An Albatross Too Many

Description

Title: An Albatross Too Many: A Sequel to As for the Godwits
Author: James McNeish
Publisher: David Ling Publishing, Auckland, 1998
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good — slight discolouration around edges, otherwise unread

Description:

“What makes us interesting is that we are without tenure and outside the law. We have no policeman, no tenure, no church, no mainland, no doctor, no nurse, no newspaper nor road nor even electric light. We have no bearings but a rock in the sea and no transport but a launch which floats on faith. We are beyond the peculiar… Perhaps we are, after all, New Zealand personified — only a little more so.”

That is how McNeish describes Te Kuaka — the remote headland community where he and his wife lived for years and which he documented in As for the Godwits (1977). This sequel returns to find it under threat: a mysterious development proposal, the shadowlands of Maori politics, and faceless Pakeha bureaucrats who, in McNeish’s phrase, think small — “in a big way.”

Part diary, part memoir, An Albatross Too Many is the story of what happens when the mainland finally arrives — what development means to a community that survived on its own terms, and what is lost when the people who plan a place have never had to live there. It has all the humour of the earlier book and, inevitably, the tragedy that attends the death of a dream.

Michael King — NZ’s most widely read historian — put his name to it twice: on the front cover (“It’s a marvellous story. I have the feeling it may come to be seen as the best thing he has done”) and on the back: “There is so much of New Zealand in it; the real New Zealand of small Maori and Pakeha communities; and it is written so unsurpassingly well.”

James McNeish was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1986 for Lovelock. He was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-Fiction in 2010. He was knighted. He died in Wellington in 2016, aged 85. This book was published eighteen years before his death, and Michael King thought it might be his best.

Why We Stock It:

A book about what happens when the people who plan New Zealand show up at the places that have managed, so far, to avoid being planned. Endorsed by Michael King. Out of print. Exactly the kind of thing The Gravy is here to keep on shelves.