New Zealand Books

Leave this one alone and get the full 6 volumes if you can. This editorised, sanitised, dull version should be avoided.

How to rate this book presents a quandary. Its format is attractive, illustrations are good, sidebars in the text are interesting, and the consistent level makes the writing acessible to avid readers among youngsters but not too annoyingly simple for many adults. I learned a lot about Australia, but only hope it is accurate. The problem is that I did already know some of the content of chapter 1 and noticed various errors without searching for them. For example, the "unusual rock formation" shown on p. 13 is actually a termite nest. It is not true (p. 20) that "The platypus is unique as one of only two species of mammals that lay eggs" because there are actually three. And the assertion on p. 22 that "Dingoes are wild dogs that are believed to have been brought to Australia by the Aborigines..." cannot be. These indigenous peoples came to Australia at least 40,000 years ago and the Dingo has been there a mere 4000 years. If these are the only slips, the book merits 4 stars but if the same error rate occurs throughout, it rates nothing. I've therefore split the difference in ratings to alert potential purchasers to the situation.

The authors have intended this to be a reference book to New Zealand feature films over the period indicated and their selection demonstrates that they have a very liberal view of what constitutes a "New Zealand" film and a "feature". Even so there are a number of surprising omissions. Apart from full details (some of which are wrong) and credits they give a story outline and their own opinions about each film. Generally the latter are well reasoned but in some cases they are also highly debatable. The book gives little detail about what what was going on in the cinema industry and the country that was manifested by these features and doesn't present much of an overview of the whole scene. Perhaps the greatest disappointment however for what is a visual medium is the poor choice of and reproduction of the stills. For those wanting a complementary and generally better book on this subject, I recommend "Celluloid Dreams: A century of film in New Zealand" which was published about the same time.

I thought from the title that this book was on native wildflowers of New Zealand. I was partially right. It has a lot of information on plants introduced from all over the world and only a few pages on the alpine section of this wonderful part of the world. I found no useful information in it at all and returned it after a thorough but quick look. Don't waste your time or money.

I also ordered "Gardener's Encyclopedia of New Zealand Native Plants" by Yvonne Cave and Valda Paddison. It was all on native plants and had wonderful photographs and information. Get that book instead. I loved it. So did my co-workers at the nursery I work for.

I love the work of Alistair Galbraith, The Renderers, Roy Montgomery, and The Dead C, and had high hopes for this book. Sadly, it doesn't live up to them or all the blurbs about how one won't read a better book about New Zealand music (perhaps because no one else has written one)... It just seems like a young man's meandering memories of his band, but it mostly covers his band and barely touches on their myriad encounters with other bands. Maybe, he could come out with another edition, and include more info about the other bands & less about The Sneaky Feelings!

Written by Trent Sands, this books can at best serve as a primer for establishing identity in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. It falls far short of being useful for the actual acts which it portrays to be designed. It does give some overview information on the process, and that alone is useful. However, the real identity seaker is going to find many blocks to using the methods presecribed. Use it as a starter, not as a guide.

This book was somewhat helpful during my time in NZ.

The town/street maps were helpful in navigating--large enough to cover most of the city while still being readable.

The reviews were less than accurate. Most of the restuarants I tried to go to from this book were closed (I understand places close...but the majority of them???). The few restuarants that I found still open were drastically different than the reviews. I wonder if the authors/contributers had been to NZ! One of the places that I stayed at (highly recommended in the book) was sooo horrible that I felt unsafe and cancelled the rest of my stay there.

I was lucky to be travelling with people who had other books on NZ.

The publication of 'The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict' in 1986 established Belich's reputation as a revisionist historian. While Belich has been widely acclaimed as a historian, a clear pattern has emerged which has seen his greatest support coming from historians with no real understanding of the New Zealand Wars. Military historians, in particular, have been tellingly critical.

This offering draws heavily upon his earlier work, and in doing so repeats the same mistakes. Belich's interpretation of the New Zealand Wars is as prone to bias as the earlier accounts that he so disparages. He fails to understand the military culture of the British Army (for example, while ridiculing such traditions as drill as 'unnecessary rigmarole', he notes the inherent bravery of the British troops in hand-to-hand combat - without realising that the latter was a product of the former), as well as such military fundamentals as differences and links between the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. His discussion of the Maori 'pa strategy', while at face value impressive, fails to recognise the practicalities of military logistics: the pa strategy itself was logistically unsustainable. His referencing, too, is suspect in places: some references either do not exist, or do not support the statements to which they have been accredited.

A reader with little understanding of either military history generally or the previous interpretations fo the New Zealand Wars may get excited about this book. That in itself is fine, provided that they use it as a stepping stone to further study, and not as a definitive end in itself. On the other hand, the book does highlight the need for a revision of Belich's revisionism. This, in fact, may be its greatest value.

This book is okay. I found others that are better written and more descriptive of the terrible tragedy in Cambodia. I would suggest When Broken Glass Floats instead.

Under normal circumstances, one of the minimal requirements for writing a biography is a degree of sympathetic interest in the subject. On this criterion one would wonder why Cassandra Pybus bothered to research and write the story of James McAuley. Apart from a flicker of sympathy for the emotional coldness of his upbringing, this account is almost entirely lacking in empathy or understanding of McAuley's motivation and his strengths.

McAuley had at least three public faces: the poet, the scholar and the political/religious activist. It seems that Pybus has a tin ear for verse and so is unable to convey any sense of his achievements in that area. Instead she mines his poetry for symptoms of sexual, religious and political hangups. Religion has traditionally been a vehicle for the highest spiritual aspirations, but she is apparently tone deaf to this area of human experience as well.

The English historian and philosopher R G Collingwood deplored the decline of religion and the rise of the "Prussian philosophy" of political bullying. Obsessed with the rise of dictatorships in the 1930s he felt that democratic principles had lost the 'punch' that religious faith had once imparted to them. This amounts to a repetition of the mournful commentary by Yeats in his poem "The Second Coming":

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

This was the situation confronted by McAuley when he turned from the romanticism and anarchism of youth to Catholicism and political engagement in the 1950s. It is the domain of politics where Pybus is most at home. Reporting on an address by McAuley at the University of Sydney she writes "It was not the poet I went to hear all those years ago. Then, as now, it was the political ideologist and cold war warrior who compelled my attention". Unfortunately her attention must have wandered, or maybe he said things she did not want to hear because she went on "I don't remember what it was he said".

Of course it is unreasonable to demand that McAuley's biographer should be a poet with religious sensibilities, however an academic historian should provide something more than a journalistic account of the work of Santamaria, Krygier and others who opposed communist influence in the trade unions, the Labor Party and the universities. Pybus provides no historical perspective on these activities. A younger generation of readers may need to be reminded that there was a cold war, sometimes more than cold, as in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and other insurgencies, not to mention Hungary. During that time a hostile totalitarian power threatened peace and security all over the world, with its agents in the west, including Australia, being funded and directed from Moscow. Due to the treason of the intellectuals, who as Pybus pointed out, mostly supported the other side, those who did not, such as McAuley were called all manner of names.

McAuley was the first editor of the Austrlian quarterly named Quadrant, the Australian arm of the worldwide anti-communist Association for Cultural Freedom. The magazine first appeared at the time that Hungarian refugees started to turn up in the West after escaping from Russian tanks in the streets of their home town. Many Australian communist left the party at that point, though the realities should have been apparent to well informed people from the 1930s, from Koestler's Darkness at Noon, from George Orwell's journalism and from the local waterside workers disruption of the allied war effort during the Hitler-Stalin pact.

It appears that Cassandra Pybus has missed the moral point of the anti-communist stand of the Quadrant supporters. They were a small part of the worldwide intellectual resistance to an aggressive dictatorship. As for the CIA funding to Quadrant which provided so much delight to Stalin's "useful idiots", it is unfortunate that Quadrant could not raise more funds locally but nobody has suggested the writers took their orders from overseas in the way that the communists did.

The outcome of the cold war remained in doubt until well after McAuley's death. The stakes were high and this no doubt contributed to the sense of urgency and impatience on the part of the McAuley and others, especially in the face of indifference or obstruction by people who should have known better. The final collapse of the Soviet empire surely revealed to the most empty-headed Vietnam Moratorium marcher that there was something rotten behind the Iron Curtain.

Pybus merely notes that McAuley was on the losing side in the 1970s. It should be added that this was mostly because the leadership in Australia and the US destroyed their moral credibility by introducing conscription for the Vietnam war. This was hardly McAuley's fault because he was a not a rightwinger of the coercive kind. He probably would have endorsed Hayek's statement "Why I am not a conservative" (Postscript to The Constitution of Liberty). A real conservative such as Malcolm Fraser (Prime Minister during the 1970s) showed his true colours when, in addition to supporting conscription and retrospective taxation, he cut back funding to Quadrant and raised the tariff barriers to impede free trade. A google search McAuley + Rathouse will turn up some helpful essays to illuminate his role in the poetry and politics of his time.

Defects in the research in this book have been documented by other reviewers who were closer to the action than myself. The embarrassing gesture towards homoeroticism as a spring of McAuley's motivation has been rubbished by commentators across the ideological spectrum.

Almost 100,000 dollars of public money went into this project and what is one to make of the expensive white elephant that has come off the press? As a taxpayer who unwittingly contributed to the funding I would like to ask for my money back. However if Cassandra Pybus is prepared to make the trip I would be willing to support research in the Moscow archives to document the flow of Soviet funds to the communist party in Australia and to fellow-travelling writers.

A slimy attack on a great poet. This is a disgusting book. I am sure it was only published because of the left-wing domination of the Australian publishing industry. McAuley was a Catholic anti-Communist and the left will never forgive him for this.