GOLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 344, 25 January 1946, Page 17

GOLD

FORBIDDEN GOLD. By Will Lawson. Os-wald-Sealy (N.Z.) Ltd., Auckland. (Reviewed by Tom L. Mills) T is. strangely stirring to read in a rapidly-moving narrative that is not all pure fiction intimate descriptions of places with which we were‘ so familiar in our younger days, when it was a delight to hike round the beach from Island Bay, and clamber over the hills down Happy Valley on to Brooklyn and so downwards into Wellington again by its back door. It is like a lost memory found again to come across a phrase like "the calm blue waters of Ohau Bay, sheltering behind Cape Terawhiti;" on another occasion to look down on the grey backs of the sea that "seemed tiny tipples on the tide that ran before the wind through the 11-miles wide strait;" yet again, as the lovers gazed from the ridge: "The strait lay level as a mirror. The Sydney steamer, making for Wellington, was passing three miles out, the tripping sound of her heavy engines coming clearly to their ears." (How Will Lawson loves the sea and all that trade on the deep waters). But he makes the search for gold realistic, and almost makes us believe that there is still a rich golden lode for the digging over the hills that run back to Terawhiti. When, towards the end of the tale the

super-villain secretly brings his stolen treasure under horse-power along the ranges into the city via Tinakori road, where he always halted at the Shepherd’s Arms hotel for his wonted (and wanted) handle of beer, I miss nothing but the name of Old Man Gillespie, who travelled some in his years and gathered so many antiques and curios by the way that his house was a museum. Another memory awakened by | Will Lawson’s book is the notable feat performed by Big Bill Polson (now Mr. W. H. Polson, M.P. for Stratford) in riding over that rough country and getting the story of the wreck in what was then one of the most inaccessible spots on the -Island.