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KōtuituiNew Zealand Journal of Social Sciences OnlineBook reviewsThe Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs by Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green, Darko Radovich. Routledge, New York (published/distributed by University of New South Wales Press, Sydney). 2005. 247 p. NZ$59.95 (paperback). ISBN 0868406937. The global population of cities is growing at approximately 180 000 people a day. By 2030 it is estimated that there will be 2 billion new city dwellers (Tibaijuka 2005). This growth presents large problems in terms of obvious things such as housing, water, power and sewerage, and it has been estimated (McLaren et al. 1998, cited in Low et al. 2005) that if all countries consumed as much energy as Britain, the world would need seven extra planets. In contrast, Wilson (1998) estimates that to raise the whole world to the United States standard of living (for which, read “consumption”) with existing technologies would require only two more planet Earths. The difference in results from these calculations reveals the fundamental difficulties associated with producing meaningful figures; they can be used for “shock and awe” rather than setting policy. Whatever the actual figure, the message is clear: energy and resource use will increase as countries aspire to “better” living. Growth in cities also increases the proportion of people separated in everyday life “from the natural world on which human life depends”. The result is that most people do not think about how farmyard animals turn into meat on the plate. Equally, there is little thought about what happens after the toilet is flushed. In Georg Borgstrom’s words, 40 years from when he first wrote them (Borgstrom 1965): “Our tragic mistake has been our failure to recognize that Nature is not acquainted with our abstract money evaluations nor does it pay attention to or fit into our methods of percentage calculations. … We are behaving like children endowed with toys and gadgets, but who do not realize that we are involved not in a game but rather in a struggle for survival.” Little seems to have changed in the ensuing years. The authors of The Green City go to some lengths in the first chapter to explain how people are, in ignorance, consuming the environment: we are using energy at a faster rate than it is being captured, and releasing by-products more rapidly than they can be reabsorbed. Cities are described as wonderfully efficient machines for consuming nature, but “efficient” is not the same thing as “sustainable”… “unless cities themselves become focused on and designed for sustainable consumption, environmental damage will multiply. The cities will be the last to know, and by that time it will be too late.” In this description they support the view of many eco-writers over the last 40 years (e.g., Borgstrom 1965; Odum 1971; Ward & Dubos 1972; Schumacher 1974; Suzuki & Dressel 2004). In the words of Suzuki and Dressel: “We have been transformed from naked apes into what can be called superspecies … In the nearly four billion years that life has existed on Earth, no species has possessed this capability for changing the biophysical makeup of the planet and thus affecting every other species on Earth.” This new book may help to effect the required change. Green houses, green suburbs, and green cities are described—and the ideas given seem neither “too hard” to implement, nor illogical. What is illogical is not implementing them, yet many local and national governments are still treating environmental issues as a short-term problem (Australian Associated Press 2005). The courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible, before they have reached crisis proportions, have in the past been crucial in tipping outcomes towards a society’s success or collapse (Diamond 2005). The green house is designed for the local climate, orientated to face the sun, uses thermal mass to cushion temperature changes, is well insulated and ventilated, uses water and energy wisely, and aims for zero greenhouse emissions. Descriptions of greenhouses in Sydney (Australia) and Oxford (UK) suggest that complete comfort with “all modern conveniences” can be obtained with a little forethought. In Sydney, a “biolytic filter”—an aerobic concrete tank containing three layers of filter beds of sand and peat, in which live worms and micro-organisms—converts all material from the lavatories, shower, bath, dishwasher and food waste, delivering water that can be used for everything except drinking. By using the roof for catching water for drinking (in yet another elaborate system) and for solar heating, the owners estimate that they have saved 102 000 litres of water that would otherwise have been taken from rivers and dams, and have reduced carbon emissions by 8.3 tonnes (and saved $1000 in energy costs a year). They have also prevented 100 000 litres of sewage from flowing out into the Pacific Ocean. The owners state that their enjoyable lifestyle in their traditional Australian terrace villa has not changed since their “green renovation”. Green suburbs build on greenhouses. With the basic recognition that all use of resources should be minimised and that integration with the landscape should be a focus, allowing and encouraging non-human inhabitants, the importance of transport and safety is emphasised. With careful design, including broad, well-lit streets for pedestrians and bicycles, as well as convenient shops and public transport (e.g., houses no more than 600 metres from a transport stop), not only can resource impact be minimised, but a sense of community can be created. The transport chapter should be read by all who live in Auckland, a New Zealand city that has been struggling to recreate itself for some time while coping with an inadequate transport system. Manchester (UK) has effected its reinvention successfully by turning its city centre into a large pedestrian zone, well-serviced by public transport. All that is required for the latter is frequency, speed, ease of interchange, comfort, and safety. The issue of price isn’t mentioned, but with petrol and parking costs skyrocketing in most developed countries, many drivers will be looking for alternatives. The authors comment that “in every society, the role of governments is surely to provide collectively what individuals and businesses cannot provide for themselves. The long-term economic success of a city may well depend upon it.” Here is an example where Diamond’s “long-term thinking” is vital. A worrying section for New Zealand is that on shopping. The authors report that a typical shopping basket now contains goods that have travelled 161 500 km to get from the point of supply to the point of purchase. The introduction of airpoints (but in this, fewer points are better) for sustainably produced food would not assist producers in the Southern Hemisphere trying to sell goods elsewhere, but could and should be part of the decision we make in purchasing “locally-grown” rather than “imported”. Energy features throughout the book with the message that society is using stores of energy with environmental consequences. The Kyoto protocol obliges participants to cut emissions of carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) by 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008–12. Whether this is possible or not has re-emerged as a global issue since the publication of the book. The European Union Commission calculates that Kyoto will cut the EU’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.06% by 2010 when it takes full effect. In contrast, United States officials estimate that Kyoto could mean a break in the United States economic output of up to $400 billion by 2010 in the worst case, representing 4.2% of GDP (Reuters 2005). For New Zealand, the calculations are ongoing, with recent admissions from the Government that its economic projections have been wrong (Price Waterhouse Cooper 2005). There is therefore something of an irony that the section on the Kyoto protocol (with the framework convention article and principles presented in an information “box” for easy reference) features New Zealand, with the Carbon Cycle presented against the backdrop of Mount Cook. Reading with the knowledge that New Zealand has seriously miscalculated the financial benefits of signing the protocol doesn’t, however, detract from the protocol’s intent. As the authors note, adherence to the protocol won’t save the world from global warming, but it will be a small first step. There are many other “boxes” containing useful information provided throughout the book. In reading them one discovers how many protocols, charters, standards, and principles have been conceived over the last 20 years—all of them aimed at improving the sustainability of the environment. Footnotes provide details for those interested, extra reading is suggested for each topic, website addresses abound for “going further”, and the index is comprehensive. The Green City can be read by the enthusiastic layman, and should certainly be in public and university libraries. The authors are academics from different but associated disciplines. Nicholas Low is an Associate Professor of Environmental Planning, Ray Green is a landscape architect, and Darko Radovic is an urban designer; all three are from the University of Melbourne. Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy and Management at Griffith University. These different academic perspectives provide a cohesive answer to the book’s various questions: what does the global agenda of sustainable development mean for the urban spaces where most people live, work, and move? Can we keep what is good about city and suburban life and still save the environment? What new methods of planning and building will be needed in the twenty-first century? The authors challenge the current thinking about environmental and urban planning and suggest that by a thousand well-directed small changes, a sustainable city can be created. The message gives hope for the future. REFERENCESAustralian Associated Press 2005. Cities finally waking up to the realities of drought. AAPrh 10.6.2005 17-19NZ [accessed 14 June 2005]. Borgstrom G 1965. The hungry planet: the modern world at the edge of famine. London, Collier-MacMillan. 507 p. Diamond J 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive. Australia, Penguin. 575 p. Low N, Gleeson B, Green R, Radovich D 2005. The green city: sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. New York, Routledge. 247 p. Odum HT 1971. Environment, power and society. New York London Sydney Toronto, Wiley. 331 p. Price Waterhouse Cooper 2005. Kyoto will cost every household $900 per year. National Business Review 22 June. Reuters 2005. The expert’s view. Reutersco 27 June 21-52NZ [accessed 14 June 2005]. Schumacher EF 1974. Small is beautiful. London, Abacus. 255 p. Suzuki D, Dressel H 2004. Naked ape to superspecies: a global perspective on humanity and the global eco-crisis. Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin. 406 p. Tibaijuka A 2005. Growing cities can bring better solution [accessed 20 May 2005]. UNESCO 2005. United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development [accessed 22 June 2005]. Wilson EO 1998. Consilience: the unity of knowledge. London, Abacus. 374 p. Ward B, Dubos R 1972. Only one Earth: the care and maintenance of a small planet. England, Penguin. 304 p. JACQUELINE ROWARTH
More than Law and Order: Policing a Changing Society 1945–92 (The History of Policing in New Zealand, Vol. 5) by Susan Butterworth. University of Otago Press, Dunedin. 2005. 348 p. NZ$49.95 (paperback). ISBN 1877276995. This is the fifth and final volume in a series which, for the first time, traces the development of policing in New Zealand since the start of permanent European settlement in the early nineteenth century. Of all previous volumes, Volume five—beginning with the termination of the Second World War and ending with the amalgamation of the police and the traffic safety service in 1992—is potentially the most cogent because not only does it cover events that many still remember and which are of direct relevance today, but this 47 year period also saw changes occurring with greater speed and complexity than at any other time in our policing history. The period from 1945 to 1992 was a time when the New Zealand Police grew from an organisation that was small, archaic, authoritarian, and crude to one which adopted modern managerial, technological, and forensic techniques equal to any other force in the world. This fascinating and well-researched book deals comprehensively with changes in the New Zealand Police at a number of levels: labour relations, administrative structure and philosophy, policing practice, training, technology, and the detection and prevention of crime. Mobile patrols and radio became fully established during this period, squads such as Search and Rescue and Armed Offenders were set up, and in the early 1970s, policing strategy itself was revolutionised. The period witnessed such influential incidents as the Tangiwai train disaster of 1953, the Wahine sinking of 1968, and the Erebus plane crash of 1979. The book explains, for the first time, the hitherto obscure reasons why Commissioner Compton resigned in 1955 after just over 2 years in office, and the impact of events such as the murders of officers Chalmers, Power, Richardson, and Schultz in 1963, the Arthur Allan Thomas murder inquiry in the early 1970s, and the Springbok Tour of 1981. The book is crammed with interesting and useful facts, and I was able to detect only a few errors: Sam Barnett became Secretary for Justice in August 1949 (not 1948 as stated on p. 74); and Chris Lewis was never convicted of the murder of Tania Furlan (as stated on p. 99)—Lewis committed suicide while on remand for the offence in 1997 and did not go to trial. Finally, the Narcotics Act 1965 did not require that a person charged with supplying narcotics prove his innocence, as stated on p. 116: the onus of proof in such cases lay, as it always has, with the Crown. (The author may have been confused by the standard presumptions contained in section 5 of the Act, relating to the possession of certain quantities of drugs.) There is one notable omission. On p. 94, the author appears unsure as to why Sam Barnett unexpectedly announced his resignation as Controller-General of Police on 18 June 1958. She suggests that it may have been over a squabble relating to police promotions. The most likely answer, as related in my book Punishment and Politics (Newbold 1989: 89–96), is more complex and interesting. In June 1958, when Barnett held the posts of both Controller-General of Police and Secretary for Justice, it was discovered that several inmates at the maximum security prison at Mt Eden had been escaping over the wall at night, committing burglaries and other crimes in Auckland City, and returning to their cells, with the contraband, before daylight. A serious gang rape in Cornwall Park was also thought to have been linked to the escapes. Although the worst aspects of the crimes were covered up, the affair was extremely embarrassing to the Department of Justice, and as chief executive, Barnett’s job was on the line. He was already unpopular with the Minister of Police Mr P. G. Connolly. It was widely speculated at the time that he had resigned his police commission as a concession to save his job with Justice. Indeed, Barnett’s sudden departure from police came barely a week after the discovery of the Mt Eden escapes. The only general criticism I have of this otherwise excellent book, is that it is inclined to be partisan, particularly in relation to events of modern times. This is probably because Butterworth has relied heavily on information supplied by retired senior police officials who are, understandably, somewhat sensitive with respect to the less glorious aspects of their history. Nowhere is this plainer than in the treatment of the case of Arthur Allan Thomas who was convicted, and later pardoned, of the 1970 murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe. The police have never admitted that Thomas was “fitted up” for this offence and have always maintained that Thomas was at least probably guilty. Butterworth appears to have accepted this view. Yet it has been proven almost conclusively that the .22 calibre projectile found in Jeanette Crewe’s head could not have been fired by the spent cartridge from Thomas’s rifle that was found in the Crewe’s garden. The cartridge and the projectile were manufactured at different times. In 1980, a Royal Commission of Inquiry found that the cartridge had been planted in the garden by detectives. A number of former detectives have told me that the manufacturing of evidence against suspects was quite common in some sectors of the New Zealand Police in the 1960s and 1970s and there are several documented examples (see Ryan 1997: 232–236; Newbold 2000: 244–246). Thus, the planting of the cartridge case is not unusual in the context of the times. Other evidence against Thomas was also later discounted. Moreover, Butterworth states on p. 145 that the initial suspect in the case, Len Demler, who had excellent opportunity to commit the murders and a powerful motive, did not have the means to do so because he was not known to own a .22 rifle. In fact, the police knew Demler had had access to a .22 rifle, but to them, and in sworn evidence, he attested that the gun was unserviceable and that, in any case, he did not know where it was (see Yallop 1978: 131–134). So, unlike other rifles in the area at the time, this one could not be tested. These criticisms relate only to a small proportion of the book and do not detract from what is overall a superb effort from a highly competent and resourceful scholar. The book on the whole is authoritative, reliable, and thorough. It constitutes a valuable contribution to a previously unexplored aspect of our nation’s past and will be an essential component of the personal libraries of students of New Zealand history. REFERENCESCommission of Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Convictions of Arthur Allan Thomas for the Murders of David Harvey Crewe and Jeanette Lenore Crewe 1980. Report. Wellington, Government Printer. Newbold G 1989. Punishment and politics: the maximum security prison in New Zealand. Auckland, Oxford University Press. Newbold G 2000. Crime in New Zealand. Palmerston North, Dunmore. Ryan K 1997. Justice: without fear or favour. Auckland, Hodder Moa Beckett. Yallop D 1978. Beyond reasonable doubt? An inquiry into the Thomas case. Auckland, Hodder and Stoughton. GREG NEWBOLD
New Rights New Zealand: Myths, Moralities and Markets by Dolores Janiewski and Paul Morris. Auckland University Press, Auckland. 2005. 206 p., NZ$34.99 (paperback). ISBN 1869403452. The publishers of this book must be regretting that National didn’t win the recent general election. Clearly timed to coincide with the ballot and with Dr Brash and his policies as prominent characters, New Rights New Zealand promised to be a timely guide to what we could have expected more of in the way of public policy. For the authors, this would have been an unwelcome return to this, a New Right agenda. While the word “new” features in the title twice, there is actually little that is new in this work. The book is primarily an historical work describing the “New Right” reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. The story is mainly a retelling of the familiar tale of the how the newly elected fourth Labour government acted quickly to prevent a fiscal apocalypse and went on to transform New Zealand through the imposition of imported New Right policies. The National Party intensified this policy direction throughout the 1990s until the return of Labour in 1999. The main characters are all familiar: Roger Douglas, David Lange, Ruth Richardson, Jenny Shipley, Roger Kerr, and New Zealand’s corporate elite. The supporting cast of foreign academics such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek will also be known to anyone with a passing interest in economic rationalisation. Much of the book is biographical, describing the lineage and background of these main players, some of which is unnecessary. Emphasised in several places is the religious heritage of politicians. Curiously, the Presbyterian upbringing of Brash is seen as a positive influence he converted from, while Shipley learned “self-discipline” as a child of the manse, a quality that suited her moralistic politics. This is just one way the religious enters into the discussion. The primary theological motif is the tension between Genesis and Exodus. The reforms provided an escape from the bondage of the Pharaoh (Muldoon) and a journey to the Promised Land, the Moses here being Roger Douglas, with Lange being his Aaron—and so the story goes. Their critics wished to return to the utopian Garden of Eden. This is fun to read but does not really provide any explanatory problems or deepen the analysis of the reforms. Yet according to the authors, “When the story of the New Right transformation is told, however, we reach instinctively for the Bible.” Given New Zealand’s secular society, I doubt this to be true, despite our Western myths having been influenced heavily by the biblical tradition. Our journey to some future Promised Land has some interesting features. One observation is the rise of the “new rights” gained by minorities during this period. Human rights legislation and Treaty of Waitangi issues were advanced at the same time as economic reforms were. Jenny Shipley personified this apparent conflict in supporting both benefit cuts and the now defunct “gay rights” Hero parade. Despite their attempts, the Christian right failed in New Zealand to win support for an alliance of family values and pro-market policies. The Maxim Institute is the latest body trying to forge this alliance, with reference to their more successful American counterparts. This is a topic worth exploring, but it is not examined in any depth here. To do so would require a much more in-depth comparative study of American and New Zealand history and culture. Another thing the authors emphasise along the way is the interconnectedness of the New Right networks of which New Zealand is a part. They claim that the special attention they give to the Australia and New Zealand linkages represents a new contribution to the historical analysis. Disappointingly, much more attention is given to these reformers than to those who wished to return to the Eden. The personalities and names of the critics are mostly hidden. Outspoken Anglican cleric Richard Randerson, for instance, does not rate so much as a mention. The content of such moral critiques remains mostly mute here. In a work examining the morality of the reforms, I expected to read more of those critics who thought the reforms immoral. I winced as well at some of the generalisations in this book. The repetitive use of “we” is a frequent one to describe something like right-thinking Kiwis. A further example is this ambiguous sentence describing visiting evangelists of the New Right: “They persuaded their co-religionists that capitalism is indeed compatible with their Christian faith and chided our churches for putting social justice ahead of consumer choice and freedom”. Read, as I think the authors intended, that the new right is like a religion, it is inaccurate to say that those “co-religionists” were Christians. Nor would it be true to say that Christians were convinced about capitalism. While working for the Church, I once dined with Father Sirico at a dinner hosted by the Business Roundtable. I was not persuaded, nor were most of the Church. One who was convinced (or did he merely have his ideas reinforced?) is, in the pages of this book, an anonymous “Anglican bishop” (actually Archbishop Brian Davis). I remember seeing Business Round Table leader Roger Kerr at a parliamentary select committee. He bumbled inarticulately through his presentation. The reception given to him was not due to the power of his ideas, nor to the quality of his presentation, but largely to the predisposition of his National Party audience to hear what he had to say. This, together with the ineffectiveness of many New Right propaganda campaigns, challenges any direct causal link between the existence of published material or groups and particular policy outcomes. As this book tries to make clear, it is the networks and ideological conditions that have real transformative power. These in turn are built on myth and morality, being important, and much neglected social forces, as the literature review in this book demonstrates. Other writers have examined the ideological as being religious, including New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering. Barbara Vincent’s work on the “The religious ideology of the Business Roundtable” is the most thorough local study. New Rights New Zealand adds to this religious analysis a time dimension or eschatology. Whereas it is easy to describe the religious nature of the New Right, this book provides a measure of its intended destiny. At roughly 200 pages, this is not a comprehensive treatment of the New Zealand reforms. It is instead more of a popular book, further indicated by the use of cartoons, some of which are of poor quality and relevance, especially the first one, which is poorly drawn, undated, and obscure. Other illustrations are classics of their day. Overall, New Rights New Zealand is a good introduction to the period for the uninitiated, but for a rounded in-depth picture, readers will want to supplement this with other works and histories. RICHARD DAVIS
Faith, Politics and Reconciliation: Catholicism and the Politics of Indigeneity by Dominic O’Sullivan. Huia, Adelaide. 2005. 296 p. NZ$44.99 (paperback). ISBN 1869691512. Dominic O’Sullivan’s Faith, Politics and Reconciliation: Catholicism and the Politics of Indigeneity comprehensively surveys Roman Catholic interventions in Australasian debates over Aboriginal and Maori rights and welfare from the early nineteenth century to the present. The two opening chapters examine Catholic attitudes and actions toward Aboriginals and Maori in Australia and New Zealand prior to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. O’Sullivan depicts Vatican II as a watershed after which the Church supported indigenous rights and welfare more consistently, unequivocally, and publicly than before, often making common cause with non-Catholics in doing so. Chapters three and four explore such processes in the Australian context since the 1960s. Chapter five crosses the Tasman to explore how New Zealand’s much smaller Catholic minority (around 14% of the total population) addressed racial politics and biculturalism post-Vatican II. This is a timely book on an important and complex set of problems. Almost everywhere we look in the world today, we see interconnections between religion, race, and politics bubbling up into public consciousness. The world religions have largely retained their appeal and power among the wretched of the Earth. After September 11, few can doubt the potency of Islam or its significance in world politics. In India, Hindu nationalism has become a major political force. Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, and independent African churches explode across sub-Saharan Africa, while Pentecostalism booms in Latin America, Africa, and beyond. In the twenty-first century, Christianity has become what it was early in its history—a religion numerically dominated by non-Western, non-white people. Yet many Western social scientists, accustomed to considering religion a spent force in the modern world, have been slow to understand this religious resurgence and its wider cultural and political implications. O’Sullivan shows that even in Australia and New Zealand, relatively secular societies by world standards, Catholic voices—not just Irish, English, Italian, Polish, and Belgian but also Aboriginal and Maori—have often spoken out to defend the humanity, rights, and welfare of indigenous peoples. As Australia’s history wars and New Zealand’s 2005 election campaign showed, racial politics remain contentious and divisive on both sides of the Tasman. The book has many merits. O’Sullivan has worked through a great range of primary and secondary material to identify an Australasian Catholic tradition and to situate it in its historical and ecclesiastical contexts. No uncritical apologist, he shows that this Catholic tradition has been neither monolithic nor highly successful in political terms. From the beginning, Catholics who defended Maori and Aboriginal rights and welfare sometimes aroused hostility from fellow Catholics as well as from critics outside the Church. The Church must bear its share of responsibility for its involvement in the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children. I found impressive just how many Catholic critics of settler racism O’Sullivan identified, particularly in Australia, in the nineteenth century as well as recent decades. “White men have too often been apostles of Satan”, declared the Australian Catholic Bishops in 1869. The fact that early Catholic defenders of Aboriginals tended to be clergy and/or missionaries probably did not help their cause in the Protestant and often anticlerical male-dominated cultures of the Australasian frontier. O’Sullivan writes as a political scientist. As a historian, I would have liked to see the author place his study more firmly and systematically in global context. Like evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism, Catholicism’s numerical centre of gravity has shifted over the last couple of centuries from the First to the Second and Third World. There it remains a significant cultural and political as well as religious force, as figures such as Cardinal Sin of Manila and East Timor’s Bishop Belo remind us. As political scientist Samuel Huntington noted in The Third Wave, Catholic clergy and lay people have played significant roles in democratic people’s revolutions against corrupt and/or dictatorial governments from Poland to the Philippines during the second half of the twentieth century. In Australasia, too, as O’Sullivan shows, Catholic clergy and lay people have often campaigned for the economic and political rights and welfare of Aboriginal and Maori people, especially in recent decades, and have upheld in public debate robust and racially inclusive conceptions of the common good. I found the early chapters on nineteenth century developments sometimes problematic from a historian’s perspective. Catholic critics of government Aboriginal policy “were motivated by religious considerations, not political ones”, we are told on page 9. Yet further down the same page, we learn that Bishop Polding and missionary Rosendo Salvado, by speaking out on Aboriginal issues, brought “the Church into politics”. On page 23, we read that Jesuit missionary, Duncan McNab, spoke of civilising Aboriginals, which O’Sullivan suggests implied “weakening, if not destroying” a unique Aboriginal culture—a position he then presents as “unquestionably inconsistent with the Church’s magisterium” as “established by Pope Paul III in 1537”. By failing adequately to place in historical context either McNab’s views or those of Pope Paul III, we get partial, inadequate, and problematic readings of both. O’Sullivan provides a long quote from Pope Paul III in 1537 forbidding European Christians from either enslaving or dispossessing American Indians, whether or not they were Christian. Although the Pope certainly wanted to prevent the Spanish and Portuguese from simply destroying Amerindian peoples and cultures, neither he nor any other contemporary Catholic critic of the conquistadors believed that the Indians did not need civilising and Christianising. This was not the only section in which this historian was bemused by a tendency to leap back and forth across large tracts of time and space without adequate attention to historical context. While pruning excessive detail (better contextualisation and tightening the argument would have improved it), this book makes a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of Australasian debates about religion, race, and politics. Historians, political scientists, theologians, and scholars of Maori, Aboriginal, and religious studies will find it useful. The issues with which it deals are not going to go away. JOHN STENHOUSE
Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image by Sylvia K. Blood. Routledge, London and New York. 2005. 149 p. NZ$61.95 (paperback). ISBN 0415272726. “Body image” research is well established in psychological literature. This book takes the reader gently through some of the hegemonic discourses that construct the field and practice of experimental psychology. Sylvia Blood takes a critical approach to experimental psychology and demonstrates how its research into “body image problems” has become an increasingly dominant explanation for women’s distressing experiences of their bodies. She notes that a shift has occurred in body image discourses. Five to ten years ago women who worried about being too fat would talk about needing to lose weight and assert greater control over their eating. More recently, Blood explains, powerful experimental psychology discourse of “body image discourse” has begun to dominant popular women’s magazines. It is not the size of women’s bodies that is the problem; rather, seeing women’s bodies as “excess” and wanting to reduce their size becomes problematic—even a sign of pathology. Being upset with your body is now seen as a psychological problem. This discursive shift marks a change in the ways in which women are understood and how they understand and act upon themselves “as women with a psychological problem of body image dissatisfaction or body image disturbance. These classifications provide answers for the body image experts and become common-sense knowledge about women’s painful and distressing experiences of their bodies” (p. 1). Blood provides us with a unique opportunity to trace the emergence, and incorporation of, experimental psychology into the everyday discourses of women’s popular magazines and women’s bodies. Blood upsets what is considered “normal” and unpacks scientific “truths” that construct women’s concern and distress about their bodies. She exposes some of the fallacies about women’s bodies that underpin experimental psychology’s body image research. The first two chapters of the book are theoretical. Chapter one identifies key psychological researchers on body image. The author uncovers the assumptions that uphold these theories and methods. Chapter two gathers more momentum, and key psychological researchers are critiqued. One does not have to be from the field of psychology to recognise the Cartesian logic that infiltrates most western knowledge and legitimates, in this instance, experimental psychology. Woven into these theoretical chapters is the everyday talk of women’s bodies. Text boxes contain quotes from interviews. At first I found these text boxes surprising and slightly annoying, but then I started to look forward to reading the next one. They break up the theoretical terrain of the book and remind the reader of the “real” embodied experiences of women. Alternative views of embodiment and subjectivities are presented in Chapter three. Critical social theorists such as Susan Bordo, Michel Foucault, Susie Orbach, Nikolas Rose, Margaret Wetherell, and Jonathan Potter are drawn on in order to provide a more complex understanding of body image. The next three chapters offer alternative ways of approaching the question of “body image” by empirically exploring the construction of women’s bodies/subjectivities. Chapter four offers an analysis of a More magazine article that featured “ordinary” women’s bodies naked. Chapter five continues empirical work in popular women’s magazines and explores the practice of subjectification. The last empirical chapter is devoted to one woman (Emma) and her body image. A discourse analytic approach is used to explore the ways in which assumptions of experimental body image research constitute her subjectivity in particular ways. Emma’s account is “rich in the cultural assumptions available to Western women for making sense of their experiences of feeling/being overweight, and feeling anxious about the size/shape of our bodies” (p. 118). These three empirical chapters are rich in detail and insight. The author’s experience as a clinical psychologist is evident in her interviews. She analyses her participants’ discourse with care and sensitivity. Body Work is a sustained critique of the way in which experimental psychology has objectified women, and the author is careful not to follow the same research path by objectifying her participants. I was happy to read on page 3 that Blood’s “own position is itself an historical artefact, equally contingent, that will in turn be critiqued”. I was disappointed, however, not to find that critique in the book. By the end I wanted to know, more explicitly, what difference Blood’s body makes to her clients, friends, and other research participants. As stated on page 68, the analysis, or readings, of a particular magazine is “a representation of the consensus of my own views and those of women peers, both Maori and New Zealand European, with whom I discussed the article”. It would seem highly appropriate to add some detail, not only about the participants but also about the researcher. Blood considers the clinical implications of her research in the book’s final chapter. She argues that alternative views of women’s embodiment and subjectivity, and understandings of the material effects of different discursive constructions, may enable new, and more useful, approaches to working with women. A series of questions frame this chapter, and as the author addresses them, she provides a fresh summary to the book as a whole. From my perspective as a feminist geographer, I could not help but notice the lack of detail on “place”. The bulk of the research, I think, took place in Auckland, New Zealand. Interviewees (how many, what age, sexuality, ethnicity etc. is not known) were crucial to the empirical data. The New Zealand magazine More is used for a detailed analysis of women’s body image in Chapter four. The place of Auckland and the connections to the wider South Pacific are central to the ways in which women understand their embodiment. Blood draws on Elizabeth Grosz to engage with the work of Schilder to argue that “the body image is formed out of the various modes of contact the subject has with its environment through its actions in the world” (p. 9). The material environment of Blood’s research participants, however, is not prominent in the analysis. Different places are mentioned—for example the gym—but place and space are largely excluded from the analysis. The themes in this book are well developed and draw on extensive and transformative empirical work. Blood has made a commitment to social change within clinical psychology. She challenges experimental psychologists to rethink women’s anxieties about their bodies as a product of social power relations, rather than as individual pathology. Although based in psychology, researchers from sociology, women’s and gender studies, and public health will gain from the theoretical discussions and rich case studies presented in this book. LYNDA JOHNSTON
The Word of a Woman? Police, Rape and Belief by Jan Jordan. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York. 2004. 267 p., NZ$172.95 (hardback). ISBN 1403921695. On the last day of March 2006, the defendants in a high profile New Zealand court case were found not guilty on charges of rape and sexual violation alleged to have occurred in Rotorua in the mid-1980s. These men—Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton, and Bob Schollum—were police officers at the time. They all admitted to having sex with the then teenager, Louise Nicholas, including what was referred to in the media as “group sex”. The men claimed that the acts they engaged in with Nicholas were consensual. She said that what had happened was rape. In the trial, and in the media coverage of the trial, she was accused of having “lied and fabricated events” (e.g., see Boyes 2006). In the immediate aftermath of this verdict, Jan Jordan’s words seem to echo with poignancy. One of her central points in The Word of a Woman? Police, Rape and Belief is that a woman’s word—in disclosing sexual violation—is likely to be met with suspicion if not downright disbelief. Not only is a woman’s credibility on the line when she reports rape, but her version of events is likely to be met by deeply entrenched responses within the criminal justice system that regard women’s words as inherently untrustworthy. As Jordan says: “Perceptions about the nature of rape combine with perceptions about the nature of women to create a cultural environment within which victims of rape will inevitably struggle to be believed” (p. 48, my emphasis). This book elaborates upon this claim. Jordan delivers a comprehensive discussion of historical antecedents of such responses and a broader review of the social and legal contexts of rape. She also presents her own New Zealand research, both with police and with women who have experienced rape. I can’t make up my mind whether it is good news or bad news that her research so strongly substantiates her argument about the extent to which the credibility of women’s testimonies are still regarded as inherently flawed. Of course it is bad news because it provides such a discouraging and pessimistic portrayal of the likelihood of justice, let alone basic decency and respect, being achieved for all women who report rape to the police. On the other hand, it is surely good to have such a thorough empirical account of official responses to women’s reports of rape, as a grounding for promoting positive change. Jordan’s analyses showed that there are no single factors that directly and reliably affect how police will regard the credibility of a rape complaint/complainant. She did find that women with intellectual disabilities or obvious mental health problems are particularly vulnerable to encountering disbelief. Although women who report a stereotypical “real” rape (involving strangers and physical violence) are more likely to get sympathetic hearings from the police, no women are immune from the possibility of encountering a disbelieving and disrespectful response. For instance, one woman who was raped by a stranger serial rapist (later convicted) told of being taunted by the detectives interviewing her with the accusation that she was lying: “Come on, Kathleen, we know you were making all this up, we know you were having an affair and you were having sex that morning and it got a bit rough and you just made all this up, just so your husband doesn’t find out…”. One of the strengths of the book is the sheer level of detail that is provided about police views and practices, opening a valuable window of insight into what goes on once a woman reports a rape. Although, as Jordan acknowledges, there is considerable variability among police in their understandings about rape, her data reveal the unsympathetic, if not misogynist, views held by some police, as well as the limited and largely unsophisticated understandings about rape shared by many. It is important to acknowledge, as her interview data show, the sensitive and empathetic orientation of some police who work in this area. Some of the detectives Jordan interviewed clearly had a strong commitment to respectful treatment of women who have been raped and had become knowledgeable about the immediate impact of rape. Nevertheless, more generally police responses too often appeared to be driven by misinformed and/or stereotypical views about women and rape. For instance, narrow and inaccurate understandings about both the dynamics of rape and the ways in which people act following a traumatic experience appeared to lead at least some police to jump to erroneous conclusions about who not to trust—the woman who makes the mistake of later laughing with a friend; the woman who attempts to conceal that she smoked a joint earlier in the evening; and so on and so on. Another impediment to the fair treatment of women reporting rape, and to the pursuit of justice in such cases, was the extent to which many police officers adhere to inaccurate inflated estimates about the proportion of rape allegations that are false. The chapter reporting on her interviews with the women Rewa raped is particularly interesting. In a sense, as Jordan notes, these women were “perfect victims”—attacked in their own homes by a perpetrator who was a stranger to the women, and who fitted the profile of a monstrous criminal (thereby enhancing the likelihood that police would sympathise with the women victims, and reducing the likelihood that they would identify with the accused). Once the police realised they were tracking a serial rapist, extra measures were taken to support the women complainants. Consequently, these women were generally well satisfied with the response they received from police. Jordan notes the importance of a good trusting relationship between police and women reporting rape—not only for the wellbeing of the victims themselves, but also for bolstering the strength of the prosecution case that can be developed against an accused rapist. It is interesting to reflect on the recent trial of Rickards, Shipton, and Schollum in relation to the comprehensive data and the arguments presented in Jordan’s book. In the light of her analyses, it is difficult to see how this case would have got as far as it did unless at least some influential senior police believed that Louise Nicholas’s version of events had high credibility. Nevertheless, a jury ended up siding with the men’s account of events. No one other than the people directly involved in those events can claim to know for sure the truth of what happened—whether the young Louise Nicholas consented to group sex with three older policemen. But it would be a na<0x00EF>ve observer who did not recognise the gendered and political dimensions to judgments made in a context where women’s versions of the truth of such events are routinely mistrusted, and where “trying to convict a man of rape involves swimming upstream, against the strong currents of patriarchal thought and belief” (Jordan, p. 245). A decade ago Justice Ellis, of the High Court in Wellington, told the audience at a national rape conference that it would “only be in the most extreme circumstances that you would ever advise a woman to participate in the criminal process if she was alleging that she had been raped” (Ellis 1996: 82). In acknowledging the extent of the ordeal faced by women who become victim-witnesses in rape trials, he clearly implied doubt about whether it is in a woman’s best interests to report rape. As Jordan’s research shows, the ordeal can start from the moment of reporting itself. Yet without the courage (and altruism, often) of women who are prepared to break the rule of silence (Jordan, p. 247) in reporting a rape, we are never going to make the progress necessary for stopping sexual violence. This, then, is an important book. Without the kinds of improvements that Jordan calls for to the criminal justice system response to rape, women will continue to be deterred from reporting rape and sexual assault. Jordan’s particular focus is on policing but, as she also makes clear, wider socio-cultural change is necessary at the same time if we can dare to hope for the elimination of rape in our society. REFERENCESBoyes N 2006. Too many flaws in Nicholas case, say defence lawyers. New Zealand Herald, 29 March. http://www.nzherald.co.nz [accessed 6 April 2006]. Ellis Justice 1996. Contribution to Panel: “The rape trial: Are the scales of justice evenly balanced?” In: Broadmore J, Shand C, Warburton T ed. Rape: Ten years’ progress? Proceedings of an inter-disciplinary conference, 27–30 March, Wellington, New Zealand. Wellington, DSAC [Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care]. Pp. 82–84. NICOLA GAVEY
1Key Themes of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, launched in Waitakere City in March, are in environmental protection (preservation and protection of the environment, water, climate change, biodiversity, preventing disasters, and sustainable production and consumption). Economic development and overcoming poverty, and social and cultural development including quality education, gender equality and sustainable urbanisation, are also important. The objectives of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO 2005) are: to give an enhanced profile to the central role of education and learning in the common pursuit of sustainable development; facilitate links and networking, exchange and interaction among stakeholders in Education for Sustainable Development; provide a space and opportunity for refining and promoting the vision of, and transition to sustainable development through all forms of learning and public awareness; foster increased quality of teaching and learning in education for sustainable development; develop strategies at every level to strengthen capacity in Education for Sustainable Development. This year's abstracts | Journal home page | All abstracts | Publishing home page | PDF file of entire paper: Print-quality (270K) Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2006, Vol.
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