WELLINGTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 38, 15 March 1940, Page 15

WELLINGTON

THE CITY OF THE STRAIT: A CENTENNIAL HISTORY. By Alana Mulgan. A. H. and A. W. : Reed, 15/-. This is a big book to handle and hold, and an expensive book to buy; but it is an easy book to read. It is big largely because the publishers have selected thick paper and used what looks like 12-pt. type. It is expensive because it is strongly bound, has a heavy dustcover, six appendices, an index and a map, and no fewer than 37 illustrations, It is easy to read because the author is a journalist. Readers out of Wellington will perhaps think that the author has outrun his commission; especially if they live in Auckland. Wellington readers may complain that he has merged their province in the Dominion. But these will be foolish complaints. Wellington was for. a time a part of Auckland historically, as, since that time, the whole Dominion has been overshadowed by Wellington officially. The two stories overlap, and to have told one without tying it up with the other would have put both out of focus. It is in fact impossible to tell the story of Wellington independently — even of Wellington province--since that story was always conditioned by the political changes that were taking place in other parts of the Dominion, and almost grew out of them. There is, however, a special sense in which Wellington’s story is, and must forever remain, its own. In the first chapter, which is also his best, Mr. Mulgan considers how far human history is the history of the skin of the globe that we ‘call our earth. " What may be loosely called chance," he says, "but what was really the play of natural forces, determined where men should live, what they should eat and weave and snare, where trade should flow and battles be fought, what winds should blow upon man’s home by day and what frosts nip his crops by night." If he had chosen to write for a few and not for the whole multitude of Wellingtonians, provincial as well as urban, he could have developed that argument to almost sensational lengths. He does carry it forward a little way-far enough to explain his title and to show us the earth heaving and the seas gone mad in °48 and ’55. But the rest is politics and economics, The town grows, the province is developed, the pioneers vanish, the twentieth century is here. But the pioneers are not lost. In a series of appendices, for which the author thanks Mr. Bagnall of the Turnbull Library, with Miss Scholefield and Mr. Zohrab of the General Assembly Library, not only is the story summarised chronologically, but all the shirs that arrived during the first twelve months are put on record with their passengers. So the price is not so high after all,