OUR ISLANDS AND OUR PEOPLE

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34119, 3 April 1976, Page 10

OUR ISLANDS AND OUR PEOPLE

New Zealand Atlas. Edited by lan Wards. Government Printing Office. 292 pp. N.Z. price $33. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley)

If many hands have laboured on the “New Zealand Atlas”, they have laboured purposefully, harmoniously and well to produce a worthy successor to A. H. McLintock’s 1960 “Descriptive Atlas” New knowledge and new developments have nudged the McLintock atlas into early obsolescence. The new atlas will have dated too by 1990, but it will, one suspects, retain much of its initial impact for a very long time. The impact is the result of the judicious use of new technologies and techniques, the ready co-operation of scholars, scientists. artists and craftsmen. the lavish use of photographs and a firm editorial policy. Together they have produced an authoritative, colourful and beautifully-illustrated atlas which thoroughly meets the objectives of the i n t e r-departmental committee responsible for its production: to explain New Zealand, its history, its shape and substance, its people and its economy in a series of articles, maps and photographs. Indeed, this atlas goes further. The 77 pages of photographs, many of them in full colour, do rather more than illustrate the almost endless variety of landforms in New Zealand or illuminate the descriptions of the cartographers. They give it a pictorial splendour more suited to books destined for the coffee table. They will, no doubt, greatly extend the appeal of the atlas, though they have added to the cost. Dollar for dollar, the McLifitock atlas was a better bargain as an atlas. The new atlas provides more — and it costs more. But it is not photographs that make an atlas. It stands or falls by the quality of its maps; and these maps are splendid. As Mr Wards says in his introduction, a modern atlas is a cartographic compendium on one hand and a flowering of the printer’s skill on the other. Lands and Survey Department cartographers are responsible for the maps and with few exceptions their work is superb.

Most of the maps are used to complement, enhance and illuminate the 30 informative and authoritative articles about New Zealand by geographers, geologists, historians, biologists, foresters and others. They are clear, expository and often seemingly simple maps, beatifully reproduced by the Government Printer, who all too seldom has the opportunity to demonstrate the skills and expertise of a hard-worked department. Inexplicably, there is considerable variation in the printing of the texts.

The classic presentation of land relief has been discarded for a detailed oblique shading, illuminating the landscape as if viewed by an astronaut several hundred miles above the earth as the sun lies low in the sky. The effect is memorable. The landform maps show to advantage the great dissection of New Zealand and the complexity and diversity of the landscape; and the climatic maps vividly demonstrate the surprising variations in climate that occur within a few miles — for instance the marked difference between the Canterbury Plains and Banks Peninsula. The charts, too, are vivid. They show at a glance the weather one might experience in any part of the country at any time of the year, including the highest recorded temperature — that overpowering 42deg. in Christchurch three years ago — and the wide fluctuations in Canturbury temperatures. Possibly the best maps are those illustrating land use. The contrast between forest cover in 1840 and today indicates how seriously native bush has been depleted, and how exotic forests have spread; hopefully the growth of the latter will help preserve the former. The atlas shows how aerial photography and satellite imagery aid the collection of land resource data. But the most striking satellite photograph is one of the alpine fault, running along the west of the Main Divide between Jackson Head and Greymouth. It could not be better illustrated. The geological maps, too, are full of interest. When the 1960 atlas was

published, continental drift was not a serious contender for explaining how New Zealand and its flora and fauna evolved. Now the theory is widely accepted; and the new maps and articles indicate how the land that was to become New Zealand split off the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland and drifted, often under the sea, until volcanic action and upthrusting produced the land on which we now live. In its wanderings it could scarcely have retained much of its original life and its present flora and fauna grew from a very fragmentary beginning by a sort of evolutionary Parkinson’s Law, by which a limited original stock diversifies to fill in a variety of vacant niches. The atlas is not without fault. The map of the Christchurch urban area, for instance, is not entirely accurate. The area between Fendalton and Bryndwr is shown as Fendalton North, a suburb unknown even to our übiquitous land agents, who delight in such euphemisms. Kaiapoi is classified as a large town when it-should, more correctly, be shown as a borough; and with all due respect to Belfast, should it be rated as a large town along with Lower Hutt or Porirua? City ratepayers, too, might well ask why New Zealand’s best sports stadium is not shown when those in other centres are. These are not mere parochial quibbles; doubts about an area one knows well cast doubts about the accuracy of the maps of areas one knows only sketchily. But perhaps these may be regarded as minor faults to set against a major achievement.