Blog Archives

Undercooked, Paul Moon

Posted on December 3, 2018

The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook, with Sam Neill
Meaghan Wilson Anastasios
HarperCollins, $45.00,
ISBN 9781460756393

Is there anything new to say about Captain James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific? Edited accounts of his voyages appeared from 1773 and, in just the last 20 years, over 200 books on this remarkable explorer and mariner have been published. However, it is now 250 years since Cook departed on the first of his great voyages to the South Pacific and, being an anniversary year, what better time to tap into the publicity surrounding his feats? The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook accompanies a lavishly-produced television series presented with a comfortable balance of gravitas and intimacy by New Zealand actor Sam Neill. But is this book a cast-off from the television series, or does it stand on its own in any way as a useful contribution to the literature on the topic?

Tagged with: HarperCollins, Issue 124, Meaghan Wilson Anastasios, Paul Moon, Sam Neill, Summer 2018
Posted in History, Non-fiction and Review

Down by the river, Nicholas Reid

Posted on December 3, 2018

The Waikato – A History of New Zealand’s Greatest River
Paul Moon
Atuanui Press, $70.00, ISBN 9780994137616

At 425 kilometres, the Waikato is the longest river in New Zealand. The case Paul Moon makes in The Waikato – A History of New Zealand’s Greatest River is that it is also the most culturally significant.

Tagged with: Atuanui Press, Issue 124, Nicholas Reid, Paul Moon, Summer 2018
Posted in History, Non-fiction and Review

Whose history? Simon Hay

Posted on September 11, 2018

The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World
Helen Bones
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781988531175

The Expatriates
Martin Edmond
Bridget Williams Books, $50.00,
ISBN 9781988533179

Helen Bones aims to dismantle the “myth” that New Zealand writers, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, had to leave New Zealand to pursue careers as writers. She argues that this myth is wrong in at least two directions: first, that many New Zealand writers stayed and wrote and published, in New Zealand – that New Zealand was at this time not the cultural wasteland that it was made out to be by the generation of scholars she calls the “cultural nationalists”; and, second, that writers who did leave had neither an easier nor a harder time of it than those who stayed. Her book is a quantitative study, insofar as it can be: not interested in the “content” of books, but in “comprehensive data collection”, “literary empirical techniques”, and “a dataset of publications”. Her goal is to “quantify the significance of literary expatriatism”.

Tagged with: Bridget Williams Books, Helen Bones, Issue 123, Martin Edmond, Otago University Press, Simon Hay, Spring 2018
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review and Sociology

The costs of war, Jock Phillips

Posted on June 6, 2018

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman
Alexander Aitken (Alex Calder ed)
Auckland University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781869408817

Odyssey of the Unknown Anzac
David Hastings
Auckland University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781869408824

As we come towards the end of the four-year centenary of the Great War, the question looms: what have we learnt over these years about what was arguably the greatest trauma affecting the largest number of people that this country has ever seen?

Tagged with: Issue 122, Winter 2018
Posted in History, Review and War

Historical revisionism, Kirstie Ross

Posted on June 6, 2018

Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War
Stevan Eldred-Grigg with Hugh Eldred-Grigg
Otago University Press, $50.00,
ISBN 9780947522230

The first Anzac Day during WWII shows us some of the multifarious, sometimes conflicting views of the war and by extension, the dominion’s commitment to it.

Tagged with: Issue 122, Winter 2018
Posted in History, Non-fiction and Review

Bustling energy, Kate Hunter

Posted on June 6, 2018

Make Her Praises Heard Afar: New Zealand Women Overseas in World War One
Jane Tolerton
Booklovers Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780473399658

As many scholars have observed, it is very difficult to write a history of women and war. Not only is war regarded culturally as men’s domain, but capturing women’s stories is beset by methodological difficulties.

Tagged with: Issue 122, Winter 2018
Posted in Gender, History, Non-fiction, Review and War

Getting the archive to the people, Matariki Williams

Posted on June 6, 2018

He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century
Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla
Auckland University Press, $50.00,
ISBN 9781869408664

This book is weighty with expectation, what unfolds within its covers being immediately problematised by the title, He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century. The title is a subtle nod to the reality that the “voices” the book is highlighting have yet to be heard in broad New Zealand histories.

Tagged with: Issue 122, Winter 2018
Posted in Gender, History, Māori, Non-fiction and Review

Posthumous vindication, David V Williams

Posted on February 24, 2018

After the Treaty: The Settler State, Race Relations and Power in Colonial New Zealand
Brad Patterson, Richard S Hill and Kathryn Patterson (eds)
Steele Roberts, $40.00,
ISBN 9780947493158

There was a time in New Zealand when university historians took umbrage if an historian employed in a government department ventured into territory that some academics felt was, or should be, their sole preserve. The panning by academics in 1968 of The Shadow of the Land, written by Ian Wards of the war history branch in the Department of Internal Affairs, was a striking example. Reflections on this study of British policy and racial conflict in New Zealand from 1832 to 1852 are central to this commemorative volume of essays exploring themes related to Wards’s interests in political, social, legal and military affairs in colonial New Zealand. An impressive gallery of historians, drawn from all sectors of the history profession, have contributed to the volume some fascinating chapters on a range of topics.

Tagged with: Autumn 2018, Brad Patterson, David V Williams, Issue 121, Kathryn Patterson, Richard S Hill, Steele Roberts
Posted in History, Non-fiction and Review

Colliding pasts, Lydia Wevers

Posted on February 24, 2018

Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds
Anne Salmond
Auckland University Press, $65.00,
ISBN 9781869408657

The cover blurb suggests Tears of Rangi is Anne Salmond’s “most ambitious book to date”, and in many respects this is the case, since in it Salmond tackles vast epistemological and ontological questions to do with the nature of reality and knowledge. Part of the sequence of books beginning with Two Worlds in 1991, Tears of Rangi is a hefty tome (509 pages), but, like her previous books, it is compellingly readable. Salmond has the gift of narrative, and it probably helps that she is also a superb orator. She has given a number of presentations on the material covered in this book and draws large and appreciative audiences.

Tagged with: Anne Salmond, Auckland University Press, Autumn 2018, Issue 121
Posted in History, Māori and Non-fiction

Grudging nationalist, Mark Williams

Posted on February 24, 2018

Charles Brasch: Journals 1945-1957
Peter Simpson (ed)
Otago University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9781927322284

I approached this book rather in the spirit of someone visiting a civic monument to a figure august and admired, but obscurely known. In the late 1980s, as one of the many editors of Landfall in that period, I spent time in the Caxton Press checking proofs, following a tradition of care established by Charles Brasch 40 years earlier. But the strong ghosts I recall in a building filled with reminders of eminence were those of Janet Frame, whose visits and material remnants still held occult power, and Robin Dudding, veiled in a scandalous story that I gathered had more than one way of telling. Brasch’s presence was fainter somehow, less detectable in the busy workings of the printing house that had hosted him and sacked his heir, Dudding.

Tagged with: Autumn 2018, Charles Brasch, Issue 121, Mark Williams, Otago University Press, Peter Simpson
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review and Sociology

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