The Printer Tells The Tale

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 90, 14 March 1941, Page 4

The Printer Tells The Tale

HE appearance of The Changing Land, the last of the Pictorial Surveys issued by the Department of Internal Affairs, marks the end of one of the most interesting ventures of its kind ever undertaken by a British Government. If the experiment had failed technically it would still have been remarkable as an idea. It would remain as an heroic declaration of a Government’s faith in the power and permanence of the word. For the Government, and not any individual, must be thanked for the decision to make our story our centennial monument. On the other hand, individuals must get credit for the plan-Dr. C. E. Beeby for recalling something like it in America, Mr. J. W. Heenan for an immediate realisation of the possibilities, and an amazingly rapid infection of other people with his own enthusiasm. Without that enthusiasm the project would never have been carried through. It would of course be foolish to pretend that the result is beyond criticism. Here and there, but rarely indeed, mistakes in fact have crept in. Once or twice only-an amazing achievement in a series running to thirty numbers and about two thousand picturesan illustration has been changed at the last moment without a corresponding change in the legend accompanying it. In one case-it will be a useful winter game to run this joke down — editor, illustrations editor, printer, reader and supervisor have been egregiously hoaxed. But it is permissible, and in fact possible, to draw attention to facts like these only because the general degree of accuracy, by all comparable New Zealand standards, is almost indecently high. But it is not merely in these senses that the printer has told his tale. The first number of the series was something that has never been told in New Zealand before-the story of New Zealand before it was New Zealand; our land, in a literal sense, in the making. The final number contains the last words of Guthrie-Smith, who died almost before his manuscript was dry, and ended with the moving words printed in a separate panel on this page. In that sense the whole series is the "pilgrim’s: path" that three generations of New Zealanders have now trodden.