MORE FROM OTAGO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 13

MORE FROM OTAGO

DOWN THE YEARS IN THE MANIOTOTO.

By

Janet C.

Cowan

Otago Centennial Pub-

lications.

IN SEARCH OF CENTRAL OTAGO. By G. H. Sumpter. Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. T is greatly to the credit of the people of Otago that they are still finding the money and the enthusiasm to produce books about themselves. Miss Cowan’s is the fifth volume issued by. the Otago Centennial Historical Committee, and at least two more are on the way. The important fact too is that they can all be accepted as accurate (except for minor slips) and even authoritative compilations for ordinary readers. Centennials are always rushed, to some extent, and these books have had to be prepared more hastily than would have been the case if each had been an independent study by an author working in his own time to gratify a personal desire for historical discovery. In that sense they are hasty work, but it has been directed haste, guided by experts and checked if not much changed by higher authority. Miss Cowan’s story of the Maniototo is in fact a little like a university thesis. She has taken her topics one by oneexplorers, run-holders, miners, local, politicians-and shown skill as well as diligence in following them through the existing records. A good deal of her material has come from early and now defunct newspapers, a revealing fact when we think how few the permarient inhabitants always were, how fevered and fleeting the life of the others was, and what a problem distribution must have been. Mr. Sumpter’s book is not history, but meditation on the move. It is a journalistic ramble in the manner of H. V. Morton and his school, discursive and chatty, and kept on the safe side of triviality by the author’s nose for news and the rich variety of his field. His chief remit as a writer is that he usually knows when to stop. Without that trick, which all journalists have to learn, he would never have made the grand circle from Palmerston to Lawrence through Naseby, Arrowtown, and the Dunstan. Both books are well printed, strongly if not attractively bound, and admirably illustrated.