In some small way, Nick Bollinger had it easy for his current and excellent Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand. His subject was defined by what it wasn't.

Auckland academic/writer/critic Roger Horrocks has it tougher with Culture in a Small Country: The Arts in New Zealand because his premise is so loaded and subjective it can be deployed into ring-fencing of practices and beliefs with “No Trespassing” signs.

“Culture” is a fearsomely contentious concept today in this country but Horrocks defines his approach as placing artists and their practices – in writing, film, music, the digital age – within the broad landscape: culture as malleable within diverse and changing contexts, part of ‘the semiotic environment, the zone of worlds, sounds and images in which we live.’

So rather than a chapter-length histories of New Zealand literature, for example, writers and books are located within the necessary adjuncts of publishing, promotion, retail, reviewing and readers. In the visual arts he accommodates public galleries, private dealers, art schools and curators in his multiverse -- to use common parlance -- which also includes amateur critics and public figures resistant to change, often more concerned with morality than aesthetics: ‘A few lines and colours on a sheet of canvas can make us more irate than a major crime,’ observed Australasian poet William Hart-Smith.

Horrocks writes of, ‘trying to reach beyond a specialised, academic audience to a wider range of readers . . . to make work clear and avoid jargon.’  Not afraid to quote Wikipedia, he laments the dismissal of historical perspective where art, for some, is reflexively repudiated as ‘the product of 'old white guys.’ His decades-deep personal experience of our cultures make for readable and informative essays which consider how the arts and artists – mostly from the mid-20th century to today's pandemic world – struggled in a country distant from international attention, artists labouring to find an audience and income in a climate of indifference, if not antipathy.

His stand-alone chapters – by osmosis touching on others – allow for insightful overviews, prevailing socio-political contexts and acknowledge how male-dominated the arts were (and in many areas remain so) but also accounting for the emergence of women, gay, Māori, Pacific and diverse voices across the spectrum.

Chapters close with interview subjects, among them writers C.K. Stead and Sue Reidy, artists John Reynolds and Judy Darragh, filmmakers Tainui Stephens and documentarian Shirley Horrocks, composers Eve de Castro-Robinson and Victoria Kelly, Don McGlashan and, in his excellent chapter on the digital age, Lisa Reihana. They consider their careers, the cultural climate, setbacks and successes.

Such an ambitious overview, which closes with the arts impacted by the pandemic, isn't without short-comings: economies of space mean names telescope into lists and careers are obliged to distill at the expense of detail; it's remiss the unsettling Kiwi-noir film The Scarecrow (the first Kiwi film to win official selection at the Cannes Film Festival) goes unacknowledged and Horrocks gives over pages to Flying Nun but nothing charting the remarkable rise of Dawn Raid and South Auckland hip-hop.  Unfortunately, the book is also without illustrations.

His emphasis in popular music becomes on funding and the growth of NZ on Air -- where he had a front row seat on the board -- as a support network. It's an important overview of NZOA, prime mover Brendan Smyth and how a music industry was created.

In an age when opinion masquerades as truth and long-established facts are contested, some will doubtless dismiss Bollinger and Horrocks' books as yet more cultural interpretation by old white males. But both prove research, intellectual rigor, a celebration of diversity and “a defense of history [where the arts] represent vital knowledge” triumph over unsubstantiated belief, hearsay and ring-fencing.

 Reviewed by Graham Reid