What a beautiful book. Undoubtedly one for the book design awards, the pale-green-on-white-cover treatment of Six Legged Ghosts entices the reader to open it up. A gift to designer Alice Bonifant, the fungus moth that lingers on the conveniently subdivisible title may not be quite as glorious as the more widely known pūriri moth, or pepetuna (one of the ghosts of the title), but it’s every bit as alluring. The endpapers, holey double-spreads of kawakawa punctuated by the kawakawa looper moth, Cleora scriptaria, are especially well chosen, the plant signifying both grief and healing for Māori.
Lyttelton author and illustrator Lily Duval, whose MA thesis explored “cultural entomology” – how we talk about and represent insects in culture – has pulled off that most difficult of feats: jumping the divide between academia and popular writing. A researcher and writer since 2021 on RNZ’s massively popular Critter of the Week slot, and illustrator of Nicola Toki’s 2023 book Critters of Aotearoa, Duval has clearly amassed a wealth of knowledge about insects – not only our own, here and now, but globally, historically (beginning with insect fossils), in art and in literature.
She is an observer par excellence, and her achievement is amplified in this handsome production by her copious illustrations. Yet, while addicted to drawing since preschool, she was an entomophobe right up until she started growing vegetables organically in her early twenties. Allergic to bees and subject to “insect-esque nightmares” as a child, she had no idea when she set out to paint all this country’s endangered and extinct species that she’d be illustrating what’s come to be known as the “insect apocalypse” – rather than a few birds, lizards or dolphins, as she writes in her preface.
Inside, the body of the text is aligned to allow sidenotes rather than footnotes, adding to its readability. Four sections – Knowing insects; Insects and us; Insects in crisis; and For the love of insects – are elegantly divided by sombre gunmetal, with sage green leaves as background to self-contained stories or fact boxes (biological taxonomy, fossils of Foulden Maar, the first museum insect), making for easier location. And there’s a whopping 40 pages of footnotes, bibliography, glossary, index and other supportive references.
Duval begins by introducing Alice Through The Looking Glass, whose experience of insects is “limited to a handful of names … and a general feeling of unease”. She meets the Gnat, who rejoices in insects as Duval does. Their exchange, which says a lot about our relationship with insects over the centuries, is a great way into a huge topic.
In keeping with her view that healing our natural world must also involve healing the wounds of colonisation, Duval asserts in her first chapter, “Te aitanga pepeke: Insects in te ao Māori”, that as a Pākehā New Zealander, stories from te ao Māori are not hers to tell – although she does manage to cover a lot with help from mana whenua.
It’s a treat to see here some of the delectable colour plates, now in Te Papa’s collection, from George Vernon Hudson – “one of the unpaid scientists of his time”, as his grandson entomologist George Gibbs calls him in An Exquisite Legacy.
Young botanists will love the lichen moth camouflaging itself on a Covid QR code.
Duval wanted to create a body of work that would overwhelm people and act as a call to arms for conservation. And she succeeds, leaving the reader with some memorable throwaway lines along the way – hooray for “the sanctity of an unmown lawn”.
“A bug lover is never bored.”
Six-Legged Ghosts: The Insects of Aotearoa by Lily Duval (Canterbury University Press, $55) is out now.
