New Zealand - Inheritors of a Dream - Saturday morning shopping brings the farmer and his post-war Model T into Queen Street, Warkworth, a tree-shaded country town 41 miles north of Auckland. #603071 Inheritors of a Dream - A Pictorial History of New Zealand - Romantic's escape, poor man's heaven, these New Zealand islands of the South Pacific have figured large in the discontented imagination. New Zealand, it seems, has been fated to hold promise for those weary of the old world. The fabulous southern continent itself, age-old mythical land of plenty, appeared for a time to take shape on Tasman's sketchy outline of these shores. And from Marion Dufresne's "Mascarin”, sailing in search of the earthly paradise in 1772, the first man from the old world sought permanent refuge here — a runaway Negro slave. (That he killed one of the two women slaves who escaped with him — to give more freeboard to his boat — and that the other escaped back to her master, is no worse a disappointment than anyone in pursuit of a dream should expect). - A fresh start, free of entrenched distinctions and inherited privilege, was all that the main wave of settlers asked. Thomas Arnold for one, the Rugby headmaster's son, came to New Zealand in the forties believing that here "the true fraternity of the future might be securely built.” When Thatcher Grove, a diminutive workman had swiftly to tell a New Zealand Company representative in 1841, "I didn't come 16,000 miles from England to be humbugged like this and I'll be damned if I'll be sat upon by you," it suggests that not everything went well in this respect. But the old magic was still working in 1863 when Samuel Butler wrote of yet unexplored forests on the West Coast containing "sleeping princesses and gold in blocks and all sorts of good things.” - On all counts, the dream was dead in 1889 when workless men left the country in shoals and the fantasy of a disappointed former prime minister, Julius Vogel, turned to projecting a utopia elsewhere — and forward in time to, in the title of his book, "Anno Domini 2,000"; the book was hardly out when New Zealand was beckoning rebel and reformer with a Liberal experiment in “the social laboratory of the world"... - Hardship and hope, reality and dream, the threads have been woven through our brief history. This gallery of bullock driver and bishop, of politician and pensioner, of runner and writer, of soldier and Samoan, offers a casual record of nation building. Maybe in searching their faces we can find traces of our inheritance. - Dick Scott - Author: Dick Scott Click the link provided at the top to purchase the book through the MAD on New Zealand Shop - Supporting New Zealand Authors and Artists