New Zealand as seen through the eyes of the past two centuries' great writers

Extracts from a new travel anthology:

Bathing at the Pink Terraces (1872)

Anthony Trollope

Trollope had heard a lot about the "hot-water territory" before coming to New Zealand, but was a comparatively early visitor to Rotorua and its region. There was no road to the Lake District in 1872, and some of the route was on horseback along the beach from Tauranga to Maketu.

After a complicated and tiring journey, Trollope thought there was "nothing pretty" at Ohinemutu, but he found that the Pink and White Terraces lived up to their reputation.

Trollope wrote:

The bather undresses on a piece of dry rock a few yards distant, and is in his bath in half a minute without the chance of hurting his feet, - for it is one of the properties of the stone flooring which has here been formed that it does not hurt. In the bath, when you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch, - you press yourself against it and it is smooth, - you lie about upon it and, though it is firm, it gives to you.

You plunge against the sides, driving the water over with your body, but you do not bruise yourself. You go from one bath to another, trying the warmth of each. The water trickles from the one above to the one below, coming from the vast boiling pool at the top, and the lower therefore are less hot than the higher.

The baths are shell-like in shape, - like vast open shells, the walls of which are concave and the lips of which ornamented in a thousand forms. Four or five may sport in one of them, each without feeling the presence of the other. I have never heard of other bathing like this in the world.

And from the pink terraces, as you lie in the water, you look down upon the lake which is close beneath you, and over upon the green broken hills which come down upon the lake. The scene here, from the pink terraces, is by far the lovelier, though the white terraces themselves are grander in their forms.

It is a spot for intense sensual enjoyment, and there comes perhaps some addition to the feeling from the roughness you have encountered in reaching it: - a delight in dallying with it, from the roughness which you must encounter in leaving it. The time probably will soon come in which there will be a sprightly hotel at Roto Mahana, with a table d'hote, and boats at so much an hour, and regular seasons for bathing.

As I lay there, I framed the programme of such a hotel in my mind, - and I did so, fixing the appropriate spot as I squatted in the water, and calculating how much it would cost and what return it would give. I was somewhat troubled by the future bathing arrangements. To enclose the various basins would spoil them altogether to the eye.

To dabble about in vestments arranged after some French fashion would spoil the bathing to the touch. And yet it must be open to men and women alike. The place lies so broad to the world's eye that I fear no arrangement as to hours, no morning for the gentlemen and evening for the ladies, would suffice. Alas, for the old Maori simplicity and perfect reliance on the royal adage! The ladies, indeed, might have the pink, and the men the white terraces; but the intervening lake would discourage social intercourse, - and there would be interlopers and intruders who might break through the "tapu" of modern propriety.

After bathing we went to the top, and walked round the hot spring from which the water descends. It has formed a lake about a quarter of a mile in circumference, the waters of which are constantly boiling, and are perfectly blue. In the centre it is said to be many feet deep. The colour is lovely but in order to see it we had to get behind the wind, so that the steam should not be blown into our faces.

As we came down we found parts of the crusted floor perfectly yellow with pure sulphur, and parts of the fretted stonework on the under curves of the rocks, where they were not exposed to the light, as perfectly green. Then there were huge masses brightly salmon-coloured, and here and there delicately-white fretwork, and the lips and sides of the baths were tinted with that delicate pink hue which we are apt to connect with soft luxury.

Eating Kiwi (1891)

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling's visit to Australia and New Zealand, described in his autobiography Something of Myself, took place after an illness that left him feeling he needed to get "clean away and re-sort" himself. His vivid terse notes on New Zealand are an accompaniment to the famous line of poetry he wrote about Auckland: "Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart." (From The Song of the Cities and often quoted by other travellers.

Kipling wrote:

Then came New Zealand by steamer (one was always taking small and rickety coast-wise craft across those big seas), and at Wellington I was met, precisely where warned to expect him, by Pelorus Jack, the big, white-marked shark, who held it his duty to escort shipping up the harbour. He enjoyed a special protection of the Legislature proclaiming him sacred, but, years later, some animal shot and wounded him and he was no more seen.

Wellington opened another world of kindly people, more homogeneous, it struck me, than the Australian, large, long-eyelashed, and extraordinarily good-looking.

Maybe I was prejudiced, because no less than ten beautiful maidens took me for a row in a big canoe by moonlight on the still waters of Wellington Harbour, and every one generally put aside everything for my behoof, instruction, amusement, and comfort. So, indeed, it has always been. For which reason I deserve no credit when my work happens to be accurate in detail.

A friend long ago taxed me with having enjoyed the "income of a Prince and the treatment of an Ambassador" and with not appreciating it. He even called me, among other things, "an ungrateful hound." But what, I ask you, could I have done except go on with my work and try to add to the pleasure of those that had found it pleasant? One cannot repay the unrepayable by grins and handshakes.

From Wellington I went north towards Auckland in a buggy with a small grey mare, and a most taciturn driver. It was bush country after rain. We crossed a rising river twenty-three times in one day, and came out on great plains where wild horses stared at us, and caught their feet in long blown manes as they stamped and snorted.

At one of our halts I was given for dinner a roast bird with a skin like pork crackling, but it had no wings nor trace of any. It was a kiwi - an apteryx. I ought to have saved its skeleton, for few men have eaten apteryx. Hereabouts my driver exploded, as sometimes solitaries will. We passed a horse's skull beside the track, at which he began to swear horribly but without passion.

He had, he said, driven and ridden past that skull for a very long time. To him it meant the lock on the chain of his bondage to circumstance, and why the hell did I come along talking about all those foreign, far places I had seen?

I had had some notion of sailing from Auckland to visit Robert Louis Stevenson at Samoa, for he had done me the honour to write me about some of my tales; and moreover I was Eminent Past Master R. L. S. Even today I would back myself to take seventy-five per cent marks in written or viva-voce examination on The Wrong Box which, as the Initiated know, is the Test Volume of that Degree. I read it first in a small hotel in Boston in '89, when the negro waiter nearly turned me out of the dining-room for spluttering over my meal.

But Auckland, soft and lovely in the sunshine, seemed the end of organised travel; for the captain of a fruit-boat, which might or might not go to Samoa at some time or other, was so devotedly drunk that I decided to turn south, and work back to India. All I carried away from the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me beer at a little hotel there.

They stayed at the back of head till 10 years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a petty officer from Simons Town telling a companion about a woman in New Zealand who "never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion."

Then - precisely as the removal of the key-log in a timber-jam starts the whole pile - those words gave me the key to the face and voice of Auckland, and a tale called "Mrs Bathurst" slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river.

The South Island, mainly populated by Scots, their sheep, and the Devil's own high winds, I tackled in another small steamer, among colder and increasing seas. We cleared it at the Last Lamp-post in the World - Invercargill - on a boisterous dark evening, when General Booth of the Salvation Army came on board.

I saw him walking backward in the dusk over the uneven wharf, his cloak blown upwards, tulip-fashion, over his grey head, while he beat a tambourine in the face of the singing, weeping, praying crowd who had come to see him off.

Magical Transport Facilities (1973)

J. B. Priestley

Priestley visited New Zealand in 1973 with his wife, the archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, to prevent a decline into a "fat-lazy-fireside old codger." He described his book as "about a visit to the country," not a book about New Zealand, full of detail of people he met, things he did, sketches, conversations, opinions and impressions.

Priestley wrote:

We left for Queenstown about the middle of the morning. The road alongside Lake Pukaki was still rough going but didn't seem as bad now as it had done the evening before. The truth is of course that all of us exist in two different places at one and the same time. There is the place outside us, the one on the map, the solidly objective one; there is the place inside us, the one within the mind, the psychological place. (The essential self, once it understands the situation it is in, has some power of choice as to where it should live in this interior country of the mind and if necessary can move from a bad psychological place to a good one.)

Many a man rich enough to own four beautiful houses cannot enjoy them because, in the interior country he carries around, he has chosen to exist in a slum or a miasmic swamp. We all have bad places in the mind, and the trick - not easy, I admit - is not to identify ourselves with them but to move out of them. I realise that this is As-if reasoning, the sort of thing that most philosophers pounce upon to denounce; but if we can remember to act upon it, then it will work in a rough-and-ready fashion and release us from much misery, which is something most philosophers cannot do.

So while the road round Lake Pukaki was just the same as it had been the evening before, we found it endurable because we were now living in a much better psychological place.

I wish I could remember, in geographical terms, where we stopped for lunch; but I can't. So I remember this tiny sketch of a hamlet with affection but am unable to give it a name. It consisted of a small tearoom, enclosed within a rose-garden, and a neighbouring general store: and that was all. If there were any houses near by, I never saw them. Just the tea-room and the store, but also some extremely pleasant friendly women apparently in charge of everything.

We ate sandwiches and scones (with jam and cream), and drank cold milk laced with whisky. This is a particularly good drink late at night, but there is nothing wrong with it about 1.20 pm on a warm day. After lunch, Jacquetta wandered next door to see what they were selling there. She was so pleased with the store and (her note) "the very nice young woman" who was looking after it, she came back to suggest that I should take a look at it, which I did.

It was a real store, containing almost everything that sensible people - as distinct from those with more money than sense - could want to support a satisfactory existence. So far, so good; but now we came to abracadabra, illusion, the magical part. The nice young woman had said to Jacquetta, "The schoolchildren should meet anyone so famous as your husband," which made no sense to her and none to me when she reported it, for there were no schoolchildren in the store, none in the tearoom, none in the road outside so far as we could see. So we dismissed this odd remark and I stayed a little longer, exploring the darker corners of the store. Then, taking my leave, I halted, dumb with amazement.

There, facing me in a compact group, were about 20 schoolchildren, magically transported from the unknown. There too was their schoolmaster, who proceeded at once - just as if he and I had already set it up between us - to introduce me and to tell the children they could ask questions. They were, I fancy, mostly between 10 and 12 years of age, and were very shy. So was I, for that matter; and was probably still gaping goggle-eyed at them. The only person who wasn't shy was the schoolmaster, who was brisk and commanding after the manner of his kind. (My father was a schoolmaster.)

When the questions finally came, they were almost the same question - What was it like to write? - or - to be a writer? - just as if repetition didn't worry them because each child felt he or she was asking a private question, the others ceasing to exist for a few moments. I found it rather hard going and so, I suspect, did everybody else except the schoolmaster, who continued to be brisk and commanding but probably unwilling now to give any of us good marks. But I never had time to explain to him that I was still lost in wonder at the inexplicable, almost necromantic presence of these children, a class conjured out of air.

There may have been a moment - though I won't swear to this - when I fancied that if I turned round I might discover that the store and the tearoom had vanished. However, Jacquetta's note is more sensible than anything I am writing here: "Somehow this little break represented the best of New Zealand." True enough; well said; but there might have been a reference, however brief, to the magical transport facilities of the local education authorities.

* Travelling to New Zealand, an Oxford Anthology edited by Lydia Wevers, Oxford University Press.

Herald Online Travel