BOOKS
WORDS: M A RI A N N E T R E MAI NE
Assume nothing Bringing alive the sensations of the past Preconceptions often limit the ideas we have about places and people. Leonard Bell’s Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930-1980 (Auckland University Press, $75) exposed my limited awareness of how much change refugees from Nazism, communist countries and wartorn Europe brought with them to New Zealand from the 1930s through to the 1950s. A wave of artists, musicians, architects and photographers brought new ideas and knowledge and reshaped the development of the arts in New Zealand. Not only did their work show examples of abstraction, symbolism and creative concepts that allowed New Zealanders to see with different eyes, it also encouraged our artistic community to be more adventurous. Reading this book shows how much all our
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lives have been expanded by the knowledge and attitudes introduced by people like Gerhard Rosenberg, an architect who lectured at the University of Auckland, and Harry Serensin, who established The Settlement, a coffee bar, art gallery and restaurant in Wellington and a venue for book launches, poetry readings and concerts. Photographers among the arrivals enabled a new appreciation of nature and the built environment, but not without obstacles. The Government had introduced the Aliens Emergency Regulations 1940, limiting the movement of ‘aliens’. Although one photographer, Richard Sharell, was exempt from the regulations at first and could travel up to 64 kilometres from his Wellington home without a police permit, this leniency was withdrawn when the Under-
Secretary for Justice pointed out it was an unsuitable time for an enemy alien to travel about with a camera. This book’s effectiveness comes from Leonard’s ability to communicate complex ideas with impressive clarity in just a few words. He uses photographs to show exactly what makes the work of each artist so distinctive and exciting. With its captivating insights and absorbing overviews of people’s aesthetic work, reading this book is like taking a tour. But this tour shows you not only each artist’s work, but also the way their committed encouragement for each other, the arts and New Zealand artists transformed a conservative, introverted New Zealand into a country with a broader view of culture as an essential part of life.
Fearless: The Extraordinary Untold Story of New Zealand’s Great War Airmen, by Adam Claasen (Massey University Press, $59.99), also shook my complacency about fighter planes in World War I. Firstly, the planes depicted in the book looked disconcertingly like larger versions of the balsa wood models my brothers used to make – scarily insubstantial. More astonishing still are the feats that these men
The idea of flying captured the imagination of the New Zealand public from its very earliest beginnings, but for the New Zealand airmen it was an obsession: they lived to fly.
accomplished in them. They are terrifying even to read about. For example, the book opens with a story about a plane hurtling down after a collision in mid-air and the pilot – Caldwell, an Aucklander – standing up with his foot on the rudder, guiding the plane back to the Allied trenches, jumping out at the last moment, rolling on the ground, and emerging with only bruises and a bleeding lip. With delightful understatement, Caldwell writes afterwards in his log, “Very lucky”. This book is gripping reading. As Adam shows, the idea of flying
Heritage New Zealand
