Landmarks

Reader's Digest, 1981. Good secondhand condition.

Kenneth B. Cumberland tells how New Zealanders remade their landscapes.
Almost forty-five years ago I came to New Zealand from the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire and from University College, London, to take up a lectureship at Canterbury University College. New Zealand in 1938 seemed not only remote and isolated, but also raw, empty, colonial and still in so many ways, Victorian. Newspapers, trams and shrieking locomotives all seemed terribly old-fashioned. Christchurch ladies still 'called' and left their cards. In town and out, roads were largely unsealed and there was unused wasteland everywhere. Life and domestic facilities in the back blocks of the North Island were primitive indeed.