Caught Mapping
Listed in category: New Zealand → New Zealand History Books
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$49.99
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paperback
302 pages
ISBN: 9781877270864
Walking the length and breadth of New Zealand with no maps (they were creating them), in dense bush and extreme weather, sheltered only by heavy canvas (no synthetics then!), the surveyors did more than any others to shape the future of New Zealand.
Historian Janet Holm reveals how they ventured into unknown country to find routes for roads and railways, sites for towns, ports, farms and mines. They created new landscapes, civilised the land, naming towns and streets to make them seem familiar, to equate them with places that colonists had left behind. But first they had to survive fearsome rivers, impenetrable forests, and native resistance. More than this, we glimpse them as husbands and fathers, balancing the public demands of surveying within their private lives.
Surveyors such as Jollie, Wylde, Sealy, Bain, Rochfort, Browning, Harper, Hewlings, and Brodrick may not have seen themselves as heroes (few reached the pages of Boys' Own Adventures), yet their stories continue to inspire today's outdoor adventurers and armchair explorers