Pioneers and their origins

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 10

Pioneers and their origins

Lion of Scotland. By Neil Robinson. Hodder and Stoughton. 168 pp. N.Z. price $2.25. The Advance Guard. Series 111. Edited by G. J. Griffiths. Otago Daily Times. 295 pp. N.Z. price $5.85. In any country as close to its pioneer origins as New Zealand, there is an inevitable curiosity about the men and women who contributed to those origins. Such curiosity in itself provides only a crude basis for the writing of history, but the “Otago Daily Times” historical biography competition has shown that amateur interest in ancestral identity may, properly co-ordinated, result in a valuable research venture into local history. Some of the pitfalls of historical biography are illustrated in the new edition of Mr Robinson’s book about Norman McLeod, ostensibly a more interesting figure than any of Otago’s '“advance guard.” McLeod was the subject of “The Rocking Cave,” a play by James McNeish, which was very successfully produced for the fifth anniversary of the Mercury Theatre in Auckland in 1973. The popularity of the play leaves no doubt about the fascination of McLeod, the puritanical tyrant who took his own community of followers from Scotland to Nova Scotia, and from there to Waipu, in the 1850 s.

It is obvious on every page that Mr Robinson shared this fascination when he did his research for the first edition of "Lion of Scotland, in 1952. In fact, for numerous passages McLeod and his followers are relegated to a secondary position while the author indulges in anecdotes about his research experiences, his own connections with the family, or historical matters of quite peripheral concern. Much of the text should have been omitted completely or reduced to footnotes (of which there are none). As a result book *® incoherent, stylistically inconsistent, and in no literary sense the tribute to its subject that it is obviously intended to be. As with the previous two collections, the contributors to the final volume of “The Advance Guard” are mostly descendants of the subjects of their essays. Most of them lack Mr Robinson’s experience as an author, but — possibly because of the competition regulations — they all show a much better sense of perspective. Certainly, there is no absence of anecdote in this book either, but since the sources are predominantly documentary there is seldom any sense of direct intrusion by the author. The approach in each of the nine essays is simple and chronological.