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Kaipara; or, experiences of a settler in North New Zealand cover

Kaipara; or, experiences of a settler in North New Zealand

Chapter 2: PREFACE.
By P. W. Barlow
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About This Book

The narrator recounts arriving in North New Zealand with family and the practical trials of establishing a household, travel, and adapting to colonial conditions. Episodes alternate between humorous and perilous anecdotes—voyage hardships, housing scrapes, hunts, auctions, and a bushranger encounter—and descriptive sketches of the local environment and economy, including forests, fisheries, bird shooting, and kauri gum digging. Social and civic life receives attention through accounts of dances, a Maori wedding, education, labouring settlers, and county government meetings. The volume blends personal observation, natural description, and practical commentary to portray everyday settler experience.

PREFACE.

The fact that nothing has hitherto been published concerning life in this part of New Zealand from the pen of a bona-fide settler has induced me to write the following pages.

Before commencing the undertaking, I had been at considerable pains to satisfy myself of the truth of this fact, and naturally so, for it is the life-buoy I cling to as I take this, my first dip, in the sea of literature; it is my one excuse for troubling the public, and in it consists my hope that they will consent to be troubled.

I do not pretend to literary talent, and my highest ambition is to lay the true narrative of my experiences in New Zealand before the public in a readable form. If successful in doing this, I shall be content, and trust that my readers will be also.

Many books have been written describing colonial life in this and other parts, in some of which the writers have identified themselves with the characters in their stories; but these have invariably been the works of visitors to the colony, not settlers in it.

There is to my mind as much difference between the two experiences as there is between the experience of a volunteer and that of a soldier of the line, and it is on this account that I approach the public with some small degree of confidence, and venture to lay before my readers the experiences of a settler in North New Zealand.

THE NARRATOR.

Matakohe, Kaipara,

Province of Auckland, New Zealand.