A Short History of New Zealand

By Gordon McLauchlan (Penguin, RRP $35)

This is an update of the popular 2004 title and, as asserted by a quote from Michael King on the jacket, it's an excellent book of its type.

That's not necessarily to damn McLauchlan with faint praise: for a start the book is highly readable (more so than King himself), punchy, illustrated, and packed with a good resume of many conventionally recognised historical milestones of New Zealand past.

But it is conventional, very much the usual bloke's history of politics and economics, with a few diversions to topics like housing styles and the emergence of restaurants and the revolution credit cards introduced to attitudes to personal debt.

You won't find any consideration here, for example, of the rise of major women's organisations in the 1920s and their social impact below the political radar, or even, for that matter, reference to service clubs, and the service ethic that has been such a distinctive feature of our society.

Nor is there reference to Lloyd Geering, or his heresy trial as a landmark in the loss of faith that provided the cultural underpinnings throughout most of the period.

Not everything can be crammed into a small book but, arguably, distilling the remote past is safer than (at the very least) sketching topics like the domestic purposes benefit, contraception and abortion and equal pay and their complex downstream effects.

But it is enlightening to revisit the Cold War years, Muldoon and Rogernomics, let alone read a quick summary of what scholars now say about colonial conquest and Maori response.

This is an easy introduction for tourists and new immigrants literate in English, and even schoolchildren, but only to what is commonly regarded as being the stuff of New Zealand history.

- © Fairfax NZ News