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Vicarious visit to little gem of an island

28/10/2019

Whenua Hou – A New Land: The story of Codfish Island
by Neville Peat

It’s probably a very low proportion of New Zealanders who can pinpoint Codfish Island accurately without clues or prompting. Confession – I was one of them, even though I find I’ve been close, on my trip to Stewart Island. I now know it lies in Foveaux Strait, off the north-west coast of Stewart Island/Rakiura.
So why did I choose to read this book? For that very reason – getting to know somewhere new. It was a whenua hou to me.
Neville Peat’s book is beautifully produced. Coloured photos on most pages are of excellent quality, and the text presents essential information in easy prose. Since I probably will never get to this island myself it serves as a vicarious visit. And a very pleasant and informative one it turns out to be.
About the names – the author explains the island was called Codfish from the early 1800s by the resident sealers, and gained the name Whenua Hou (New Land) “as a result of the mixed-race settlement” that developed there. Along the way it’s had other names too – Maori and European.
So, this small island has a long history that deserves to be remembered, and this is told in the first four brief chapters.
It is also an important wildlife refuge – particularly known for the kakapo which is now recovering from threatened extinction status due to an active management programme by DOC and Ngai Tahu iwi, and the establishment of the Whenua Hou Nature Reserve.
In 79 pages Neville Peat explains all and his book is a fitting account and description of this little gem of an island. I’m grateful to him for being able to travel there and appreciate it in this way.

Review by Paua Blue

Title: Whenua Hou - A New Land The story of Codfish Island
Author: Neville Peat
Publisher: Dpt of Conservation/Whenua Hou Committee
ISBN: 978-1-98-851490-1
RRP: $25 + p&p
Available: [email protected] or phone +64 3 2348192 (Te Rūnanga o Ōraka Aparima office)

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Get up and pull on your boots

18/10/2019

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Day Walks in New Zealand – 100 best short tracks
By Shaun Barnett

This is a book to make you itchy.
Itchy to get up from your armchair, pull on your boots, and set out for a good walk.
Good walks is what this attractively-produced book is all about. There are 100 of them described – evenly distributed around the country. Fifty in each island North and South (South including Stewart Island).
Most have a 2-page spread, a few one only, each containing a map, description and coloured photos of excellent quality chosen to appeal to anyone with any degree of love for the outdoors.
As will most people, I expect, I immediately check out the entries for several of my favourite walks. On the basis of my experience I find them accurate, and informative in that I learn a few more facts – about the area and track’s history, tree and bird life.
I’m reminded of others all but forgotten over the passing years that I tell myself I must revisit, and am enticed by descriptions of great-sounding walks new to me that should be put on a must-do list.
This is not a small-format spiral-bound resource to be tucked into a backpack and referred to along the trail. With its larger-format it is designed to be more of a coffee-table book and it would make a good gift to anyone at all interested in this country’s natural scenic gems, whether or not they’re very active walkers.
Those who are enthusiastic hikers will likely feel a little envious of the author, Shaun Barnett, for the hundreds of hours he has spent on these 100 tracks, and no doubt many more. And grateful to him for his work in putting his top 100 together in this attractive high-quality volume.
Excuse me – I must get up, find my boots and scratch the itch.

Review by Kauri Wood

Title: Day Walks in New Zealand – 100 best short tracks
Author: Shaun Barnett
Publisher: Potton & Burton
ISBN:9781988550084
RRP:$49.99
Available: bookshops

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Rural life to captivate youngsters

11/10/2019

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My Kiwi Gumboots
by June Pitman-Hayes
Illustrated by Minky Stapleton;
Maori lyrics by Ngaere Roberts

Having just won my very first pair of Red Band gumboots at the Field Days, choosing this book was a no-brainer.
I soon discovered it’s a delightful read, with bold illustrations and font, and it’s potentially interactive with its rhyming verse and songs.
The rural and farming country life are depicted with references and pictures of pukeko, tractors, dogs, lambs being bottle-fed, kowhai, chooks, bees and ducks, and frogs, which should have all our youngsters captivated.
To some children, those unfamiliar with this lifestyle, it might be intriguing to see pictures of brown eggs since the majority of supermarket eggs are white. All of these images and more tweak my memories of my own rural childhood, growing up as a country girl around farms, and I cannot wait to share this book with my grandson, who will have the beauty of both lifestyles.
The aspirations of our little farm girl are simply to grow up and be big enough to have her own pair of Red Band gumboots, like her mum and dad have.
It’s a most enjoyable read and, added bonus, there’s a CD to sing along to in both English and Maori, with lyrics at the end of the book. And there’s also an extensive glossary.

Review by Susan Tarr

Title: My Kiwi Gumboots
Author: June Pittman-Hayes, Illustrated by Minky Stapleton
Publisher: Scholastic NZ
ISBN: 9781775435808
RRP: $19.99
Available: bookshops

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Well worth collecting and supporting

5/10/2019

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AUP New Poets 5
Carolyn de Carlo, Sophie van Waardenberg, Rebecca Hawkes
Edited by Anna Jackson

We’re all happy to see the resurrection of the AUP New Poets series, and long may it continue.
The new format is especially welcome: the older volumes looked a bit more elegant to me, but the new look under Anna Jackson’s guidance allows for more poems. Each of the three authors has the equivalent of a good chapbook, and it is a credit to Jackson that the three voices play so well off each other. We have a nature poet, a journalist-poet, and an introspective poet, each of them eloquent and aware of today’s fast-changing world, all careful observers but with very different priorities.
Carolyn DeCarlo’s first poem, ‘Spy Valley’, describes light and colour as primary sense, seen against a background of silence:
Mauve colours the sky over Spy Valley,
      churning a hazy film that deadens bones,
  holds things still and seep in its grip.
  Nothing moves, all is quiet,
   captive in the lush grey wash
   tingeing all the houses and fences
   and faces upturned to the sky.  (p3)
The poet is on a different plane to the upturned faces, and other poems continue the image of the poet looking at the world from a different perspective. ‘Winter Swimmers’ is a series of six poems placed separately through DeCarlo’s selection. It looks like a framework for the other poems; the first with this title begins with the poet floating on the surface:
We drift on the surface,
      obeying the currents, ...

      They have been before us,
      the winter swimmers, ...

      Our feet brush against their hair
      as we kick on,
      bending backward to flip
      over and over, never tiring.   (p8)
     In the next ‘Winter Swimmers’ (p 17) the poet is airborne, distant and bigger, telling us to ‘Watch the birds/diving down into their ears, the ascent just as abrupt’.   The third poem finds us in a house watching new ferns grow, ‘the old brown lengths hovering/ then sinking below.’ (p22). The sense of sinking continues until ‘We are in pieces,/ not limited by bodies/ of water and skin,’ (p28) and ‘we float up/ like plastic bags on the sea’. And in the final poem (p35), ‘this is when I think of trilobites’ inhabiting both the Cambrian seas and the present, the geological landscape being in two places at once, and releasing the poet’s imagination as ‘I lie on my own elaborate spine/ chanting for horseshoe crabs/ to grow horns’ (p35).
Sophie van Waardenberg is less introspective, bringing a journalist’s detail to her poems, as well as a strong sense of her personality and her relations with other people. ‘I don’t remember inviting you’ (p35) is conversational and with wonderful images:
        go away, well well away, take yourself through my doors
         and back into the sun. my body has had its funding cut
and is making you redundant. be offended, or don’t. fly
        to france, to california. tell me about it abstractly. wonder

at your luck. my body has a space inside it.
     a big space inside it. there it is clean and loud. soon
it will be full of pigeons like piazza san marco.
nobody will be taking any pictures but you.
‘Schön’ (p47) is a (possibly) straightforward love poem, lyrical and exuberant, ending:
               my girl lets the spring in through her hands
               she puts her hands over my ears and I remember how it feels

               it is nice and nice and nice
      Rebecca Hawke is in the front line of close-up environmental warfare, in her language and her sentiments. She plays with the visual structure of her poems, which reinforces her whatever-it-takes line of attack. She begins with ‘Primal scream practice’ (p65):
           This is the beginning of language          A planet
            huge and awful throwing itself at the nearest star
            and missing          Water gnawing toothlessly at the land

        ‘Add penetrant to preferred broadleaf herbicide & devastate the
            wildflowers’ centres on lupins, the plant kingdom’s answer to rabbits –
            pretty colours which are just as desirable as fluffy bunnies. (Not.)

‘If I could breed your cultivar I’d have you in my garden’ (p83) begins:
      I gripped your hand white-knuckled
      as we scuffed through beefy snowdrifts –
      dead magnolia blossom

      heaped on the pavement & going so greasy
      underfoot you slipped. ...

and ends
        ‘retchworthy but I kind of wanted it.’ ...
Another slimy petal

      windblown & useless. I preferred you
      quiet as a magnolia cutting, propped
      in a jar & dreaming up the tree you could be.

‘Death by nectar’ is a glorious soliloquy by a pitcher plant (p91), reminding us that the animal kingdom doesn’t have a monopoly on troublemakers. Its last stanza:

      Oh no
      I must close the lid on my crawling
      body restless for this honeytrap gullet
      these speckles of red and green shrieking
         stop and go at the same time
          as I surrender to syrup I
             must pray the pitcher
withers on its stalk
before I
disintegrate
entirely
The AUP new poets series is well worth collecting and supporting. If they are all as good as volume 5, I’m looking forward to more in the series – go AUP, and well done with this one.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: AUP New Poets 5
Authors: Carolyn de Carlo, Sophie van Waardenberg, Rebecca Hawkes. Edited by Anna Jackson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409036
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops

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Vicarious visit to little gem of an island

Get up and pull on your boots

Rural life to captivate youngsters

Well worth collecting and supporting

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