Blog Archives

Here be gods, monsters and mortals, David Eggleton

Posted on August 26, 2019 by NZ Books

Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold By Māori Writers
Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka (eds)
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143772965

In Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold By Māori Writers, the retelling of mythic stories is a communal activity, with one storyteller picking up where another leaves off, but then transmogrifying the story and often taking it in a completely new direction. Pū rākau means “tree roots”, and so these stories are an affirmation of the polytheistic animism running through the cosmology of the Māori world – Te Ao Māori – with story branching from story, and all interconnected to the main trunk of the mythology as part of a holistic continuum. Here be gods, monsters and mortals in tales of star-crossed lovers, of defiance and derring-do, of transgressive behaviour and comeuppance. These myths retold bend and blend genres, from the supernatural and fantasy to science fiction, ghost stories and magical realism – all this, the reclaiming and the repurposing, a far cry from the bowdlerised, even infantalised, interpretations found in the versions of A W Reed, Antony Alpers and other 20^th-century Pākehā anthologists.

Tagged with: David Eggleton, Issue 127, Penguin Random House, Spring 2019, Whiti Hereaka, Witi Ihimaera
Posted in Literature, Māori, Review

On not relying on truthiness, Brian Easton

Posted on August 26, 2019 by NZ Books

A Conversation With My Country
Alan Duff
Penguin Random House, $39.00,
ISBN 9780143773269

In 1990, a comet brightened the New Zealand literary scene and society with the publication of Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, for it involved both an extraordinary literary style and a powerful story.

Tagged with: Alan Duff, Brian Easton, Issue 127, Penguin Random House, Spring 2019
Posted in Māori, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Stirring up the dust, John McLellan

Posted on May 26, 2019 by NZ Books

Tutu Te Puehu: New Perspectives on the New Zealand Wars
John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds)
Steele Roberts, $50.00, ISBN 9780947493721

In February 2011, over 150 years after the start of the First Taranaki War, the first ever conference dedicated to the New Zealand Wars, “Tutu te Puehu: New Zealand’s Wars of the Nineteenth Century”, was held at Massey University’s Wellington campus. The fact that it took such a length of time for a conference to be held on this subject exemplifies the lack of impetus the New Zealand Wars have previously held in the narrative of the nation. But, thankfully, in the seven or eight years in which it took to publish this edited collection of papers presented at the conference, Tutu te Puehu: New Perspectives on the New Zealand Wars, there has been a welcome groundswell of interest in the subject.

Tagged with: Ian McGibbon, Issue 126, John Crawford, John McLellan, Steele Roberts, Winter 2019
Posted in History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review, War

Melody slithering through the misery, Martin Lodge

Posted on December 3, 2018 by NZ Books

Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War
Chris Bourke
Auckland University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 978869408718

For both civilians and the soldiers alike on active service during WWI, music proved a significant and enduring element of New Zealand’s war effort and war experience. This was recognised at the time: a contributor to the onboard magazine of the Opawa, a ship carrying troops to Europe, wrote in 1917 that “A ship without a musical programme is like a dog without a tail.”

Tagged with: Auckland University Press, Chris Bourke, Issue 124, Martin Lodge, Summer 2018
Posted in Māori, Music, Non-fiction, Review

Getting the archive to the people, Matariki Williams

Posted on June 6, 2018 by NZ Books

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, Review

Colliding pasts, Lydia Wevers

Posted on February 24, 2018 by NZ Books

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, Non-fiction

Championing indigenous art histories, Stella Ramage

Posted on February 24, 2018 by NZ Books

Colonial Gothic to Māori Renaissance: Essays in Memory of Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
Conal McCarthy and Mark Stocker (eds)
Victoria University Press, $80.00,
ISBN 9781776561094

The Gedenkschrift – essays by colleagues collected in posthumous commemoration of an esteemed academic – is an uncommon genre in Aotearoa New Zealand. Partly, this is due to its logistical demands: contributors must produce new work that chimes with the honouree’s research interests within a Goldilocks time-frame, when loss is fresh but not too raw. Museologist Conal McCarthy and curator Mark Stocker, with the help of a small army, have achieved this feat, launching a substantial book within three years of the death of renowned art historian, curator and public speaker, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki.

Tagged with: Autumn 2018, Conal McCarthy, Issue 121, Mark Stocker, Stella Ramage, Victoria University Press
Posted in Art, History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Connecting kindred tribes, David Eggleton

Posted on November 29, 2017 by NZ Books

Black Marks on the White Page
Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (eds)
Penguin Random House, $40.00,
ISBN 9780143770299

Billed as a guidebook to the contemporary literature of Oceania, Black Marks on the White Page is not quite that; it’s too eclectic, too much of a hotchpotch for a start, sweeping erratically back and forth across the Pacific to locate, we are told, “the best new and uncollected fiction” generated out of the rolling identity revolution of Pasifika peoples in the 21^st century. You could make a very long list of “the best” that is not included. What this anthology is is a sampling: it contains 29 examples of “story-telling” by 25 writers, complemented or contextualised by images of nine artworks by nine artists.

Tagged with: David Eggleton, Issue 120, Penguin Random House, Summer 2017, Tina Makereti, Witi Ihimaera
Posted in Art, Literature, Māori, Non-fiction, Pacific, Short stories

A most “vigorous afterlife”, Roger Blackley

Posted on May 28, 2017 by NZ Books

Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand: The Māori Portraits
Ngahiraka Mason and Zara Stanhope (eds)
Auckland University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, $75.00,
ISBN 9781869408565

This extremely elegant book, with its unusual, tall-and-thin “hyper-portrait” format, brings the artist Gottfried Lindauer and the principal collection of his works into the 21^st century. It achieves this by foregrounding Māori perspectives, by emphasising Lindauer’s involvement with photography, and through the diverse range of scholarly perspectives by which the collection is explored. With contributions from Czech and New Zealand art historians, curators and conservators – both Māori and Pākehā – the book is a scholarly triumph for the Auckland Art Gallery.

Tagged with: Gottfried Lindauer, Issue 118, Ngahiraka Mason, Roger Blackley, Winter 2017, Zara Stanhope
Posted in Art, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Protect, promote, and attract an audience, Wayne Hope

Posted on May 28, 2017 by NZ Books

Māori Television: The First Ten Years
Jo Smith
Auckland University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781869408572

The birth of the Māori Television Service in March 2004 coincided with nationwide protests against the Labour government’s plan to entrench, legislatively, Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed (in response to a Court of Appeal decision legitimising prospective claims based on Native Title). A 13-day hikoi beginning in Northland arrived in Wellington on May 5. Over the same period, Tariana Turia announced that she would oppose the legislation and resign her ministerial portfolio. The formation of the Māori Party two months later appeared to signal a political resurgence of the pan-Māori Te Tino Rangatiratanga principles which had been advanced through the language and land rights struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, and by the Mana Motuhake Party in the 1990s. In this context, the establishment of a Māori Television Network was an historic accomplishment. The New Zealand “colony-to-nation” myth, which had informed mass-mediated constructions of national identity, could now be openly contested. Māori journalists, broadcasters, and programme-makers could foreground and develop their own cultural knowledges in contradistinction to assumed monoculturalism.

Tagged with: Auckland University Press, Issue 118, Jo Smith, Wayne Hope, Winter 2017
Posted in Māori, Media, Non-fiction, Review