The 1960s have become emblematic. After the paranoia, prosperity and buttoned-up Cold War years of the 1950s, with their semi-salacious paperbacks of Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and the glossy near-propaganda of Life magazine, the new decade began with bouffant hairstyles, the grey and grittier Coronation Street, and ended up in Vietnam protests and the Beatles' anarchic 1968 White Album. It is an era which has come to symbolise release and revaluation.

It was no different in Aotearoa New Zealand. Murray Edmond’s Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s is the newest social examination of the period as it was manifested in New Zealand’s largest city with its burgeoning population of 440,000 at the beginning of the decade. As Edmond so accurately observes, “Auckland had never had a plan.”

His style is contemporary. It is a variant of the curated history that can be observed in the TV documentaries of the UK’s Adam Curtis, including his most recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head, or Martin Edmond’s memoirs like Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole Days 1974 – 1980, the story of the revolutionary New Zealand theatrical group as seen through a personal lens. There is no attempt to be omniscient; individual perspective is emphasised and single details will frequently provide the most resonant revelations.

Edmond’s roving eye begins with the writer Janet Frame living in her Takapuna caravan and that eternal bohemian, a youthful Anna Hoffman, escaping New Zealand’s confines to the bright lights of Sydney’s King’s Cross only to be deported home ignominiously. Amid its many topics, it contains a whole history of Auckland theatre, short accounts of the lives of various personalities (including Barry Crump and his series of wives and mistresses – including, surprisingly, an occasional male lover) and an examination of the Barbara Hepworth Torso II controversy. It ends with the surprisingly forgotten series of bombings which summed up the nation’s radical mood in 1969 and 1970.

Examining Māori activism, feminism, rock music, film, theatre, the visual arts, along with literature and festivals, Time to Make a Song and Dance is a discursive history. This is one of the book’s advantages – but it also has a downside. Edmond’s focus can waver and the careful balance between straight narrative and supporting material is disrupted. With many factual writers the devil can be in the detail, but Edmond’s problem here is the direct opposite; his choice of detail is seldom at fault, the problem lies in the sometimes-pedestrian bridging sequences.

Chapter Eight, A Fine Mate You Turned Out To Be: The Artist, Gender, and Fiction, shows Edmond at his best. It is a fine compilation of Auckland bohemian analysis and gossip, which both entertains and educates. Edmond amply demonstrates the depth of his research and his ability to enliven his narrative with sly fact. There is a real-life theatrical death falling from the handrail-less mezzanine floor of an architect-designed North Shore house during an extra-marital affair; the aforementioned Barry Crump’s complex sexual relationships and the curious success of his laconic novels, along with the revealing writing lives of women, including Janet Frame and lesser-known Jean Watson.

Simply as a guide, Edmond will have enduring value. Sometimes a reader might worry about his acceptance of a witness’s veracity, especially when dealing with the book’s many mythomanes – relying on the endearing late Anna Hoffmann’s memoirs, for example, is a fraught business. She, however, is just one of many in a book filled with larger-than-life characters. The quality of Edmond’s use of archives is evident throughout.

Time to Make a Song and Dance uncovers unsuspected links between diverse lives, shows commonalities and differences, and often spotlights the one vivid point that illuminates everything. It is a useful addition to New Zealand’s recent social history.

Reviewed by David Herkt