Futa Helu / "The ocean of humanity is fed by the rivers of many cultures."

Richard Langston, Auckland University Press, 2026 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton 'Trapped in Amber' Richard Langston's new book is a triumph. He has orchestrated dozens of voices to create a narrative of The Clean's long but intermittent career. Some of his material comes from his own interviews, but he has also mined newspapers, magazines, and the diaries and letters of Hamish and David Kilgour and their mother Helen. Langston has loaded his book with weird and fascinating det

Wouter Veenendal, Third World Quarterly, 2021 Discussed by Scott Hamilton According to the precepts of mainstream political science, Vanuatu should be a violent, intolerant place in the 21st century. Instead it is ranked as one of the freest countries in the world by Chatham House. Vanuatu's political system is profoundly paradoxical. The country has fifty-two MPs, yet they belong to over a dozen parties. Parties form and collapse regularly, MPs frequently change their colour

Alastair Bonnett, Routledge, 1997 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton Jimmy Corry lives, or rather lived, on Lendrick Street, in Protestant East Belfast. On the night of June the 9th a mob waving Union Jacks and Loyalist paramilitary banners ran down the street, smashing the windows of homes and cars. Corry's car was parked outside his house. Someone broke its windows, poured petrol in, and dropped a match. The fire grew quickly, then leaped the gap between the car and Corry's broken

Rene Kahu Astle, self-published, c. 2020 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton In the 2020s autism has been studied and discussed with a new intensity. For decades the condition was little-known, even among most members of medical communities. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuer defined autism in 1911, yet not only general practitioners but many psychiatrists and psychologists in Aotearoa remained unfamiliar with its symptoms into the twenty-first century. In a factory so large Each sardine

Peter Bromhead, Wardini Books, 2016 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton Peter Bromhead died on August the 25th. He was 93. At his peak, when he was drawing cartoons for the Auckland Star in the late '70s and '80s, Bromhead was an Aotearoan George Grosz, a caricaturist who mocked powerful people and ideas using an artfully primitive style that perfectly complemented a caustic, proletarian sense of humour. Bromhead's portraits of Prime Ministers Rob Muldoon and David Lange became famou

Murray Edmond, Caxton Press, 1988 Scott Hamilton Talks with Murray Edmond about His Eighties Masterpiece Town and Country Players perform Games We Play, a piece about the turmoil around the 1981 Springbok Tour of Aotearoa. From left to right: Murray Edmond, Anne Hunt, Ralph Johnson, and Janet Elepans. For five and a half decades Murray Edmonds has been one of Aotearoa's most innovative and interesting writers. This is part of an interview I did with the man during his recent

John Layard, Chatto & Windus, London, 1942 Reviewed by Andrew Paul Wood Haidy Geismar included this photo of Vianney Atpatoun holding a 'bootleg' copy of John Layard's book in her fascinating essay 'The Stone Men of Malekula: an ethnography of an ethnography'. The essay can be read via her page at ResearchGate. John Layard & Stonemen of Malekula: from Colonial Archives to Village Council I. Ethnographic texts, far from being static documents, are living artifacts that continu

John Pule, Canterbury University Press, 2014 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton The Bond of Time was written in 1983 and published in a small edition in 1985. It was republished in 1998 by the Pacific Writing Forum in Fiji, then appeared in a new edition with an introduction by Jeffrey Papamoa Holman in 2024. This is the cover of the 2024 edition; it features Pule's painting The Great World (to Ha). RS: Massey University Press has just published This Must Be the Island: Liga Hanai e

pip adam, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton 'No one else in New Zealand is writing like this' says Philip Matthews in an admiring review of pip adam's new novel kluge for Newsroom. Like the creators of modernism a century ago, pip adam is trying to find new ways of writing suitable for a new century. And like them she is addressing the crises of her century. The academic industry that has grown up around modernist masterworks like TS Eliot's Th

Andre Breton and Keiji, with notes by Scott Hamilton RS: This new translation of Andre Breton's poem Rano Raraku was supplied by Indonesian-Australian activist and linguist Keiji, whose translated documents from Indonesia's 2025 uprising were featured in an earlier Reef Shark post. Notes by Scott Hamilton follow the poem. Rano Raraku How beautiful the world is when Greece never existed when the Persians did not pass My horse is grazing at the bottom of a crater The bird-men f

Scott Hamilton This photo, taken from Te Ara's website, shows Pat Hanly working in 1977 on Prelude to a Journey, a mural for Auckland's international airport. Shamefully the mural was removed in 1996 when the airport was redesigned. In 1975 Pat completed another set of huge paintings for the University of Auckland's medical school. Called The Seven Ages of Man, they still grace the school. I was thinking about Pat Hanly on the weekend because the bright winter sunlight pourin