Why we do like to be beside the seaside
We are a country of strange cargo. Islanders. We live on the last, the loneliest and the loveliest. Three paragraphs into this sumptuous homage to our home by the sea and Sarah Ell has nailed the dichotomy of our psyche.
The ocean makes us poets; the ocean makes us hard and human.
“We live continually at the mercy of the sea,” writes Ell and anyone who has grown up within sight of a coastline (that’s pretty much every New Zealander) knows the drill: Never turn your back.
She acknowledges her stories star more men than women; more Europeans than Ma¯ ori but the claim that Ocean could be considered a portable maritime museum is a reasonable one.
Start by reminding readers the “great fleet” mythology was debunked decades ago; finish with the America’s Cup that is New Zealand’s Cup. Not everyone will love the prominence that Captain James Cook gets on the cover, but the book has been published with Ministry for Culture and Heritage assistance, and marks 250 years since the Endeavour sailed into Aotearoa’s history books.
Ocean is packed with charts, news photographs, reproductions of historic and contemporary paintings and advertisements. Its chapters reference the ocean’s importance to trade, sport and recreation and its nationhood-defining role (the Wahine disaster, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior). There are shipwrecks and there is science; a dolphin called Opo and an aluminium smelter called Aramoana.
Ell covers a huge amount of territory and the result is a coffee table collectible for seafarers — and by-the-sea dwellers.