"THE NEW ZEALANDERS."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20028, 18 August 1928, Page 7 (Supplement)

"THE NEW ZEALANDERS."

A DISAPPOINTING EFFORT.

Tho Outward Bound Library is designed by the publishing house of Dent, so the editor, Mr. Ashley Gibson, tells his readers, to supply to " travellers and emigrants in esse or in posse and their friends at home" something that tho best and brightest of travel-books, the most crammed and earnest of guide-books, can never quite succeed in conveying. With this end in view he has chosen for each book " an author of established reputation, who has lately made his or her

homo in the country depicted; and the same requirement has been made 1 of each artist. „ The books, thereforo, may be taken, not as transient impressions, but as the fruit of an intimate and up-to-dato knowledge." With quickened interest, therefore, we turn to " Tile New Zealanders" —which shares with " The Australian Bush" the honour of first place in the series—and find that the task has been entrusted to Mr. Hector Bolitho. Frankly, the result is disappointing. Mr. Bolitho tells us that he was once a shipping reporter on an Auckland newspaper, and that ho broke the sub-oditor's heart by the way he " sent out boats before they were ready, and kept them in dock when fliey vvero miles and miles out on the ocean." On the whole, he appears to think ho was better employed in cultivating his senso of colour by gazing upon " golden oranges with blue-green mildew spots thrown overboard from the Suva boats." The same royal disdain of dull fact is discernible throughout tho book. In Rotorua, for instance, " there is a lake on which pennies and stones will float." The truth about Hamurana peers dimly through this astonishing distortion. A Few of the Gems, Mr. Bolitho tells us that he has written his book half from memory and half from information supplied him by tho New Zealand Government. From tho first half presumably come some of tho gems of tho book. In one chapter Mr. Bolitho has a man " hooking mullet with a hand-line;" in another, people on a strawberry farm near Auckland read books on the verandah " in the long-drawn-out twilight;" one "summer day" he saw " palls of white clematis"—a surprisingly inept description of its gay and bridal beauty—and further on, " maize with lancer-plumes." There is a time to sow and a time to reap, but all seasons are one with our author.

The whole arrangement of the book indeed supplies us with an explanation of Mr. Bolitho's self-confessed failure as a shipping reporter. He could hardly succeed in any position that required a sense of the orderly marshalling of correlated facts. Thus, a chapter in " The New Zealander: His character, his culture, and his architecture," concludes with " Unloading: A Waterfront Sketch." "New Zealand Women and Sheep Dipping," form another curious combination. Statistics and Sunny Gardens. Sometimes, in the midst of an amorphous jelly of the author's own composition are embedded, with unintentionally comic effect, chunks of Government statistics. As, for instance: "Maternal mortality in New Zealand is 4.65 per thousand, and the infantile mortality the lowest in the world. . . Nature provides its own nurse in the sunny gardens and warm air that is fdled with the song of the birds, the drone of bees, and all the strange, soft voices of summer." Equally " strange and soft" are such statements as: "In the country she (the New Zealand woman), has a spacious house, and if it is lit by lamps she trims them herself. She is radiant because of the lightness of her potato cakes and the brilliance of her copper kettle." Then, leaving the " ranch"—amazing word for a native-born writer to use of a New Zealand sheep-run—he comes to town. In 1920 we learn, Auckland people " still thought the waltz rather intimate," while Christcliurch was "just learning not to blush at the polka." New Zealand women demand " plain, homely, serviceable clothes, and good, solid food Like all people who lead calm, happy lives. New Zealanders pursue culture and uplift with gauche eagerness. Ido not decry second-rate art and writing . . . Great thinkers and artists have too often sneered at suburban taste." - This gem of humour is none the less precious for being unconscious. A Gilbertian Flavour. On one point the author may be reassured. He says that without the " encouragement and generosity" of the New Zealand Government the book would be a very tame performance. His modesty deceives him. On the contrary, his own contributions are far from tame. Li,ke the air played on the bagpipes by W. S. Gilbert's Scotsman, " they are wild, they are fitful, as wild as the breeze." Seriously, it is a matter for deep regret that the editor of the Outward Bound Library should have made such an unfortunate choico of author, for the volume on New Zealand, and we can only wish him better luck with the rest of the series. The illustrations by the New -Zealand artist, Mr. Harry Bountree, arc characteristic, but liavo not reproduced well. " The New Zealanders." by Hector Bolitho. Illustrated by Harry Rountree, (Dent).