Category: New Zealand

Busy week, lucky country

Mechanical Dolphin

It’s been another busy week out here in Central West New South Wales.

On Monday, I interviewed the Australian comics creator Pat Grant for the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. You can read Pat’s comics Blue and Toormina Video online. Pat and I will both be teaching courses at the Centre later this year – Pat’s on Graphic Storytelling and mine on Storytelling for a 21st Century Audience.

Time Travel Detectives poster

Talking to Pat was timely, because I’d just arranged for Sydney’s superlative comic store Kings Comics to send our local library a vast selection of comics on sale-or-return, which we then allowed the public to choose from in a series of all-ages workshops which I ran to determine our new collection. (Kings mistook me for Doctor Who, too, which only endeared them to me more).

Tuesday saw the kick-off of Time Travel Detectives, an immersive role-play programme for 5-12 year olds which invited local children to enter the Parkes Library Time Travel Lab and venture back to 1873 to prevent a time-lost Justin Bieber and his strange minion creatures from changing history and taking over the town.

The event included two new artworks by the Melbournian artist Peter Miller, Spirit Box and the Life Projector, which became Victorian scientists’ devices for detecting the time-travelling intruders – with Peter and his wife Wendy taking on the roles of rival 19th-century inventors battling to outdo one another. Read more →

Can Aussie libraries learn from their Kiwi cousins?

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It’s a cheeky question, really. A few days back I was trying to tease the Centre for Youth Literature team at the State Library of Victoria on Twitter, as they ran an event which saw authors debating the relative merits of zombies and unicorns:

http://storify.com/booksadventures/zombies-vs-unicorns-nz-versus-australia

All I was really doing was stoking the old trans-Tasman banter between Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, suggesting that Melbourne were all about the author talks, while the Kiwis rolled up their sleeves and waded into the front lines of storytelling and outreach.

The State Library of Victoria is one of my favourite libraries in the world: a beautiful building to rival the New York Public Library, home to non-shelfy treasures like Ned Kelly’s armour, staffed by people like the superheroic Hamish Curry running gaming and cinema events, the Centre for Youth Literature’s Adele Walsh creating activities like “comic book speed dating”, and the zombies versus unicorns ringmaster herself, Jordi Kerr, who wrote for this very site on roller derby and librarianship last year.

So why tease such lovely people?

Well, it was this talk of zombies vs unicorns – a debate for the schools element of the Melbourne Writers Festival featuring authors Justine Larbalestier and Margo Lanagan – a spin-off from Justine’s anthology of the same name.

When I saw that the Melbourne Writers Festival was charging schools $7 per student to visit the city centre and hear writers debate “zombies versus unicorns” on stage, I got to thinking about the work we’d been doing in New Zealand over the last six months, which focussed on taking storytelling off its pedestal and out of the city centre; getting out in the community and inviting kids into the world of stories through roleplay and immersive storytelling.

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Complete control: New Zealand censorship, security, space, word, and image

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For a while now I’ve been fascinated about the links between space, word, and image – starting with a talk I gave to the State Library of New South Wales about the comics medium last year.

Our recent panel on censorship at Auckland Libraries opened up some more explicit links between space and media – in the way New Zealand polices its physical borders and its cultural ones.

NZ Censorship Images
Did you know that New Zealand’s chief censor, Andrew Jack, comes from a background as a legal adviser to New Zealand police and customs?

That the man he replaced, Bill Hastings, left censorship to run the Immigration and Protection Tribunal, which decides on issues of residency, deportation, and refugees?

Or that New Zealand’s censorship began in the 1850s, more than thirty years before the first Offensive Publications legislation, when customs officers began to regulate importation of material they saw as indecent?

It’s as if the business of policing material and cultural boundaries were interchangeable in the eyes of the Kiwi state. Coming to New Zealand as a foreigner and a native of that other Island Nation, so implicated in NZ’s colonial and postcolonial history, it’s interesting to see the tensions between the country’s physical and cultural border controls, even when the tradition of censorship is relatively liberal.

NZ Censor's StampIn the interwar years of the 20th century, American comics and movies were the boogeyman feared by the New Zealand state. Comic imports were banned from 1938 under regulations which considered US comics to place an “undue emphasis” on “sex, obscenity, horror, crime, and cruelty”, while in the 1920s the Manawatu Daily Times had expressed concern that US films were showing Kiwi youth “life through the artificial, spurious, and meretricious glare of Broadway, New York.” But material which the state finds objectionable comes from within NZ’s borders, as well as without – from undesirable persons to controversial teen literature.

Our panel last week was part of a broader event which looked at the history of the sex industry in Auckland’s Karangahape Road, urban development in New Zealand’s largest city, and the ways in which women’s bodies are policed and controlled in Kiwi culture. It felt timely, as it seems the tensions around policing cultural and physical boundaries in New Zealand are rising once again.

The Kiwis might just have celebrated their first gay marriages, but at the same time women are being told that tampons are a luxury item – the female body as the object of state control.

New Zealand censored reportage from the First and Second World Wars in the interests of national morale. Now a government communications security bill and questions around reporting on the NZ SAS link restrictions on Kiwi media to the surveillance state.

Culturally, too, the issue of censorship is beginning to bubble over in this small Pacific nation. The winner of New Zealand’s most prestigious children’s book award has been submitted for age classification.There’s also a growing debate over the legal status of Alan Moore’s controversial but widely acclaimed comic Lost Girls.

As part of my legacy work at Auckland Libraries, I’ve set up a teen feminism working group in collaboration with Auckland University of Technology. This project, run by female librarians for teenage girls, will help to develop a media literacy curriculum with a focus on gender, sexuality, and their representation in the media: exploring everything from an infamous (and awesome) Bodyform advert to Adventure Time‘s gender-flipped episodes with Fionna and Cake, and beyond.

In doing so, it chimes with the best of the liberal tradition in the Kiwi state, recalling a 1989 ministerial inquiry which found: “A media-literate public, well-educated about human sexuality, sex stereotyping, the demeaning treatment of women and minorities, and the misuse of violence in entertainment is the best defence against the harmful effects of the media. This is especially important in the face of fast developing communications technologies.”

Public libraries, with their principle of free public access to all human knowledge and culture, have a key role to play in arming and empowering the public to make their own decisions about the material they read or watch. It will be interesting to see how the debate moves forward in 21st century New Zealand…

For more on the history of Kiwi censorship, visit A Brief History of Censorship in New Zealand.

See coverage of Auckland’s protest against the GCSB online.

Guest Post: Walking Through Walls – Library Spaces Everywhere

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Following guest posts from Adrienne Hannan on what librarians can learn from military strategy and Hamish Lindop on the best way to reach out to our customers, we’re joined this week by Auckland Libraries’ Baruk – aka @feddabonn on Twitter – an outspoken, audacious, and innovative librarian who co-designed and delivered our interactive teen space (featuring real live teens!) at the recent Auckland Libraries hui New Rules of Engagement. Here’s Baruk on ‘Walking Through Walls’:

We usually think of libraries as being confined to specific spaces that people come to. Even the more liberal expressions I have heard, “parks with walls” still focuses on a particular geographic space…with walls. And one wonders – does this attitude wall us in psychologically as well?

I’m an Aucklander and a librarian: although I grew up in a remote corner of north eastern India, I work in New Zealand’s largest city, in the biggest public library system in the southern hemisphere. A decade into the 21st century, the majority of the human race lives in an urban environment – but at the same time, the concept of the city is being re-imagined. This breakdown is a rich source of inspiration for librarians; here are three examples.

Frieze magazine recently published a piece on the methods of urban warfare used by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). It’s a philosophical change as much as a tactical one, based on a drastic re-conceptualisation of space. If a soldier sees an urban space as consisting of streets and houses, each doorway and window becomes a threat that could hold a sniper or be booby trapped. The IDF therefore ‘walks through walls’, using explosives to blow apart roofs and walls that stand in the way of the direction they wish to go.

“We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps.” – Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi

What’s good for war is also good for play: the increasingly popular sport of parkour does something similar, in its refusal to stick to prescribed paths laid down by urban planners. Parkour players – “traceurs” – make a game of moving vertically, climbing walls and jumping roofs to move between spaces. While at first glance it looks like it requires more athleticism and gymnastic ability than most of us have, it is more about one’s attitude to space, and really another way of tracing desire lines in the urban landscape. (See more on desire lines and libraries from Books and Adventures guest Jess Begley).

If we lack the acrobatic skill to move through the urban space as a traceur would, there are other options. Read more →

Guest Post: Adrienne Hannan, “The Strategic Librarian” – Part II

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Following last week’s guest post on what librarians can learn from the 21st century military, children’s librarian and New Zealand Defence Force reservist Adrienne Hannan, of Wellington City Libraries, sets out the ‘ten commandments of manoeuvre warfare for librarians.’

Manouevre warfare in libraries

Adrienne was a guest speaker at the Auckland Libraries conference ‘New Rules of Engagement (PDF download)‘ – now she offers 10 ways librarians can learn from the military’s can-do attitude and take our operations to a new level of efficiency, effectiveness, and panache.

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Guest Post: Adrienne Hannan, “The Strategic Librarian” – Part 1

Mechanical Dolphin

On the eve of the Auckland Libraries children’s and youth librarian conference New Rules of Engagement: A Hui of Awesome Awesomeness (PDF download), I’m joined by one of our guest speakers, Adrienne Hannan. She’ll be showing Australian and Kiwi librarians how to run a thrilling educational Nerf gun activity.

Adrienne is children’s and youth coordinator at Wellington City Libraries in the Kiwi capital…but she also has a rather intriguing double life which I’ll let her explain as she takes us into the world of The Strategic Librarian…

New Zealand soldiers

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Dark Night: Bromance, 3 – “I’m Taking A Ride With My Best Friend”

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This is my final piece looking at bromance in the context of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night festival exploring sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen.

The first time we hung out together, he pissed me off and I threw my bike at a tree.

The last time I saw him, we went out for my birthday, overindulged, and I ended up passing out at some godawful steampunk gig in Oxford.


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Dark Night: Bromance, 2 – Jules

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Julio Iglesias, I started writing about that awful word “bromance” after the launch of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night festival exploring sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen. Our guest speaker, Dr. Pani Farvid, introduced the movie Shame by pointing out that it many ways it wasn’t about sex at all. Its topic was addiction, and more broadly than that, the ways in which society disciplines all of our feelings, not just our sexuality; telling us that these are the permissible ways in which to have and express emotions.

In the pub afterwards, we talked about how heterosexual men define themselves as much through their relationships with other men as those with women. And after that, I knew I would spend this week of Dark Nights writing about Mike, and Jules, and J. That, if I could write about sexual relationships of varying intensity and duration, I could do the same for three varieties of “bromance”.
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Dark Night: Bromance, 1 – “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley”

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Ted and Elaine from AIRPLANE/FLYING HIGH

You know Ted and Elaine from Airplane* are the most romantic couple of all time, right?

*(“Flying High” to some of you Antipodeans out there)

You’ve probably forgotten. That’s okay. I’ll give you a quick reminder.

Last Friday I was at the launch for Dark Night, Auckland Libraries’ festival exploring sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen. Afterwards, in the pub, the conversation got pretty deep as we considered the ways in which society influences the way we show our gender and sexuality to the world.
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On A Dark Night, You Can See Forever, part 3: That Mad Daffodil Summer

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As we finally reach the opening of Dark Night, Auckland Libraries’ guerrilla season of events exploring sex and sexuality, I’m blogging on the way that films and literature shape the way we think about relationships.

It’s a different take on the arguments I’ve been making in recent weeks, that libraries offer a place for us to immerse ourselves in culture and participate in a way unique from any other space.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, still

The books we read and the movies we watch can have drastic effects on the lives we lead: in this third Dark Night post, I look at the way films skewed my take on romance and led to me poisoning myself for love at a London railway station.
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