. That question has now been unequivocally answered by John Reid’s monumental book which follows the company’s more than 50-year history in expansive detail.

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Posted in Art, History, Non-fiction, Review
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