In 1907, aged nineteen, the writer Katherine Mansfield set out on a camping trip that was for her arguably the New Zealand equivalent of the European Grand Tour in that it functioned as a rite of passage into the independence of adulthood and as a way of educating herself about her country's indigenous peoples. The route taken by the small group of friends she travelled with was through an extremely remote and hilly part of the North Island known as the Ureweras, a region inhabited by the Tuhoe people who had retreated there after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Undertaken in two horse-pulled roofed coaches, the trip also took in the Rotorua Lake district where Maori commandeered a booming tourist industry, the Huka Falls and Taupo. Throughout the voyage Mansfield kept a notebook which she filled with evocative descriptions of the landscape and of Maori but it was clearly not intended for publication, being more of a space to experiment with different writing styles and even forge a distinctive writing style of her own.

In this chapter, I examine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook, as it is commonly known, as an example of a particular form of travel writing from the early modernist period — one that is associated with the cultivation of aesthetic taste and with the preservation of high culture.