WRONG IMPRESSIONS.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17786, 10 August 1929, Page 14 (Supplement)

WRONG IMPRESSIONS.

NEW ZEALAND AUTHOR CRITICISED “IRRITATING INACCURACIES.” Every now and then (says a Wanganui paper) there appears in our newspapers exposures of the ignorance of the people in the Old Country and in America regarding New Zealand, and fun is made of their crude conceptions of our country. But what can bo said for a New Zealander who writes erroneously about his own land?

Miss Isabel M. Cluett, in a criticism of Hector Bolitho’s “The New Zealanders,” which she wrote for the

June number of the Booksellers' Journal, points out the following blunders appearing in the book. “He speaks,” she says, “of our long and lingering twilights, of oysters growing on mango trees, of rubber trees growing wild; of our gaunt, silent, farmwomen, clad in their coarse galatea dresses; of their occupations of making ginger wine and spreading out plums to dry on sheets of corrugated iron, of people sitting down to a six o’clock supper on Sunday nights, and a host of other small but significant inaccuracies which to any reader with a knowledge of New Zealand are irritating and distasteful, giving an altogether false impression of the country.-