Melbourne Age 'Pick of the Week'
The Melbourne Age has selected The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget by Rachel Buchanan as its non-fiction 'Pick of the Week'.
Reviewer Bill Perrett describes it as a 'contemplative book that nevertheless packs a punch'. The full review is as follows:
'The history of Parihaka, once a thriving, autonomous Maori settlement in the Taranaki region of New Zealand, is sad and disturbing and also inspiring.
It's a chronicle of colonial arrogance, injustice and broken promises, of force used against non-violent resistance. Government confiscated land, destroyed property, made mass arrests; Maori, led by two "prophets", ploughed land given to settlers and built fences across roads.
Rachel Buchanan's account, her "framing" of the events of the 1860s and after, is based in her PhD research, but is also both more personal and more global. She describes her own journeys and reactions to the place, to her family's "amnesia" about its Maori roots. She shows how Maori and Pakeha have used pictures, stories, even public structures to record histories, then and since, and how Parihaka enlightens colonial history more broadly.
It's a contemplative book that nevertheless packs a punch.'
Bill Perrett, Non-fiction Pick of the Week, The Melbourne Age, 10 April 2010.