Tutira, the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station

Forest and Bird, Issue 293, 1 August 1999, Page 48

Tutira, the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station

by Herbert Guthrie-Smith, 464pp, Godwit, Auckland 1999, RRP$39.95. Probably New Zealand’s most unread ‘classic’ Tutira is rediscovered here by an American academic and published simultaneously with the University of Washington Press. Guthrie-Smith farmed around Lake Tutira in the Gisborne back country late in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, making all those mistakes with farming techniques which have

turned this region into the fragile place it is today. He loved nature, however, and kept detailed note of what was done to make a farm, and the effects this had on the land. Tutira lies in the tradition of the country diary, the meticulous recording of wildlife and nature through the seasons and the years: for comparison, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne comes to mind. Like White, Guthrie-Smith looks at the form of the land and its changing condition; he describes the history, wildlife and plants, and notes their inter-relationship with his farming adventures. Unlike Selborne, the New Zealand story is less a lasting record of a vanished arcadia: it is more a documentation of change and degeneration, as overstocking, weeds and pests and natural disasters reshaped the land. By the standards of his time Guthrie-Smith was a conservationist, and his record of the changing natural history of a sheep farm is still valuable.