Alice Tawhai invites readers to a Wonderland of workplace bullying. Fellow Ockhams finalist Rebecca K Reilly reviews.

Unless you are very lucky, probably sometime in your life you will have the experience of having a terrible job. In a way, all jobs are terrible because it would be much nicer not to have to exchange labour for capital, and instead go about our lives enjoying ourselves and never emailing at all. But some jobs are definitely worse than others. Some jobs are judging cakes on a TV show about baking or being a background actor in a popular stage musical, and some are not this at all, but rather sitting in a dull room with nothing to do and then being told you’re doing it wrong. It’s this sort of terrible job which we see depicted in excruciating detail with Aljce’s new role at the Therapy Hub in Aljce in Therapy Land. 

There are many depictions of women at work across New Zealand literature and they mostly don’t seem to be having a very good time. This makes sense as the pay gap is still 9.1% as of 2021 and work in women-dominated industries, particularly care-work and midwifery, is massively undervalued. In ‘Living the Dream’, a short story in 2021’s Acorn Foundation prize-winning Bug Week, we see a young student teacher presenting a lesson for assessment while her older male associate imagines having sex with her. In Emily Perkin’s Not Her Real Name we get a young office worker unspectacularly sleeping with her boss during a conference. In Everything We Hoped For, Pip Adam writes of a woman who’s somehow deleted a whole database and is spending the whole duration of a staff party on the phone trying to fix it, still in costume. The jobs these women, and Aljce, have, are all different but in a way all the same, as Aljce says: “All jobs seem very different at first, she told herself. Until you get used to them.”

Aljce in Therapy Land begins on Aljce’s first day of her new placement, where she needs to accrue 500 hours of client contact time to receive her post-graduate counselling qualification. Already in the first few pages, although Aljce seems optimistic about the new workplace, something seems off with the Therapy Hub, supposedly a one-stop shop for all counselling needs, especially when the manager Jillq refuses to fill out the form Aljce needs for her accreditation, telling her she doesn’t believe she’s ready to see clients. This is the first red flag from Jillq of about four hundred throughout the book. She’s the manager, the owner and sits on the board of the Therapy Hub. Her qualifications are dubious at best. She plays favourites with her employees and is the epitome of a toxic workplace bully. 

The bulk of the book’s plot revolves around Aljce’s run-ins with Jillq, constantly being called to her office to be told what her latest wrongdoing is, how she isn’t cut out for being a counsellor because of her hard, unlikeable personality and twice Aljce is given a written warning for bullying (over one incident where she made a joke with an external visitor, which he was not offended by). At one point, Jillq springs a meeting on Aljce where the staff of the Therapy Hub gather in a circle and go around telling Aljce why they don’t like her. She’s criticised for her clothing, her attitude, is told that she isn’t following procedures that seem to have been made up to catch her out and is blamed for incidents that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her. No one in the Hub stands up for her and everyone she speaks to in the wider industry says they want to stay out of it. Naturally, Aljce wants to quit but she can’t, as she doubts that she will be able to find another position where she’ll be able to complete her 500 hours and she needs the money because she’s a single mother and has a mortgage to pay (somehow). 

Interestingly for a novel where the protagonist is a single mother, we hear very little about Aljce’s relationship with her children, Pleasance and Liddell. The book strongly makes the point that Aljce’s job and Jillq’s toxic hold over her have totally taken over her life to the point where there simply isn’t room to be thinking about anything else. The narration is in a close third-person and predominantly alternates between describing conflict at the Therapy Hub and Aljce’s reflection on it and herself, interspersed with conversations with friends, usually while stoned, and other people external to the Hub which primarily serve to reinforce these ideas. Aljce wants to believe that she’s a good, although misunderstood, person but obviously she begins to falter in this opinion after being constantly dragged down by Jillq, as well as a man she meets online who cuts contact with her after seeing what she looks like. 

We don’t find out anything about Aljce’s life before the Hub, what her previous relationships have been like, about her family, the father of her children, what she did before she wanted to become a counsellor – this plot is solely focussed on the conflict that is currently occurring. This gives Aljce in Therapy Land quite a different feeling from a novel like Victory Park by Rachel Kerr, which has a similar domestic setting and context, but is sort of the inverse as a story that shows how women can end up alone and in low-paid care and service work and whether it’s possible to progress once you’ve ended up in that place. The laser-focus of Aljce in Therapy Land on conflict and the way the tension remains at a consistent level throughout the text, work to make the reader feel as if there really is no escape for Aljce, there is no life outside of where she is, and she is trapped in a Kafka’s Before the Law situation. 

The book’s title is no accident either, there are strong references and allusions to Alice in Wonderland throughout. It’s heavily inspired by Lewis Carroll’s work enough to verge into loose adaptation territory, I would go out on a limb and say. Jillq is the Queen of Hearts with her mass of red curls, tyrannical attitude and swathe of obliging subordinates, particularly Mrs Kingi. Aljce is Alice, falling asleep at inopportune times, not being able to find her way out of the Hub, a friend of a “Mad Neighbour” with a steady drug supply. There are white rabbits hopping around a cabbage patch outside the Hub and Jillq angrily leads everyone on a hunt to seal up the rabbit-hole. All the clocks are different. There’s a pink iced cupcake in the staffroom with a bite out of it. All the chapter titles are Wonderland quotes. 

The novel is not shying away from its parallels, it’s leaning into them, hard. 

What this results in is a story world that allows things to slip over the line of being an achingly real bureaucratic hellscape and into a new territory where things really don’t make sense and it’s okay. Whether everyone’s been forced outside to collect golf balls in the rain (staff members at the Hub frequently putt golf balls from their offices), or a tree is suddenly on fire outside after being hit by lightning, it all seems to make sense. This also makes some of the more unrelenting aspects to the situation at the Hub more palatable to the reader as well – the fact that no one ever sides with Aljce or speaks negatively about Jillq, that every time Aljce thinks she’s found an ally they instantly disappear, everything seems to be a dead end. This can be frustrating, but at the same time the book is telling you that nothing should be expected to come together in a conventional way and the Hub is its own vortex with its own logic. This is complemented by the way Aljce thinks and speaks about colour – she has synaesthesia and notices the colour in everything, her colleague Hattie’s hair which goes from bright blue to silvery ringlets and as red as Jillq’s herself, the pink glow of the sky and the glowstick her child sees differently, and the different shades of poppies in her neighbour’s garden, bringing the surreal world of the Hub and Aljce’s reflective interiority together. 

This is a book that takes risks, is experimental with pacing, uses a lot of expository dialogue and frequently slips between reality and fantasy. Although the tense themes and fairly repetitive plot may not appeal to all readers, anyone who’s been employed in a toxic workplace or had a horrible boss will find this relatable and we’re lucky that Lawrence & Gibson has created space in the New Zealand literary market for less conventional novels. As Aljce says: “The trick, I think, would be to write a book where it could be seen from different perspectives at different times, different layers, and the reader never really being sure of which layers were true, or which angle to view it from.”

Aljce in Therapy Land by Alice Tawhai (Lawrence & Gibson, $25) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

Anna Rawhiti-Connell reviews the new illustrated history book by Lucy Mackintosh.

I stuck to the main road when I went to Ihumātao in 2019. I went to drop off food on behalf of my family and some friends, to those seeking to protect that place, and I gave a mate a ride out. My mate immersed himself while I did not look up or down, or even around. 

I knew enough to know I wanted to make a small gesture but not enough to meet the gaze of that place fully. Not enough to know the ground on which I stood. Not enough to know that the road I was sticking to was likely a pathway between flourishing and peaceful settlements that existed long before the so-called establishment of Auckland, as marked by Auckland Anniversary Day. Not enough to know that the existence of these settlements debunk a long perpetuated idea about Māori being “constitutionally incapable of remaining at peace with his brethren”, as A.W. Reed wrote in 1955.

Reading Lucy Mackintosh’s Shifting Grounds is a confrontation of that ignorance, but a gentle one, supported by a guiding hand. Her beautifully laid-out book concentrates on three places in Tāmaki Makaurau: the Ōtuataua Stonefields at Ihumātao, Pukekawa/Auckland Domain and Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill as rich and eloquent examples of “landscapes as archive”. 

The book is hardbacked and deeply researched (there are nearly 40 pages of references). It initially sat on my shelf for a while as I contemplated both the intimidation of history writ new, and unjustifiably and incorrectly, a weighty tome. Just as Mackintosh maintains that history is not a dead, static thing, but an ongoing vibration, the book itself is lively.

Each of the three places has two chapters, six in total, that unfold somewhat chronologically. Somewhat in the sense that the stories have time stamps, but the observational and lyrical style of writing, and the vast number of photographs, maps and illustrations, are a mesh of the contemporary references and that which would be deemed historical. You leap from double page spreads of current photos of the Ōtuataua Stonefields, quiet, still and uninhabited, to pictorial representations of undefended settlements of the Puhinui Peninsula that further debunk statements from historians like Reed. There is peace in the contemporary photo, just as there was peace there in the past.

A photo from the Lantern Festival at Pukekawa/Auckland Domain in 2017 follows one of the Ah Chee Gardens being ploughed over to make way for Carlow Park in 1921. The Ah Chee gardens bordered the Domain and the family went on to establish Foodtown and Georgie Pie. Mackintosh and her collaborators on the book are inviting you to consider then and now, not as fixed points but as evolutions. There is not a past version of the Chinese immigrant community in Auckland, nor a current one, there is instead a lineage that might connect your culinary experience in the city now to one in 1882. 

Each chapter is focused on a different “story” or way into Mackintosh’s central tenet: that the land speaks and makes room “for the presences and absences, as well as the voices and silences, that have helped shape the city”. Her first chapter on the Ōtuataua Stonefields at Ihumātao delivers immediately. It is a site formed after volcanic eruptions tens of thousands of years ago. Modifications to and use of the land since the 15th century are still evident. Stone structures again support the idea that Māori in the region were not in a constant state of war with each other, but living in undefended settlements.

As Mackintosh outlines in her introduction, ignorance of this history is not wholly the result of individual failure. She quotes historian Russell Stone who says “the city has not been well served by historians” and explains that long periods of Māori settlement and history have been relegated to “a short section on prehistory” in the past. I immediately wrote “Why?” in my notebook, recalling a sixth form history lesson on historiography, the study of approaches to historical method and the writing of history. 

The answer is also depressingly familiar – for a long time history has been considered to be history purely by way of its dominant form of documentation, writing. “Winners” write history and write others out and the documenting of Auckland’s history is no different to that of other places that were colonised. In urban centres in New Zealand, eurocentric narratives of economic progress and civic monuments have been the loudest drum we’ve marched to and therefore have become “the history” we know.  Mackintosh’s first chapter on Pukekawa/Auckland Domain illustrates that well. She introduces readers to the likely place where Governor Fitzroy built a house for Waikato chief, Pōtatau Te WheroWhero, decades before we came to know the Domain as the site of the city’s commemoration of those who died at war. Its existence, a possible strategic move to shore up support from Māori leaders, calls into question an idea long supported by historians: that the signing of Te Titiri o Waitangi was “the end of Māori Auckland”. This is also evident based on archeological maps from Ihumātao, which reveal it to be a site of ongoing convergence and movement.  

In a way, the entire book answers the question of why so many of us might not know our city’s deeper stories. It does so by centering that which has been revealed by the landscape, and in many cases, subsequently ignored and not deemed to be “history”. The story of the construction of Sir John Logan Campbell’s obelisk and new coach road at Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill perfectly demonstrates the way we’ve ignored landscape in favor of curated history and commemoration. The destination of the road was the summit of Maungakiekie, a hugely significant site for mana whenua. At its opening in 1907, Campbell recounted his first trip up the mountain in 1843. “Sixty-four years lies buried in the past,” he declared. 

Campbell meant for the obelisk to commemorate Māori. And yet, during the construction of the road, as Mackintosh writes, “they had removed the Māori terraces, taonga and human remains that lay in their path, destroying the very history they were seeking to commemorate”.

Shifting Grounds reveals a meaning in the land; it finally allows Tāmaki Makaurau to be less of a place forged through the eyes of Pākehā historians, or merely as we see it now. Instead, Mackintosh’s writing and the book’s educative and exciting use of photography creates a place “where long histories have been crafted into the physical environment, where different knowledge systems have evolved and co-existed, and where the past continues to reverberate across time”.

When travelling in cities overseas I’ve often been told to “look up” to truly appreciate a city. Mackintosh asks us to look down, at the ground, at the tracks in the grass and beneath the earth, and consider that what we see now not only whispers our history back to us, but directly influences our present-day understanding and experience of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, by Lucy Mackintosh (Bridget Williams Books, $59.99) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.