It would be silly to call this a ‘review’ of Empire City, as it will take me a few years to get through this tome properly, but I am so happy to have it, to drool over it and to put it on my desk as a kind of dual use research/paperweight. I bought it last week from Unity in Wellington on a recommendation from an historian without a second thought and then realised it weighed nearly 1.7kg and I was on a trip around the motu with only carry-on luggage. Worth every lug.
As a coffee-table picture book it’s got an incredible number of portraits and drawings of early Wellington and its people, maps and documents, all faithfully reproduced with excellent descriptions and references. I so wish I had found these when I wrote Jerningham. There’s a picture of Dr Dorset, young and shiny moustached looking directly out at me through the decades and more vulnerable than I had pictured him. There’s a painting of Kaiwharawhara from the hills with early bush clearance, Te Aro and Ridgeway’s wharf in the (late?) 1840s. Boats in the harbour from Thorndon Beach, 1845. Te Kāeaea is here in black and white, an old man with high cheek bones and sad eyes, a rangitira who Jerningham mentions in his journals with respect. There are sketches of pigs and cartoons of daily life. Bearded soldiers, maps and plans.
So far I’ve mainly been drooling at the pictures, but I’m back in 1850s Wellington these days pulling another story from that chaotic bit of history and finding titbits of tales and enlightenment on my dips into the text.
There are 137 pages of bibliography, notes and index (a die-for, for history nerds). I would love to buy a copy of Empire City to put on every NZ bookshelf – for dipping into stories, for finding answers, for background on how we came to be who we are, or just so everyone can settle down into a comfortable chair for a time, to look at the pictures and wonder about the past.
Cristina Sanders' blog 