Uprising - Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand
Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia, 2001. Creasing to spine, otherwise good secondhand copy.
This book is about walking as a form of knowing. Armed with Ngai Tahu's ancient oral maps and modern satellite atlas, I crossed the Southern Alps more than a dozen times, trying to understand how our forebears saw the land. What did it mean to define your identity by sacred mountains, or actually see them as ancestors, turned to stone? Raised in the shadow of New Zealand's Southern Alps, Nic Low grew up on stories of mountain exploration from his family's European side. Years later, a vision of the alps in a bank of storm clouds sparked his return home, and a decade-long obsession with comprehending how his Maori ancestors knew that same terrain.