Annabel Cooper (2)

The Lives of Colonial Objects

ISBN: 9781927322024

Author: Annabel Cooper    Publisher: Otago University Press

The Lives of Colonial Objects is a sumptuously illustrated and highly readable book about things, and the stories that unfold when we start to investigate them....


The Lives of Colonial Objects is a sumptuously illustrated and highly readable book about things, and the stories that unfold when we start to investigate them. In this collection of 50 essays the authors, including historians, archivists, curators and Māori scholars, have each chosen an object from New Zealand’s colonial past, and their examinations open up our history in astonishingly varied ways. Some are treasured family possessions such as a kahu kiwi, a music album or a grandmother’s travel diary, and their stories have come down through families. Some, like the tauihu of a Māori waka, a Samoan kilikiti bat or a flying boat, are housed in museums. Others – a cannon, a cottage and a country road – inhabit public spaces but they too turn out to have unexpected histories. Things invite us into the past through their tangible, tactile and immediate presence: in this collection they serve as 50 paths into New Zealand’s colonial history. While each chapter is the story of a particular object, The Lives of Colonial Objects as a whole informs and enriches the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 376


Dimensions: 255 x 225 mm


Publication Date: 20-07-2015


$50.00
Filming the Colonial Past

ISBN: 9781988531083

Author: Annabel Cooper    Publisher: Otago University Press

The New Zealand Wars were defining events in the nation’s history. Filming the Colonial Past, an engaging new book from Annabel Cooper, tells a story of filmm...


The New Zealand Wars were defining events in the nation’s history. Filming the Colonial Past, an engaging new book from Annabel Cooper, tells a story of filmmakers’ fascination with these conflicts over the past 90 years. From silent screen to smartphone, and from Pākehā adventurers to young Māori songwriters, filmmakers have made and remade the stories of this most troubling past. When Rudall Hayward went to Rotorua, Whakatāne and Te Awamutu to make his two versions of Rewi’s Last Stand (1925, 1940) and The Te Kooti Trail (1927), he quickly found that the tangata whenua he relied on for making his films would help to shape the stories. By the time of the renewed interest in the New Zealand Wars in the 1970s and early 80s, thinking about race, nation and empire was undergoing a sea-change. The makers of television drama (including The Governor) and independent film (Geoff Murphy’s Utu) set out actively to engage with Māori advisers and performers. In the late 1980s and 90s, screen industry deregulation brought a new set of challenges. Filming the Colonial Past shows how documentaries – notably the New Zealand Wars series of 1998 – and feature films – Vincent Ward’s River Queen and Rain of the Children – negotiated these hurdles. Meanwhile, Māori working on Pākehā-led productions honed their skills. Today, the growth of Māori creative control, enabled by the diminishing cost of digital media and the expansion of platforms, signals a new era. From these sources come documentaries from Māori perspectives and new ways of exploring the past, from music videos to online histories. Each of these productions is a snapshot of a complex cultural moment. In examining this history, Annabel Cooper illuminates a fascinating path of cultural change through successive generations of filmmakers.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 304


Dimensions: 240 x 200 mm


Tags: History   New Zealand   Military
$49.99
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