ICARUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 529, 12 August 1949, Page 15

ICARUS

Now on ithe shining back breaking water while the lucid bird in his high tree sings, and the ploughman opens the hillside, it is of no matter that a boy should fall no planet, human entering the water. ND ships in furrows and fields in their waves neither a bird nor a boy attend, and the proper grief of his father who watches a while may be heard till the song, the sorrow, are lost on the waves.

Kendrick

Smithyman

BOOKS (continued from previous page) his rule. The second world war created fresh interest in the group, for, with Campbell Island, they were occupied by New Zealand units as a defensive measure, and since then a. permanent station has been maintained at Campbell Island in the interests of science. ' It is fitting therefore that there should be a popular history of the Autklands. This one was written before the war as a degree thesis by the Rev. Fergus Blair McLaren, of Otago University. McLaren was a young man of exceptional ability and character, He preferred to serve as a combatant in ‘the war and was killed in Greece. A eet of him was published six years ago. This thesis of a hundred pages cover$ competently the history of the Auckland Islaads from their discovery by one of the captains of the Enderby firm in 1806, until the thirties of this century. The Enderbys were very important, people in shipping. At the end of the 18th Century they had pioneered whaling in the South Pacific and taken the lead in breaking down the monopoly of the East India Company. In the forties of last century the Enderbys promoted a colony in the Auckland Islands to rescue the British whaling industry from its parlous state. Two factors wrecked the venture. The whaling proved very disappointing, and the soil and climate of the Aucklands made cultivation impossible. The settlement was completely abandoned in 1852, and in 1863 the islands came under New Zealand’s jurisdiction. Despite the opinion of a visiting Governor in the nineties that the group was "well fitted for occupation," this failure and the melancholy record of subsequent sheep-farming show clearly there is no future for settlement, unless the world becomes so overcrowded that it snatches at any place for a living. But the islands have a strategic importance and are rich in scientific interest, and New Zealand is, well able to keep an eye on them. While they are left to nature’s care, it is satisfactory to have this handy history of the various dramas, some of them tragic in the extreme, in which intruding and unwel- ;

come man has been involved.

A.

M.