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New Zealand Now

Preface

page vii

Preface

This Survey is not historical. It is not scientific or political. It is personal — some impressions of his country by one New Zealander whose memory goes back fifty years.

It is of course historical to some extent. To illustrate present conditions it has sometimes been necessary to recall past conditions; but that has been incidental and not systematic. By accident there may also be a contribution to knowledge or a new thought for a politician. But that has not been the purpose or the plan. History and science deal with facts. This book contains little but impressions. With the exception of Chapter 2, which comes straight from the Year-Book, it has been written without reference to any other book and without an exchange of opinions with living authorities. If it had seemed to me desirable, or more desirable than anything else, to make no statement that time may amend and to offer no opinions but those page viiigenerally held, I should of course have consulted authorities and been careful to reach no conclusions. But authority, in a field in which most of the facts are still to be collected, seemed less important than easy reading and stimulated thinking. So I have been cheaply provocative and deliberately rash. It is after all a survey and not a map—a flying survey of a once familiar scene that no one any longer knows.

It has seemed more natural, and generally more honest, to write in the first person; though I have slipped sometimes into the second person, and often fallen back on a kind of editorial 'we'. I should have been ashamed if I had felt it possible to write of New Zealand impersonally.

If a picture emerges at all, the credit belongs to E. H. McCormick, editor of the series, who, though he was no longer available for consultation when I began to write, suggested a line of approach to me before he enlisted for military service overseas. I am also indebted to Sydney Brookes, of the staff of the New Zealand Listener, for much of the second chapter. For inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions I alone am responsible.

Oliver Duff

Wellington
13 May 1941