Six-legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa
Lily Duval, Canterbury University Press, $55
Lily Duval, Canterbury University Press, $55
Kate Evans, Moa Press, $39.99
Mason Ball, HarperCollins, $45
Louise Maich, Bateman Books, $49.99
Giselle Clarkson, Gecko Press, $39.99
Suzanne Heywood, HarperCollins, $37.99
Jeremy Hansen and Jade Kake, Massey University Press, $75
Women And Photography In Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960. Lissa Mitchell, Te Papa Press, $75.00
A Future Forecast for New Zealand. James Renwick, HarperCollins, $39.99
Kennedy Warne, Massey University Press, $39.99
Liv Sisson, Penguin, $45
The First: The Walsh Brothers and the Aeroplane Days of Edwardian New Zealand Terry Moyle New Holland, $49.99
Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga Te Papa Press, $70
Lindsey Fitzharris
On the surface, this is a straightforward book of fish facts. On another level, it’s a story about gorging and slurping, about human nature, about waste, about greed. There’s a bit near the end about how the hagfish (or “bloody snot eel”, as Dad would call it) will patiently rasp itself inside softening corpses on the seafloor. If that doesn’t work, the hagfish will force its body against the rotting ribcage, or belly, or whatever, writhing until it gives way. Gross, but not as gross as the human appetite. The reading experience reminded me of being a kid and watching, horrified, as my uncle ate a whole bucket of prawns. Robert Vennell fillets his beautiful book into five sections, from fresh water and shorelines to the deep seas. Within each he covers just a handful of creatures. Bold choice, quality over quantity—and undoubtedly the best one. Each chapter is deep and rich. Māori perspectives, stories and histories are centred. Taxonomy and etymology, aptly, are broken out into little boxes. Vivid illustrations (some of which are reproduced here) flicker and dart throughout. Vennell is very good at writing about abundance. He conjures an Aotearoa where dogs lap up whitebait from rivers; the piper fish swim in shoals three kilometres long; kids walking home from school stop off at the rockpools, picking up a crayfish for each family member. His language is plain: eels are “gigantic tubes of meat”; pāua “thick, meaty chunks of protein”. But the numbers are obscene. Twenty thousand eels served at a feast in 1838. Eighteen million crayfish tails shipped to the US in 1949 (the tails were often snapped off, the crays dumped at sea). One weekend, 50,000 people turned up at a beach near Dargaville to dig for toheroa. They took home more than a million shellfish, leaving what they couldn’t eat at the tip. There are small numbers, equally grotesque: Vennell writes of a Dunedin hotel serving up flounder less than five centimetres long, and of blue cod for sale, weighing less than 100 grams. There’s a chapter about upokororo, the New Zealand grayling, last seen in 1923. Māori had stealthy methods of catching these particularly skittish fish. Pākehā simply dynamited the rivers, “causing entire shoals to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up and collected”. How on Earth have we managed to drive only one fish extinct? The true secret of the sea is that we ate it all.
“As soon as we die, we enter into fiction,” said the late English writer Dame Hilary Mantel. “Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.” In the case of transported late-18th-century English convict Charlotte Badger, both the fiction and the interpretation have been prodigious. The known facts are few. Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, Badger was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for the theft, in 1796, of “four guineas and a Queen Anne’s half-crown” from the house of Benjamin Wright—a man who may have been her employer. After four years in jail, she was shipped out to the penal colony of New South Wales. She then reappears in the records aboard the colonial brig Venus, fetching up in the Bay of Islands in 1806. She made a return trip to New South Wales, via Norfolk Island, the following year, and in 1811, aged 33, she married 48-year-old army veteran Thomas Humphries at St Philip’s Church in Sydney, which one guidebook described as “the ugliest church in Christendom”. In 1843, after years of apparent calm, she had one last entanglement with the law. Charged with stealing a blanket, Badger was acquitted, after which she fades from view. Ever ready with a telling phrase, Mantel defined history as “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it—a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth”. In Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife, Jennifer Ashton manages to do the seemingly impossible: from the slightest of marks left by Badger, she crafts a compelling story. In common with others of her social class, Badger mostly came to official notice when she transgressed. No letters of hers have survived—it is unlikely that any were written, given that she signed the church marriage register with a cross. She had no important friends or acquaintances to record her eccentricities or witticisms for posterity, and she did nothing of note. Unless you count mutinying and taking control of the Venus. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography repeats a fanciful story that while at sea in the brig she dressed as a man, and “armed with a pistol, flogged the captain and conducted a raid on another vessel to obtain supplies and weapons”. Another version: she incited the male convicts aboard to do the rebelling. While admitting that her fate was not known, the Dictionary also offers the possibility of a “very corpulent” Badger reaching Tonga in 1826 with an eight-year-old girl in tow, perhaps en route to the United States. Ashton will have none of it. She turns such stories to good use, though, as examples of how the past is embroidered, distorted, redacted, or amplified to suit present needs and according to shifting notions of what history actually is. And it is certainly exhilarating to see how Badger shape-shifts her way down the years, in historical accounts, but also in novels, plays, songs, and exhibitions. In reconstructing Badger’s life, Ashton was obliged to write a different sort of biography. “We have to abandon our desire to understand her thoughts and feelings and focus instead on the wider meaning of her life,” she writes. “When we do, we enlarge the ways in which we can understand the past as well as the practice of historical writing.” Mantel would have approved.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser spent his early years in Austria, and much of his adult life flitting about the globe, but in hindsight he seemed fated to set down his deepest roots in Aotearoa, a place he called the Promised Land. From his first visit in April 1973 until he was laid to rest 27 years later on his bush-clad property in Northland, Hundertwasser felt at home. He extended his first stay (for a touring exhibition) to four months, embarked on a road trip in a Morris Mini, and spent time living on Rakino Island in the Hauraki Gulf. While there, he began work on a painting that was to form the basis of his iconic poster for Conservation Week 1974. A stream of idiosyncratic work followed, including his gift to national identity, the striking koru flag, which took its cue from the spiral of a fern frond, and the landmark Kawakawa Public Toilets, with their playful pillars, irregular ceramic tiles, and “tree tenant”. What gave Hundertwasser’s varied work cohesion was his tireless exploration of new ways to coexist with the natural world. Andreas Hirsch’s Hundertwasser in New Zealand is an informed and sympathetic account of the artist’s life here, offering insights into his philosophy and his creative evolution. Hirsch is a former curator of the Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna and his book is generously illustrated with photographs and sketches, and with reproductions of Hundertwasser’s paintings and prints that seem to hang from the page like tropical fruit. Hundertwasser had a lifelong love of the sea—his original family name, Stowasser, means “standing water”—and in 1967, he purchased an old Sicilian salt freighter, which he renamed Regentag (“rainy day”). Explaining the name, he said: “On a rainy day the colours begin to glow… It’s a day when I can work.” Less prosaically, he added: “Each raindrop is a kiss from heaven.” All up, he lived on board for the best part of 10 years. [gallery columns="2" ids="464646,464645"] By 1975 Hundertwasser had bought a 200-hectare farm in the Kaurinui Valley, with access to the sea. It was here that he embarked on his most ambitious attempts to enact what he called “a peace treaty with nature”. Living off-grid in an old farmhouse that had been shipped there in the 1930s, he set about planting trees—100,000 of them—and, in an echo of Venice, built a system of canals connecting the land with the sea so that he could row Regentag’s dinghy right up to his house. He also experimented with a humus toilet and a plant-based sewage treatment system, and converted the old cowshed into the Bottlehouse—a grass-roofed building with translucent walls made from old glass bottles. As Hirsch notes, “recycling and self-sufficiency are two of Hundertwasser’s basic requirements on the way to restoring paradise”. Hundertwasser didn’t live to see the realisation of his greatest gift. Whangārei’s Hundertwasser Art Centre with Wairau Māori Art Gallery opened in February 2022, after years of controversy and delay. With its planted roof, golden onion dome, and exuberant tiled exterior, the building is vintage Hundertwasser, and one of only two museums in the world dedicated entirely to his work. More than that, it was conceived as a place to encourage independent creativity and to celebrate both European and Māori culture. “I want to show it is possible to live in a better world,” Hundertwasser told a journalist when Regentag first visited Auckland. Appropriately, it was raining at the time. [caption id="attachment_464649" align="alignnone" width="1600"] In tape-recorded letters he left at Kaurinui, Hundertwasser urged his students never to waste paint. “Without combatting the throwaway and consumer society, positive creativity is not possible.” In these photos, both taken in 1978, he is painting at Kaurinui and revelling in a stay at a commune on Kawakawa River.[/caption]
Plans to mine a well of diatomite in Otago hit a snag when scientists pointed out that the site contains contains a wealth of perfectly preserved examples of prehistoric Aotearoa.
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