S.I. guide a two-in-one book

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33106, 22 December 1972, Page 12

S.I. guide a two-in-one book

A travel book which doubles as a practical guide and vade-mecum for the tourist and as a companion for the armchair traveller is the way the author, Errol Brathwaite, sees his latest work, “The South Island of New Zealand.”

One of the “Companion Guide” series, the book covers an extended tour of the South Island from Picton, down the east coast and up, the west coast back to Picton.

“Selection of material was the most difficult task,” Mr Brathwaite said yesterday. “There was about 18 months of travelling involved in gathering the information and impressions and writing the first draft, but the hardest part was deciding what to use.”

In all, it took four years and a half before the book was published. To achieve his aim of making the guide a readable book, Mr Brathwaite has included frequent snippets of Maori legend and historical anecdote with the accounts of the towns and localities. “To this extent it is still story-telling, and really I am a story-teller. These little sidelines also help to illustrate the significance of what a tourist or traveller is seeing,” he said. The 375-page book, together with the earlier published companion volume on the North Island—also written by Mr Brathwaite—have set several firsts—the first in the series (which until now has been restricted to Britain and Europe) to have colour photographs with the text, the first to deal with any country in the southern

hemisphere, and the first to have a photographic jacket. The nature of the New Zealand guides is also more pictorial than the rest of the series, another facet which adds to appeal to the stay-at-home reader. “I think I must have covered every road in the South Island and tramped most of Stewart Island while collecting material. More often than not a call at one place would send me off to yet another which I hadn’t really intended visiting at all,” said Mr Brathwaite. A good road map was the essential thing for such a tour and also reference to a great many parish histories, publicity brochures and local guides.

“With some of these one has to be a bit careful. The

actuality isn’t always as rosy as those involved would paint it and I didn’t want to gild the lily at all if the guide was to have real worth,” he said.

The guide will eventually need rewriting to bring them up to date, and for this reason he had withheld some material for later editions, he said. In the meantime, however, there are three projects ahead of him. The first is a novel-length fairy story for children. Such a work would, he said, help him to get back to writing fiction after the lengthy break taken writing the guides. The other two projects are a three-volume history of the Royal New Zealand Air

Force and an even more mammoth undertaking, a New Zealand family saga. This will be written as a series of novels which could eventually be published as an omnibus covering a century in the life of a Canterbury family.