(and reading)

Those writing (and reading) New Zealanders

As a by-product of the New Zealand educational system there has never been a dearth in that country of people who “wanted to write”.

And there, as in Australia, in the last 10 years there has been a boom in publication of their work. New Zealanders are published by New Zealand publishers and by others, but perhaps the most amazing thing of all is the numbers in which some of the books are published—and bought.

THE whole of New Zealand has roughly the same population of Sydney. But a NZ book that appeals to Kiwis can sell 50,000 —a fact sufficient to turn authors on the other side of the Tasman to nail-biting and green-eyed envy.

The books that do best are seemingly those of simple country life and two published recently are cases in point. One is Fiordland Muster, by Rupert Sharpe; and the other, Over the River, by Mona Anderson.

Fiordland Muster, in its way, is a small gem, something of an instant classic I should think. Its author died shortly after the manuscript was complete but he had been a country man all his life although known to thousands of New Zealanders from his articles in the Weekly News.

These were compounded of ex perience, wisdom, caustic wit and sometimes of opinionated stub bornness.

This book, the last of his writing, covered a time when he went muster ing in the far south-west of NZ, a region now called Fiordland, a jumble of broken mountains, treacherous rivers, rain, cold and thick bush. It is as remote, untouched and difficult to live with as anything in the primitive Southern Highlands of New Guinea.

Sharpe went with a character named David Gunn who ran a herd of Hereford cattle in this wilderness.

Sharpe’s descriptions of the country, the job, the Gunn way of life—all told with dead-pan humour—are delightful. Illustrated: $2.80.

Mona Anderson’s Over the River, although it also describes life on a station in the NZ high country, is scarcely a female edition of Rupert Sharpe. Basically it is the story, chatty in style, of how she came to

write two other books about life at Mt. Algidus, across the Wilberforce River. The books were A River Rules and The Good Logs of Algidus —the first of which has sold 50,000 copies and the second 20,000. Probably nothing else need be said about Mona Anderson’s writing. 13.75.

Several other recent NZ books are; New Zealand Gemstones, by Lyn and Ray Cooper. This is not only a guide for gem and rock hunters in the Dominion but describes how to use them in costume jewellery and other decorative work and as such will be of interest to collectors in other countries as well. With four colour plates. $3.75.

New Zealand’s South Island in Colour and New Zealand’s North Island in Colour are, as the titles indicate glossy coffee-table books of NZ beauty spots. Photography in both cases is by Kenneth and Jean Bigwood; text for South Island is by Jim Henderson and for North Island by L. J. Wild. Both were printed in Japan and sell at $4 each.

The Year of the Hornbill, by Hugh Wilson. The author was a NZ Univer sity graduate who, in 1963, went to Sarawak for a year under the British Volunteer Service Overseas scheme.

His reactions to what he saw were pretty predictable—white men guzzl ing in clubs, missionaries still with a Victorian outlook—but he had the NZ young man’s urge to climb mountains and he and some of his pupils from the Tanjong Lohang Secondary School finally conquered Mt. Kinab ilu, 13,455 ft. $3.75.—JT. (FIORDLAND MUSTER, published by Hodder & Stoughton; the others by A. H. & A. W. Reed).