Book Review | BWB Texts

The Whole Intimate Mess: Motherhood, politics, and women’s writing

by Holly Walker (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Alison McCulloch

When I saw Holly Walker, MP, speak at a meeting in Tauranga, I remember thinking how confident and together she was. That was a few years back, and she must have been barely 30 years old. “Whoa,” I thought, “I could never have done that at 30-something.” When she decided to step down as an MP, I confess to being a bit disappointed. Having read a fair bit over the years about the struggles facing women in Parliament, I had started to think that was then, this was now and things had finally changed for the better. I mean, look at Holly Walker. This book makes very clear that’s not the case.

Walker’s résumé is impressive, Bachelor’s degree, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Member of Parliament, all before she turned 30. And all of it following an origin story about her mother’s struggles as a single parent and her own lifelong dream to make sure every child in New Zealand had the kind of safe, secure, opportunity-rich childhood she’d enjoyed. It was a story that, by the time she left Parliament in 2014, she had come to doubt as inauthentic. “The reasons for this lofty ambition,” she writes, “were as much to do with celebrity and approval as they were about public service.” Holly Walker wanted to excel, to exceed expectations, to be approved of, to be liked.

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Book Review | BWB Texts

Tax and Fairness

by Deborah Russell and Terry Baucher (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Peter Malcolm

This is an excellent and timely book, since apart from general statements about increasing or mostly reducing tax, there has been very little comment or debate as to whether we should pay tax at all and how much tax each of us should pay.

The authors have subtitled the book “we need to talk about why we pay taxes”, an important statement, although I believe they should have added “and how much should each of us pay”. The last couple of pages make an excellent case for “the why”, and the last two sentences encourage us to see our tax system in a more positive light:

“Proudly paying our taxes is a sign that we believe in our own capacity to create a flourishing society that gives all New Zealanders fair opportunities. We should smile when we pay our taxes.”

But what about the “Fairness”? The authors give little space to this critical question apart from the unfairness of an almost non-existence Capital Gains Tax. The question of tax scales, progressive or regressive tax systems, hardly rates a mention. Many commentators aruge that in comparison with most other developed countries our tax rates on the poor are heavy and the tax rates on the high income/wealthy are light. Is this fair?

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Q & A | BWB Texts

For Scoop Review of Books, Alison McCulloch interviewed Prue Hyman about her new book, part of the BWB Texts series, Hopes Dashed? The Economics of Gender Inequality

SRB: Can you start by giving me a brief biography, with respect to your background in gender inequality issues?

Prue: I taught feminist economics and economics generally, but specialising in feminist economics, where I could, at Victoria University for many years. I worked for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs for two years on secondment. That, obviously gave me a background in feminist economics and on a couple of sabbaticals, I worked with people who were working in the field and just gradually read and wrote about it myself.

SRB:    So how did this book come about now?

Prue:    Bridget Williams did a book edited by Max Rashbrooke, called “Inequality” (click here for the SRB review) and it had very little gender stuff in it to my surprise, because it’s still one of the major aspects of inequality. And she got me to have a look at the small amount there was in there, and I said it was all right as far as it went, but it wasn’t detailed enough. Bridget Williams published my earlier book in 1994, “Women in Economics: A New Zealand Feminist Perspective,” and we agreed I’d do an update essentially for the Texts series.

SRB:    Early in the book, you briefly mention the state of feminism today and have some positive things to say, including about the commitment of many younger women and the diverse issues they’re active in, including rape culture, body image, unionism, anti-racism and more. But I wonder, given your focus on gender inequality, do you distinguish among the kinds of feminism? In particular, between, for example, so-called “choice feminism” or “neoliberal feminism”, which is perhaps less focused on women as an oppressed class than on women’s individual identities and choices?

Prue:    To me “choice feminism” or “neoliberal feminism” is almost a contradiction in terms. I think it’s an abuse of the term feminism and I think it’s unfortunate that some modern women who get prominence, that that’s all they mean by feminism, because to me, feminism is about women as a class, and not only about women as a class — I must use a broad term, but it can’t be a feminism of the type I’m writing about and keen on without also dealing with the intersections, i.e. race and class and disability and all the rest. At times, I think, ‘well, I’m less concerned with all women than I used to be.’ It’s really the women who are most disadvantaged by other facets that I care about most. Read more »

The Stolen Island: Searching for ‘Ata

by Scott Hamilton (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Michael Horowitz

Located even further south than temperate Noumea, Tonga’s tiny island of ‘Ata might have become the jewel of the kingdom’s burgeoning tourist industry. Imagine a Tongan resort that would not only be mild in winter, but pleasant in summer.

Alas, it was not to be. As Scott Hamilton poignantly describes in his concise account, Stolen Island, an Australian whaler anchored offshore in June 1863 … tricked nearly half the island’s over 300 inhabitants to come aboard to trade … then locked the exits and delivered them to a slave ship bound for Peru. Shortly after their arrival in port, the Peruvian government enforced its abolition of slavery and ordered all captured islanders, including Tahitians and Tongans, repatriated. Yet the prisoners were again betrayed: this time by being labelled a medical threat by the captain of the returning vessel and dumped on remote Cocos island, where all but 38 perished. Finally in November, a Peruvian warship brought survivors to the seaside village of Paita, where the descendants of some ‘Atans may possibly carry on today.

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Three Cities: Seeking hope in the Anthropocene
by Rod Oram (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by John Lang

We’ve all heard of Beijing, London and Chicago—the three cities Rod Oram scaffolds his latest environmental insights upon—but we’ve not all heard of the Anthropocene; at least not yet. If the term is still slippery, you have an excuse, but not for much longer.

The BWB text, Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene takes readers for a whirlwind trip around the globe searching for the stirrings of something resembling hope, but unsurprisingly, not hope itself.

The Anthropocene epoch, superficially synonymous with climate change, but more accurately associated with the breadth of change being carved out on the natural world by humans, has only just begun, says the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA). A mere month ago, the WGA voted in favour of formally recommending (to the International Geological Congress) that the Anthropocene qualifies to succeed the 11,700 year-old Holocene epoch.

Oram’s text begins where it should, in Beijing, where the perils of climate change and its hopeful solutions are reacting with such unpredictability, even the most ardent experts can’t foresee the results.

China has admirably, if indignantly, taken to the problem of climate change of late, yet the oxymoron that is ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’ (sustainable development) has never been better embodied than within its borders. Bringing 300 million people out of poverty has had its drawbacks. Armed with a (coal) burning desire to spearhead the international energy transition, mostly born of necessity but with a likely pinch of pride, China plays out the ‘great contradiction’. Others can only gasp, or applaud. In 2015 alone, hundreds of new coal-fired power plants—the antithesis to combatting climate change—were commissioned; at the same time, over one hundred billion dollars was invested in renewable electricity. Read more »

Christchurch Ruptures
by Katie Pickles (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Judith Morrell Nathan

Professor Pickles, head of history at Canterbury University, has written about the earthquakes from a new angle, arguing they have “fractured pathways to remembering the past”. Her approach to history is thematic and sociological, not chronological. The book looks at Christchurch’s history and the impact of the earthquakes through five themes: landscape, people, heritage, culture and politics. “The earthquakes have exposed major components in the history of Christchurch such as the dominant Anglican tradition and Englishness, the denial of a Maori past, and the environmental pitfalls of building on a swamp.”

The disruption to the landscape is all too obvious, with many buildings demolished by the earthquake and subsequently in the recovery phase. The break from the colonial past is symbolised in the destruction of statues of Canterbury’s founders. Pickles argues that traditions need to be looked at afresh and not just clung to or restored. While the earthquakes have brought the city’s colonial past back into focus, many heritage buildings had been knocked down before the earthquakes.

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Creeks and Kitchens: A childhood memoir
by Maurice Gee (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

Our family always went camping for Christmas, because my father was a teacher and we escaped the city for the entire summer holidays. There was always a creek to set the red Christmas jelly in a billy held firm by stones and boulders; my dam-buiding skills were put to festive use. Our creeks usually had willows to camp under and the shade aided seeing the ‘bullies in the creek and helping them move house into empy Wattie’s fruit salad tins. I never did see a naked man washing himself in a pool, as did Maurice Gee, but I did see a young couple standing in the water kissing and felt very strange and dizzy – I think their standing in “my” creek felt like a violation, along with something I, aged seven, didn’t understand.

My mother’s kitchen was tiny, and not very welcoming. With two doors in a tiny room that was a throughway between the wash-house/loo and living area, there was no chair or table, just a little stool she sat on by the open door of the oven early winter mornings with her first cup of tea. Gee and I share the view of our mothers as the essential touchstones of our departures and returns, but his kitchen sounds more like the hub of the house, with its “black stove and drying rack, its brown lino, its worn mat and wooden table, the Philco radio on the mantelpiece.”

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First Contact: Abel Tasman’s Arrival in Taitapu, 1642
by Anne Salmond (BWB Texts, e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Judith Nathan

This work was my introduction to BWB short texts, described by BWB as “short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers.” This work certainly fits that description though as BWB describes its texts as “commissioned digital-first works” I had assumed it would be Dame Anne’s latest thoughts on Abel Tasman’s voyage. It is in fact the Preface, Introduction and Chapter 3 of her prize winning book, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772, first published nearly 25 years ago by Penguin Books.

Nevertheless, this well-written scholarly work deserves another airing, this time as an e-book instead of a large, comprehensive paperback; it will deservedly bring it to the attention of a wider audience. It benefits from Dame Anne’s deep understanding of Māori culture, a perspective that was not considered necessary by an earlier generation of historians. The preface to Two Worlds, reprinted in this work, explains her belief in the importance of approaching the encounters from both sides.

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Luminous Moments
by Paul Callaghan (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Judith Nathan

As a former Massey University staff member, I was well aware of the eminence of our long serving professor of physics. In one of the items in this collection of seven recent writings and speeches, Sir Paul Callaghan attributed his interest in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, the field in which he made his international reputation, to his appointment to a small university science department largely comprising chemists.

It was really after his move to Wellington, to Victoria University, that it became apparent that Sir Paul was much more than an eminent physicist. He not only gathered a group of talented scientists around him to progress his research and founded a company to promote its commercial application, but he also made it his mission to explain the importance of good science to the general public, for example in interviews on National Radio with Kim Hill. One of these is published in this collection; there is also an item on pseudo-science. Even more admirably, he chose to publicly share many aspects of his three years of treatment for the cancer that sadly killed him at 64: these items serve as a reminder of the tremendous amount that Sir Paul achieved in this last phase of his life.

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Geering and God: 1965-71: The Heresy Trial that Divided New Zealand
by Lloyd Geering (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Judith Nathan

This text is an extract from Sir Lloyd Geering’s autobiography, Wrestling with God, published in 2006, with a brief foreword about Professor Geering by Allan Davidson, a leading New Zealand church historian. Many older Dunediners like myself, and indeed older Presbyterians and others throughout the country, will remember the controversy aroused by the articles and speeches of Professor Geering, Principal of Knox College Theological Hall in the late 1960s. Perhaps I should state up front that I remember my father supporting Professor Geering’s views, so I came to this volume predisposed to admire it.

One wonders whether theological articles today could be so divisive as these were, and whether they would result in the author being not only vilified within his church but also interviewed on television. Christianity can still rouse intense public criticism but it is in relation to sects such as the Destiny Church, not a mainstream denomination. It is hard to imagine a 21^st century trial for heresy.

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