New Zealand Books

This is a travel journal of an Australian author, Kate Llewellyn, who spends several weeks visiting New Zealand and the Cook Islands. Instead of doing all the mainly touristy things, she meets and talks with locals, seeks out culinary delights and regional wine, muses on the many oddities and wonders she stumbles across, and thoroughly immerses herself in the culture, language and history of the South Pacific.

I discovered this book in the local library while looking for things on New Zealand that weren't guidebooks, of which there are dozens. I wanted to read something about the country from the perspective of someone who had really engaged with the culture, and this short book is both insightful and well written. Kate Llewellyn's prose is lyrical and imaginative, and although she mainly concerns herself with the places she visits and the people she meets, the journal-style of the book allows us to know her quite personally through the other aspects of herself which she chooses to share with us.

Because I'm going to New Zealand in a couple of weeks, that was the part of the book I was most interested in, but reading about the Cook Islands (of which I knew almost nothing) was also quite enjoyable. A couple of times I felt she lost the rhythm and style that characterised the book, particularly when she interviews the woman who was the first female Speaker of the House in the Cook Islands (with whom she also stays). It's not that I didn't find it interesting, just that it didn't really fit into the narrative that she herself had established throughout.

Still, whether you're going to the South Pacific, have already been, or just like enjoying different countries from the comfort of your own home, 'Lilies, Feathers & Frangipani' is a pleasant journey through a couple of amazing countries.

The first thing I want to point out is that this book has many more (and better) maps of Auckland than the full Lonely Planet New Zealand, so in that sense it's a great book for someone who will be spending a while in the city. However, I think the ideal person to buy this book would be someone who is traveling around the south pacific and due to time constraints will only be hitting Auckland and the surrounding area. I met a lot of vacationers in Auckland who were doing just that. If that's you, pick up this book! It's a lot less weighty than the full LPNZ, and it covers everything from the Bay of Islands to Rotorua (and places in between like Whangarei and Hamilton) -- not just Auckland city. The only downside is that the prices are slightly out of date since it's a couple of years old. However, all the info other than prices about places to stay, things to do, etc. is still valid (I just visited July-August 2001, so I know).

Islands, especially the ones that haven't been in contact with the mainland for a very long time, come as close to being alternate histories as you can get in the real world.

What would have happened if the primitive lemur relatives of monkeys and apes had become the dominant primates instead of monkeys and apes? Go to Madagascar and you can get a pretty good idea. What would happen if a fairly large island was populated almost exclusively by rats? Some of the Philippine islands still have the fading remnants of that experiment.

This book talks about the results of a different experiment. What would happen if a fair-sized land mass lost all of its land mammals and most of its land creatures and had to be repopulated from the sea and the air? Go to New Zealand and you'll see the remnants of a once spectacular experiment in that direction.

Moas were giant flightless birds of New Zealand. They were far heavier than ostriches. The largest ones weighed over four hundred pounds. They were herbivores, bird equivalents of deer, horses and bison. The last of the Moas probably died out shortly before Europeans started settling New Zealand. Like many island birds they appear to have been very vulnerable to human activities and quickly died out after the Polynesian Maori settled the islands.

Moas weren't the only unique creatures of New Zealand, or even the most interesting. The island apparently broke loose from Gondwana, the southern super-continent of the Cretaceous around 82 million years ago. It probably carried a typical Cretaceous group of plants and animals, a few of which still survive there and nowhere else on earth.

More of those plants and animals might have survived, but New Zealand got hit hard by the indirect effects of the end-of-Cretaceous meteor strike. It also went through a fairly long period around 27 million years ago where over eighty percent of the current land area was under the ocean.

This book was written before the discovery of primitive rat and mouse-sized fossil mammals (apparently close to the borderline between mammals and reptiles) on New Zealand, so unfortunately it doesn't cover that issue. That gives us some interesting alternate history or alternate biology potential: what if New Zealand primitive mammals had survived to greet the Maori. Without the bottleneck New Zealand might have had a rich assortment of primitive mammals or even the kind of small mammal-like crocodiles that were once common in Africa.

I suppose it might even be possible that small dinosaurs could have survived there past the end of the Cretaceous. That could have been interesting, though they probably wouldn't have done much better at survival than the Moas did once humans arrived.

In reality, as I mentioned earlier, New Zealand was repopulated mainly from the sea and the air. The dominant animals were birds and insects, with a few species of bats and lizards playing odd but subsidiary roles.

One of the most spectacular birds was Haast's Eagle, the largest known eagle. A large Haast's Eagle probably weighed close to thirty pounds. This was not a flightless bird, just a very large and formidable one. It was apparently the top predator of New Zealand and preyed on Moas, typically ones in the one hundred to two hundred pound range, but it sometimes tackled Moas weighing more than four hundred pounds.

According to the book, very large eagles apparently were the top predators on a number of islands or groups of islands, including Hawaii and Cuba, but Haast's Eagle was top predator in a very complex eco-system, and it tackled prey that were enormously larger than itself.

According to the book, over a dozen Moa skeletons have been found with evidence of having been attacked by Haast's eagles. The eagles apparently used their extremely powerful claws to attack the hindquarters of Moas, crushing bones and causing massive bleeding.

The large living eagles can take prey up to about forty pounds, and they have trouble with something that big, so Haast's eagle was an impressive animal. It may not have preyed mainly on Moas, but it was quite capable of doing so.

The book mentions in passing that while Haast's Eagle was the largest known eagle, it wasn't the largest raptor. The terratorns of Pleistocene North and South America ranged from about the size of Haast's eagle up to 80 kilograms for one Argentine species.

Haast's eagle didn't have some of the worries that eagles on a continent have. In Africa, if an eagle actually managed to kill a two-hundred pound antelope, what would it do with it? It couldn't fly off with the carcass, and it couldn't defend that carcass against lions and hyenas, or even jackals. On a continent there isn't much point in a raptor killing animals too heavy for them to fly off with. In New Zealand it was advantageous to do so because the eagle could guard the carcass and feed on it for an extended period of time.

The authors speculate on how the first Maori and Haast's Eagle interacted. They suspect that the eagle actually did go after people. After all it was used to hunting bipeds much larger than this strange new one. They also speculate that a few Haast's Eagle may have survived into the 1860's, when an explorer and surveyor reported killing two large "hawks" with wingspans of up to 9 feet in a remote corner of New Zealand.

That leads to an interesting minor what-if. What would have happened if Haast's eagle had survived long enough for Europeans to capture a few and them back to zoos? Would they have been able to breed in zoos? If so, how would Europeans have reacted to them?

New Zealand had a lot of other interesting critters, and if you can wade through the jargon this book will tell you about most of them, from a flightless distant relative of cranes that may have been a predator to giant relatives of the cricket that act like rats and mice, and bats that scamper around in tree like miniature squirrels.

Unfortunately some of the most interesting of those animals are either extinct or close to it. I wonder if they would have fared better if the Polynesians hadn't colonized the island. Probably not. Europeans of the early 1800s were quite capable of ripping through a naive and vulnerable fauna like a buzz saw.

The animals of New Zealand would have faced a much larger set of threats in a very short time, rather than having a few centuries to adapt to Maori, dogs, pigs, and rats before they had to face Europeans, foxes, feral cats, rabbits, ferrets, sheep, wallabies, possums, goats, sheep, and deer.

In Low Tide, a science fiction adventure, Charlie
Snelling and his friend Wiremu go out to sea so they can fish. The tide is unusually low and when they start looking around, Charlie's little sister, Elisabeth, is found tagging along behind them. They spot a ship up on a tall rock and decide to explore it. They see a name on a bell but can only make out the letters A and L. They figure it's the Alexander, which divers are searching for because it holds treasure. They are very excited until everything starts rumbling.
A huge tidal wave carries them and the ship up into the Knuckle, a cluster of mountains, where the Koroua, a crazy mountain man, supposedly lives. Charlie, Wiremu, and Elisabeth lie still on the ship too hurt to move. Charlie hears something climbing aboard and then he sees it. Standing before him is the Koroua, with black teeth and white hair all over its body. All they wanted to do was go fishing, but soon, all Charlie wants to do is take the ship with the treasure and make it home alive. I liked how there was one problem after the other. William Mayne's writing is descriptive and very creative. The beginning, middle, and end all have adventures of their own and are nothing alike. I'm glad I kept reading it because the end was really surprising. I would have never expected it!

Schrempp demonstrates his wide knowledge in this book as he grasps both the ancient and the traditional firmly in his theories. It is clear that he has spent time in each culture, learning and analysizing their mythology. Since high level theorizing, however, makes the book unaccessible to the layperson and even difficult at times for those less familiar with either culture. Likewise some of his translations or interpretation may cause discomfort for the experts on either culture. The book is an interesting addition to the field of comparative mythology and should be read by any seriously engaged in either ancient or traditional systems.

An interesting look at Australian publishing.

The editors suggest that with media corporations buying book companies with an eye on spinoff products they still don't quite get it, and no matter what they do, they can't get the considerably over double digit profits that they want to make out of it, despite cost cutting.

Apparently a new cool scientific idea in bookselling not too many years ago was to count the actual books sold.

Sounds like they have to be a bit more sophisticated than that to work out models to improve their bottom line, so that seems to be part of the problem.

Other criticisms include paying huge advances to celebrities, which means leaving other authors languishing, or not publishing them at all, or, bizarrely, not choosing new authors.

No surprise that some book chains are starting to struggle as people realise there is not as much choice there as there used to be, and find it more easily online.

It is also rather focused on 'literature' and what they see as possible increasing decline for this sort of book given the lack of instant marketability compared to celebrity cooking or a crime series.

`What a funny place this is!' says one of the Bloomsbury Group's hangers-on to Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Beauchamp, and one of the foremost modernist writers of her time). `Such brilliant people saying such silly things.''

This comment just about sums up - not this superbly punctilious portrayal of Katherine Mansfield's creative years by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar C K Stead - but the quite laughable overweening inconsequentiality of a group of writers who, like the Algonquin Round Table in a different time and place, were so utterly convinced that the sun shone out of their art.

Various members of the group are sighted here together with assorted camp-followers: Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, Lady Ottline Morell on whom he based the man-eating Lady Chatterley, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, J M Keynes - and that other `bugger' (as the aforementioned hanger-on so describes him) the insufferably bitchy Lytton Strachey . . . every one of them housepartying for England while the world goes to hell in a handcart.

`Last night . . .' trills the same silly also-ran, `. . . we(took) a vote on whether the moon was a virgin or a harlot.'

Ah! time for Miss Mansfield to prove her mettle, I thought: because I really rate a lot of her stuff. How's she going to handle this latest bit of silliness.

Oh, dear! I was to be quickly disappointed. `How did it come out?' says she.

Plus points: there are some wonderful set pieces here - D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda having a domestic spat in the course of which they reveal themselves to be just as vain and childishly pathetic as lesser mortals having a domestic spat; and an achingly graphic depiction of the violent death in action during WWI of Katherine's beloved brother Leslie, and of Fred Goodyear being mortally wounded.

Kathleen Mansfield can write like an angel when the fancy takes her, and when a quite different fancy takes her, acts like a tramp. Consequently her lover of long-standing, John Middleton Murry, leads a veritable dog's life.

Leslie Beauchamp and Fred Goodyear apart, the men of her acquaintance are all principled pacifists, the principle in question being they are quite doggedly determined to dodge the draft. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of her women friends are ninnies in need of assistance to boil an egg or run a hot bath. In fairness, though, it must be allowed that Katherine Mansfield isn't one of these, though she does appear to have developed a brand of existentialism for her own personal use: `I can,' you can almost hear her thinking, `therefore I will.'

And may the devil take the hindmost, which means, of course, poor, long-suffering, affable, almost totally ineffectual John Middleton Murry, who is unlucky enough to be Katherine Mansfield's artistic and intellectual inferior - and saddled with her.

The premise of this book is fantastic: it aims to be an introduction to New Zealand culture geared toward the educated but non-specialist American. By explaining dominant trends in NZ literature, describing some of this literature's historical context, and relating it to American culture, William Schafer outlines some answers to the questions of what it means to live in New Zealand, and how that nation has structured its unique identity. On a more basic level, this book gives its readers a sense of what NZ lit and film is available, and thus provides a spring board for an independent exploration of NZ culture. Schafer's quotes and discussion of the fiction of Witi Imihaera (author of the novel The Whale Rider, upon which the 2003 film is based), for instance, were particularly attractive to me and, as a result, I have since read several of his works. Mapping the Godzone opened a new world to me, and I look forward to continuing to explore NZ culture under its guidance.
While the book's aims are laudable, its execution is not quite as impressive. Schafer tries to avoid the jargon and heavily theoretical analysis of contemporary literary criticism, but at times he slips up and his prose drags. At other times, he is somewhat too summary in his discussions--particularly when he relies on series of lengthy quotes by other critics. The quotes from literary sources should be well appreciated, since they provide a window into the style of many authors; the quotes from scholars simply seem to point to laziness on the part of the author. Could he not sum up the material himself? Besides these (not too grave) issues of style, the content of the book could have been improved. Clearly Schafer (an English professor) was mostly interested in the literary achievements of New Zealand. However, he does intend his book to be a primer on culture as well, and to achieve this end he would have done well to include more of popular and visual culture in hi
s book. He does write a short section on film, but it consists mostly of a list of movies that the reader might find interesting.
Despite its flaws and shortcomings, Mapping the Godzone is a unique resource for the American reader curious about New Zealand, and it seems to be an excellent overview of that country's literature. I am glad to have found it.

This fascinating book, part historical, part current, will give you an insight into Maori culture and it's importance to New Zealand, while sweeping you along with it's captivating story.
However, if you're badly arachnophobic you may want to skip some bits!
Witi Ihimaera is one of New Zealand's greatest living writers. His ability to show the ideas and feelings underpinning Maori culture are priceless.

Gavin Bishop, pre-eminent New Zealand illustrator, gives a strong portrayal of Maui, the trickster archetype in a legendary battle to order the universe. A story from the well-spring of Maori myth this is a book to treasure within a family library and as part of a comprehension collection of heroic tales in public libraries. Tama Nui te Ra, the sun, is personified in the tale and the illustrative style is an inspiration to teachers and students of the language arts.