Book on N.Z.-Europe link offers guide for tourists

Press, 12 June 1989, Page 16

Book on N.Z.-Europe link offers guide for tourists

By

TONY VERDON

in London

New Zealanders visiting Europe can now arm themselves with a great amount of information on sites of special interest, thanks to the efforts of London-based journalist, Martin O'Connor.

From the birthplaces of Abel Tasman and Captain James Cook to the origins of Hereford cattle and Romney Marsh sheep, O’Connor has researched and written about them in his book, “The New Zealand European Connection.”

The former Wellington journalist, aged 37, believes New Zealanders should have easier access to background information when they tour Europe.

His book is crammed with detail about places and personalities with strong New Zealand connections.

In spite of the long journey New Zealanders face to reach such European destinations, thousands visit places such as Gallipoli in Turkey and Messines in Belgium each year.

O’Connor’s book aims to make such visits even more worth while and meaningful for New Zealanders.

■ Apart from sites of historical interest, O’Connor

covers places of sporting and literary significancce to New Zealand, such as Cardiff Arms Park, Lords and Wimbledon, and Katherine Mansfield’s Menton, in the south of France.

Although crammed with historical facts, O'Connor lightens his book by writing about personalities and their time. The book is the result of months of travel throughout Europe and hours spent tracking down details of New Zealand connections with towns and villages. While some are obvious and already welldocumented (such as Captain Cook’s birthplace, Whitby, on the North Yorkshire coast, most of the sites are more obscure and often bereft of any explanatory guidance for overseas tourists. In some cases the historical connections with New Zealand were difficult to track down and develop. Most chapters feature

readily accessible places in Britain.

Others feature places in The Netherlands (Lutjegast, the home town of Abel Tasman); West Germany (Bonn, the Rhineland home of Sir Julius von Haast, and Berlin, the site of Jack Lovelock’s 1936 1500-metre triumph): Turkey (Gallipoli and the Anzacs), Belgium (Messines); France (Le Quesnoy, where Major Barrowclough and members of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade took the town from the Germans near the end of World War I, and Katherine Mansfield’s Menton). In Britain the birthplace of Samuel Marsden is included, along with the exploits of Anthony Wilding on the Centre Court at Wimbledon. A favourite haunt of the painter, Frances Hodgkins, Corfe Castle, in Dorset, is also featured, as well as Kew Gardens, the botanic wonderland of Captain Cook’s botanist, Sir Joseph Banks.

Another chapter covers Ernest Rutherford’s work at the Cavendish Physics Laboratory, just out of Cambridge, where the father of the atomic age first turned his attention to the atom, and to which he later returned as a Nobel Prize winner. O'Connor works on the foreign desk at “The Times" newspaper in London. He researched and wrote most of the book during his days off.

He was born in Dunedin and educated in Wellington, where he spent his early years in journalism.

He later worked on the “Greymouth Evening Star” and the "Wellington Sports Post," before going to the Parliamentary press gallery for the “Evening Post." O'Connor spent a year travelling and doing casual work in Britain and Europe in 1976 and 1977 and after this trip he began to consider writing a book about New Zealand’s European connections.