Down South : In Search of the Great Southern Land

Bruce Ansley

Bruce Ansley has spent much of his life in the South Island. He was raised in New Brighton, Christchurch, and has lived in Dunedin, Christchurch, the Marlborough Sounds and Golden Bay. He has grown up with the south's people, its cities, towns, rivers, mountains, bush and plains. He has picked tobacco in Motueka, been a commercial fisherman in Fiordland and a deer farmer on Banks Peninsula. He has worked in radio, television and newspapers in the south too. For almost a quarter of a century he was the Christchurch-based writer for the New Zealand Listener magazine, until he became a full-time author. As a writer, tramper and traveller, and being professionally nosey, he has poked into many corners of the island, although nowhere near all of them: he finds the south and its people endlessly fascinating. He now lives on Waiheke Island to be close to his family, but his heart remains in the south. Down South is his eleventh book.