New Zealand Speaking

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 56, 19 July 1940, Page 5

New Zealand Speaking

N normal circumstances, the death of Guthrie-Smith would have been felt to be a public calamity; as it in fact was. For although he had reached his eightieth year, he was so much a part of New Zealand that no one ever remembered his age. He was not so much a man as a voice-a voice expressing the sorrows and joys of the earth that we in New Zealand know. He was also in the deepest sense a man of science, if science is knowledge, and not merely information. All his life, he told us in the first edition of Tutira, it had been his habit to "note small things"; but "note" was a very inadequate word. He noted things as Darwinand Fabre noted them-looked at them, examined them, brooded over them; looked below, above, and around them; got them into focus; established their connexion with other things; found what they meant, and still would mean to himself and to generations who would come after him; and not till he really knew what he was saying did he put his knowledge into print. That is what Mr. Heenan means when he says on another page in this issue that Tutira is a scientific treatise, a textbook, a succession of learned papers, a departmental report, the findings of a Royal Commission, a geological, botanical, ornithological, ethnological, and sociological survey, and "miraculously something more." That is why he so boldly calls it not merely New Zealand’s greatest book, but one of the great books of the world. That may be a reckless claim, but if it is, he is a bolder man still who will make it of any other book written in New Zealand. And the book was the man as the man was the book. The book is New Zealand; not all of it, perhaps, and not any part of it for ever; almost as fast as they were written, some pages were history-history that can never be re-enacted. For although it is possible to describe a dead thing, and feel that the description will stand, a living thing goes on, Guthrie-Smith followed that living thing. His field was one small patch of land on which homo sapiens was no more and no less interesting than the weasel or the rabbit, so that Tutira is literally New Zealand speaking.