Yes, tried that thank you, it worked like advertised but I need this going through bind. Yes it's nice if there is local redundancy but scaling this over many servers presents a management headeache if all in local files. I'll look at reversing it like you said but later and for now I'll keep it as hosts=bind,local till I work everything out with the DNS config. Thanks to your help and a bit more digging looks like I'm fine with how things are now except for one thing I posted here:

Multiple DNS forwarders and syntax question.

And the question here about forwarder logging that I'm seeing very little of:

How could I enable logging of bind 9 forwarders messages?

Thanks,
DH