otago university press 2017–18 catalogue NEW BOOKS I 1 OTAGO UNIVERSITY PRESS CONTENTS PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand New books 2017 3–26 Level 1 / 398 Cumberland Street, 2018 highlights 27–30 Dunedin, New Zealand Books in print: by title 33–39 Phone: 64 3 479 8807 Books in print: by author 40–41 Fax: 64 3 479 8385 How to buy OUP books 43 Email: [email protected] Web: www.otago.ac.nz/press facebook: www.facebook.com/OtagoUniversityPress Publisher: Rachel Scott Production Manager: Fiona Moffat Editor: Imogen Coxhead Publicity and Marketing Co-ordinator: Victor Billot Accounts Administrator: Glenis Thomas Prices are recommended retail prices and may be subject to change Cover: The lighthouse at Taiaroa Head, home of the cliff-top albatross colony on Otago Peninsula. See The Face of Nature: An environmental history of the Otago Peninsula by Jonathan West. Photograph by Ian Thomson 2 I NEW BOOKS A STRANGE BEAUTIFUL EXCITEMENT REDMER YSKA Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a ‘ravishing, immersing read’, A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska, himself raised in Karori, retraces Mansfield’s old ground: the sights, sounds and smells of the rickety colonial capital, as experienced by the budding writer. Along the way his encounters and dogged research – into her Beauchamp ancestry, the social landscape, the festering, deadly surroundings – lead him (and us) to reevaluate long- held conclusions about the writer’s shaping years. They also lead to a thrilling discovery – a short story previously unknown to Mansfield scholars, written when Mansfield was aged 11. The story is printed in full herein. This haunting and beautifully vivid book combines fact and fiction, biography and memoir, as Yska rediscovers Mansfield’s Wellington, unearthing her childhood as he goes, shining a new lamp on old territory. It’s not enough to say I immensely enjoyed A Strange Beautiful Excitement … it’s simply splendid. – DAME FIONA KIDMAN … the best account I have ever read of Wellington and Karori as they were in In print Mansfield’s day … Vivid and vigorous, it is a pleasure to read.– KATHLEEN JONES, hardback, full colour KM BIOGRAPHER 198 x 150mm, 272pp ISBN 978-0-947522-54-4, $39.95 REDMER YSKA is a Wellington-born writer and historian. He has published books about postwar teenagers (‘bodgies and widgies’), Dutch New Zealanders like himself, and a commissioned history of Wellington City. He was awarded the National Library Research Fellowship to write a history of NZ Truth, published in 2010. Yska was the major recipient of a New Zealand History Research Trust Fund Award in 2014, allowing him to write this book. NEW BOOKS I 3 PRISCILLA PITTS & UNDREAMED OF … ANDREA HOTERE 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship In 1966 Michael Illingworth, whose oil painting Adam and Eve appears on the front cover of this book, was awarded the inaugural Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. For the first time in New Zealand a practising artist was given a studio and paid a salary to make art for a whole year. Such support, as Frances Hodgkins herself wrote from her own experience, was capable of ‘yielding up riches – undreamed of’. Fifty years later, the fellowship is still going strong. This sumptuous book brings together the art and the stories of half a century of Frances Hodgkins fellows. Arts commentator Priscilla Pitts writes about their work, while journalist Andrea Hotere interviews the artists about their lives and sources of inspiration. The result is a vibrant celebration of the talent fostered through New Zealand’s foremost visual arts residency. PRISCILLA PITTS has had a long career writing about the visual arts, with a particular focus on contemporary New Zealand art. She is the author of Contemporary New Zealand Sculpture: Themes and issues and a founding editor of Antic, a journal of arts, literature, theory and criticism. She was formerly director of Artspace (Auckland), the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth) and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. More recently she was General Manager Heritage Destinations at Heritage New Zealand, and these days freelances as a writer, exhibition curator and museum consultant. September 2017 hardback, full colour 280 x 220mm, 232pp ANDREA HOTERE has a background in historical research and investigative journalism. ISBN 978-0-947522-56-8, $59.95 She began her career at the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, before working at the BBC in London, and in New Zealand on various publications including the Sunday Star-Times and Published with the assistance of New Zealand Education Review. She has also written for magazines, researched and produced Creative New Zealand award-winning television documentaries and edited a book on architecture. 4 I NEW BOOKS 1999 Séraphine PICK b.1964 1995 Angels would not fear to tread at for a term: ‘She was a breath of fresh air, interested in the imagination and how you Séraphine Pick’s place. Pick was born so bright and bubbly and enthusiastic. can make up and manipulate an image in in Kawakawa, Northland, in 1964, a To see a woman artist was encouraging. front of you by being intuitive.’ century after her namesake, French There weren’t many role models for She had grown up looking at artist Séraphine de Senlis, and grew up females … except looking back, to Rita surrealism, with her father showing her steeped in artistic promise. Her parents Angus and Frances Hodgkins, Flora images by Hieronymus Bosch. ‘“This was JEFF both attended art school, but left after Scales, Olivia Spencer Bower …’ the first surrealist,” he would say. ‘Dunedin her mother became pregnant. They lived Pick did a diploma of teaching at felt very surreal; everything was new and on Moturua Island as caretakers till she Christchurch College of Education in 1991, strange. My father loved the grotesque was five. ‘It was beautiful … I remember then taught art at Rangiora High School. side of art; the idea of the abject, life and it really well.’ The family relocated to In 1994 she received the Olivia Spencer death. Artists like Goya. I’m realising now Russell, where her brother was born. Pick Bower Award, and in 1995 the Rita Angus that he was dropping little seeds into my says her parents were ‘self-sufficient and Cottage residency. ‘That’s why I’ve moved brain; it’s coming back as I get older. My environmental’ and their home was ‘very around the country – to find a way to aesthetic leans towards imagery that has a political … They knew a lot of artists and make art. It’s like a job, getting those sense of unease about it.’ intellectuals.’1 residencies.’ Pick has a son, Joseph, born in In 1970–72 the family moved briefly to Winning the Frances Hodgkins Dunedin in 2001, the year she bought her Australia. At the National Gallery of Victoria Fellowship in 1999 heralded ‘a rich period first house as a solo mother. Since 2006 THOMSON in Melbourne, Pick saw a grand master’s of development’ and also marked the she has lived and worked in Wellington. work for the first time: Van Gogh’s boots. point from which Pick was able to make ‘To construct artworks is quite hard. ‘I remember it all being spot-lit theatrically, art full time. ‘The Dunedin landscape was It’s a decision-making process and the all very dramatic, in a dark room, but it was the big thing. It was so beautiful. There’s possibilities are endless. You have to have just a pair of shoes.’ She reflects: ‘People an emotional thing that happens with the “walk-away confidence”.’ AH[ ] don’t realise how difficult that confident cycle of the season down there; it just responds to the very contemporary concept of the virtual crowd and changing concepts mark-making is. There’s much more to fed into the work. I was starting to look of privacy. Based on images from the internet, these works reveal a parade of youthful it than what you see. I loved that idea of back into those older European artists … foolhardiness, pranking, at times unforeseen tragedy. Though the bruised, near-naked girl going up to a canvas and making a mark.’ there were lots of things that came out of (Purple Water, 2013), the comatose gaffer-tape-bound male (Tape, 2013), or the figure with Returning to New Zealand, Pick that.’ She also started looking seriously its head in the gutter may be insensible to their own plight, the original images have been attended Bay of Islands College (1978) at New Zealand artists, including Frances shared with who knows how many million others, physically as isolated from one another where she studied under Selwyn Wilson. Hodgkins. ‘I loved her water colours and During her school years her home was gouaches and I’m very influenced by as the characters in Pick’s earlier works – but here sharing common experiences. The thin, frequently full as her parents supported those.’ almost watery brushwork of these paintings is a reflection perhaps of the fluid nature of the a number of foster children. ‘Their Pick lived in Port Chalmers, where her internet, but also a way of unfixing our response to the image. backgrounds were all very different. I learnt mother’s predecessors had once made Then there are her large, often disturbing crowd scenes, such as Sevens (2013) and a lot from them about how lucky I was in landfall.