TRAVEL DIARIES OF A NATURALIST

Forest and Bird, Volume 15, Issue 2, 1 May 1984, Page 44

TRAVEL DIARIES OF A NATURALIST

DAVID COLLINGWOOD

Edited by Miranda Weston-Smith This is a beautiful book. How fortunate that Peter Scott has made his diaries available in this age of colour. I think of other famous diaries published, all tending to be boring, flat accounts lacking a visual quality and oozing egotism. Here is Sir Peter Scott on his travels — Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Africa, the Galapagos Islands, Antarctica and the Falkland Islands. His artistic sketches of species along his naturalistic way, flow in the margins and share whole pages with colour photos of places visited. The New Zealand naturalists, Graham Turbott, Bob Falla and Gordon Williams pop out of the ‘New Zealand 1956’ diary as his companions on his close inspection of our natural history. There is a photo of him in front of his mother’s marble statue of his father — the great explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, — which stands in Christchurch. Then there is the calm account of the historic visit he made to his father’s hut at Cape

Evans on Ross Island in Antarctica. The world he describes and his experiences, told in his easy vernacular, sweeps us along. Can there be anyone who has been so immersed in Natural History and yet has travelled in the field of his choice with both the eye of the naturalist and the artist? This diary is a work of sheer excellence and a wonderful record of a man’s life and times. Yet it has a figure 1 on the cover and one reads that it is drawn from only fifteen of the fifty notebooks covering his travels since 1956. So amazingly, there is a possibility of more to come in later volumes. 287 pages on art gloss paper, liberally illustrated and bound, this book was sent to me for review by Millwood Gallery, 291b Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington, from whence it may be obtained. A book by the first person ever to the knighted for services to conservation and the environment (1973) is one not to be overlooked. It is a work of brilliance and quality. Excellent!

William Collins Sons & Co., London $39.95