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The Four Corners of New Zealand - Treading in A.H. Reed's Footsteps, A.H. Reed
New Holland
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Alfred Hamish Reed was a remarkable man. Born in England, he arrived in New Zealand (Maoriland, he frequently calls it) in 1887. He worked as a gum digger in the Far North, then as a typewriter salesman and finally a publisher in Dunedin.

But most of all he's known for walking. Reed walked to all four corners of New Zealand and kept walking until he was 99, climbed Ruapehu at age 80 and trekked across some of our most rugged country in Fiordland at 76.

Most of these adventures were documented in a series of books that New Holland has republished as one title, with a foreword by Geoff Chapple, Reed's latter-day walking counterpart and protagonist for Te Araroa – the Long Path – national north/south walkway.

The text proceeds at the pace of an old man walking, but is thoughtful and fascinating. Or perhaps that pace was just the pace of life in New Zealand during the 1930s, 40s and 50s when it was written.

Take, for example, the contents of  the Reed rucksack: One spare suit wrapped in a flourbag, a cut-throat razor, strop and shaving soap, boot polish and brush, pyjamas, fountain pen and bottle of ink, slippers, book, pocket hymns and the New Testament (which he is fond of quoting from).

With this on his back, Reed strode from Cape Reinga to the Bluff, to East Cape and West Cape, assiduously noting what he saw and whom he talked to. Its closest literary companion is Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning, but Reed is pragmatism to Lee's poetry.

Most of all it's a wonderful insight into the way we were all those decades ago, when automobiles were still wondrous and a man could boil his billy when and where he felt like it.