New Zealand Books

IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME TO FIND THIS ONE IN THE DAYS BEFORE AMAZON.COM. ALTHOUGH YOU MAY NOT FIND ANY DIRT IN THIS BIOGRAPHY, IT STILL IN AN IMPORTANT READ BECAUSE IT FOCUSES ON THOSE NEW ZEALAND DAYS OF KM. IT HAS A REMARKABLE FEEL FOR WELLINGTON. READ IT. R. CAPPUCCI

This is an older book for young adult readers, although it may also be enjoyed by the adult interested in the natural history of New Zealand. The story concentrates upon how the native animal life was affected and altered by European settlement. Also includes discussion and photos of the Maori people. Many black and white photographs.

This book was written as an ongoing diary by a well-to-do and artistic English lady who migrated to New Zealand in 1863 with husband and first child to become freehold farmers and co-'founders' of the new town of Amberley. It was apparently written as a record that she could send back to her friends in England. It tells many quirky stories, trials and tribulations experienced while living on the family farm in North Canterbury and gives us a detailed insight into a period long-gone. The book has its amusing moments but also offers a critique of their fellow locals in the district, a few whom at the time the first edition was published, took offence to their thinly disguised persona and tried to destroy copies! To others who read the book it provided a detailed history into earlier European establishment and settlement of New Zealand, and the problems they faced.
The enclosed photos are historically valuable and the story holds a worthy place in early New Zealand history and literature. Well bound, and well worth a read if you're studying New Zealand history and enjoy good, harmless yarns. This, coming from a descendant of the author!

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).

The 'longest decade' currently spans over 15 years: the combined length of the prime ministerships of Paul Keating and John Howard. George Megalogenis is a journalist with The Australian and a former member of the Canberra press gallery.

Mr Megalogenis has written a book which, while it primarily deals with economic policy, also considers native title in the aftermath of Mabo and Wik, the political rise and fall of Pauline Hansen, East Timor and the Tampa. The book begins with Paul Keating's last year as Australian treasurer, through his prime ministership and John Howard's, and ends in December 2005 with the Cronulla riots.

The similarities between Howard and Keating on matters of economic reform will be surprising to those who focus only on the apparent differences. By looking back at the work done during the 1980s, some of the potential contributers to the strengths and weaknesses of the current Australian economy seem clearer.

The strength of this book is the historical material it contains. It is not a definitive history, but it does provide a useful (and well presented) overview of some key political events, together with highlights such as John Hewson's infamous answer about how the cost of a birthday cake would be affected by the (then) proposed goods and services tax.

The book is arranged chronologically rather than by topic. While this is fine for those of us who have a reasonably clear memory of the times, it may make for a disjointed read for those seeking to follow policy development.

Recommended for those who wanting some undertanding of this period in Australian political history. Megalogenis's writing style livens up what might appear to be dry and dusty topics.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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.