LAND and PEOPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 12

LAND and PEOPLE

Re a NEN a BT OR EE THE EARLY CANTERBURY RUNS, by L. G. D. Acland; Whitcombe and Tombs; 42/-.

(Reviewed by

R. M.

Burdon

T is most unlikely that Leo Acland will ever be superseded as the principal authority on that section of history which he has chosen as his own special province. His sources of information were mainly people-the great majority of whom must be long since dead. As early as 1894, when a cadet at Mesopotamia station, he began taking notes gathered from shepherds and run-hold-ers. I do not know exactly when he first decided to write a book, but it was not until more than 30 years later (after he had fought through two wars and lost an arm by frashly following a wounded tiger through an Indian jungle) that a series of articles on the Canterbury runs began to appear in The Press, Christchurch. The articles, with some additions, were published in book form by Whitcombe and, Tombs in 1930, and a second much smaller collection was | published 10 years later. A revised collected edition came out in 1946. The present volume, a vast improvement in binding and typography on its earliest predecessor of 1930, contains revisions made by the author before his death four years ago, and also a glossary of slang words used on Canterbury sheep stations. In the light of recent researches made by himself, C. R. Straubel has revised the introductory chapter dealing with Canterbury’s land laws afid regulations. Leo Acland had a horror of anything that savoured of pretentiousness. Having undertaken to write a detailed record of the runs of Canterbury, he was scrupulously careful to avoid digressions of any kind. "I have recorded many trivial details," he wrote in the introduction to his 1930 edition. "I put them in partly because they may come in useful to somebody some day, and partly to illustrate the time; otherwise I have not tried to describe life in the old days." Acland’s style is concise to the point of austerity, and the scraps of general information his conscience does permit him to include are stated in the baldest possible terms-for example: "Returning early in 1865, Michael Studholme brought out the first hares to South Canterbury, John Molloy, a fellow passenger, looking after them. Most of them died in the hot. weather, but enough survived to stock the country. For some time they were kept in an enclosure at Waimate." Written with such economy of phrase, this book contains an enormous mass of

I Qe ORO SS Ree EE PE. eR ERENT eRe ES A 6 SRN TREE re eS fact fitted into the smallest. possible space. This is no cause for complaint, but I cannot help feeling sorry that the "trivial details’. are so few and brief, and that the writer was so ready to accept the limits imposed by his own modesty,