BOOKS ABOUT OTAGO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 9

BOOKS ABOUT OTAGO

PIONEERING IN SOUTH OTAGO. By F. Waite. Otago Centennial Historical Publications. Whitcombe and Tombs. THE FACE OF OTAGO. By B. J. Garnier. Otago Centennial Historical Publications. Whitcombe and Tombs. OR Otago readers these are both fascinating books, but for different reasons _ exasperating. Mr. Waite has achieved what many would have thought impossible-made Balclutha and Clinton interesting and even romantic places in the development of the South Island. He has dug out settlement stories that would soon have been lost for ever, and he has even rescued from oblivion the thin trickle of Maori history that mingled with our own during South Otago’s first half century. Nowhere else is the light shed so revealingly on adventures like Greenfield, the bush settlements near Catlins, the discovery and development of Kaitangata, or the journeys of some of the first settlers to properties selected on the map and then found to be a hundred miles or more away through the rough bush of the coast. The account Mr. Waite quotes of a tide by a newly-married couple from Dunedin to Glenham in 1854 ought to follow the Speech from the Throne every time Parliament meets, to sober up the prophets of woe, But efter. digging up all this excellent materiel Mr. Wait® neglects, it almost seems deliberately, the elementary duty of sdicastie his lights and shades and

arranging everything in the best selling order. He gives all his pages, and nearly all his paragraphs, the same value from beginning to end, and although his end is a 15-page appendix on the place names of his territory-an invaluable) and most unusual feature-it is sandwiched between two other appendices that have value for reference only. Mr. Garnier’s book is not history but science-or something on the way to science. It is a picture of Otago in its physical aspects, told in words that few laymen will read with ease. While the maps and illustrations are beyond praise, the text is so difficult for those without the vocabulary of science that it is difficult to know for whom it was written. Mr. Garnier himself is responsible for two chapters only, the others, though edited by him, having been written by Professor Cotton (Physiography), John P. Holloway (Vegetation and Soils), K. W. Robinson (Eastern Otago), and R. W. Willett (Southland and Fiordland). To leave the impression that all these chapters are difficult would be unfair; but not one of them is as easy as it might have been, and the really beautiful aids to understanding provided by the illustrations are therefore half lost. There is no scientific reason why geography should give itself airs, and many reasons in New Zealand at present why it should try to gain popular support. 2