In 1858 Canterbury settler Thomas Potts protested against the destruction of totara on the Port Hills near Christchurch. A decade later, as a member of Parliament, he made forest conservation a national issue. Through his writing he raised the then novel idea of protecting native birds on island reserves, and proposed the creation of national 'domains' or parks. As a pioneering colonist, acclimatist, and runholder, however, Potts' own actions threatened the very environments he sought to maintain. This book is about, and partly by, Potts, and through him about New Zealand and the course and consequences of colonisation. It describes and interprets his life, from his early years in England through to his 34 years in New Zealand. Excerpts from Potts' vivid 1850s diary, written from close to the edge of European settlement, are published here for the first time. Thomas Potts of Canterbury also reproduces 11 long-forgotten essays by him from the 1880s, in which he reflected on the 1850s and what had happened since-both to New Zealand's natural environment and to Maori and Pakeha.
The poems in Sinking Lessons portray the vitality of a world full of things and beings we too often disregard, using language that vibrates in harmony with the lively tales it tells-from small, everyday events to stories of shipwrecks and strandings, resurrections and reanimations, arctic adventures and descents into the underworld. The cast of characters includes members of the poet's family alongside heroes from myth and literature, such as Orpheus, Scheherazade, and Frankenstein's Creature. And crowding in upon these, at all times, a multitude of non-human protagonists: sun and stars, wind and water, mud and sand, body fluids, decaying matter, chemicals organic and inorganic, and a great many fishes and birds and beasts. Sinking Lessons is the first collection of poetry from Philip Armstrong, winner of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama, and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour. Featured artists: Vita Cochran, Star Gossage, Robert West AWARDS & COMPETITIONS Results from the 2020 Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition WRITERS John Adams, Johanna Aitchison, John Allison, Shaun Bamber, Tony Beyer, Iain Britton, Medb Charleton, Ruth Corkill, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, David Eggleton, Johanna Emeney, Rhys Feeney, Michael Giacon, Carolyn Gillum, Patricia Grace, Eliana Gray & Jordan Hamel, Isabel Haarhaus, Bernadette Hall, Sarah Harpur, Jenna Heller, Stephanie Johnson, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Megan Kitching, Claire Lacey, Leonard Lambert, Malinna Liang, Emer Lyons, Carolyn McCurdie, Cilla McQueen, Owen Marshall, Talia Marshall, Zoë Meager, James Norcliffe, Keith Nunes, Kotuku Tithuia Nuttall, Vincent O'Sullivan, Leanne Radojkovich, essa may ranapiri, Gillian Roach, Pip Robertson, Jo-Ella Sarich, Tim Saunders, Sarah Scott, Sarah Shirley, Elizabeth Smither, Charlotte Steel, Nicola Thorstensen, Rushi Vyas, and Susan Wardell.
A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker ... are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown's tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. This delightful, evocative poetic narrative wafts between the truly surreal and the 'everyday' absurd.
Ken Gorbey is a remarkable man who for 15 years was involved with developing and realising the revolutionary cultural concept that became Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Then in 1999 he was headhunted by W. Michael Blumenthal to salvage the Jewish Museum Berlin, which was failing and fast becoming a national embarrassment. Led by Gorbey, a young, inexperienced staff, facing impossible deadlines, rose to the challenge and the museum, housed in Daniel Libeskind's lightning-bolt design, opened to acclaim. As Blumenthal writes in the foreword: 'I can no longer remember what possessed me to seriously consider actually reaching out to this fabled Kiwi as a possible answer to my increasingly serious dilemma ...' but the notion paid off and today the JMB is one of Germany's premier cultural institutions. Te Papa to Berlin is a great story-a lively insider perspective about cultural identity and nation building, about how museums can act as healing social instruments by reconciling dark and difficult histories, and about major shifts in museum thinking and practice over time. It is also about the difference that can be made by a visionary and highly effective leader and team builder.
In the early 20th century, 130 young Anglo-Indians were sent to New Zealand in an organised immigration scheme from Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district of India. They were the mixed-race children of British tea planters and local women, and were placed as workers with New Zealand families from the Far North to Southland. Their settlement in New Zealand was the initiative of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary, the Rev Dr John Anderson Graham, who aimed to 'rescue' and provide a home and an education for children whose opportunities would have been limited in the country of their birth. Jane McCabe is the granddaughter of Lorna Peters, who arrived with a group from Kalimpong in 1921. Jane is one of many hundreds of descendants now spread throughout New Zealand. Most grew up with little or no knowledge of their parent's Indian heritage. The story of interracial relationships, institutionalisation, and the sense of abandonment that often resulted was rarely spoken of. But since the 1980s increasing numbers have been researching their hidden histories. In the process, extraordinary personal stories and many fabulous photographs have come to light. Jane McCabe here tells this compelling and little-known New Zealand story, in pictures.
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama, and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour.
Originally published in 2001, A City Possessed is the harrowing account of one of New Zealand's most high-profile criminal cases – a story of child sexual abuse allegations, gender politics and the law.In detailing the events of the 1990s that led up to and surrounded the allegations made against several staff of the Christchurch Civic Cre`che, author Lynley Hood shows how and why such a case could happen. A City Possessed won the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction at the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.Her penetrating analysis of the social and legal processes by which the conviction of Peter Ellis was obtained, and repeatedly upheld, raises major issues for our justice system and the way we see ourselves. Peter Ellis served seven years of a 10-year jail sentence for abusing seven children at the Christchurch Civic Cre`che. He has always maintained his innocence, and has gained widespread support for what many see as a miscarriage of justice.This paperback edition comes at a time when Peter Ellis and the Christchurch Civic Cre`che case have returned to public attention. In July 2019, a terminally ill Ellis was granted a final appeal to the Supreme Court, scheduled for November 2019.
Judging her first Landfall Essay Competition in 2018, Landfall editor Emma Neale was seriously challenged. The overall high quality of the 90 submissions made it impossible to choose. After a nails-bitten-to-the-quick struggle, she optimistically submitted her shortlist of 21 essays. The publisher had some strong words with her. Emma was told a shortlist needed to be shorter than 21. A lot shorter. There were no fingernails left to chew. She wasnt flexible enough to bite her toes. The only thing left to gnaw down was the too-long list. In the end she pared the list back to 10 but it seemed so wasteful not to be awarding many more prizes. The world needed to be able to read these damned fine essays. Thats when this book was born ... Strong Words is a striking collection of essays that show what Virginia Woolf once described as the art that can at once sting us wide awake and yet also fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life. It celebrates an extraordinary year in New Zealand writing.
In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening and speech. Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening -- or the errors of listening -- in everyday communication.
The title of James Norcliffe's tenth poetry collection points deftly to the way it conveys big emotions without cracking a smile or shedding a tear. In Deadpan, Norcliffe writes in an alert, compassionate yet sceptical voice. The book's first section, 'Poor Yorick', shares the thoughts of an introspective narrator as he contends with the travails of later life. 'In his hospital pyjamas', Yorick is by turns cheerful and beset by loss, laughing and weeping, comparing the stages of life (and death). The following sections - 'Scan', 'Trumpet Vine', 'Telegraph Road' and 'Travellers in a small Ford' - reach around to mine experience in a world where 'nothing lasts'; not childhood, place nor identity. An appropriate response to this ephemeral world is to embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, absurdity and surrealism. 'Deadpan, ' writes the author in his introductory essay, 'is the porter in Macbeth pausing to take a piss while there is that urgent banging at the gate. It is Buster Keaton standing unmoved as the building crashes down on top of him. It is my poker-faced Yorkshire grandfather playing two little dicky birds sitting on the wall.' These poems are concise and contained, using supple, precise language and a gleam of dry and mordant wit. Deadpan is the work of a mature and technically astute poet who is one of New Zealand's leading writers.
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour.
Diana Bridges subjects are reflected through a range of cultural lenses. To engagement with Western and New Zealand literature should be added her immersion in the great Asian cultures of China and India. Her poetry is an intricate meshing of realities and possesses a remarkable depth and richness of perspective. These are poised, elegantly wrought poems, full of lively intelligence and verbal deftness. Since Baxter, most New Zealand poets have shied away from the use of myth in their poetry. In this collection, Bridge mines this vein for its deeply traditional and personal resonances. She knows, as firmly as did Jung, that myths give us pictures for our emotions. Here, the poems that openly glance off myth are brief, fresh takes that centre on the heroines of Western Classical legend. They begin in an irony that is needed to cope with the sometimes shocking stories, then range through time to alight with radical brevity on Shakespeare and English history. The book concludes with The Way a Stone Falls, 22 poems set in Southeast Asia. The sequence takes on board the Cambodian tragedy of last century by way of headless statues -- taking a sideswipe at French colonialism. It confronts the hardest decision in the whole Hindu tradition, that of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This is how Bridge finds her way in the world -- a place of trees and people and noise and contingency -- with the assurance that myth tells her story as well as its own.
Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty, and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables, deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain.
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Featured artists: John Z Robinson, Justin Spiers, Susan Te Kahurangi King. Awards and competitions: Results and winning essays from the Landfall Essay Competition 2018, with judge's report by Emma Neale, and results from the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2018, with judge's report by David Eggleton. Writers: Philip Armstrong, Jane Arthur, Tusiata Avia, Antonia Bale, Tony Beyer, Victor Billot, Madeleine Child, Thom Conroy, Jodie Dalgleish, Doc Drumheller, Breton Dukes, Ciaran Fox, David Gregory, Michael Hall, René Harrison, Siobhan Harvey, Trevor Hayes, Kerry Hines, Joy Holley, Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, Megan Kitching, Jessica Le Bas, Therese Lloyd, Jess MacKenzie, Frankie McMillan, Alice Miller, Michael Mintrom, Lissa Moore, James Norcliffe, Heidi North, Jilly O'Brien, Vincent O'Sullivan, Aiwa Pooamorn, John Prins, Lindsay Rabbitt, essa may ranapiri, Sudha Rao, Richard Reeve, Harry Ricketts, Alan Roddick, Derek Schulz, Di Starrenburg, Jillian Sullivan, John Summers, Jasmine Taylor, Angela Trolove, Iain Twiddy, Bryan Walpert, Susan Wardell, Rose Whitau, C.A.J. Williams, Briar Wood, Helen Yong
Bound together by myth and music, Michael Harlow's 'The Moon in a Bowl of Water' is a stunning new collection from a poet in complete control of his craft. Harlow is the maestro of the prose poem. Here he presents a collection of small human journeys, with a strong emphasis on narrative. The work is consciously rooted in Greek mythology and in the idea of storytelling as a continuous river, flowing from the ancients to the present, telling one story on the surface, but carrying in its depths the glints of ancient archetypes, symbols and myths. Each poem is studded with associations that hark back millennia. Harlow delights in the airiness of the imagination and the magic of transformation, especially through the power of language. Words become 'thought-birds' that can be caged, coaxed to sing, or allowed to fly, and the poems' sonic after-effects echo and re-echo in the reader's mind and ear.
This book explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages. The first book to examine migration through the lens of the personal essay, The Braided River presents migration as a lifelong experience that affects everything from language, home, work, family, and friendship to finances, citizenship, and social benefits. Throughout, Diane Comer, both migrant and essayist herself, demonstrates the versatility of the personal essay as a means to analyze and understand migration, an issue with increasing relevance worldwide.
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