THE FAR-OFF HILLS
STATION AMUSEMENTS IN NEW ZEALAND, by Lady Barker; 12/6. MUSTERER ON MOLESWORTH, by Bruce Stronach, 10/6. Both Whitcombe and Tombs. Y distinguished colleague "Sundowner" has, with his usual discrimination, got ahead of me in praising Bruce Stronach’s little book. It deserves praise. It recreates the dust and drought of hinterland Marlborough graphically and urgently, giving us the events of a mustering season on the toughest of back country with humour and human feeling. It is hard to realise that this is an epoch that has gone. It is over 20 years since Bruce Stronach was on Molesworth, nearly 15 since he wrote the articles now collected in this permanent form. (The photographs add something to the book, but very queer things have happened to the screen of the over-ambitious dust-jacket.) Cattle ranching on Molesworth and St. Helen’s is almost as radical a change as. the cutting up of the Canterbury Plains, where tussock once reigned in the world of Lady Barker, whose pleasantly garrulous second volume on her New Zealand life (published in 1873) is’ now given a modern second edition. Behind the amusements, the picnic rides in summer, the skating or tobogganing in winter, is always the demanding nature of the life, its work, its isolation, its comradeship (almost overturning social barriers), its precarious refinements. Both these books have their own authenticity and success.
David
Hall
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540430.2.23.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 13
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230THE FAR-OFF HILLS New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 13
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