Obituary Raymond Frank Grover (1931-2019) Brad Patterson Born in Matamata in 1931, the eldest son of a transient school-teaching family, Ray Grover’s early years were in small rural settlements at the Bay of Islands and on the Wanganui River. After…
Obituary Peter Wells (1950-2019) Siobhan Harvey Into the apparent silence of diverse voices in Aotearoa New Zealand literature, award-winning novelist, essayist, historian, anthologist, filmmaker and playwright, Peter Wells spoke. His was an articulation which, in life, was strong, uncompromising, inquisitive,…
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.
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.
The Camera in the Crowd: Filming New Zealand in Peace and War: 1895-1920
Christopher Pugsley
Oratia Books, $80.00, ISBN 9780947506346
Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen
Annabel Cooper
University of Otago Press, $50.00, ISBN 9781988531083
As most contemporary movie-goers around the world would know, despite its small population, when it comes to film New Zealand punches well above its weight. What is perhaps less known to most is that Aotearoa has a rich film-making tradition which harks back to the last years of the 19th century, when Auckland-based photographer Alfred H Whitehouse started producing the first films ever made in the country. During the silent period, New Zealand was home to a relatively vibrant film industry; however, in the late 1920s, a number of factors, such as the transition to synchronised sound, the economic depression and the government’s lack of interest in film, marked the decline of local cinema production. New Zealanders would have to wait until the establishment of the New Zealand Film Commission in the late 1970s to witness the emergence of a sustainable local film industry. The resurgence of New Zealand national cinema culminated in the mid-1990s with the international success of films such as The Piano (1993), Once Were Warriors (1994) and Heavenly Creatures (1994), which put the country on the world cinema map. The production and release of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s gave the New Zealand film industry even wider global media exposure, cementing the country’s reputation as a major film production hub.
A Mistake
Carl Shuker
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776562145
Carl Shuker is a writer who is not afraid to take risks. His previous four novels were all hailed for their innovation in form and espousal of post-modernism. He is, as far as any definition of genre can be trusted, a truly literary writer.
Excisions, Alan Roddick
Charles Brasch’s literary executor Alan Roddick explains the afterlife of Brasch’s journals
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