Reviews: New Zealand Atlas

Summary

Reviews New Zealand Atlas. Edited by Ian Wards. Government Printer, Wellington, 1976. xv, 292 pp. N.Z. price: $33. THIS is an impressive but disappointing volume. It is more than an atlas, with one-quarter of its space devoted to photographs and one-third to text. The Government Printer has printed, bound and published the volume with great care and attention to detail. The double page maps open completely flat; the photographs are striking; the maps informative and, in one case, beautiful. The first section consists of six 'sectional maps' at I : 1,000,000 scale showing elevation, settlements, roads, rivers and lakes. Although clear and legible, the yellow tones used for elevation are garish and unattractive and the blue shading for icefields and glaciers (not shown on Ruapehu) makes the core of the Southern Alps look like a chain of lakes surrounded by higher country. Each sectional map is accompanied by a brief descriptive text. Maps of the main urban centres (scale 1:125,000) are followed by thematic maps with associated texts of the whole country. These cover a conventional range of topics —- discovery, historical settlement, population, landforms (the most beautiful map in the volume), climate, geology, soils, land classification and use, fishing, mineral resources, manufacturing, transport and communications, and tourist resources. The last is a singularly uninformative and unattractive perspective diagram, better suited to a tourist pamphlet than a serious work. The main body of the atlas ends with sections on Antarctica, the Pacific Islands, fifty-two pages of photographs, gazetteers and index. The second atlas of its genre published by the Government Printer, this volume invites comparison with A Descriptive Atlas of New Zealand, published in 1959. It is a more lavish production but not greatly different in concept or content. The new atlas has more colour maps but fewer maps in total. When comparing the two atlases one is struck by the elegance and delicacy of many maps in the older volume. The new atlas uses much stronger colours which are sometimes visually clearer but often lack the logic of older colour conventions. For example, the map of 'Vegetation circa 1840' gives a visual impression of Canterbury's short tussock (aqua green) being a much heavier cover than the forests of Westland (yellow), or the tall tussock of Otago and Southland (pale pink). The new maps of towns are less detailed than those in the old atlas, having omitted many streets and replaced contours with hill shading. Why not have contours as well ? The Shell Road Map booklet using annotated airphoto mosaics of the main cities is much more informative. The texts of both atlases are authorative though some contributions in the new volume read like government annual reports — factual and uncritical state93 94 REVIEWS ments of bland government publicity which allow, as Curnow says, 'no murderers mooring in our Golden Bay". The Anglo-Maori Wars are overlooked in seven lines; the social tensions of a multiracial society are wished away with comments 011 encouraging equality of opportunity and how 'exceptionally intelligent' the Maori were. Haven't claims of differential intelligence between racial groups been thoroughly discredited? A considerable number of minor errors, omissions and puzzles can be found. Jamaica, fourteen years after independence, is shown as a colony of the United Kingdom (p. 47). Does New Zealand really import cork from Fiji (p. 181)? (Fiji's export statistics do not list it.) North America is not a country (p. 173). The important Fijian town of Ba is omitted in favour of a neighbouring village (Nailaga) and the old towns of Navua and Levuka are missing from a map which mis-spells Qamea and Qoma (p. 193). Mis-spellings (e.g. of Samamea and Sataoa) occur in the Western Samoa map (p. 193) and much less information is conveyed on this map than on its 1959 equivalent. The 'Patterns of Settlement' map implies that 45,413 'Polynesians' entered New Zealand between 1950 and 1971, but this is the number of 'Pacific Islanders' (other than Fijians) resident in New Zealand in 1971 and not the number of migrants. About 15,000 of the 45,413 were born in New Zealand and therefore are not migrants. Furthermore...