Press Release

With one in 13 of New Zealand’s native plants threatened with extinction, the authors of a new book hope to make Kiwis more aware of their plight.

Threatened Plants of New Zealand, published by Canterbury University Press, is a comprehensive, up-to-date account of New Zealand’s six extinct and 184 severely threatened native flora.

Combining precise botanical descriptions with lavish illustrations, the book provides an assessment of the degree of risk to each species, gives an explanation of the nature of those risks, looks at current conservation strategies and provides the characteristics of each plant for identification in the field. The book also includes distribution maps to show where the plants can be found and a full glossary of terms.

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Contributors Mylyn Kuve, Dr Alice Aruhe'eta Pollard, Catherine Adifaka, Taeasi Sanga, Ethel Sigimanu, Betty Fakarii and professor Marilyn Waring. Photo: PMC

When Solomon Islanders at the launch of Being the First were each handed a copy of the book, the general reaction was one of “awe”.

The book is the first ever to document the lives of leading Solomon Island women from their own point of view, and the first published historical account of achievements by local women over the past 50 years.

It was launched in New Zealand yesterday at AUT University.

“They all kind of picked it up and held it close to them – bringing it to their chest. It was quite emotional,” says Suzanne Bent-Gina in Honiara, describing how women responded when given a copy of the book to keep – free.

Bent-Gina, deputy director of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands’ (RAMSI) Machinery of Government programme, helped organise the book project as part of its component on women in government.

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By Keir Wotherspoon

There is a frenetic energy to Simon Schama when he talks about history, the kind of energy that you might expect from a highly excitable child caught in the ecstasy of their very favourite topic rather than a Cambridge-trained professor of Modern History. Schama appeared on Friday as part of the International Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Festival, one of two talks that he was scheduled to speak at, and his only solo appearance.

During Friday’s sell-out session in the Wellington Town Hall, he nimbly darted in and out of the questions from interviewer Sean Plunket. Schama’s hands became so animated at one point that he whacked off his own lapel microphone, which had become so tangled that it forced him into a hunched position. “If I were a leprechaun, it’d be perfect,” he quipped to his audience, who even before the incident had perhaps noted something leprechaun-like in their lively speaker.

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Release

Poet and academic John Newton new JD Stout Fellow

Victoria University’s 2010 JD Stout Fellow will explore the contribution of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, among other war-time immigrants, to New Zealand’s national identity and culture.

Dr John Newton is a poet, critic and academic as well as the author of the highly‐acclaimed book, The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune published last year by Victoria University Press.

As the JD Stout Fellow, Dr Newton will be based at Victoria’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies where he will conduct research for a new book about immigration to New Zealand at the time of World War Two.

He plans to explore the contribution made by such immigration to the development of New Zealand culture.

“War‐time immigrants, including Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, played a key role in the growth of national culture from the mid‐1930s to the late‐1960s,” says Dr Newton.

Until this year Dr Newton has been based in the English Department at the University of Canterbury, where he has taught New Zealand and American Literature, Poetry and Reading Culture.

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Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes by Martin Edmond

Auckland University Press, 2007. Reviewed by SCOTT HAMILTON

Over the last couple of decades Martin Edmond has won critical acclaim and a considerable readership with a books that combine autobiography, history, and fiction. Edmond’s 1992 breakthrough book The Autobiography of My Father is a study of his own grief as well as a reconstruction of his father’s passage through postwar provincial New Zealand society; his wonderful 1999 volume The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont combines a hallucinatory journey in search of the late painter’s surviving canvases with memories of the recklessly experimental life Clairmont lived in the 1970s; Chronicles of the Unsung, which was published in 2004, moves between accounts of youthful wanderings in America, Europe and the Pacific and meditations on the fates of Rimbaud and Van Gogh; and the baroque masterpiece Luca Antara mixes memories of the seedy side of Sydney in the ‘70s and ‘80s with the bizarre and violent story of the first European visits to Australia.
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Writers and Readers Week Preview: Peter Singer

By Jeremy Rose

Shortly after we launched the Scoop Review of Books, two years ago, I sent the philosopher Peter Singer an email asking him the following question:

“New Zealand is in the process of introducing a compulsory bio-fuel component in all fuel. The Green Party, and others, have introduced measures to ensure that the bio-fuel isn’t coming from unsustainable sources (and taking food out of the mouths of the poor) and as a result in the short term at least all of the bio-fuel is likely to come from tallow from the country’s very large meat industry.

“What would your personal position be? Would you give up driving a car rather than fill the tank with animal fat? How would you advise moral vegetarians and others to tackle the dilemma?”

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Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives.” Edited by Kate McMillan, John Leslie & Elizabeth McLeay.

Victoria University Press, Wellington. 2009. Reviewed by ALISON McCULLOCH

Second-wave feminism has been dead for some time now, though precisely when it took its last gasp remains unclear. Some locate the seeds of its destruction as early as the 1978 Radical Feminist Caucus at Piha, marked as it was by splits around questions of race, sexuality and class. “The women’s movement,” Sandra Coney wrote in 1993, “exists only in pockets, as rape crisis centres, refuges, groups against pornography and women’s centres.”

She and others were critical of the movement’s failure to analyse what went wrong, and in that same article, Coney wondered if those past mistakes could ever be learned from. “It is probably impossible for the old soldiers to do this,” she wrote, “because of bad histories and because they are still wedded to the old ideas.”

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The Kiwi Fossil Hunter’s Handbook by James Crampton and Marianna Terezow

Random House New Zealand, 207 pages. $40.Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

Although there are many popular books on New Zealand plants and animals, our unique fossils have been largely neglected outside the technical literature. Yet fossils are the evidence for past life, and are found in most parts of the country. This book helps fill the gap. It has a practical approach, providing detailed accounts of 27 accessible localities around New Zealand where you can go and find fossils. Some of the localities are reserves, where you can look at and photograph them, but at many you can actually collect fossils yourself. I imagine that many budding paleontologists will be checking out localities close to where they live, but the book could also provide the basis for a 1-2 month fossil tourist trip around New Zealand.

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