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National Geographic : 1974 Aug
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belongs-2,000 miles south in Antarctica. The island is warm enough for a man to go coatless, and cool enough to keep him mov ing, all year round. Moisture-laden winds sweeping over the Tasman Sea between the island and Australia, 1,200 miles away, bring showers 150 days of the year. In terms of ter ritory, the North Island comprises slightly less than half of New Zealand, whose other part is the breathtakingly beautiful but thinly populated South Island.* By almost every other measure-history, population, wealth, industry, agriculture the North Island constitutes, in the words of a man I met in an Auckland pub, "rather more than most of the whole blessed country." Some 70 percent of New Zealand's three mil lion people live in the North Island; more than two-thirds of manufacturing takes place there, and its farmers own 93 percent of the nation's dairy cattle, 77 percent of its beef cattle, and more than half its sheep. Before I was properly welcomed to the North Island (a statement I'll explain in a moment), I saw and admired many of the things man had done there: Auckland with a crescent of factories on its outskirts like grime under the fingernails of an honest mechanic; Wellington, the genteel capital, snubbing the rude winds and seas that blunder through Cook Strait; shadeless provincial towns with their Spartan frontier architecture and their bluff and busy people. And, above all, the fat pastureland, as green as Ireland and as steep as Switzerland, where 32 million sheep and nearly 8 million cattle form a national treas ury on the hoof. 'Orses Provide a Pronounced Diversion I had even begun to understand the dialect a little, remembering to call a New Zealander a Kiwi, a white man a pakeha (a Maori word meaning "colorless"), a dairy farmer a "cow cocky," and to "grizzle" instead of complain. When I asked a cheery girl behind the counter of a dairy in Thames, on the Coromandel *Peter Benchley wrote of the South Island in the Jan uary 1972 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Evening sprinkles Wellington with jewels. A spacious protected harbor invites shipping to the capital, as it drew English settlers who founded the city at mid-19th Aucl Tasman. Sea WNorth Islan North Island f New Plymout Mt.Egm 8, Wangani Palmerston N r yCoromandel Peninsula tnes S Bay of Plenty East Cape ;t rangi tou COAST G isborne Hawke Bay avelock North I South Pacific APA Oceanr astlepoint rton Elevations in feet o ioo STATUTEMILES DRAWNBY JAIMEQUINTERO COMPILEDBY DOROTHYA. NICHOLSON
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