2B RED: Kiwiana🍋
Books by or about Kiwis
For this edition of 2B RED, I have opted to continue with the Kiwi theme by highlighting some selected books written by New Zealanders or about New Zealand.
The view from Canada
My first three selections are about New Zealand, but written by John C. Weaver, a Canadian professor of history at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
Adam Smith's Islands: New Zealand's Incomparable Restructuring, 1980-1995 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025) is the product of a seven-year research project supported by McMaster University, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Deane Family Foundation. It is a massive work, providing a highly detailed account of the economic reforms in New Zealand. It sets those reforms in an international context of changes in economic and social policies that were already underway in other countries (recall Reagan and Thatcher).
The chapter on the currency crisis — with the intriguing subtitle “Forex Frenzy: A Freeze, A Run, A Cut, and a Float" — takes the reader through every step of the political drama, draws out the relationships between the key personalities, and highlights the erratic behaviour of Prime Minister Muldoon. His rejection of the advice of Roderick Deane, then acting Governor of the Reserve Bank, merely added to the chaos. Muldoon twice overrode the recommendation of the Bank's Board that Deane should be appointed Governor.
The book's undoubted strength is the careful and detailed recounting of the narrative. However, the author does not really provide the reader with an overall assessment. A critical evaluation of the reforms arguably might have been a more prominent theme of the concluding chapter. (Incidentally, the book ends on a depressing note about our lacklustre productivity growth.)
To say the book is well referenced would be a gross understatement. Following 435 pages of text, there are 163 pages of notes, 26 pages of bibliography, and a detailed index of 32 pages. Don't be put off by the sheer magnitude of the book; it is an important contribution to New Zealand's economic history. Though one does tend to pine for a 10-page executive summary!
This was not Weaver's first book about New Zealand. An earlier book is on an altogether different theme. Suicide is a human tragedy; a ghastly social reality from which we can’t escape. The chances are you knew someone who died by suicide. Weaver’s A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age (McGill-Queen’s Associated Medical Services of Medicine, Health, and Society, 2009) tackles this difficult and emotional topic in a sensitive manner. His database is 7,000 suicide cases between 1900 and 1950 in New Zealand and Queensland. He documents thousands of suicide inquests, and draws on witnesses' testimony, death-bed statements, and suicide notes. Without any pretence at offering "solutions," his work surely leads to an enhanced understanding of major social problem.
And finally, another book by John C. Weaver contributes to our understanding of our colonial era, warts and all. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003) documents
how the landscapes of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were transformed by the pursuit of resources. He underscores the tragic history of the indigenous peoples of these regions and shows how they lost "possession" of their land to newly formed governments made up of Europeans with European interests at heart.1
Colonial history from a Māori viewpoint
In the May edition of 2B RED we met Lauren Keenan (Ngāti te Whiti o Te Ātiawa), a rising New Zealand author who, in an award-winning historical novel, portrayed and analysed the cultural interfaces between European migrants and the indigenous Māori population.
Keenan has followed up with Toitū Te Whenua: Places and People of the New Zealand Wars (Penguin Books, 2025). This non-fiction work looks at key points in New Zealand's colonial history by presenting significant events and individuals from a Māori perspective.
Complete with detailed maps and easy-to-follow driving directions, Toitū te Whenua: Places and People of the New Zealand Wars is the perfect companion for exploring these historic sites. As the only guide of its kind written from a Māori viewpoint, it is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand history.2
And forthcoming …
At this point I will interject with a forthcoming book. The author was a former international consultant on employee benefits, and later co-founder and director of the Retirement Policy and Research Centre at the University of Auckland. His great-great-great grandfather William Cook arrived abandoned and injured in Paihia in 1823. He was nursed by Tiraha, the daughter of the Ngapuhi chief Tamaki Waka Nene. Michael Littlewood’s William and Tiraha: A Biographical Novel (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2025) is a blend of historical evidence and fiction writing. 2B RED looks forward to reading it.
The Oxford Five
Sir James McNeish was a novelist, playwright and biographer, author of some 25 books. He died in Wellington in 2016, aged 85, several days after submitting his final manuscript, Breaking Ranks, to HarperCollins. In 1999 he was awarded a Fellowship which allowed him to spent time at Oxford University. This led to the publication of Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung (Penguin Books, 2003). It is a multi-biography of five prominent New Zealanders James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, Ian Milner and John Mulgan. They all studied at Oxford in the 1930s, four of them as Rhodes scholars. Given their inclination toward socialist systems one might view them as the (Kiwi) Oxford Five, drawing a possible parallel with the infamous Cambridge Five of the same era (Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and Cairncross) although the latter group, convinced of the superiority of the Soviet communist system, were active spies.
Dance of the Peacocks traces the lives of the five scholars from their studies at Oxford, their friendships, to their various involvements in the turmoil of the times: the Spanish civil war, Hitler's Germany, North Africa, Eastern Europe and China. Altogether they knew five wars and three revolutions. Additionally, Ian Milner was accused (wrongly) of being a Cold-War spy.
New Zealand must have seemed increasingly small and parochial after spending decades based in England, and only Bertram returned to live here, taking a Senior Lectureship in English at Victoria University. Some of the others had, from time to time, expressed interest in returning to New Zealand, but despite their illustrious careers and worldly experiences, were never offered a position they considered satisfactory. So they remained in "exile" as the subtitle rather oddly states, given that they left voluntarily and faced no barriers to returning had they been willing to compromise professionally.
Female spies in WWII
The Last Secret Agent: The untold story of my life as a spy behind Nazi enemy lines (Allen & Unwin, 2024), by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson, is the astounding true story of one of the last female special operations agents in France to get out alive after its liberation in WWII.
Women played a critical role in many aspects of WWII. Of particular note were their contributions to the French resistance under the auspices of Churchill's Special Operations Executive (SOE). Notable among them was Wellington-born nurse and journalist, Nancy Wake (named by the Gestapo as The White Mouse).
But another New Zealander was among the 39 women recruited for the SOE: Phyllis (Pippa) Latour. (I confess to stretching it a bit: Pippa Latour was born in South Africa, but she moved to Auckland after WWII and died there at the age of 102 in 2023, the last remaining survivor of the 39. The Kiwi connection is strengthened by the fact that Jude Dobson, her co-writer, is a New Zealander.)
Born in 1921, Pippa Latour became a covert special operations agent who parachuted into a field in Nazi-occupied Normandy. Trained by the British, Pippa was lauded for her fluency with languages (her father was French physician) and her coding ability – attributes she put to remarkable use when she posed as a teenage soap-seller, often selling her wares to the German soldiers and sending back information via code to England. She kept her codes on a piece of silk concealed in a shoelace which she used as hair tie. During her time in Normandy, Pippa sent 135 secret messages conveying crucial information on German troop positions in the lead-up to D-Day. Pippa continued her mission until the liberation of Paris in August 1944. For decades, Pippa told no one — not even her family — of her incredible feats during WWII. It was not until recently, when her children encountered information about their mother on the internet, that the story emerged.
Our next entry in this vein is a novel by New Zealand author Soraya M. Lane. The central character of The Last Correspondent (Lake Union Publishing, 2020) is a journalist who was denied access as a war correspondent; the authorities simply stated the front lines were no place for a woman. Unwilling to accept this ruling, she disguised herself as a nurse and stowed away on a hospital ship to Normandy. This resulted in her being the first journalist to report on the landing. The story is closely modelled on the true story of a female journalist who did exactly that to reach the front lines as a war correspondent, one Martha Gelhorn (who incidentally also married Ernest Hemingway).
Ageing is an inescapable fact …
It is now a well documented and an inescapable fact that our ageing population will bring with it wide-reaching economic (and political) ramifications. The rising dependency ratio (i.e. retirees per worker) would result in a massive rise in net public debt if current superannuation policies were to be sustained. This is but one aspect of a "New" New Zealand explored by Paul Spoonley, a leading New Zealand social scientist. His The New New Zealand: Facing demographic disruption (Massey University Press, 2020) is an excellent place to start for anyone wanting an overview of what demographic changes hold in store.
Economists in wartime
Our final two entries are by Alan Bollard, a leading New Zealand economist who, in addition to having held a number of the most senior positions in the public sector both here and overseas, and holding a professorship at Victoria University of Wellington, somehow finds time to write books – some 17 in total covering fiction, non-fiction and economic matters. Bollard’s Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a blend of biography of seven economists and economic history, set in the years leading up to and encompassing WWII.
Each chapter could be a standalone biography for each one of the seven economists. Bollard links their stories so as to make a coherent whole. The economists were:
Takahashi Korekiyo, the Japanese Minister of Finance (whose ideas eventually led to his assassination);
H.H. Kung, the Chinese Minister of Finance (who became inordinately wealthy by dubious means);
Hjalmar Schacht, a top German advisor (who ended his career opposing Hitler's policies and who was acquitted at the Nuremberg trials);
J.M. Keynes, economist, academic, investor, philanthropist (whose work laid the foundation for modern views of fiscal policy);
Leonid Kantorovich (whose programming skills tried to improve efficiency in the USSR);
Wassily Leontief (whose Russian language and mathematical skills contributed to US intelligence in WWII); and
John von Neumann (a mathematical genius who helped make US bombing raids more accurate).
The author enriches each of their stories with captivating and often amusing anecdotes about their lives.
Bollard followed Economists at War with another "handful of economists" book: Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2023). The Cold War, starting after the end of WWII and lasting for 45 years, was characterised by conflicting political and economic ideas, rather than military confrontation. Any reader with an interest in economic history, global politics, the Cold War, or the history of economic thought, will benefit from this book. The central theme is that the work of these economists led to significant advances in economic theory and policies. The book describes the complex positions these economists found themselves in and how they used their economic discipline and their personal abilities to change things.
The seven central chapters analyse the context, the life and the work of seven chosen economists. But an outstanding feature of the book is the fact that the views of each are juxtaposed with those of other prominent economists who held alternative views. The central figures with their alternates (in parentheses) are: Harry Dexter White (J.M. Keynes); Oskar Lange (Friedrich von Hayek); John von Neumann (L. Kantorovich); Ludwig Erhard (Jean Monnet); Joan Robinson (Paul Samuelson); Saburo Okita (Zhou En-lai); and Raul Prebisch (W. Rostow). So really one is geeing fourteen economists for the price of seven! And as each chapter evolves, the work and views of yet others are woven into the narrative.
The author again manages to inject into the narrative little sidelights, often entertaining, that reveal the character and human side of each economist. A very extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index will also make this a most useful reference work.
By Grant Scobie
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From the Penguin Books website.
Many thanks Grant, I've just gone and ordered a few of them
Great book list, great photos.