Books

WORDS: MARIANNE TREMAINE

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 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at first and could travel up to 64 kilometres from his Wellington home without a police permit, this leniency was withdrawn when the UnderSecretary for Justice pointed out it was an unsuitable time for an enemy alien to travel about with a camera.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

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.

Preconceptions also affect attitudes towards islands. Some see them as magical places that offer an escape from the mundane, but to others they are inconvenient locations without the takenfor-granted facilities of the mainland. Islands: A New Zealand Journey, by Bruce Ansley, writer, and Jane Ussher, photographer (Random House NZ, Godwit, $80), leans towards the magical point of view. They illustrate the variety of New Zealand’s many islands by giving a visual tour with historical summaries of selected island groups from the far north to the far south. Beautiful photographs and interesting, pithy historical backgrounds.

Place names, including those of islands, make you wonder about the meanings and events behind the names. With Place Names of Banks Peninsula and the Port Hills, by Gordon Ogilvie (Canterbury University Press, $59.99), any mysteries about names in this part of the country will be solved. Gordon says the book was a labour of love; he wanted to share his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the area with others. He undertook the task of compiling a comprehensive successor to Johannes Andersen’s Place Names of Banks Peninsula, first published in 1927 but long out of print. Anyone with a connection to the area should buy this book: impressive research, wonderful illustrations and an extraordinary breadth of information. Gordon’s hope for the book is to give readers “the excitement of discovery” and it can be relied on to give places, which before seemed known and familiar, many more layers of richness and significance.

Assigning categories to familiar objects can encourage a lack of curiosity. For example, looking at a house and recognising it as a ‘railway house’ usually seems not to require any further thought. The history and purpose behind railway houses are seldom considered. However, Railway Houses of New Zealand by Bruce Shalders (New Zealand Railway and Locomotive Society Inc., $49), changes that mindset. Bruce has compiled an overview of the history of railway houses, explaining the need to house railway staff to avoid resignations when men transferred to different parts of the country and could not find accommodation. The New Zealand Railways’ scheme provided the first workers’ housing in New Zealand. This book is illustrated with photographs and plans of houses throughout the country, alongside specific details of the houses built in each era. Even the layout and facilities in the houses are explained. One chapter deals with life in a railway house and another takes us through a typical railwayman’s day. Bruce writes so clearly and takes such good photographs that you feel you have absorbed – effortlessly – a great deal of information about New Zealand history.

Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War, by Chris Bourke (Auckland University Press, $59.99), is a reminder of the power of music to stir the emotions. Brass bands playing to soldiers leaving the country, soldiers singing together as they marched, fundraising concerts at home – music helped to boost morale at home and abroad. Chris has documented the music that made a difference for New Zealanders: the songs they wrote, the songs they sang and the songs they adapted, for example “It’s a long way to Invercargill, but my heart’s right there”. This is an intriguing book, a very different and utterly absorbing war history.

Lucy Goes to the Lighthouse, by Grant Sheehan and illustrated by Rosalind Clark (Phantom Tree House, $25), cleverly succeeds in linking the present and the past. Lucy is enjoying her new birthday iPad so much that she decides not to go on a bike ride with her mother. But her mother’s disappointment changes her mind. They take a picnic and set off to Pencarrow Lighthouse. While they eat their picnic, Lucy’s mother tells her about Mary Jane Bennett, who lived in a cottage there with her family and how a chain of events led to her becoming the first and only female lighthouse keeper in New Zealand. Beautiful illustrations and an interesting story.

GIVEAWAY

We have one copy of Lucy Goes to the Lighthouse to give away. To enter the draw, send your name and address on the back of an envelope to Book Giveaways, Heritage New Zealand, PO Box 2629, Wellington 6140, before 30 June 2018. The winners of last issue’s book giveaway (Aotearoa: the New Zealand Story) were Claire and Craig Radford, Dunedin.