The word eclectic might have been invented for Urgent Writing, says reviewer Jim Sullivan.
THE JOURNAL OF URGENT WRITING
Nicola Legat (ed)
Massey University Press
By JIM SULLIVAN
"This collection of impassioned essays about hot New Zealand issues by smart New Zealand thinkers will tune up your intellectual engine'' says the front cover and for once the blurb is accurate.
The word eclectic might have been invented for Urgent Writing, perhaps the prize for the most unexpected item going to Wayne Barrar's photographic essay on the North Otago diatomites. (I looked it up: "fossilised remains of diatoms which are single-celled aquatic algae''.)
Most of the writers have a barrow to push and their arguments are usually convincing.
Mike Joy's "The Making of a River Radical" is an alarming indictment of local bodies and how legislation threatens transgressors with little more than a slap with a dead whitebait when they fail to live up to the "Clean, Green'' tourism poster image.
Chris Gallavin discusses without actually advocating it something I thought was strictly Hollywood B-grade movie stuff - a degrees-of-murder approach to our homicide laws. Dan Salmon's plea to save the tuna has me converted to a non-fish diet. Jarrod Gilbert notes that the gangs are not as murderous as their image suggests and more than one writer reinforced my own perception of some politicians as being either very dim or very dishonest, perhaps both.
Crime writer Paul Thomas scores the best chapter heading with "Skiting on Thin Ice'' introducing an essay which glides easily from the old New Zealand "virtue'' of not bragging to the sheer awfulness of Donald Trump.
Mike Grimshaw makes an eloquent plea for a complete re-think of the way the rebuilding of Christchurch is being carried out but, that chapter and the diatomites excepted, Urgent Writing has a strongly North Island flavour as in Teena Brown Pulu's essay, which describes South Auckland as not so much a Pacific city as a collection of several Pacific cities.
Some of the chapters are personal stories about childhood, loss of parents or journeys like Jeff McNeill's pilgrimage to the site of the 1917 Battle of Messines. For all that, they mix a message with the nostalgia.
The writers are all professionals so probably editing was done with a very light hand, perhaps too light, as a chapter about obesity among Pacific Islanders writes of "photos taken 200 years ago in the Pacific Islands''. Selfies in Samoa in 1816? "Photos of paintings'' would have done the trick. Academics writing for a general audience will usually tone down the jargon but I kept a dictionary close at hand for words such as "ochlocratic'' and "sortitional'' and to check if my concept of "neo-Malthusian'' was accurate. It wasn't.
Of the 21 writers, 11 are employed by Massey University which is now a richly diverse seat of learning with multiple campuses, a far cry from the agricultural college of the old days. Two of the writers, Ridvan Firestone and David Hall, have Otago University connections and there is no reason why Otago could not produce a similar collection of thought-provoking essays.
If it does, I hope it finds at least one modern Jonathon Swift on the campus as the absence of satire, harsh or gentle, was one drawback to Urgent Writing, but then I'm biased in favour of writers who give me a grin.
Probably only a university press could take the punt of publishing a collection like this and I hope Massey does it again next year, by which time I'll need to have upgraded my two-stroke intellectual engine into the type of thing you find under the bonnet of a Maserati.
Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
