Reading the Maps

I've been writing for the Spinoff about Philipism and RSA racism , and talking to Radio New Zealand about a slaver .

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/05/links.html

EP Thompson once met the last member of the Muggletonian religion, a Kentish fruit farmer named Noakes. As he expounded on Muggletonian doctrine, Noakes repeatedly said ‘We believe�...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-empty-chapel.html

I've written for the Spinoff about Don Bassett's decline into white supremacism.

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/03/bassetts-bad-history.html

I have a column about New Zealand's strange and sometimes nightmarish history of contacts with America in the new issue of North & South.

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/03/yanks.html

In percentage terms, the most devastating genocide of the 20th century didn't occur in Hitler's Europe or Rwanda - it happened at the bottom of South America, and NZers were partly responsible. I...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/02/in-patagonia.html

I've got a piece about nude trampers and poetic mountaineers in the new North and South . Read it with your kit off.

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2021/01/chaffing.html

 Sam Russell from Lindin thinks that it is wrong for the Maori Party's co-leader to use the word 'Holocaust' in the context of New Zealand history. I've disagreed in this twitter thread . 

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/12/words.html

It was a pleasure to speak at the launch of MK Joseph's long-lost anti-fascist novel Tomorrow the World last weekend. Jack Ross has written about the launch on his blog . Ross has for years been ...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/tomorrow.html

She's probably got bigger things to worry about right now, but I've queried the suddenly notorious Olivia Pierson's understanding of the Enlightenment in this twitter thread . 

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/dark-enlightenment.html

Last week I tramped to Weka Pass Cave, where people made art with charcoal and ochre five hundred or more years ago. Now I wonder: was that iron fence by the cave's limestone overhang intende...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/weka-pass.html

  I've written about the syncretic and subversive sculpture of Whare Joseph Thompson for EyeContact . 

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/warriors-in-wood.html

Some conservative older Pakeha are complaining about Labour's promise to make Matariki, or Maori New Year, a public holiday. They say Matariki was never part of their childhoods in the '60s o...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/09/some-conservative-older-pakeha-are.html

  Many critics say that Rothko is outdated, irrelevant, that his blocks of layered colours & mystical ambitions represent a cul de sac in art history. What do they know? On the walls of ...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/09/influence.html

Aucklanders may not be able to move far in space, but the realm of time is still open. A wormhole took me back to 1887. I wrote about the journey for EyeContact .

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-wormhole.html

When I was ten years old Khmer refugees arrived at my school, & my parents took me to see The Killing Fields at St James cinema. Since then I've been fascinated by Pol Pot & the Khmer Rou...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/08/lockdown-reading.html

19/7 In one day Rekohu/Chatham/Wharekauri gave us five rainbows. I kept thinking of the back cover of Binney's great biography of Te Kooti, which shows a rainbow over Te Whanga Lagoon. The...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/08/rekohu-notes.html

1 Wars are fought first in the imagination. The invasion of the Waikato was planned in Auckland; the city's toponyms record its guilt. Pt Chevalier had a firing range; the suburb is named after...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/07/five-theses-on-non-existence-of-present.html

Cities smoke, statues collapse, & the oranges in our yard swell & brighten. The indifference of nature is both frightening & consoling. The kids try to knock the oranges out of the tree w...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/06/suddenly-his-mind-went-blank.html

As a few articles in the media show , I've been busy arguing that Akaroa's Bully Hayes restaurant and Bar should change its name, and was pleased to find today that the establishment's owner, ...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/06/listen-to-bishop.html

In the US & UK monuments celebrating slavery are coming down. The people of Bristol have thrown the statue of their slaver Coulston into the sea. Here in NZ we have a popular restaurant ...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/06/akaroas-slaver.html

We spent the long weekend with my brother-in-law, who has resettled in the Kaipara. We watched his old American neighbourhood burn on TV, then walked into the hills to look for kaka. A black f...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-ruin.html

The world is buzzing over the story of the Tongan teens wrecked on 'Ata Island in the mid-'60s. I've written for Newsroom about the fascination that the castaway has cast for many Westerners, an...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-uses-of-culture.html

Rutger Bregman has written about the adventures of some young castaways on the Tongan island of 'Ata for the Guardian. In the mid-sixties the group of teenagers stole a boat from Nuku'al...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/05/an-atan-utopia.html

Along Awhitu's coast, south of the Manukau, the sea has eaten millions of tonnes of clay, of cliff. The red soil ends up on the north side of the harbour, where a new land as flat & perfect a...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/05/amendments.html

'Ata is a tiny, remote island with virtually no reef and almost impossibly sheer cliffs. Why, then, would its inhabitants build a fort? Archaeologist David Burley is one of the few living huma...

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-build-fort.html