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Voices from the past, Jock Phillips

Remembering Gallipoli: Interviews with New Zealand Gallipoli Veterans
Christopher Pugsley and Charles Ferrall (eds)
Victoria University Press, $40.00
ISBN 9780864739919

Amid the flood of printed words that have marked the centenary of New Zealand’s Gallipoli experience, Remembering Gallipoli comes with, in every sense, the most history. The interviews on which the book is based were initially conducted in 1982 by four women, members of a media company, Bluestockings, as background research for Television New Zealand. There were 130 soldiers and one nurse interviewed, all in their late 80s or 90s. Chris Pugsley and Maurice Shadbolt then re-interviewed 21 (or 26 as Pugsley writes elsewhere) on camera. Extracts were used in the powerful 1984 documentary Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story and drawn on for Pugsley’s magnificent book in the same year with the same name. Shadbolt chose 12 of the subjects to tell their stories in his stirring Voices of Gallipoli (1988), a book which was a revelation to many, including Helen Clark, who read it on the plane flying to Gallipoli in 2000 when she conceived of a project to record the memories of WWII veterans.

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review, War

Yesterday today, Glyn Harper

How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War
Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts (eds)
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9780864739353

With the centenary of WWI now upon us, a flood of books on New Zealand’s role in that conflict can be expected. The first of these appeared in late 2013, and this trend will continue for the next few years. Amongst the books on offer in 2014 is How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War edited by Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts. Few of the publications that will appear over the coming years will match How We Remember for its diversity or its insights.

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Sociology, War

To-ing and fro-ing, John O’Leary

Henry Lawson in New Zealand Charles Ferrall (ed) Steele Roberts, $29.99, ISBN 9781877577390   Who could be more Australian than Henry Lawson? He was born on a New South Wales goldfield, wandered and worked in the outback, and wrote stories

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Posted in History, Literature, Review

Bovver boys

What they wrote A taste of contributor comments over our first 20 years   On New Zealand Books My hope is that New Zealand Books will provide a forum for frank discussion that dares to rise above the suffocating confines

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Posted in Comment

Ngati Peking, Charles Ferrall

Being Maori-Chinese: Mixed Identities Manying Ip Auckland University Press, $45.00,  ISBN 9781869403997 Many of the nearly 5,000 people who claim Maori-Chinese ancestry in Aotearoa New Zealand have a similar genealogy or whakapapa. During the 1920s and 1930s a Chinese man

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Posted in Māori, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

After the gold rush, Elaine Clark

East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination ed Charles Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith Victoria University Press, $49.95, ISBN 0864734913 Southeast Asia and New Zealand: A History of Regional and Bilateral Relations ed Anthony L Smith New Zealand

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

Pa-men and boys, Linley Boniface

Katherine Mansfield’s Men ed Charles Ferrall and Jane Stafford Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society in association with Steele Roberts, $29.95, ISBN 187733846X “The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Man in the dock, Lynley Hood

The Trials of Eric Mareo Charles Ferrall & Rebecca Ellis Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734328 Some crimes touch a collective nerve, trigger a collective outrage. The high-pitched intensity of the debate – the foam-flecked arguments, the inflammatory media stories,

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review

A major Australasian critic, Charles Ferrall

Patrick White Mark Williams, Macmillan, 1993, $45.95 During the early 1960s Patrick White wrote an admiring letter to Janet Frame; she replied 22 years later. The Tasman is often wider than it looks, but this belies some more direct correspondences

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Travelling through fiction, Charles Ferrall

The Good Tourist and the Laughing Cadaver Michael Gifkins (ed) Vintage, 1993, $24.95   Visiting a library in Timbuktu, an actual town in the central west African country of Mali, the Australian writer Murray Bail is told by an Islamic

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
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