Thomas Brunner

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 5

Thomas Brunner

N an article on Page 11 of this ii issue, written to commemorate Westland’s coal ‘centennial, Dr. G. H. Scholefield asks what the incentive was to exploration in New Zealand. In the case of Thomas Brunner the answer is clear: he was sent out officially to find land. The New Zealand Company had blundered in choosing Nelson for its second settlement, and Brunner was asked to look for further living space. That made him an explorer to begin with. What kept him .exploring in the desperate conditions of his later journeys it is not so easy to say, but it was certainly not the hope of personal gain. The only reward offered to him in 1843 if he discovered "the immense plain (of Maori legend) in the interior, boundless to, the eye, where there were birds larger than geese which killed dogs," was the honour of having the plain named after him. Whatever was promised, if anything was, before his most famous journey, glory seems to have been his only reward when he discovered coal. And glory came slowly to our early explorers. Tough though they had to be in body and in mind-some of Brunner’s. experiences, if we had imagination, make us shudder yet-they did not, like the explorers of early Australia, become historical sensations by vanishing into space. On his most remarkable journey, the one that the. West Coast is celebrating this week, Brunner was certainly, away from his base for 560 days, and given up for lost; but as a rule our explorers were back in a month or two whether they had succeeded or failed, and if they did not come back somebody knew what had happened to them. Nor was it their own generation which failed to see’ them in their true proportions. They have received less than their due right up to the presefit time. They were big and brave and tough beyond all present-day standards, and nearly all of them were disinterested and of unshakable integrity. That certainty was the case with Brunner, who, if his name had not been given to a lake and a coal-field, would already have been forgotten.