Young Country

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.