In the Zone
Zone of the Marvellous by Martin Edmond
Auckland University Press 2009. Reviewed by PAULINE DAWSON
Martin Edmond’s Zone of the Marvellous is an amazing treasure box of fact, fiction, myth, history, fable and imagination in search of the antipodes. Helped on its way by a Copyright Licensing Writers’ Award won by the author in 2007, in eight discrete essays, the author writes that what he seeks “to do is describe how this other place was first rumoured, then imagined, then looked for, discovered, plundered, colonised and finally domesticated”.
Following the rather ’straight’, yet lyrical telling of the historical story in The Supply Party (Edmond’s last book), Zone of the Marvellous goes back to the densely packed stories and tangents found in Luca Antara. While Supply Party had strong undertones of loss and absence, Zone, although also telling tales of journeys, is much richer. Perhaps this is simply the contrast of the Australian outback to the tropics of the Pacific and the Asian spice routes.
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My father was a land developer, responsible for some of the earliest coastal subdivisions on the Kapiti coast in the 1920s and 1930s. Before he died in 1953 he was becoming disturbed at the way development was changing the nature of the small beach community at Paraparaumu beach. Half a century later he would hardly recognise the densely settled urban area he helped create.

