This is a special upgraded edition of the portrait of New Zealand, first published in 1981. Pure nostalgia, it portrays a country and its people before consumerism and the fairies took over. Now widely identified by J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy of little people who inhabit Middle Earth, the real New Zealand was not so long ago a country of independent, resourceful folk who were very real, if sometimes eccentric, but always down to earth, rather than below it.