Provincial Perspectives - Essays in Honour of W.J. Gardner

University of Canterbury 1980 edition, good condition with dustwrapper.
Jim Gardner, for nearly a quarter of a century, has energetically affirmed the importance of the study of local and regional New Zealand history. In this symposium his approach of exploring and interpreting our past bears further fruit in the work of some of his students and colleagues. The six essays in this collection are diverse but always penetrating. They are linked by their sensitivity to the varied qualities of the individual communities which constitute the everyday reality of New Zealand life. Topics include the quarrelsome Aucklanders of the 1840s; the struggling Canterbury settlement and the efforts of a `bankruptcy lawyer;' Henry Sewell, to salvage the church-plans of the Canterbury Pilgrims; the rescue from obscurity of women of the Canterbury gentry replete with airs and graces; how Samuel Butler hardened the realism of his narrative out of his exploration of the Canterbury high country; the tensions generated by economic distress in the Grey Valley coaltown of Blackball in the 1920s and early 1930s; and following goldminers around the Pacific Basin and in doing so, underlining the international nature of the communities they created...