FOR EXPATRIATE WELLINGTONIANS

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 10

FOR EXPATRIATE WELLINGTONIANS

Wellington Prospect, edited by N. L. McLeod and B. H. Farland. Illustrated with drawings by Rodger Harrison. Hicks Smith and Sons, Ltd. 215 pp. Bibliography. Hesitate not another minute over a present for your expatriate Wellington friend; send “Wellington Prospect" and he will be delighted. Whether he sojourns now in the wilds of Earls Court or Patagonia (or even no further away than Christchurch), he will dip into this book eagerly. He will linger longingly over the map decorating the end papers the harbour comes alive in this drawing that is immediately more intimate than a survey map; the hills are everywhere, improbably exaggerated to any but an Old Wellingtonian. After the map, the expatriate will sentimentalise over the index with its list of contributors. It seems all the old names are there: Beaglehole on Cook; Pat Lawlor on K.M.; Professor Brooks; Alex Veysey; Shallcross; Stewart Maclennan on art and Stuart Perry on Culture; Peter Harcourt covers Theatre, Councillor Jeffries the Motorway. The notes on the contributors will next engage your friend’s memories and conjectures. “So he got that job” . . . “is that what he’s doing now” . . . “looks as if old has retired at last” . . . “he went back home after all.” New names are accounted for. Now to flick through the pages looking at the illustrations. Rodger Harrison’s drawings are mostly of “the old days,” but this is entirely appropriate in a book that will so obviously be most enjoyed in a mood of nostalgia. Pictorial evidence of the current rash of high rise building on The Terrace would not be as pleasing to the Old Wellingtonian in Exile as “the coffee bars of the 19505,” or “Welling-

ton and New Zealand's last tram— May 2, 1964.” Lambton Quay as he knew it is there, and the wharves, but he will look for a picture of the “unit” and be disappointed. No picture. But no editor would dare leave out the cable car there it is with an Asian student and an American sailor right in the front. When at last the recipient of "Wellington Prospect” begins to read, he will be reassured that all is well in the home city. Thirty-nine short articles on standard topics, each seemingly written by a member of the Establishment, so that no unpleasant controversy is aired certainly no domestic dirty linen is washed here. Given six pages to cover the history of the Foothills Motorway no writer could do more than touch on the arguments, and Councillor Jeffries (the

writer in this case) is honest in stating that he has voted consistently for the project. Duncan Campbell writing on “The Airport” wonders what Wellingtonians will find to talk about if ever the issue is satisfactorily resolved. The editors, themselves Wellingtonians, well know what their fellow citizens want to read, especially when time and distance have dimmed memories of the Wellington weather, high housing costs, the gardening impossibility, the Civil Service and Head Office suffocation, the sardine experience of Willis Street at lunch time. There is no originality in the book, except the idea itself: something more than the run of pictorial New Zealand eulogies, something less than a critical appraisal of the past and present capital.