Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Cultural Reimaginings of New Zealand and Australia, Jun 2022

Bringing together history, heritage studies, conflict archaeology, ecocriticism and literary analysis, this article contends that the 2012 novel On Dangerous Ground: A Gallipoli Story provides an important reflection on the multiple meanings of Australian national heritage and its fluctuations at the First World War centenary. As I argue, its author, Bruce Scates, recognizes the different heritages of the Gallipoli peninsula by including a multiplicity of voices and perspectives in the 1915 layers of his novel. The whole tradition of Australian historiography, to which Scates himself has largely contributed, finds its echoes in the text. The article demonstrates how Scates undermines the myth of the glorious Gallipoli campaign and the heroism of the Anzacs, revisiting the mythologized site of conflict from a Turkish perspective. The Gallipoli peninsula is approached as an affective landscape, which deeply transforms the protagonists. However, the fabricated nature of this site of the conflict, and the construction of its special place in the national mythology, are also emphasized in the analysis. Synchronously, On Dangerous Ground problematizes the obligation of the nation towards those missing in action, and the cultural malaise accompanying exhumations.

In Chappy (2015), Patricia Grace offers an insightful glimpse into the complexities of cross-cultural communication as she recounts the vicissitudes of a Māori–Japanese–Hawaiian family throughout the course of the twentieth century. This article focuses on the representation of alterity as an empowering source of enrichment for individuals and communities by referencing Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other. It is argued that Chappy emphasizes the significance of cherishing Otherness in its infinity, instead of attempting to enclose it in well-established frameworks. In doing so, the novel grants precedence to interaction immersed in the Levinasian ‘saying’ – being together, listening to each other and exchanging stories, viewpoints and languages without establishing the relations of domination and subordination – over communication entrenched in the ‘said’, whose aim is to gain the complete understanding of the Other. In this context, the article discusses the motif of translation. And while translation aims to transform the foreign into the familiar, it functions in the novel not as a tool for abolishing alterity, but as a contact zone where different cultures enter into a creative dialogue. Translating stories is portrayed as a communal activity, whereby all those involved encounter one another on equal terms, contributing their own experiences and perceptions of the world – their respective baskets from the Māori proverb referred to in this article’s title.

A few decades ago the culture of Aboriginal Australians was believed to have been removed or assigned to the margins. It was considered static and primitive, produced by uncivilized and barbaric peoples. Since the 1980s the view has been successfully challenged and recent art histories produced in settler colonial countries emphasize that Indigenous cultures were neither stuck in the past nor resistant to change. Its development was due to contact between the Indigenous and settler societies and the cross-cultural interactions the contact engendered in political, social and artistic life. This was often against the backdrop of conquest and displacement, which was the result of colonization. Adopting as the main frame of the discussion the theory of transculturation and the concept of counter-narrative from cultural studies, this article will show these different types of encounters and their influence on the life and art of William Barak, a nineteenth-century Aboriginal Australian statesman, leader of a Woi Wurrung nation and an artist. It will also show – again through transculturation – what trajectory the Australian mainstream society followed from initial separation and exclusion, through assimilation to an integration of Indigenous Australians in the artistic and social life. The counter-narrative concocted on the basis of those encounters produces a nuanced picture of loss, survival and strength as experienced by William Barak and his peoples.

Review of: Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman (2019)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 364 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 10842 463 9 (hbk), £75.00

Review of: A History of Kiribati: From the Earliest Times to the 40th Anniversary of the Republic, Michael Ravell Walsh (2020)

Independently Published, 555 pp.,

ISBN 979 8 69535 895 7 (pbk), £15.00

Review of: Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town, Anthony J. Pickles (2019)

New York: Berghahn Books, 216 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 78920 221 2 (hbk), US$135

Review of: Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing, Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot (2018)

Wellington: Te Papa Press, 320 pp.,

ISBN 978 0 99413 624 4 (hbk), NZ$75.00

Review of: Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World: New Zealand Archaeology 1769-1860, Ian Smith (2019)

Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 328 pp.,

ISBN 978 0 94749 248 9 (hbk), NZ$59.99

Review of: The Dark Island: Leprosy in New Zealand and the Quail Island Colony, Benjamin Kingsbury (2019)

Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 208 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 98854 598 1 (pbk), NZ$39.99

Review of: Slippery Jim or Patriotic Statesman? James Macandrew of Otago, R. J. Bunce (2018)

Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 384 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 98853 135 9 (pbk), NZ$45

Review of: Morganeering, Or the Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth, Alexander William Bickerton, edited with notes and introduction by Lyman Tower Sargent (2020)

Dunedin: University of Otago, lvi + 253 pp.,

ISBN 978 0 47355 007 3 (pbk)

ISBN 978 0 47355 009 7 (PDF)

Review of: Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination, Jenn Fuller (2016)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 47441 384 8 (hbk), £75.00

Review of: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950, Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad and Gerry Turcotte (Eds) (2017)

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 654 pp.,

ISBN 978 0 19967 977 5 (hbk), £110

Review of: Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa, Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell (2017)

Dunedin: Otago University Press, 288 pp.,

ISBN 978 1 98853 107 6 (pbk), NZ$39.95