Before Christchurch, there was Wellington

Rodney Grapes is an earth scientist and university teacher who is really interested in earthquakes. The Visitation will become the standard text on the 1848 quakes that laid waste to Wellington and introduced the phenomenon to so many British settlers.

Grapes gives a detailed account of Wellington's experience, drawn from what seems to have been a lifetime of research of letters, diaries and early reports. In addition to soil liquefaction, with which many are now all too familiar, there are vivid descriptions of strange noises and atmospheric accompaniments to the tremors.

The reader is then led to the Manawatu and southern Hawkes Bay and across to the "Middle Island" as was, with effects there given in equal detail. A chapter describes the Awatere Fault, the source of the shakes, and an epilogue hints at more to come.

The book's timing is poignant; hurried rewrites and asterisked footnotes were added to the introduction as the recent shocks hit Christchurch.

Yet through all of Canterbury's suffering, there never was declared a "day of public fast, prayer and humiliation", as Lieutenant Governor John Eyre ordered for October 20, 1848.

We rational 21st-century folk have no need for all that - we know the science - but I doubt that at the epicentre one finds much of the terror dulled by modern understanding.

 - Peter Dowden is a Dunedin writer.