Silver Owl Press
This web page contains details of only one of David McGill's books. For more detailed information visit his web site: www.davidmcgill.co.nz
Contact him by clicking on DAVID MCGILL if you want to buy his books or learn more about them, and his other New Zealand social histories, including No 1 NZ best sellers A Dictionary of Kiwi Slang and The Other New Zealanders, and Ghost Towns of New Zealand, Landmarks, Wellington: A Capital Century, and I Almost Tackled Kel Tremain. Or contact Silver Owl Press, 24 Aperahama Street, Paekakariki 5034, phone/fax 04 292 8226. They can be posted to you within minutes of your order, p+p included in price.
The G'Day Country Redux
by David McGill
In February 1985 David McGill set off to travel New Zealand rail in guards’ vans, with guards as companionable dispensers of local knowledge. The Minister of Transport Richard Prebble launched the book at Wellington Railway Station, with traditional servings of block cake, ham sandwiches and thick NZR cups of tea. Soon after his government dispensed with the services of the goods train guards.
A generation later McGill introduces the leisurely journey by comparing the then Silver Fern trip from Wellington to Auckland with the present-day Overlander. On the latter he enjoys the company of former Railways worker Michael O’Leary, poet and fellow inhabitant of the born-again heritage rail settlement of Paekakariki.
This extensively revised edition is lavishly illustrated with over 100 photographs old and new of our rail system, and proposes profitable tourist and local passenger train revival.
An original Michael O’Leary railway poem introduces each chapter, and his appendix revives dozens of forgotten Maori railway station names in waiata for obsolete rail journeys.
‘Splashes of Dickensian magic.’ Otago Daily Times
Available from publisher: NZ$34-95, plus $5p&p. 256 pages.