Paradise Lost ?

‘The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’

The 17th-century English poet and polemicist John Milton arrived in NZ under rather inauspicious circumstances. The Endeavour’s botanist, Joseph Banks, used pages from Paradise Lost to press plant specimens collected during Cook’s first voyage. Another edition of the epic poem came as part of Charles Darwin’s library on the Beagle in 1835.

But this activity does not account for why the Alexander Turnbull Library hold one of the world’s best collections of Milton and ‘Miltoniana’. This distinction primarily rests with Library founder Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, and his visionary commitment to establishing a Milton collection in Wellington.

‘Paradise of New Zealand has problems too, many much like ours…

Even this self-consciously egalitarian society, which was first to give women the vote in 1893, is not immune to social and economic inequality.

What’s it like in paradise these days? It’s a good question to ask in the dark days of winter, especially since I am currently in a position to give a tentative answer. Did I say that I have been in New Zealand for a month and that the summer there, often as unreliable as our own, has been terrific this January and February? We encountered only one wet day in a month.

Guardain article, read on … 

‘The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we’ll ever know’   – Paul Bowles