The Southern Maori.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20523, 16 April 1932, Page 14

The Southern Maori.

Since there can never be too many people, at work on our early history, every new book that appears is to bo received thankfully if it is the result of independent research. Nor is the present, for all its anxieties, a bad time for the appearance of such a book as the Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt's Pioneering Bays of Southern Maoriland (Epworth Press). Mr Pratt is not a research worker in the strictest sense, but he is a great deal more than an impressionist. He began to be interested in the Maori race when he was still a boy, and when he left New Zealand as a youth to live in Tasmania, his interest instead of fading was intensified by contact with men who had helped to make ''New Zealand history over 90 years ago. In particular he became interested in the story of'the Rev. James Watkin, whose diary he edited for The Press last year, and whose work at Waikouaiti in the early 'forties is only now beginning to be appreciated at its full value. Whatever Ve may think of Mr Watkin's intellectual powers, of his attitude to the representatives of other churches, especially Bishop Selwyn and Mr Hadfleld, it is a sufficient indication of his strength of character that his influence remains nearly a hundred years later. Mr Pratt is of course much more than Watkin's biographer, but it ; is Watkin more than anyone else who ! directs his pen and gives colour to his narrative. It would perhaps be unkind to say that Mr Pratt aims a little deliberately at colour, and that ho might have written a more useful book still if he had been content to be a little more drab. But any book about those early days is better than no book at all, and it is impossible to doubt Mr Pratt's special knowledge of the period immediately preceding the formal settlement of Otago in 1848. He has apparently read all the jourrials, diaries, letters, and missionary reports to which we at present have access, and if his reproduction of this material is, popular rathei than scholarly, his guiding principle has clearly been to get first at the facts.