with an essay and notes by Professor RCJ Stone
RRP: $45.00 - limited slipcase edition $60.00
Released: 15 June 2012 - Random House
“Ah! I never can forget that morning when first I gazed on Waitemata’s waters. The lovely expanse of water with its gorgeous colouring, stretched away to the base of Rangitoto, whose twin peaks, cutting clearly into
the deep blue sky, sloped in graceful outline to the shore a thousand feet below . . . As we rowed over her calm waters the sound of our oars was all the broke the stillness. No, there was something more – the voices of four canny Scotsmen and one shrewd Yankee (the sum and substance of the first invading civilisation), loud in the praise of the glorious landscape which lay before them.”
– The 1898 Edition of Poenamo by Sir John Logan Campbell
June 2012 marked the centenary of the death of the esteemed
philanthropist Sir John Logan Campbell, Father of Auckland, by the
republication of his long-out-date memoir, Poenamo: Romance and
Reality of Antipodean Life in the Infancy of a New Colony, originally
published in 1881 by Williams & Norgate of London. A later version
of Poenamo, the reissue in 1898 by Wilson & Horton of Auckland,
possessed the illustrated form that Campbell always longed his
memoir to have. The Trustees of the Sir John Logan Campbell
Residuary Estate therefore thought that a facsimile of this reissue
was the most timely way for the Trust and the people of Auckland to
honour Campbell’s memory.
Poenamo is a classic New Zealand adventure story – arguably the
classic – chronicling the birth of a virgin colony and what Campbell,
one of our earliest European pioneers encountered on arrival: bush,
beauty and ‘Tongata Maori’ as Campbell affectionately regarded the
Māori people before they became, in his opinion, sullied by white
ways, and embroiled in racial war. Campbell’s ‘voice’ throughout is
playful and evocative; his meditations on life in a new frontier are
lively, charming and engaging.