A Visit to New Zealand (by J.B. Priestley)

• 1974 edition. 156 pages
• Publisher. Heinemann
• Hardcover. D/j. Large. Ilustrations. Index
• Condition. Good. A little foxing on end papers

Priestley visited New Zealand in 1973 with his wife, the archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, to prevent a decline into a "fat-lazy-fireside old codger." He described his book as "about a visit to the country," not a book about New Zealand, full of detail of people he met, things he did, sketches, conversations, opinions and impressions.

In his final chapter he writes preceptively about the role of New Zealand as an outpost of European civilization where there are no glaring inequalities of wealth, no desperate social or political problems, and where there is room for the present population and plenty to spare.

Priestley wrote:

We left for Queenstown about the middle of the morning. The road alongside Lake Pukaki was still rough going but didn't seem as bad now as it had done the evening before. The truth is of course that all of us exist in two different places at one and the same time. There is the place outside us, the one on the map, the solidly objective one; there is the place inside us, the one within the mind, the psychological place. (The essential self, once it understands the situation it is in, has some power of choice as to where it should live in this interior country of the mind and if necessary can move from a bad psychological place to a good one.)

Many a man rich enough to own four beautiful houses cannot enjoy them because, in the interior country he carries around, he has chosen to exist in a slum or a miasmic swamp. We all have bad places in the mind, and the trick - not easy, I admit - is not to identify ourselves with them but to move out of them. I realise that this is As-if reasoning, the sort of thing that most philosophers pounce upon to denounce; but if we can remember to act upon it, then it will work in a rough-and-ready fashion and release us from much misery, which is something most philosophers cannot do.

So while the road round Lake Pukaki was just the same as it had been the evening before, we found it endurable because we were now living in a much better psychological place.