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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Magpie Hall by Rachael King

Vintage, $35. Reviewed by KERRY TANKARD

I went to the Wellington book launch of Magpie Hall, and wasn’t disappointed; many friendly, talented people contributed to make it an awesome evening for Rachael, including the Brunette Mafia, her writing friends from VUW’s Institute of Modern Letters writing programme. Bill Manhire, the head of the programme, was present, along with a scattering of the Wellington litterati.

So, on to the book; a second novel often comes with a lot of baggage from the first one, especially in terms of readers expectations. This novel is no exception, and I expect, from the smattering of reviews in New Zealand that I’ve read, I’m not the only reviewer to have found the gothic novel form as appealing as the contemporary family narrative woven into this historical mystery.

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Golden Prospects: Chinese on the West Coast of New Zealand by Julia Bradshaw

Shantytown (West Coast Historical & Mechanical Society Inc.), 294 pp. $55. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

A large number of Chinese men emigrated to New Zealand during the gold rushes to Otago and the West Coast in the 1860s. Most came seeking to make money and return to their families in China. Some were successful, but many died unmarried, without descendants. Julia Bradshaw has undertaken a long-overdue project in researching the story of the Chinese on the West Coast. It was not an easy task as there are few people of Chinese descent living on the West Coast today. Their story has been largely overlooked. For example, in the article on the Chinese in New Zealand in Te Ara, the West Coast gets only a passing mention.

Most of the Chinese came from a small area in the Guandong Province. Life was difficult there in the 1860s, and young, single men were often chosen by their families to travel overseas and send money home. They were generally unwelcome on the goldfields, and often the subject of prejudice and ridicule. But the suspicion was not entirely one-sided. The Chinese made little attempt to fit in with local communities as they did not plan to stay any longer than necessary.

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Ring around the city: Wellington’s new suburbs, 1900-1930 by Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew

Steele Roberts Publishing, 200 pp. $45. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

Like most early New Zealand settlements, Wellington was sited on the edge of a good harbour. But there was little flat land around the harbour, and the town was boxed in by steep hills. By 1900 it was overcrowded, land prices were rising, and new suburbs were urgently needed on or beyond the hills. The key to the development of Wellington’s suburbs was a network of electric trams which were able to climb the hills and provide rapid transport to outer suburbs.

This book tells the story of Wellington’s suburbs using Kilbirnie and Kelburn as examples. Trams provided access to Kilbirnie and Hataitai (and later Miramar and Seatoun) while access to Kelburn came from the privately-run Kelburn cable car.

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Don McCullin supporting the Freedom of the Press: 100 Photographs, edited by Jean-François Julliard

Reporters sans Frontières, 2009. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

THE PARIS-based global media freedom group Reporters sans Frontières has carved out an innovative niche for its brand of fund-raising books in defence of the endangered journalist species. The latest addition is another fine collector’s item—100 iconic war and social disorder imagery from British photojournalist Don McCullin.

His Sleeping with Ghosts collection (1995), a retrospective of his war photography, particularly struck a chord with me. And this RSF collection of some of his most famous photographs (and many lesser known ones) is just as evocative, at times chilling, filled with anguish and suffering, or just disturbingly reflective.

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Beyond the Battlefield: New Zealand and its Allies 1939-45 by Gerald Hensley

Penguin Books, $65. Reviewed by DENNIS ROSE

A few years ago I visited the grave of a friend’s brother who had fallen, in April 1945, crossing a river near Faenza in Northern Italy. Despite kiwi fruit growing in the fields next to the cemetery it seemed a long way from home.

Gerald Hensley’s Beyond the Battlefield, published by the Penguin Group, with acknowledgements to the National Army Museum, outlines New Zealand’s foreign policy before and during the Second World War. It helps explain that remote grave by tracing the political and military decisions that deployed New Zealand servicemen, and women, to many of the main theatres of war. The span is similar to that of F.L.W. Wood’s official war history volume The New Zealand People at War: Political and External Affairs, but with a primary emphasis on external affairs and much assisted by access to British, American and Australian (but not Russian) archives. It is a well-researched, well-presented, and stimulating review.

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Castles in the Sand: what’s happening to the New Zealand coast? by Raewyn Peart

Craig Potton Publishing, 276 pp. $50. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

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.

In this well illustrated book, Raewyn Peart has documented how New Zealanders have used and modified the coastline, and the problems this has caused. Published by Craig Potton Publishing in association with the Environmental Defence Society, it is a readable and thought-provoking book that raises questions about whether some wild and beautiful coastal areas should be off-limits for development, and whether local communities can maintain the nature of the environment they live in against the pressures of commercial developers.

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State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji, by Susanna Trnka

Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2008. Reviewe by STEVEN RATUVA

THE DISCOURSE on Fiji’s embattled political history has often been the domain of historians, political scientists and economists and every now and then, the intellectual monotony is broken by streaks of intellectual freshness, which provide new prisms through which we can visualise the complex socio-political reality of the Fiji society. The book, State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji by Auckland University anthropologist Susanna Trnka, does just that.

The ethnographic approach shifts analysis away from the conventional broad-sweeping political narrative that political scientists and historians tend to thrive on and captures in a meticulous anthropological fashion, the living experiences and consciousness of individuals and communities, embroiled in a survival game amid the political chaos of the 2000 coup.

However, the absence of the role of the media in the book is quite conspicuous because, over the years, the media has been instrumental in reinforcing stereotypes, constructing prejudices and inflaming tension. The pattern of reporting between Indo-Fijian and indigenous Fijian journalists was quite apparent. There were indigenous Fijian reporters who were ‘embedded’ with the rebels and took a coup sympathy and justificatory stance and, on the other hand, many Indo-Fijian journalists took a ‘victimhood’ stance and were geared towards reporting the excesses of the coup.

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Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: travels to find where my stuff comes from, by Fred Pearce

Eden Project Books

Cradle to Cradle: re-making the way we make things, by Michael Braungart and William McDonough

Vintage

Ecological Intelligence: knowing the hidden impacts of what we buy, by Daniel Goleman

Allen Lane

Reviewed by BERNARD STEEDS

Everything we buy has a hidden life.

This life occurs before the product gets to us – as the raw materials are extracted or grown, as the product is processed or manufactured, as it is transported to us. It occurs while we own the product – through the energy it consumes, or the toxins it emits. It occurs after we have finished with it and sent it for dumping or recycling.

But when we buy product we are not told about these costs. In general, the companies that profit do not have to tell us. Nor, generally, do they have to take full responsibility. They may not even be fully aware themselves of the impact of their products, either on the environment or on people’s health and welfare.

Each of these three books is an attempt to address this issue – to explore the ‘life cycle’ and ‘environmental footprint’ of the stuff we buy: one by telling us about it, one by arguing that we should be told more, and one by offering a solution.

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Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor, by Tony Maniaty

Sydney: Viking, 2009. Reviewed by MARCUS O’DONNELL

EARLY on in Tony Maniaty’s Shooting Balibo we come across Herman Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and John Dos Passos. We quickly get the message that this is as much a journey of the imagination as it is a travelogue, memoir or investigation. Maniaty tells us that when he went to East Timor as an ABC reporter in 1975, just before the ill-fated journalists, his travel reading was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here we get a sense of the young journalist’s ambition, his questing commitment to follow the story, just as Ahab follows his whale.

But in retrospect it also tells us how large the 1975 events at Balibo have figured in Maniaty’s life. Shooting Balibo narrates his recent return to Timor, as an advisor to Robert Connolly’s film Balibo and marks the first time he has returned to the tiny island nation since he fled just before the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In a sense, the book is still about him following the whale.

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