The Inevitable Explorer

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 381, 11 October 1946, Page 11

The Inevitable Explorer

] RATHER doubted the propriety of Miss Rewa Glenn’s inclusion of Samuel Butler in her series, More New Zealand Explorers. For, as an explorer, Butler has little claim to honourable mention, It is rather like including Katherine Mansfield among New Zealand musicians, purely because as a girl in New Zealand she played the piano. But most young girls of Katherine’s day learned to play the piano, and similarly most rumholders of Butler’s day learned to explore. If you had to travel from Christchurch to found a station on the Upper Rangitata a little exploring was a necessary evil; but, to switch quotations in mid-stream, Butler was never tempted to drink deep. of the Mackenzian spring. Exploring was, in his own words, "delightful to look back on and forward to." Yet Miss Glenn’s sketch added many unforgettable details to my knowledge of Butler the Man. I turn with added interest to his Erewhon through knowing the discomforts of the

flash attendant upon its germination; I thumb through the Notebooks hopeful of finding a reference to that dreary occasion when he returned from getting stores to find his camp awash, and he and his companions were forced to spend the night perched on boulders, endeavouring to keep their feet dry. (I wonder whether on this occasion Butler remembered his own advice, "When fatigued, I find it rests me to write yery slowly with attention to the formation of each letter. I am often able to go on when I could not otherwise do so.")