Category Archives: Books

Jacinda Woodhead (editor) & Giovanni Tiso (guest editor), Overland 219 (Winter 2015)

This is a special Aotearoa / New Zealand issue of Overland. It isn’t so much about that country as by writers from there, in the belief, as Giovanni Tiso, regular columnist and guest editor of Nº 219, writes, ‘that this difference, this shift in perspective, can be a value in itself’.

This probably isn’t the kind of shift Tiso had in mind, but John Clarke is here, in an unfamiliar persona. With none of the satirical deadpan of his Clarke and Dawe TV spots, he gives us The things she did, a biography of his remarkable mother Neva Yvonne Morrison Clarke McKenna, who died this year. Everyone should be able to write about their mother with such deep respect and pleasure.

A number of this issue’s articles address familiar themes with a fresh twist:

• Settled peacefully by Morgan Godfery discusses issues our two settler nations have in common. I had thought Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent remark that before 1788 Australia was ‘unsettled or, um, scarcely-settled’ was an unfortunate misspeak. But Godfery quotes his own Prime Minister John Key, ‘New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully,’ and Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada has ‘no history of colonialism’.  One is a journalisic gotcha; two is a coincidence; three is a sign of what James Baldwin, quoted by Godfery, called the ‘habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power’.

• Faisal Al-Asaad’s In a rage almost all the time discusses recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere in the USA in the context of globalisation and the politics of occupation, drawing out the correspondences between Palestinian resistance and US anti-racist activism.

• Catriona MacLennan’s The ethics of defence tackles a subject that has been much discussed: the ordeal that defence lawyers often inflict on women who allege rape, while the accused has the right not to take the stand. Her list of commonly held false beliefs about rape (she calls them myths) is not novel, but it clearly bears repeating, since she quotes a number of cases where they emerge – still – from the mouths of judges and lawyers:
  

  1. false rape complaints are common, frequently being made by lying and vindictive women as a means of punishing or getting back at men
  2. women’s behaviour or clothing are a justification for rape as men are ‘led on’ by skimpy female clothing and are unable to control their sexual urges
  3. women who consent to sex at night wake up the next morning regretting it and make false rape complaints to cover their regrets
  4. real rape is perpetuated by strangers in dark alleys; sexual assaults on wives or girlfriends are not really rape – if a woman has consented once to sex with a man, she has consented in perpetuity
  5. women make up false complaints of rape against famous men to try and extort money
  6. women who are out alone or without men at night are foolish and it is understandable if they are raped
  7. women who are drunk or have used drugs are to blame if they are sexually violated
  8. where sexual conduct occurs at teenage parties after drinking, it is simply experimentation and a prank and not really rape
  9. if the survivor has no obvious traumatic physical injuries she has not been raped.

  She argues that the ethics of defence lawyers need to be re-examined, and goes a step further:

  We should … consider moving to an inquisitorial rather than an adversarial legal system. The inquisitorial system aims to get to the truth of a matter through extensive investigation and examination of all evidence. By contrast, the adversarial system is a competition between the prosecution and the defence to make the most compelling argument.

  I have a lawyer friend who tells anyone who will listen that a prosecutor’s duty is to discover the truth of a criminal matter, that his adversarial relationship with the defence is secondary to that duty. The notion that the adversarial approach is paramount is, he argues, true of the US system, and we think it holds here because we watch so much US television. I sent him the url for this article. His emailed response, which I take to refer to the argument for inquisitorial system, was brief: ‘Just rubbish. What more can I say?’ Perhaps the New Zealand system is closer to the US one than ours. Catriona MacLennan is as much a barrister as my friend. Maybe they should have a cup of tea some time.

• Evidently the question of free speech is as significant across the Tasman as it is here. It’s nice to have it discussed in At a price by Max Rashbrooke with reference to Milton, Mills and eminent legal philosophers rather than to Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and the Institute of Public Affairs. Nice too to read Loose lips, in which NZ investigative journalist Nicky Hager reveals trade secrets on how to find and protect whistle-blowing sources.
• ‘Pass the ta’e please’ by Scott Hamilton is a fascinating account of kava and politics in Tonga, from traditional ritual use among high-ranking men to current use by rebel artists (ta’e, the Tongan word for excrement, is their word for kava). By no means the main point of the article, but one that provided an odd shift in perspective for me, is that Futa Helu, ‘Tonga’s most important modern intellectual’, was part of the Sydney Push as a young man: who would have thought that that circle of dedicated drinkers and talkers I knew in my youth had contributed such a force to Tongan culture and politics?

There are poems, too, and short stories (one of which does that irritating thing of revealing only at the end that it is an excerpt from a novel in progress), and a small but creditable Australian presence, including regular columnists Stephen Wright and Alison Croggon: the former’s On backyard cricket is a splendidly deranged rant about successive Federal governments’ treatment of child refugees (‘Australia appears to have become a nation governed by people who proudly engage in legalised child abuse, torture and neglect’); the latter’s On the intellectual life of a nation offers some acerbic home thoughts from an enviable writers residency abroad (‘The problem is not with the quality of work that is made here. Au contraire! Australia has the oldest living culture on the planet, and the contemporary work Australians produce is as worthy of notice as anything that emerges from other centres. It’s more in its mediation, in what art is assumed to be in the wider culture.’).