Book Review

A Scientific Welsh Eye Surgeon: the short life of Llewellyn Powell MD (1843-79)
by Geoffrey W Rice (Hawthorne Press & Cotter Medical History Trust, 2020. 144 pp. $30)

Reviewed by Simon Nathan

Llewellyn Powell was a bright young Welshman who studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, emigrated to Canterbury in 1865 and started a medical practice in Christchurch. Dr Geoffrey Rice, the author of this short biography, explains that it is the first publication of a larger project to document the activities of medical men in Christchurch during the late 19th century. Although Powell died young, aged only 36, he had an interesting career, intertwined with different facets of early Christchurch.
Powell left behind almost no personal papers or medical records. Dr Rice has been able to put together this readable biography using the National Library’s Papers Past website to search the digitized issues of the Lyttelton Times and the Press. This novel approach works effectively because Powell was a public figure whose activities were regularly reported in the newspapers. He also wrote letters to the papers on issues that concerned him, so the author is able to convey some insight into his personal opinions.
Although Powell worked across several different medical fields, he specialized as an eye surgeon, and was described by one of his contemporaries as “the best oculist in New Zealand”. However Powell’s medical career was partly overshadowed by his wide-ranging scientific interests. He was a skilled microscopist, and one of the first local exponents of forensic pathology. He was an expert in New Zealand spiders, describing new species in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, and was an early member of the Canterbury Philosophical Society, serving for a period as president.

Two drawings of New Zealand spiders by Powell in a paper published in volume 3 of the Transactions of the NZ Institute (1870)

He gave public lectures on scientific topics to the high school and fledgling university college. Although his health was poor as he suffered from chronic tuberculosis, he was clearly a man of energy who actively participated in everything that interested him.
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Book Review

Love you: public policy for intergenerational wellbeing
by Girol Karacaoglu (Tuwhiri, 2020 $27)

Reviewed by George Ritchie

Girol Karacaoglu

We are in the middle of a systemic environmental, social and economic crisis.

So says Girol Karacaoglu, a former Chief Economist at the NZ Treasury who these days heads up the School of Government at Victoria University.  

And he’s not alone – Girol stresses to me over Zoom that this is a view shared by “the most orthodox institutions you can think of” referring to the Treasury in its evidence for the 2019 Budget and the Secretary-General of the OECD, Angel Gurria, in a 2019 speech.

His new book is intended primarily as a challenge to young people: change the way that New Zealand debates and creates public policy. Help us get out of this crisis. 

Thirty years ago, NZ was something of a fashion-setter in terms of giving its central bank statutory operational independence and responsibility to maintain consumer price stability. It was also ahead of the game in terms of the degree of its statutory fiscal management transparency.

The urgent predicament these days is how best to institutionalise greater transparency, inclusivity, and clearer accountabilities for advancing the wellbeing of current and future generations. You might be excused for thinking, well, why get so animated as to release a book about this? Didn’t the Government release a Wellbeing Budget in 2019 and 2020? Doesn’t the Public Finances Act now require the Treasury to produce a long-term report on wellbeing every four years?
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Book Review

This Pākehā Life: an unsettled memoir
by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books, 2020) $39.99

Reviewed by Lindsay Shelton

I have been recommending this book to everyone. And those who have accepted my recommendation are now recommending it to others. Its story may at first seem to be a modestly low-key one, but it quickly proves to have a powerful impact, with resonances that will be personal for every reader.

As Alison Jones writes: “Most Pākehā people seemed to know nothing about Māori history, and they did not know what they did not even know. In my experience, Pākehā people like my father who denigrated Māori things knew nothing about Māori. On the other hand, I too knew next to nothing about Māori though my ignorance was tempered by curiosity and attraction rather than rejection and fear.”

The author, a professor in Te Puna Wānanga at the School of Māori and Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland, tells a moving personal story that begins with her birth in Cornwall Park Hospital in 1953 — “with no relatives here, my parents and I were alone in New Zealand.” Her parents were immigrants from England, who had arrived the previous year.

From her hospital bed, her mother looked out at One Tree Hill, without knowing that the “volcanic cone, rising high amongst all the other remnant volcanoes in the Auckland area, has another name, another history, and another identity.”

And now, “it officially has a doubled name, joined by a slash. It is Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill. The slash marks an ongoing tension: the mountain’s identity remains unsettled.” And she tells us: “The stories of Maungakiekie and One Tree Hill, the histories that call those places into being, are quite different.”

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Book Review

Tree of Strangers
by Barbara Sumner(Massey University Press, 199 pp.) $35

Reviewed by Gregor Thompson

I bumped into a childhood friend recently in a bar in Auckland. Ordinarily, I live in Wellington but I was on my way to Paris to start a new life. The recent surge in Covid-19 cases in continental Europe has necessarily put that plan on the backburner. Lily told me that her mother had written a book and that I ‘ought to read it. Not knowing what to expect, I came out the other side with an internal obligation to share what I had read.

Having previously worked as a journalist, amongst other things Barbara Sumner is an award-winning documentary producer. Sumner is a multi-disciplinary creative and seems to have a habit of perennially popping up. 11 years after her Oscar short-listed 2009 film This Way of Life, Tree of Strangers is Barbara Sumner’s first literary work. Her newly published autobiography is consistent with her previous work in the sense that it is exceptional.

Displayed on the front cover is an image of the author playing alone on a lawn, presumably the backyard of one of her numerous childhood homes. The photo was taken by her adopted father when she was three years old, it conveys an impression of resolute loneliness. Perhaps the perfect portrayal of Sumner’s fascinating life.

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Book Review

Architects at the Apex
by Geoff Mew (with assistance from Adrian Humphris) (Ngaio Press, Martinborough. 264 pp.) $59.95

Reviewed by Simon Nathan

The older buildings in New Zealand reflect the work of a relatively small group of architects, many virtually unknown outside heritage circles – the buildings are their memorials. This volume illustrates the work of a group of leading architects who were active in New Zealand between 1840 and 1940. The authors, Geoff Mew and Adrian Humphris, have previously published important books on Wellington architecture.

It was not entirely straightforward to make a choice of who was included. The authors specify their criteria for selection which includes a geographic spread of buildings, an innovative approach to design, and recognition by others in the architectural profession. Readers may note the absence of a favourite architect – for example, I regret the omission of Thomas Forrester who designed many of the whitestone buildings that make Oamaru so distinctive – but the book includes all the major players.

In the first part of the nineteenth century, architects often found it hard to make a living, but were used to design commercial buildings, churches, schools, and government buildings. With increasing prosperity in the Pākehā community, the better-off families employed architects for their houses, both in town and country. There was a shortage of local building stone in most parts of New Zealand, but wood was freely available and was used as the dominant building material. Later brick was used, particularly in urban centres where there was a high risk of fire.

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