The road and the river

I'm grateful to Creative New Zealand for providing funds for the publication of Ghost South Road, a book that will match my words with the sumptuous and occasionally melancholy images of Paul Janman and Ian Powell. 

Ghost South Road will be published by Atuanui Press, and Creative New Zealand has also given Atuanui funds to bring out a book that Paul Moon has written about the history and present of the Waikato River. The Great South Road and the Waikato River flow beside one another for many kilometres, and Atuanui plans to bring out the two volumes at the same time, early next year. 

Brett Cross, the proprietor of Atuanui Press, sent me some chapters from Moon's book a few months ago. This was part of my response:

Over the past couple of decades Paul Moon has proven himself one of the most prolific and provocative intellectuals in New Zealand. 

Although he holds an important academic post and works assiduously in the archives of our academic and public libraries, Moon is unafraid of leaving the security of the seminar room and the stacks and entering the trenches of public debate. 

Moon's opinion pieces for newspapers, which have covered subjects as different as the contemporary significance of the Treaty of Waitangi, the meaning of freedom of speech, and the relationship of Christmas to Christian theology, have drawn on his research without seeming either fusty or recondite. Like Keith Sinclair and James Belich, Moon belongs to the tradition of the New Zealand public historian, who has an audience both inside and outside the university. 

It seems to me that Moon's new book stands a good chance of reaching a wide audience. Like Moon's pieces for our media, the book draws on careful historical research but is unafraid to discuss contemporary social and political issues. 

During his chapter on Ngaruawahia, for example, Moon uses his reading to reimagine that town during the era when it was the capital of the Waikato Kingdom, and a place where the river ran clearly. But Moon soon pivots from past to present, and decries the garbage he finds floating through Ngaruawahia, and the capitalist civilisation which has made garbage tips and dumps its supreme monuments. 

Not all readers with agree with Moon's nostalgia for the Kingitanga's communistic economy, or with his polemic against the present: but even those who differ with him will be stimulated and engaged by his mixing of objective scholarship and subjective judgment. 

I imagine that there might be some interesting debates at the launch of the two books and at any subsequent joint promotional events, because I don't agree with everything Paul Moon says, and I doubt whether he'd accept some of the things I write. In this blog post from 2009 I talked about some areas of (dis)agreement.