a 'vision' looking westward from a point on the coastal hills over the Taieri Plain apparently to the plateau country south of the Strath Taieri proper. He later said his art had been an attempt to communicate this vision. He described it as seeing a landscape 'standing far from the sun of Egypt in the Otago cold.' He called it a 'landscape of splendour and order and peace', which he conceived as a pre-Biblical place. In 1945 his younger and also celebrated Otago contemporary, the poet James K. Baxter, wrote 'Upon the upland road/Ride easy, stranger:/Surrender to the sky/Your heart of anger.' The lines certainly capture the effect on some people of the experience of crossing the plateau, approaching the Strath Taieri by road from the south. That landscape became greener in the 1960s and 1970s as native tussock was converted to European pasture, a process protested in the works of the artist Marilynn Webb. But the postwar prosperity of farming ended with the 1970s. In October 1977 the Taieri County was merged with its northern neighbour Waikouaiti County, thus Strath Taieri became part of the new The Silverpeaks County surrounding Dunedin and its boroughs in an inland arc. Rural recession intensified and in 1989 The Silverpeaks County was merged into a new, much enlarged, City of Dunedin. In 1990 the Central Otago Railway was closed and the line from Clyde back to Middlemarch soon uplifted. Nevertheless, a tourist train service was being operated from Dunedin to Strath Taieri by way of the Taieri Gorge on the remaining part of the line. Since 1991 this has been run by the Taieri Gorge Railway Limited owned by the Dunedin City Council. In 1993 the course of the track further inland was opened as the Otago Central Rail Trail for hikers and cyclists, by the Department of Conservation. Both have proved successful in attracting visitors. As a farming district, strategically located but isolated by geographical barriers, Strath Taieri's development turned on changes in farming and transport until the late 20th century. While the closure of the through railway saw the end of that means of moving heavy goods between the coast and the interior the completion of the tar sealing of state highway 87, in 1996, was the effective provision of another. With the growth of tourism, much of it motor-vehicle-based, this, with the rail trail and tourist rail services has added