New Zealand - The Maori continuity; communal living in a gum digging camp, Lake Ohia, between Mangonui and Kaitaia. (c. 1910) #602169 Northland New Zealand - Introduction: - I was a country boy, growing up in Totara North, with the Whangaroa Harbour, or, more specifically, mangroves, at my front doorstep, the disused bush tramway leading into the hills behind, and the sea, everywhere the sea. - I went to primary school and began high school in the North, having one year to the smell of beer and stale cheese in the Masonic Lodge at Kaeo, which was the building that housed the foundation pupils of Kaeo District High School. Later I came back North, to spend five strong years working at Kaitaia College and living at Ahipara, on the edge of Ninety-Mile Beach. I have a son there still, and many friends and relatives, from Mangonui to Mahurangi Heads. - The North is as formative for me as it was for the country as a whole, and this book is the journey that, this year, I cannot take, a leisurely drift through the quiet back roads and waterways of the old North, where the past never really died, it simply faded not quite away. - Plundered, despoiled, worked over many times by those who came like flights of hungry locusts, the North has an immense resilience. Northland has arrived at a precarious balance between human needs and natural forces, it is now a mild, equable region, with the sea, cleansing, restoring, a backdrop to almost every view. - These photos, this text, is aimed at the spirit as well as the simple actuality of life in the North, from Maori times onward. - In collecting the photographs and paintings, in writing the text, in designing and laying it out, working with Mary Foreman (another Northlander now living in Coromandel), "The North' has been a pilgrimage back to a land I never really left. - Barry Mitcalfe Author: MITCALFE, BARRY ISBN : 0908632010 Click the link provided at the top to purchase the book through the MAD on New Zealand Shop - Supporting New Zealand Authors and Artists