Kerry Hines’ unique, poetic portrait of New Zealand alongside rarely seen images of colonial life

Young Country

Kerry Hines

Hardback, 214 x 162mm, illustrations

200pp, 978 1 86940 823 7 AUP  -  $34.99

Kerry Hines’ unique, poetic portrait of New Zealand is set alongside rarely seen images of colonial life by photographer William Williams.

Young Country is a book of poems by twenty-first-century writer Kerry Hines alongside images of colonial New Zealand life by nineteenth-century photographer William Williams. 

Here, wry, plainspoken but haunting poems sit alongside evocative photographs of settlement: landscapes, streetscapes, skyscapes; the escapades of a trio of flatmates; portraits of family and friends; burnt bush and rising buildings. Whether imagined or actual, 

in this ‘young country; / people are an occasion’, and the book features many figures: Williams and his housemates Tom and Alex; ethnographer Elsdon Best; notorious criminals and the judges who sentenced them; the mythic creature Shellycoat who accompanied the Scottish settlers; wives, prostitutes and ‘hallelujah lassies’; and visiting professor Robert Wallace who cast an outsider view on this new society. 

The stunning photographs and poems of Young Country combine to offer a meditation on how we capture the present and re-present the past, on the parallels between building a community and authoring a text, and on the possibilities that expansive fiction offers to documented truth.

 

About the author

Kerry Hines has a PhD from Victoria University (2012) for her thesis ‘After the Fact: Poems, Photographs, and Regenerating Histories’, part of which forms the basis for Young Country. She contributed an essay, ‘William Williams and “The Old Shebang”, to the book Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays and her poetry has been published in literary journals, magazines and the co-authored collection Millionaire’s Shortbread.