Book Review: The Journal of Urgent Writing, edited by Nicola Legat

Available now in bookshops nationwide.

This book, or journal, is the first in a planned annual collection of long form essays from (mostly) academics and journalists, addressing “urgent” topics that they have been researching or thinking about recently. If continued as planned, these journals should give a snapshot about issues that were concerning us at that time – or that should have been concerning us more, in retrospect. In any case, this collection brings specialist writers to a more generalist audience. A fine idea that seems to be gaining in popularity, considering that Auckland University Press has also just published a collection of non-fiction stories and essays.

Some editorial decisions have probably been made about the order in which these essays are presented, but I could not pick up any logic in the placement. In some cases essays that touch on similar subjects are placed far apart, making me wonder whether they would have given the reader a different impression if read sequentially. I only wondered this after reading two essays that did seem to segue: historian Peter Meihana writes on how the concept of “Māori privilege” may be part of New Zealand’s national creation myth, used by colonial governments to both claim egalitarianism and to sanction Māori dispossession. This is followed by Krushil Watene’s piece on water, law and philosophical concepts of ownership. Watene argues that indigenous perspectives on humans’ connection to and responsibility to nature are among the philosophical forces that can lead us away from recent (environmentally disastrous) ideologies that privilege exploitation of natural sources for individual gain.

I suspect that, as with a magazine, these pieces should be picked up in whatever order the reader cares. No more energy for new arguments? Flick to the sole pictorial essay and marvel at diatoms! I just wasn’t feeling it when I turned to an essay about why children can’t read, so came back to it later only to realise that it wasn’t the subject that had left me cold, but the fact that the essay had none of the conversational qualities that made some of the others so engaging. Nothing wrong with a list of well-argued refutations of myths on this topic, and I’m sure the piece could have formed the basis of a good lecture, but there was no illustrative anecdote, no insertion of the authors’ voices into the narrative along the lines of “when we first looked at this issue we expected X, but here’s what happened…”.

Other readers may well differ, but the most successful essays for me were the ones that gave the feeling of a good sit-down chat with someone who knows way more than you on a particular topic and would just love to tell you about how they discovered it. The first piece – Dan Salmon on the problem of sustainable tuna fisheries and so much more – is a fantastic example of this. The next piece is a complete change of tune: an address to graduates about how to live a good life which, although containing plenty of warm and worthwhile advice, did not strike me as especially “urgent” or new. Paul McDonald’s address does, however, incorporate advice which could be a commissioning brief for this kind of collection: “Tell stories, too, especially those that exemplify our humanity. Constructive change is most likely to result from a combination of logical data and a compelling story”.

To that end, Jarrod Gilbert makes riveting use of statistics combined with shocking examples of how those stats are or are not addressed, in his essay on crime and justice. He writes like a guy who could talk your ear off about any number of maddening stories on these topics without getting at all boring.

Mike Joy is angry about the state of our rivers, and this is hardly news, but it is perhaps fitting that his subject and angle was the one I could most easily predict from looking at the author list. His essay charts his personal and professional journey to becoming “that scientist who campaigns about freshwater”, and the dramas along the way.

Teena Brown Pulu tells an intensely emotional family story to illustrate the irrelevance of rules that force people to nominate only one ethnicity to identify with. Paula Morris and David Slack also do lovely work weaving wider themes into their reflections about life stages and parents. Slack’s final essay ends the collection beautifully on a poignant and hopeful note.

Richard Shaw addresses arguments for why young people disengage from democracy and what should be done about it, in a topical and indeed urgent piece that is hard to read now without thinking ”ah, this was written right before THAT THING happened in the USA…”
Speaking of which, it’s only fair that a collection of urgent 2016 writing should allude to the political news in the USA. In the one essay that genuinely irritated me, Paul Thomas started off with what seemed like a “damn kids get off my lawn” invective against the “cult of self-esteem”, politically correct outrage and social media narcissism. He then annoyed me further by seguing into what may be a fair point, arguing that Trump’s rise to power is linked to his embodiment of extreme narcissism which is only now seen as normal. Frankly that’s an argument I was just not ready to read about, even if it contains a grain of truth. 2016, everyone.

To sum up, a quote from another highly topical essay reminds us what this compilation is aiming for. David Hall’s fair-minded discussion about the meaning of environmental politics buzzwords such as “green growth” concludes: “By taking seriously other ideas, even those we disagree with, we force ourselves to think better about our own.”

With that in mind, bring on the 2017 round of thought-provoking rants.

Reviewed by Rebecca Gray

The Journal of Urgent Writing
edited by Nicola Legat
Massey University Press
ISBN 9780994130068

Book Review: Helen Clark: Inside Stories, by Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon

Available in bookshops nationwide.

Helen Clark needs little introduction, but for those reading this blog from the far side of Mars, let’s recall that she was NZ’s first elected female Prime Minister, before that a politician, a political activist and is now a high-ranking United Nations official.

There are many events in her career which are still matters of controversy. And just how was she so effective? What’s the ‘inside story’? This book seeks to answer many of the questions about Helen Clark, and the events that she was part of, in the words of those who know her, and were part of it all. This is a worthy aim: much of that period is still quite murky. What really happened in the 1984 Labour government to send it lurching off in an unexpected economic direction? What about ‘paintergate’? How was the foreshore and sea-bed furore managed?

The book has its origins in Pond Eyley and Salmon’s documentary Helen, which has been on TV a couple of times, and screened at documentary film festivals. Claudia Pond Eyley is a visual artist and film maker, and Dan Salmon is a documentary director and producer. While putting Helen together during 2012-13, they interviewed many of those who know Helen Clark best. This book is formed from transcripts of these interviews, with short linking passages introducing each chapter.

The range of participants is astonishing: from Clark’s parents and sisters to political colleagues and foes. They include friends, her husband, teachers, mentors, staff, journalists, lobbyists and commentators. I was very impressed by the range of participants – it must have taken a tremendous amount of work to get all these people to cooperate.

The coverage is obvious: Helen Clark’s life, from birth in the Waikato to the UN in New York. The organisation is, for the most part, simply chronological. Chapter titles tell the story: Chapter 1: Country girl to left-wing liberal; Chapter 2: Getting extremely involved in politics; Chapter 3: Meeting Peter; Chapter 4: MP for Mount Albert, and so on to Chapter 18: New York City.

Helen Clark is renowned as not only a skilled politician, but a very private person. The greatest contribution of the book is to get inside these protective barriers and reveal something at least of her ways of thinking and working, her relationships with people, and her motivations. Naturally some contributors verge on hagiography, and some have political axes to grind, but neither tendency is so powerful as to detract from the interest in what they have to say.

The book lives up to its sub-title – there are inside stories here. But this genre of recorded oral history has some limitations. There was a nagging doubt at the back of my mind about how much editing the interviews had been through. These are not verbatim transcripts, and there isn’t any indication of how much has been omitted. There’s some repetition of course: the 1984 Labour government rejection of its assumed economic policy features in several stories, but the stories don’t form a coherent picture and the reader is left perhaps with more data, more insight into Clark’s role, but not a lot more insight about the big picture.

This book is interesting, in places amusing and often enlightening. By design it doesn’t attempt to interpret, analyse or synthesise. We still don’t have the sort of analytical, independent biography that Helen Clark, and the events she has been part of, deserve. This book may be part of that later volume’s source material.

Helen Clark: Inside Stories
by Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon
Published by Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869408381