The Tale of Timber Town

A New Zealand goldfields town in the 1860s: a strike, a bank, a shipment of bullion, a Māori who knows where more is, and a swindle dressed as a company. Grace was a missionary's son who grew up among Māori at Lake Taupō and spoke the language from childhood; he is one of the few colonial writers whose Māori characters are neither noble nor comic. Fifty-eight plates by painters including George Catlin and Johan Christian Dahl carry the forest and river landscapes that answer the timber town of the title.