Publisher's Synopsis
This book picks up the baton held out by Charles Brasch in Landfall 77, which surveyed the religious ideas of New Zealanders. It maps the country's transition from mainstream Christianity to a new plurality of belief. Paul Morris avers that 'the level of public discourse is very poor in New Zealand, Sunday school stuff at best, and part of our job as academics and writers ought to be to address this. But the contributors help us to translate. From Colin McCahon to dub-reggae, in the pages of Landfall 215 we encounter not only the unexpected -- but also the expected in unexpected ways. Jacky Bowring conjures 'an angel bearing the weight of things' then explores the nature of that angel by ranging from Albrecht Durer to Colin McCahon. Here is an 'uprooted Angelopolis' that Rex Butler and Lawrence Simmons explore further in their survey of McCahon's after-life. Charlotte Steel, 'a self-confessed landscape hater', looks at how we try to locate our national identity by looking at them thar hills rather than by talking to one another. Why, she asks, do we hysterically sell New Zealand to ourselves in the language of travel guides? If we are to mature as a people then 'landscape has to go.'
