A PLACE ON THE MAP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 657, 8 February 1952, Page 5

A PLACE ON THE MAP

FEW weeks ago the new Oxford Atlas was the subject of a leading article in "The Listener." Among the criticisms made of the atlas was the failure to give New Zealand a place to itself. Evidence that the habit of linking New Zealand to Australia is not universal among postwar cartographers has now been supplied by a new settler from the Netherlands who called on "The Listener" with an atlas published in Amsterdam in 1950, The "Winkler Prins Atlas" is a large volume, interesting for a number of reasons; but the feature of most interest to."The Listener" was the full page devoted to New Zealand, Admittedly, the map is a little smaller in scale than the Oxford version, which was fitted into a double-page spread given mainly to Australian States; but it stands on its own, and there is even-room for insets of the Cook Islands, the Kermadecs,* and the Chatham Islands. Moreover, the West Coast . sounds in the South Island arenamed. It must be recorded, a" little sorrowtully, that Havelock which is out of position on the Oxford map, has disappeared completely in the Dutch atlas. But there is no mention of "Australasia," Opposite the map of New Zealand is a page of information, and at the foot of it is a quotation in French: "La Nouvelle-Zélande:. + c'est la Grande-Bretagne transpor- 4 tée aux Antipodes, avec le puritanise et l’observance du Dimanche" (Pierre Rémond, 1950). Can this mean that we have been both mio? & and labelled?