Contents
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Deputy-Controller and Auditor-General. 25/3/35.
Famous l.n.e.r. locomotive becomes screen star.
In addition to its arduous duties in hauling 500-ton trains over the East Coast Route, the famous L.N.E. streamlined locomotive No. 2001 “Cock o’ the North” is finding time to “feature” in a new Butcher-Panther film now in course of production. This picture is being made under the joint direction of Mr. Oswald Mitchell and Mr. Challis Sanderson, who were responsible for the highly popular “Danny Boy” a year ago, and the film now in the making promises to capture the imagination of the public to an even higher degree than its predecessor. Its title will be that of the locomotive “Cock o’ the North,” and its story has been woven around the family life of an engine-driver and some of his work-mates, in whose destinies this famous greyhound of the steel track plays a dramatic part. Amongst the human film stars appearing in this production are Miss Marie Lohr, who will take the part of the engine-driver's wife, George Carney as the engine-driver himself, with Johnny Scholfield as his fireman. At present Mr. Carney is undergoing a strenuous course of instruction in his duties as an engine-driver, at the hands of Mr. Ben Glasgow, a retired L.N.E.R. engine-driver who for many years was responsible for working the Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh. Mr. Glasgow regards Mr. Carney as an apt pupil. Ronnie Hepworth who made a name for himself in the title role of the film “Danny Boy,” will appear as the engine-driver's son, and Frederick Peisley and the rising young actress Miss Eve Lister will have the parts of the young couple around whose infatuation for each other, so much of the plot revolves. Variety is to be added by the inclusion of parts to be played by Horace Kenney, Naughton and Gold, the crazy artists from the Palladium, and Leslie Hutchinson (Hutch.) who will figure in one of the smartest road-house sets ever shown on the screen. Mention must also be made of Mrs. Simone Rogers, the original Madameoiselle from Armentieres, who will take a prominent part in the final acts of the story.
It will thus be seen that the story of the film will cover a wide field and a popular one, and it will provide the public at the same time with some unusual views of the “Cock o’ the North” locomotive and its footplate.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The Railways Booking and Luggage Office on the wharf at Wellington—established for the convenience of inter-island and overseas passengers.
The 1935 railways statement.
Some Typical Press Comments:
The striking improvement in the situation of the railways, which is reflected in a working profit of well over a million for the past year, redounds to the credit of all concerned in their administration.— Hawke's Bay Herald.
The annual report of the Railways Board is an entirely satisfactory account of its stewardship on behalf of this great national organisation. Enterprise and foresight have characterised the Board's operations since it took over control of the system, and the past year has seen the continuation of the steady rehabilitation of the largest single organisation in the Dominion. In brief, during the year every important section of the Railway Department's business showed an increase compared with the previous year. For the first time since 1931 the freight carried exceeded 6,000,000 tons, and the freight revenue was the highest since the same year. As 64 per cent. of the total revenue is derived from freight, the significance of these increases is clear. Substantial increases were also made in the passenger traffic, in the number of journeys, total revenue, passenger train miles and revenue per mile of line. These comparisons, however, are greatly enhanced when it is remembered that owing to the variation in the Easter holiday dates the previous year included two Easter periods and the year just concluded none at all. At the present rate of progress the passenger traffic should thus show a substantial increase for the coming year.— Taranaki Herald.
The year closed with a contribution of £1,087,191 by the Department towards its interest bill, a splendid result in view of the fact that an increase in salaries and wages was made with the partial restoration of the cuts effected when economies were instituted, and the reduction of rentals from workers’ dwellings had also to be borne. This was the second successive year that the Department was able to conclude its period with the net revenue more than one million pounds, and the report justly claims that the result has been achieved by the strictest supervision and direction over the diversified interests of the system, and by its constant and unremitting efforts to render prompt and efficient railway service to the public.— Manawatu Evening Standard.
Wellington's new station officially inspected.(Rly. Publicity photos.)
On 19th September the members of the Government Railways Board made an inspection of the Tawa Flat Deviation works, and the new station building and yards at Wellington. The top (left) illustration shows the Board members and railway officers standing in front of the General Manager's rail-car which was used for the run to Tawa Flat. In the group (from left) are: Mr. G. H. Mackley (General Manager of Railways), Sir James Gunson, C.M.G., C.B.E., Mr. E. Newman, C.M.G., Mr. D. Reese, Mr. H. L. P. Smith (District Engineer), Mr. G. W. Reid, B.Com., F.P.A. (N.Z.), Mr. G. W. Wyles (Signal and Electrical Engineer), Mr. G. J. Bertinshaw (Chief Engineer), and Mr. W. Schierning, District Traffic Manager. The centre illustration shows the progress being made on the new station building.
New Zealand
Railways
Magazine
Railways
Magazine
Registered at the G.P.O., Wellington, N.Z., for transmission by post as a Newspaper.“
.”
For Better ServicePublished by the
New Zealand Government Railways Department
Vol. X. No. 7.
Wellington, New Zealand
We New Zealanders, when we travel, are a happy, hungry people. We like our snack and we like it often. A healthy climate, fresh bracing breezes and clear radiant sunshine, make for hearty appetites.
Even when staying at home and working, our “five-meal, meat-fed men” are no figment of the imagination. They are very real, solid fellows. And our women make tracks to the cupboard quite often too.
There is the surprise of visitors at the universality in hotels of the seven o'clock cup of tea and bread and butter or biscuits. The full rich breakfast. The forenoon tea and cakes. The hearty luncheon of lighter fare—cold meats or pies and salads and sweets and tea. The afternoon tea with its wide variety in cake and pastry. The real full-course dinner in the evening, and then the supper before retiring—the glass of milk and biscuit, or the complete regalement of sandwiches, frilled chicken legs and accessories and a little something to drink with it.
But when we travel, the excitement of motion and the companionship in the cars of trains seem to give still another fillip to our capacity for enjoying a few additional snacks. On the average, there is a refreshment room on the Railways of New Zealand for every 80 miles of track—and they all do well. Last year the 30 counter refreshment rooms and four dining-rooms run by the Railway Refreshment Service earned £16,022 for the Department, and the whole operation of this service showed a net profit of £2,132. There are also eleven of the smaller stations at which are located refreshment rooms that are held on lease. There is actually a total of 42 stations where refreshments are available to the traveller—and when the word “refreshment” is used in this context, it covers a multitude of possible passenger requirements. Fruits, aerated drinks of various kinds, smokers’ requisites, chocolates and other sweets, ice-cream (in season), and even headache cures—although there is not usually a headache in a trainload of carefree passengers—these are among the things which travellers may obtain at very reasonable rates at the refreshment counters. Even in sandwiches there is a range from the standard ham variety to the egg and lettuce kinds, whilst pies and sausage rolls, buttered buns, fruit cake, small cakes, and biscuits are among the range of eatables from which choice may be made.
The “snack bar” just recently opened at Paddington Station, London, appears to be modelled to some extent upon the practice here, and if it is to be fully tried out, should carry an equally wide range to meet the desires of travellers. In reference to it, “The Railway Gazette” speaks of the spacious, clean and attractive refreshment counters throughout Australia and New Zealand, and states that “the quick service of the white-robed waitresses is invariably excellent.” Some remarkable tributes to the high quality of these services in our own country have been paid by visitors to New Zealand; and the constant patronage of New Zealanders themselves proves that the system is in popular favour.
We cannot quite agree, however, with the “Gazette's” further statement that “at these stations most of the eating and drinking is done at the counters, where crowds of men, women, and children apparently endeavour to drink as much tea as possible in the usual seven minutes allowed.” Certainly people “line up” at the counters in great array, and large numbers like to have their “tea and …” on the spot; but those who have any fears as to whether they can finish in time usually stroll back to the train, taking their spoils in their hands, and proceed to enjoy the refreshments there, carrying on comfortably if they so wish, after the train is once more under way. At the next main station the crockery is collected from the train, and there is quite a business for the Refreshment Branch in balancing up supplies of crockery as between the various refreshment stations.
The happy travellers are those who can find something they want at every refreshment halt. It bucks them up for the full enjoyment of the ride between.
General Manager's Message
Travel Savings Stamps.
The Board has decided to introduce, as a trial, the issue of Travel Savings Stamps in the strong belief that there are many people with restricted incomes who are unable, under existing arrangements, to make a lengthy train journey or a visit to the more attractive scenic and tourist resorts, owing to the fact that they have, during the course of the year, possibly expended in inconsequential trifles sufficient money to provide them with the necessary fare. By means of these stamps the inconsequential trifles, might, it is thought, be well replaced by provision for a holiday.
All our principal stations will carry stocks of the travel saving stamps, and these may be purchased to any required amount. As it is desired to afford every person an opportunity to commence saving for travel, the stamps have been prepared in the comparatively low denominations of 1/-, 2/-, 2/6d, and 5/-. It is intended to provide other denominations as the demand develops.
I feel that, in affording this opportunity for laying by savings for the purpose of making a train journey at some suitable time, the Board is doing something which should appeal to the public and result in increased business for the Railways.
It is realised that much of the success of the new savings system will depend upon the manner in which the staff submit it to intending patrons, and I would request every member to make the path of the prospective purchaser of travel savings stamps, young or old, as clear and comfortable as possible. This can be done by directing the applicant correctly regarding the place of purchase, taking a courteous interest in the buyer's object in obtaining the stamps, and giving helpful advice as to the places which would be worth visiting when the time comes for converting the saved stamps into railway tickets.
The staff can help, too, by personally recommending the purchase of stamps amongst their friends and associates as a simple way of effecting savings that will ensure to the purchaser a healthful holiday by rail.
General Manager.
successful afforestation in new zealand.(Rly. Publicity photos.)
The above illustrations show typical portions of the plantations of Commercial Pine Forests, on the shores of Kaipara Harbour, North Island, New Zealand. (1) Some vigorous young trees; (2) and (3) marvels of forest regeneration; (4) plantations as seen from approach road; (5) pines routing the ti-tree; (6) an arm of Kaipara Harbour. (See article on page 12.)
)
ByO. N. Gillespie
.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The Railway approach to the Plantations of Commercial Pine Forests on Kaipara Harbour, North Island, New Zealand.
“I Don't see why men don't grow to be eight feet high in this country,” an American visitor said to me one day. He was looking at some ewes grazing in the shade of a shelter belt of trees which he had learned was only five years old. He was an engineering graduate of Princeton, born on a Southern farm, and knew something about both sheep and timber. He was mildly amazed at the size of the woolly animals, but was in a state of complete stupefaction at the miracle of growth wrought by trees in our country. He said they shot up like the fabled Dragon's Teeth, and asked “What were we doing about it?”
And so I came to write this article. I have described many wonderful features in New Zealand in this last few months, but in the potentialities of afforestation as an industry, and as a “life-saver” in wealth production, there are, I find, stories so exciting, tales of the future so glowing, panoramas of such golden opulence, that Hans Andersen, at his best, created nothing so brilliantly unbelievable. Yet they are all unimpeachable truth. It is on record that, at an experts’ conference, a New Zealand forestry man's plain statement of the rate of tree growth in this country was received in shocked silence—the perfect quiet of disbelief and disappointment at a good man going wrong. One Scotch authority was particularly vehement. Only after the New Zealander had gone outside, and brought to the table the cross section of a trunk with the annual rings that proved his statement, was the latter convinced. Then, handsomely, in true Gaelic manner, he apologised.
This is the stubborn, inescapable fact for friends and sceptics. A pine tree in our country grows in ten years to the size it would reach in any part of the Northern Hemisphere in twenty-five to forty years, and mostly the latter. Our illustration shows a good example.
Everyone has heard of our vast afforestation schemes. Everyone has heard cheap criticism of them of the same type that laughed at the freezing processes of meat and the use of chemical manures. The size of the ventures was so impressive, the claims made for them seemed, at first sight, to be so extravagant, that our steady-minded, highly critical and conservative folk were inclined to sniff. I like to think that all the wonders of our land, the richness of our soil, and the heady magic of our sunny skies have never altered, in one iota, the essential saneness of our national outlook. If ever a country in the world is “safe” in the best sense, it is New Zealand, inhabited as one great London writer once said when here, “by a race more British than the British.”
Being one of them, I accepted no reports, but in company with my friend of the camera, went out to see for myself.
There are, of course, many great afforestation companies in the Dominion, well founded and stable. We, however, went to one within easy striking distance and that, according to an authority, “while being truly typical has many good points of its own.” This man also said a thing which I was to remember later. “They are all past the experimental stage,” he remarked drily. “All the possible mistakes were made and put right years ago.”
In the early morning we were on our way from the Bayswater wharf, heading North. The road was perfect, the day was fine, and we were soon through that area that lies across the water from the city of Auckland. We
Locality Map, showing the situation of the Komiti and Nukuroa Plantations.
(
Rly. Publicity photo.)
The winding road through the Plantations.
The asphalt road wound in and out, past dreamy little Warkworth, through the Dome Valley, and we reached the rolling down country that lies between the Kaipara Harbour and the Pacific Ocean. Then we sighted, in the distance, long undulations smothered with dull green. From where we alighted the tree masses appeared so thick as to look like enormous ribbed blankets thrown at random from ridge top to river bank. Then we passed Topuni Station, where the railway crosses one of those deep winding tidal creeks which intersect the whole of this country.
Here I stopped the party for a while to watch a half dozen pukeko dancing a measure in a marshy paddock. Their ballet dress consists of black skirt, blue blouse and collar, with scarlet beak and legs and two white dominoes behind.
We left them to enter the plantation proper, and saw first, the two year old trees. Apart from their extraordinary height, the astonishing feature was the uniformity of their growth. I asked just why each tree was the exact full brother of his neighbour. However, as we later went through millions of trees of various ages, we found this was a constant phenomenon. Then our guide, hitherto patient, amiable, but far from chatty, broke loose with the answer. The soil was the same in its constituents everywhere, the configuration of the country similar everywhere, and only an occasional swampy hollow, usually unplanted, differed from the general expanse of gentle slopes and smooth curves. On all this great property of the Commercial Pine Forests Company there are less than three hundred acres that are not ploughable.
As we progressed, mile after mile, through trees that steadily increased in height, we got the forest feeling. There was eerie silence, broken only by the occasional twitter of fantails, or the soft sough of the gentle wind. Then we stopped the car and started a hike. The ploughed firebreak, wet and soggy, made a most unlikely motor road. Here, Sir Malcolm Campbell would not have got more than a mile an hour out of the Bluebird. Thus we reached the ten year old trees. The seven year olds looked monsters, and we had, as you will see in the pictures, passed countless incredible examples of growth.
(
Rly. Publicity photo.)
Pines (four years old) defeating the native bush.
We photographed them in a hurry, for this climate is better for trees than for men with cameras and note books. When I asked about the risk of fire, looking at the endless broad, bare ribbon of firebreak, our mentor said, looking to the sky, “There is our best fire extinguisher.” Nevertheless the patrol is systematic and never ceasing, and indeed, there has been so far no serious outbreak of fire.
Then we came to the sections which abut fairly and squarely on the waterfront. They are on the long finger end of a peninsula projecting into the inland sea known as the Kaipara Harbour, a place of great beauty and notable utility. From it radiate in every direction narrow deep tidal creeks, making a web of useful waterways which intersect and surround the plantations. Hardly is there a tree which is not within easy distance of a water channel. Through Kaipara Heads, has passed by scow and steamer New Zealand's greatest output of the mighty kauri. A five thousand ton steamer
hotels
A comparison of the difference of growth in 45 years in Norway and New Zealand.
can berth twelve miles farther up the harbour than the Tinopai plantation, and this direct water access solves in a most satisfactory manner, the whole problem of transportation. Then for good measure, the excellent road highway, and the railway pass through and round the property.
We made the return journey through the apparently endless drop-curtains of lacy foliage, until we took the picture you see of the pines on the hill slope among the native trees, with a typical New Zealand waterfall in the foreground. There is a monotony about the pine, but he is a relentless invader. Everything blenches before his resistless march. Like the Norwegian rat, he is the conqueror of the indigenous article. Here in this Northland, particularly, where there are no frosts, where the air is mild, and the days are compounded of sunshine and shower, this exotic immigrant revels in his new-found strength. I noticed a tightly-massed row of trees resembling a hedge eight feet high. It proved to be a forgotten trench of odds and ends of seedlings which had been heeled in and left. Similarly I saw in dozens of places where trees had been felled, self-sown youngsters jauntily growing. The moment the sun gets in when the shadowing branches have gone, innumerable little ambitious beginners spring up everywhere. This involves the interesting fact that a planted acre will grow trees to the end of time, and that little trouble or cost is incurred in re-establishment. This natural regeneration is far and away best in the Dominion, and is a comforting factor in the money value of a forestry investment.
In the older lands, tree culture is a State duty, and is regarded as such. Here in New Zealand it is a proposition of commercial safety and attractiveness. It is the speed of growth that makes this true. Compound interest has a habit of waxing-fat at the expense of investment, but as a spectator said to me, “These monsters can race any interest bill.” In ten years, pines on this property become marketable pulpwood, and in a further ten years, are forest giants fit for the sawmill. This is the whole basis of the confidence of the folk who are commercially interested.
As to the marketing future, the reference can only be to these old and familiar twins, “Supply and Demand.” It is indisputable that the world is racing towards a timber famine. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, never notable for light or humorous statements, makes the cold and final summing up after a world survey, that the world growth is eighty per cent. of the world cutting and the rate of the latter is increasing.
The newspaper world is wholly dependent on soft woods. Lord Rother-mere predicted a year or two ago, “A serious shortage of pulpwood within the lifetime of many of us.”
(
Rly. Publicity photo.)
The long spine in the centre represents one year's growth of a pine in New Zealand.
Our Director of Forests said six years ago, “New Zealand must establish plantations of exotic softwoods to the fullest extent of her financial ability. The market will probably be limitless.”
We must remember that it is only forty years since newsprint manufacturing was commenced from pulpwood. In that short period, the consumption has been so enormous and at such an accelerating rate, that even the last great natural reservoir, Canada, is in actual danger of exhaustion in thirty years. The various uses of these timbers have expanded since the War from 400, to 4,000 and included in the new consumers is the amazing artificial silk industry.
Timber still forms the basis of modern civilisation. We New Zealanders, under the stress of urgent demand, and like the rest of the world, have squandered our forest wealth, but we own a private and exclusive miracle-working quality. we alone in the world have the capacity of swift re-creation of forest capital. Our North Island is a tree paradise, a timber
(Continued on page 49.)
Electrification of important suburban tracks in the London area—notably on Liverpool Street and King's Cross routes of the London and North Eastern line, and the Great Western North Acton-Ruislip section—is likely to be undertaken in the near future. These new works follow the decision of the Government to assist in the improvement of transport facilities in the London district by a guarantee of the necessary loans. The programme involves the electrification of approximately 44 miles of suburban railway, the doubling and electrification of about 12 1/2 miles of further suburban lines, and the building of about 12 miles of new tube railways. The total cost of the works is in the region of £35,000,000, and it is estimated that the improvements will be completed within a period of five years from their commencement.
Electrification of the Liverpool Street and King's Cross suburban routes will come as an immense boon to the traveller. It is proposed to electrify throughout, the Great Eastern suburban line from Liverpool Street to Shenfield, and the Loughton Branch and Fairlop loop. The Central London tube line will be extended from Liverpool Street eastwards to connect with the Loughton Branch and Fairlop loop lines, and through trains will be operated. On the Great Northern section of the L. and N.E. Railway, out of King's Cross Station, it is proposed to electrify the Edgware, High Barnet and Alexandra Palace lines, to extend the Highgate tube to make a connection with these electrified suburban lines at East Finchley; and to extend the Northern City tube line, which now terminates at Finsbury Park, to make a connection with the electrified suburban lines near Finsbury Park. Through train services will be operated from all branches to the City, and from the Edgware and High Barnet lines to the Central Area. An interchange station will be provided at Highgate for passengers from the Alexandra Palace Branch to the Central Area. Outside Paddington, the proposal is to construct and electrify two additional tracks from North Acton to Ruislip, on the Great Western Railway. The Central London tube trains, now terminating at Wood Lane, will be extended to operate over this line so as to provide direct services to the Central Area and the City in place of Paddington.
Broadly speaking, railway experts in Britain are convinced of the immense utility of electrification for City and suburban movement, but for main-line haulage steam locomotives promise to hold pride of place for many years. The steam-operated main-line services of Britain are second to none in all-round reliability, speed and comfort, and during the summer season an enormous number of fast steam-drawn passenger trains are operated by the four group lines linking up every corner of the country. The summer service of the Great Western system, for example, represented a daily passenger train mileage of 123,877 miles. Summer additions included the running from July to September of new 60 m.p.h. expresses, streamlined railcars, business trains between big cities and
The Southern Railways “Golden Arrow” Express en route between London and Dover.
The most interesting Great Western innovation during the summer was the re-arrangement of the London-Cornwall services. In place of the “Cornish Riviera Express,” two trains were introduced, named respectively the “Cornish Riviera Limited” and “The Cornishman.” The “Cornish Riviera Limited” carried reserved seat passengers only. On Mondays to Fridays it ran non-stop in each direction between London (Paddington) and Truro (279 1/4 miles), while on Saturdays the train ran non-stop from London to St. Erth (299 1/2 miles). The new train “The Cornishman” catered for intermediate traffic not served by the “Limited.” It ran daily and virtually took the place of the old “Cornish Riviera Express.” Cornwall and Devon are among Britain's most beautiful counties, and holiday traffic thereto reaches, annually, tremendous proportions.
The named trains of the Home railways include some of the most renowned of passenger services. To mention but a few of these giants of the “Iron Way,” we have the “Flying Scotsman,” the “Royal Scot,” the
A typical fast passenger locomotive of the Austrian State Railways outside Vienna West Station.
One hundred years ago, the horse-drawn mail - coaches used to run between London and Holyhead, with the Irish mail aboard, the journey to Holyhead occupying twenty - seven hours. Add to this a sea crossing to Dublin of about ten hours, and you get a total journey time from London to Dublin of about thirty-seven hours. To-day, just 9 hours 10 minutes are taken on the combined rail and steamer journey to Ireland, thanks to the fast mail service of the L. M. & S. Company.
It was on August 1, 1848, that the first “Irish Mail” train drew out of Euston Station, London. She left at 8.45 p.m. To-day, the “Irish Mail” still leaves London at 8.45 p.m. daily, but the service has been accelerated beyond belief. This famous named train conveys passengers, in addition to mails, and included in its composition are luxurious sleeping and restaurant cars.
It was the dictum of Napoleon that “an army marches upon its stomach.” To-day, this maxim might very well be changed to read: “A railway passenger travels upon his stomach,” for no surer way exists of attracting passenger business than to make suitable provision for the needs of the inner man along the system lines.
In Europe, the business of railway catering is conducted upon various principles, some of the railways operating their own refreshment departments, and others letting this work out on contract. Most of the railway catering in Britain is cared for by the group lines themselves. The London, Midland and Scottish Company is actually the largest hotel-owner in Europe. Across the Channel, two big establishments are responsible, in the main, for providing the railway traveller with refreshment. These are respectively the International Sleeping Car Company, and the Mitropa Company. The first-named has its headquarters at Brussels, while the Mitropa undertaking is centred on Berlin. Most of the French, Belgian, Spanish, Swiss and Italian restaurant cars are staffed and managed by the International Company, by arrangement with the railway authorities concerned. The Mitropa Company operate restaurant cars on most of the German long-distance trains,
Holiday crowds at King's Cross Station, London, L.N.E.R.
Continental travel reached tremendous proportions this summer, and a striking feature was the increase in the volume of vacation travel between Britain and Austria. A wonderfully attractive land for the holiday-maker, Austria is served from end to end by an efficient State-owned railway network, having a total length of 3,600 miles. Although State-owned, the Austrian railways are worked on business lines, with their finances entirely separate from those of the State. In consequence of this change of policy, effected in 1923, the name “Austrian State Railways” was altered to the present nomenclature “Austrian Federal Railways.”
Heavy gradients and severe curves abound in Austria. Steam locomotives total 2,041; electric locomotives 215; electric railcars 27; and internal combustion engined railcars 55. Passenger carriages total about 7,850; and goods wagons about 33,600. An outstanding work of recent years has been the electrification of many of the mainlines in Western Austria. To-day, some 571 miles of track are electrified, and further conversion plans are under review.
Written for the “New Zealand Railways Magazine” by)
James Cowan
No colonist of New Zealand lived a more useful pioneer life than Stephenson Percy Smith, who began his career as a surveyor in bush-clad Taranaki and ended his long public service as Surveyor-General. He came out from England with his parents when a child; he was an explorer of the interior of the North Island before he reached his twenties; he was acting for the Government in diplomatic Maori negotiations while still a very young man; he served in that pioneer battle-corps of the Empire's volunteers, the Taranaki Rifles, and he carried out survey duty under fire in the Hauhau War in South Taranaki. A survey party in his day was often a kind of military outpost. Mr. Smith was often entrusted by the Government with special State duties for which his Maori knowledge, his cool, judicial mind and his scientific tastes qualified him. He was our great pioneer Maori-Polynesian historian and ethnologist, blazing the way of knowledge as he has so often blazed the trail in the Maori forest. He was a man greatly beloved for his spirit of kindly helpfulness, and honoured for his great labours in the cause of a fuller knowledge of our Maori race and its origins.
S. Percy Smith, F.R.G.S. (Born in Norfolk, England, 1840; died in New Plymouth, 1922).
Some of New Zealand's pioneer surveyors and explorers began their hard self-reliant life at an age when very many modern youths are still at college. Scientific education is so severe and complex in its requirements in these days that the period of instruction is necessarily prolonged.
But the professional man of our early settlement era had to set to at his practical work early and pick up his theory and his book science in his spare time. The surveyor and engineer, who played so important a part in the making of the nation, was early tested in the hard school of exploration and camp life in a perfectly wild land. The late Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson, the discoverer of Arthur's Pass, was barely twenty-two when he undertook the truly herculean task of surveying a great area of the Westland Coast and interior.
Stephenson Percy Smith was carrying out Government surveys in the all but unknown lands of the Northern Wairoa and Kaipara—unknown to all but the Kauri timber getters and traders—and parleying with Maori tribes when he was only twenty. Charles Wilson Hursthouse was about the same age when he began the Government survey of the Waitara block that led to the first Taranaki War. Such sturdy youthful pioneers developed very early the qualities of independence and the command of men.
A year before the great geologist-explorers Hochstetler and von Haast travelled through the heart of the North Island as far as Taupo and the thermal regions, young Percy Smith and a party of four other Taranaki lads made an even more arduous and adventurous journey. His companions were Charles Wilson Hursthouse, his fellow-cadet in the Survey Office in New Plymouth (who became, forty years afterwards, Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges for the Dominion), F. Murray, J. McKellar, and H. Standish—all family names of note in Taranaki's history. They set out from New Plymouth at the beginning of 1858 on a trip of pleasure and exploration through the interior, a tour that lasted two months, and in the course of which they walked 500 miles, canoed fifty and rode on horseback 60 miles. The distances do not seem great in this easy motoring age, but it was a solid test of fitness and endurance of body and spirit in the early times. They carried their swags of food and blankets (weighing forty pounds each when they set out); they took a gun for shooting birds for food, but no other arms or munitions except that staple article of currency among the Maoris, tobacco.
They left New Plymouth on January 4, 1858, beginning a hard but glorious excursion by walking up the Coast to Mokau Heads, and paddling and poling up that rapid-whitened forest waterway in a canoe hired from the Maoris. They tramped from Motu-Karamu, nearly fifty miles up the river, through the ranges and valleys and swamps to the south end of Lake Taupo. There, at Mr. Grace's mission at Pukawa, and at the chief Iwikau Te Heuheu's pa close by, the young trampers were hospitably welcomed. “A good old man” was Smith's description of the chief in his narrative of the journey. From the Taupo country the party walked to Rotomahana and Tarawera; a memory of that wonder-region pilgrimage is a sketch from Percy Smith's pencil—one of many historic little drawings—of Rotomahana lake with its two pretty islets; places of primitive Maori life that vanished in the thunder of a bursting world in 1886. Returning to Taupo, the hard-faring tourists trudged through the Tongariro-Ruapehu country and down to the Rangitikei and Wanganui, and so on up the Coast—the last stage on horseback, to their vast satisfaction —to their homes.
You Tararua trampers and young fellow foot-slogging holiday cruisers, can you beat that record? Bear in mind there was not a wheel in all the land,
Waitangi Bay and township, Chatham Island, in 1868. The redoubt captured by Te Kooti is on the edge of the cliff above the beach. (From a sketch by S. Percy Smith).
The period 1858–59 was one of Maori warfare in the district between the Bell Block (Hua) and the Waitara. The land-selling faction and the Land League, which was opposed to sales, fought each other bitterly and the Government professed itself powerless to stop the fray. Europeans were safe; the Maoris were careful not to interfere with the settlers. Fortifications were built by both sides. Young Percy Smith saw a good deal of the guerilla warfare. On March 10, 1858, he and Mr. Parris, Civil Commissioner in charge of Native Affairs, rode from New Plymouth to the Waitara to watch the combat. Smith, in his capacity of surveyor and topographer, made sketches under fire of the stockades occupied by Ihaia te Kiri-Kumara (the supporter of the Governor and land-selling), and Wiremu Kingi te Rangitaake, the leader of Maori nationality. “Plenty of bullets flying over my head while sketching,” Mr. Smith wrote in his diary.
Mr. Smith very early in life was called upon to exercise his qualities of wisdom, command and tact in dealing with Maori affairs. He was for most of his official life a kind of Native Commissioner as well as surveyor. He was not yet twenty-one years old when he was despatched by the Government to the Kaipara district in order to enlist the assistance of the Ngati-Whatua tribe against the Waikato tribes, who were reported to be preparing for an attack on the town of Auckland. He had been engaged in surveying newly purchased Government land in the Kaipara and Northern Wairoa, and after several months’ work there he had returned to Auckland, when he received instructions to go back to the district with all possible speed and bring down the Ngati-Whatua (the kindred of the Orakei residents) to come to the defence of the city, as most of the British troops were in Taranaki.
“As I knew the people well by this time,” Mr. Smith wrote in his diary narrative of the mission, “it was thought I was the best messenger to fetch them. On the 4th April, 1860, an hour after receiving my instructions, I was away up the Waitemata with three Maoris on this business. We travelled on over the portage through the night, arriving at Kapoai, a native village on the Upper Kaipara, at 3 a.m., and as soon as the tide served, started down the river for the Wairoa. The natives had all gone to Te Kopuru, where I found them all encamped. In addition to about four hundred Ngati-Whatua, there were some two hundred Ngapuhi (the two tribes were engaged in peace-making). They had built a square of temporary huts and tents with a large open space in the centre for speeches and war-dances.
“As soon as I arrived I was seated on a stool in the centre of this square (the marae), where the letter from the Government was read, and I had to explain the necessity for the Auckland [Orakei] tribes returning at once to assist in the defence of the city. But they did not appear in any hurry, and declared that they could not leave until they had concluded the peace with Ngapuhi all of which was very annoying to me, as I had to impress them to make all haste back. Otherwise, this great meeting was very interesting to me, for it was held with all the formality of ancient times — long speeches, war-dances, and all kinds of old ceremonies, not the least interesting of which was the hari-tuku-kai, or songs and dances of the young women
“It was not until the 11th that peace was made and we all left, the Ngapuhi going up the river and the rest of us down stream to Tauhara; and a very fine sight it was to see our flotilla of about thirty boats and several fine war-canoes under sail. We were detained there by bad weather until the 18th, for the crossing inside Kaipara Heads is only to be undertaken in fine weather; it is so dangerous a place owing to the heavy seas which get up. It was not until the 20th that we arrived in town, and then most of my relieving force had melted away. Luckily the Waikato tribes had changed their minds and gone home, and so ended my urgent trip to fetch help to Auckland.
“Had the necessity arisen there is no doubt the Ngati-Whatua tribe would willingly have fought against their old enemies the Waikato. And, moreover, this tribe felt a kind of responsibility for the safety of the pakeha, for after a great meeting at Okahu (Orakei), on Auckland Harbour, they had sent an emissary to the Bay of Islands, to Governor Hobson, inviting him to occupy their country on the isthmus of Auckland and form his seat of Government there. It was not entirely an unselfish offer on their part, for the Tamaki Isthmus had been the constant highway of hostile war-parties both from north and south for ages past, and they thought that if they could get the white man to settle there these hostile incursions would cease, which in fact they did, for ever. In these raids Ngati - Whatua always suffered.”
During the Sixties Mr. Smith was chiefly employed as a district surveyor in Taranaki. The surveyors engaged in subdivision work for settlement and laying out roads and townships carried out their duties under adventurous and often very perilous conditions. In 1866–67 he and several other surveyors were busy cutting up country for settlement between the Waingongoro and Waito-tara Rivers, including the land where the towns of Hawera and Patea and Waverley now stand. This country had recently been confiscated from the Maoris in punishment for what was called by the pakeha rebellion, and by the Maori, fighting for their rights and nationality. As a state of war existed at the time and the land was held only by virtue of the rifle, survey work had to be carried out under military service conditions. Mr. Smith and his fellow surveyors and their men were given covering parties of Military Settlers and Constabulary for their protection.
There were some narrow escapes. Once Mr. Smith and two companions, Major McDonnell and Lieut. Wirihana (Native Contingent) were nearly cut off by a party of Hauhaus in ambush, when they were out on horseback selecting sites for redoubts and townships. At the Waihi stream—not far from the present site of Hawera town—Smith was riding about forty yards ahead of the rest, when he was fired on heavily by Maoris who were concealed in the fern and flax. He got his horse turned with difficulty, and rode back to his comrades, and they all galloped off with bullets flying about their ears. The Hauhaus kept up a hot fire on them for a long time. Mr. Smith in his diary account of the incident wrote that he could see and hear the bullets striking the flax bushes as he rode along.
“We recrossed the Waihi and reached Waingongoro in safety, very thankful for our miraculous escape. None of us was hit, though there were more than forty Hauhaus firing at us as hard as they could.”
On other occasions the surveyors carried on their day's work under fire. Diary entry, 1st September, 1866: “Traversing the Tawhiti near Keteonetea, the Hauhaus came down and fired at us at 500 yards and kept it up for some time. The Native Contingent doubled out to our relief, when the covering party mistook them for
On Niue Island, 1901. Mr. S. Percy Smith is seated on the right. Colonel Gudgeon (N.Z. Resident Commissioner in the Cook Islands) addressing the people; the Rev. F. E. Lawes, Missionary (with the umbrella) interpreting.
Occasionally some of Smith's men, by way of variety when survey work was delayed by the Hauhaus, joined the Military expeditions as volunteers for night attacks; two of them were killed.
In 1868 Mr. Smith was sent to Chatham Island to carry out some Government survey work and he was there when Te Kooti and his people to the number of nearly 300—men, women and children—escaped from their island of exile. The escape was most cleverly planned and skilfully carried out by Te Kooti, who had a just grievance against the Government, which had sent him there without trial two years before, and kept him there, with his companions, on a kind of indeterminate sentence. Mr. Smith happened to be some miles away, in the interior of the island, and knew nothing of the occurrence for several days. He made a number of sketches of the place, as was his way on survey duty, and one of these is reproduced with this article. It shows Waitangi Bay and settlement, the official and business headquarters of the Chathams, with the military redoubt on the low cliff above the beach terrace. This redoubt, a square earthwork with flanking bastions at diagonally opposite corners, was easily captured by Te Kooti from its unsuspecting small garrison under Captain Thomas, R.M. The magazine, armoury and Government safe were looted, and Te Kooti with his armed men and their families, put to sea in the three-masted schooner Rifleman, which had just ar-
(Continued on page 46.)
Some years ago I had occasion to spend several weeks in travelling up and down the North Island, and made the discovery that our trains are extremely cosmopolitan affairs. One expects to find such an atmosphere in big hotels or on board ship, for cities and the sea are themselves more of the world than of the country that claims them; but, somehow, the same idea does not immediately attach itself to travel by rail—not, at any rate, in New Zealand.
Everything beyond the windows is so familiar. We have grown up with the farms, the mountains, bush, and the rolling hills dotted with the forms of cattle and sheep, and the train has become, like them, a homely thing. It is easy enough in the circumstances to lose sight of the fact that the cars which thunder over the bridge by the old swimming-hole, carry more passengers than coast-wise steamers and accommodate every night twice as many travellers as the largest hotel. Passengers and travellers who have, in many instances, come from the ends of the earth, who are eager to learn all they can of the country they are passing through, and in exchange for such amenity, can often tell stories of romance and adventure in other lands.
Having made this discovery, I was able to extract much entertainment from it, by the simple expedient of drawing into conversation anybody who would be drawn, with the result that those journeys have become a sort of book of memories to which one may turn at idle moments and find many pages of interesting experience.
Here is a story which was told by a man who read a month-old copy of “Figaro” while the north-bound Limited rolled down the grade from Pukerua Bay to Paekakariki. It was midsummer, and across the sea, spread motionless as a sheet of glass below us, Kapiti brooded, violet-shadowed in the waning afterglow.
Kapiti and “Figaro,” the swinging rhythm of wheels and the heady rush of speed: what better setting for a fantastic Limited night entertainment!
* * *
“As Raymond descended the cliff of San Sebastian, his foot slipped and projected him into the gulf below. It was a treacherous enough place, a narrow crumbling ledge with the Mediterranean creaming over sunken rocks a hundred feet down, and as his feet flew from their hold and his hands caught vainly at roots and frail grasses he realised that he must fall directly upon the vast floor of Pietro Negro—the Black Rock—a place of evil repute among the fisher folk.
“After the first shock, however, it seemed that his fall was not severe—the sky and cliff face spun but slowly before his eyes, and he had no sense of fear, for it was almost as though he floated downwards; moreover, as he neared the broad back of Pietro Negro, he saw that it was covered with a vast crowd of people.
“In an instant he was among them, unhurt and being carried irresistibly forward by their eagerness—an eagerness which was focussed upon a sinister shape, grimly black against the sparkling water—a guillotine. The guillotine worked by electricity, and made a not unmusical humming noise. Raymond was vastly interested in its mechanism, but could approach no closer for the press of people, and the broad blue-coated back of a lieutenant who stood immediately before him. Even from the distance, however, it was apparent that it was the last word in refinement of engines of its kind, and the executioner—who wore no mask, but was a sinister enough figure in a long black silken robe—was testing the machinery.
“As he moved the insulated handle to the first little copper disc of the switch, there began the musical humming of the motor—and very slowly the shining edge of the blade disintregated itself from the sheathing of the beam—stealthily it would seem—like some keen bright serpent advancing with cold unhurried menace upon its fascinated victim. Its momentum did not increase, but continued its downward course, steadily, remorselessly. Only the whine of the motor increased in pitch, as though watching, it screwed itself up to an intense fever of excitement. The sun flashed on the paper-thinness of the blade—the blue sea behind danced and glittered unheeding. Almost three-fourths of the way down now and a bare two feet to the block.
“Raymond started slightly — for the blade had vanished. The motor hummed a contented, self-satisfied song, and the executioner was putting back the switches. The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders and grunted in satisfaction; the blade was returning to its sheath with a swift soaring flight. Raymond pursed his lips and whistled silently.
“‘Electro magnetic principle,’ he muttered to himself, ‘what a machine!’
“The crowd were growing impatient, they tired of the executioner's practising upon an empty block. This was a holiday-fiesta — afterwards there would be much dancing and drinking of wine, reckless love-making when the full moon rose that night and made inky shadows crawl like jungle beasts beneath the cypresses. There would be fires flashing like jewels upon the hillsides. Mad revelry to regale the gods of bounty who had brought home the harvest of grapes. But first, Nailda and Rondo must die. It was high noon—the execution of
“His foot slipped and projected him into the gulf below.”
“Raymond looked about him and back up at the town—white and terracotta, nestling on the hillside amongst olive groves—and the tall black cypresses beyond. It was generous of colour that town, basking there in the sunlight, its narrow streets blue splashed with shadow. One could almost sense its hushed silence of desertion—for all the people were here upon the rock that supported the guillotine, impatient with the lust for blood. Red blood must flow that noon—that red wine might flow that night. Raymond shuddered; he felt the desire to go—to run madly from this place. He cursed the misfortune which had made him one of the crowd. He turned about, but behind him was a solid mass of people—dark, eager faces, white teeth flashing in smiles that were vulpine snarls. Earrings of gold glinted beneath bright silken handkerchiefs. The air was heavy with musk and sweat, and the cloying sticky smell of ambrosia.
“But there came a stir—soldiers were forcing an entrance on the far side of the crowd, cries and curses greeted them as they used the butts of their rifles ruthlessly. Behind them on a white mule rode a high churchman—the governor of the town—and behind him again came the gaoler, an imposing figure with a red sash tied beneath his frock coat.
“More soldiers, and in their midst, the objects of much vituperation, catlike snarlings and spittings—the prisoners. Raymond cried out in dismay for they were a boy and a girl—no more — and fair-haired. As they marched to the scaffold above the dark yelling crowd they seemed like radiant beings from another world. Unafraid, too, thought Raymond, they held hands—and the boy smiled. The girl was grave, but the wind whipping at her short blue frock, made it dance like an echo of the brightness of the sea.
“Perhaps, afterwards, thought Raymond, her soul will indeed be one with the spirit of the sea and the wind and the bright flashing spray. He turned again, unable to face what must follow, but the crowd was hemming him in closer than ever.
“There were speeches now. First the gaoler, who was also prosecuting attorney, defamed them like a red-bellied buzzard. What infamies such innocents had committed! Was it possible these children could have jeopardised the State to such an extent? Raymond had difficulty in following the speech. It seemed they were leaders of a band of youngsters rebelling against the harsh traditions of Church and State—wayward children behaving as children have always done—and they were to die to appease the grape harvest madness of their countrymen. Die beneath that terrible crawling knife, flashing with incredible swiftness through its final stroke. Another man spoke, a man who wore the white bib of a lawyer; apparently he merely corroborated the words of the gaoler, speaking in a quick, jerky manner. The boy turned and smiled at the girl. Raymond sensed that the pressure of his hand grew tighter. Madness seized him—to destroy the mob—to tear down the guillotine—to stamp out this brutal festival—enthrone these children as the progenitors of a new race. Clear skinned and heroic as ancient Greeks. He could not even move his hands—he became faint—the sun swung in an inky sky. He rallied himself with the sweat pouring from his forehead.
“The little lawyer had retired, and another took his place. A big man, swarthy, and with crisp curling of hair, but his limbs were clean and straight and his shoulders broad. Beneath the olive of his complexion was a ruddy tinge. He towered above the executioner.
“As he spoke, and his voice was ringing and defiant, a change shook the crowd; something was wrong. He invoked an ancient law. The Fiesta was an ancient tradition, he argued. Had they forgotten that on that day not less than three persons could be executed! It was law—it had never been repealed. He urged the high churchman, who shifted uneasily in his scarlet saddle. The crowd began to murmur and then cry out. They were being cheated. The lieutenant scowled and looked about him, his heavy black brows meeting in a thunderous arch above his nose. Clamour arose on every side. Who was this upstart lawyer—was what he said the truth? A conclave formed around the guillotine—the tall ruddy lawyer could be seen dominating them. Soldiers closed in about the girl and boy. Raymond turned. The press was easier now and he felt sick and faint; he must get off the rock—out upon the hills where the cool winds might drive the fever from his brain.
“The lieutenant's voice spoke behind him in dialect. What was it he said? ‘Importunate foreigner’ — Raymond turned his head. A tall man wearing a homburg hat stood at the lieutenant's side. He fingered a tightly curled moustache. They both looked at him. Panic seized Raymond—he shouldered his way through the crowd. At the outskirts a soldier barred his way—long French pattern bayonet pointed at his breast. He turned about. He could not create a disturbance—the crowd was in a mood for anything. A foreigner was conspicuous—it would be easy to explain that he had caused a political uproar. From his new angle he could see the boy and girl—ringed about with soldiers, the crowd was howling like a pack of jackals.
“At this moment the soldier prodded him roughly between the shoulders, with the butt of his rifle. There was annoyance more than pain as he stumbled. His hat fell off, and while it flashed through his brain that it was
“In their midst … the prisoners.”
“He was standing by the boy and girl now, high above the crowd. There was peace all about and the sun shone brightly upon the dancing waves. Below him, expectant faces gazed upwards—the churchman droned in an interminable speech. He turned to look at the boy, and smiled faintly, the pain of his arm made him very sick. The youngster gave him a radiant smile—the girl smiled too. They were fellow voyagers now. The dancing blue frock filled him with a grave happiness.
“Presently the churchman would finish, and the whining motor would take up the strain. How cool the breeze was after the stench of the crowd! They would have their fiesta to-night, with the fires and the wild music, and the dancing.
“And now the moment had arrived—he lay upon his back gazing up at the crossbar of the guillotine—his neck snugged into the curve of the block. The executioner bent over him, his face filled the whole sky—blotting from his sight the boy and girl and the bright sunshine. But his eyes were anxious and a gentle sympathy softened the lines about his mouth.
“‘Senor,’ he called softly, ‘Senor,’ then turning his head, ‘See,’ he cried in excited patois, ‘he is not dead—he has had a terrible fall—but he lives!’
“Other faces drew near, faces that he knew, Mario, the padronne, Luigi Thejda, Alessandro Mulas—but the boy and girl were gone—also the guillotine and the savage crowd.
“He tried to rise, but the pain in his arm was excruciating and a dead weight seemed to press down his chest and shoulders.
“Mario gently restrained him. ‘Everything is splendid now,’ he said smiling, ‘soon we shall take you down to the village and Don Federico will set this broken arm and all the other bones which may be broken. Only you must lie still—one does not fall from the clouds every day.’
“‘But I don't understand,’ Raymond said, ‘the crowd,’ he added, and then painfully, with many halts and pauses
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Waiouru Station, on the Main Trunk Line, North Island, New Zealand, on the verge of the National Park. (Waiouru is the highest station on the Main Trunk, being 2,660 feet above sea level.)
“‘The Senor has had a terrible fall,’ he muttered, and then as an afterthought portentously, ‘upon Pietro Negro’!”
Just as he emerged from the tobacconist's shop, with a fine new briar in his hand he bumped up against an old chum who greeted him cheerily with: “What ho!—another new pipe? Must cost you something for pipes, old sport!” “Oh, I don't know,” he said with a grin, “fact is my doctor has limited me to two smokes a day, so I've been buying a pipe with a decent sized bowl.” Both laughed heartily. “I know a trick worth two of that,” said his friend — “smoke ‘toasted.’ Next to no nicotine in it. The toasting works the oracle! No need to limit yourself with ‘toasted.’ You can smoke as many pipes of it a day as you like. And you simply can't match it for quality.” Thus he solved the riddle of how to smoke all he wanted, doctor's orders to the contrary, notwithstanding! Substitutes are sometimes offered for “toasted.” But there are no substitutes for Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold. They are unique!*
* * *
* * *
“Speeding along a radio beam in the stratosphere at 1,000 miles an hour, it will take the busy man a little more than an hour to fly from Australia to New Zealand in A.D. 2,000.” —Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.
Margaret Macpherson
(
All rights reserved.)
The express steamer service between the North and South Islands is excellent. There are two lovely steamers, the Rangatira and the Wahine. Both are excellent ships in either of which it is pleasant to travel. Of course, some people are never well in a ship. Colonel Falla (who is the official head) of the Union Steam Ship Company, dearly loves to tell of an elderly female relative of his who went aboard the inter-island express steamer and within an hour was most dreadfully ill, and continued being woefully sick all night. What added to the horror of it all was the fact that no matter how hard she rang for the stewardess, nobody came until six the next morning when a steward put his head in the door.
“Steward, why does nobody answer my bell?” she asked pathetically. “I have been so ill.”
“But, madam,” he said incredulously, “as we did not sail last night, the stewardess has been ashore.”
The steamer had never left the wharf!
After my South Island tour I was very weary and decided I must have a holiday. I unfolded this idea to Hamish.
“But I thought that was a holiday we had in the South Island,” he protested.
“It may have been a holiday for you; but it was not a holiday for me. Now I want to go to some quiet place and …”
“And give a lecture every other night and write about what you see all day.”
“No, Hamish. For once you are wrong. I am going to lie on my back on the beach and contemplate the universe. I am going to invite my soul.”
“Then I gather we are going to a seaside place?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask the name of this place?”
“That is just what I was going to ask you.”
Hamish grinned a schoolboyish grin. “Then it's Otaki!”
So to Otaki we went. And how we loved it! Sometimes we lay on the beach and thought, and sometimes we just lay on the beach. We dug for toheroas and our landlady made them into fritters for us. Oh, toheroa fritters … I could write a poem about them! And as for toheroa soup, rich, green, creamy … Ah!
Otaki beach is just beach and nothing else. An expanse of sand pounded by breakers, it is ideal for surfing and sun-bathing. A mile or so out at sea lies Kapiti Island, now a bird sanctuary, but once the stronghold of Te Rauparaha who used to raid the coast of both North and South Islands. Te Rauparaha was a Maori chieftain who, with 400 of his tribe, settled at Otaki in 1819. Small and ferocious, never was there a more daring, impudent, and savage warrior. For hundreds of miles around he was feared; no one knew when he might not appear in a pa (village), carry off the women, slay and cook the men, leave not a rooftree unburned to tell the tale. Heavily tattooed as to countenance, his furious cruelty was the terror of his neighbours and his face was a thing to make children scream with nightmare. Te Rauparaha! The very name was a whiplash.
But, in 1839, a missionary settlement was established at Otaki, and the warrior chief was the first to be converted. He was, it appears, an extremist in all things. With characteristic impetuosity he threw himself into the faith and works of his new creed. A church must be built for the salvation of souls? Te Rauparaha built it in 1846. It still stands, a unique example of ancient Maori art. The pillars which uphold the roof are totara logs fifty feet high and sunk twelve feet into the ground. How these logs were conveyed to the site is not known. Were they floated down the sea-coast or were they (horrible thought!) brought by captured slaves? (Te Rauparaha was a slave holder in those days.) Be that as it may, there they stand, as sound and straight as on the day they were erected. The walls are lined with rough-hewn planking interspersed with flax weaving. The altar rails are ornate with carving, done in the days when all carving was done with fishbone or stone chisel. No one who is interested in early Polynesian art should miss seeing Otaki Church.
Te Rauparaha was buried at Otaki in 1849, and his turbulent career is commemorated by a chaste white marble statue of him which looks wistfully out to sea to his ancient stronghold, Kapiti Island. Yes, Te Rauparaha is gone. Descendants of his brave bandits now go decorously to Church or to the Maori College close by. Hundreds of them still live at Otaki, but they live in more or less European style. The women wear hats and high heels—except when they get outside the town, when they throw off shoes and stockings and run happy and barefoot where no one may see.
At Otaki there is nothing to do, and we did it with enthusiasm. In vain did Hamish remind me that I had a Twelve-Month Plan for seeing New Zealand.
“All God's chillun got plans,” I replied lazily. “There is the Roosevelt Plan, and the Five-Year Plan, and the Lloyd George Plan, and many others I will not name. But there is a Five-Million-Year Plan, too. Coral islands are slowly being built up out of the sea. Nebulae are forming into worlds.”
“At Otaki there is nothing to do and we did it with enthusiasm.”
But after a fortnight we were anxious to move on again. And so we came to Palmerston North.
Palmerston is a miniature Christ-church—flat, yet beautiful. Here I met all sorts of interesting people. First there was Mr. Fleck, who makes hand-wrought jewels in exactly the same way that Benvenuto Cellini made them six hundred years ago. His silver and gold wire are drawn by hand; his enamels are baked in a tiny furnace; his precious stones are set in designs of flowers and leaves. He is a true artist, the second of his kind that I have met in New Zealand. The other jewel-craftsman is Reuben Watt, of Auckland.
“Cellini himself,” says Mr. Fleck reverently, “never did more exquisite work than Reuben Watt has done.”
How I respect and love artists who praise each other so wholeheartedly, so unselfishly! It is the mark of the true artist; I have learned to recognise it.
Then there is Linda Bennett. Linda Bennett is a producer for the Little Theatre Society of Palmertston. Petit, auburn-haired, and brown-eyed, she keeps the place alive by administering a series of shocks to the conservative townsfolk. She is a capable little actress and a radical thinker, a charming hostess and a storm-centre of intellectual activity. If Palmerston is convinced that Bernard Shaw is revolutionary and improper, then Linda insists on putting on a Shaw play.
“At heart, my Linda, you are a hooligan,” I told her one day.
She opened her eyes very wide.
“A hooligan? But, Margaret, surely not a hooligan? Why, that is the sort of person who goes around breaking windows …”
“True. And that's what you do. Not glass windows, but mental windows. I approve of it. You let a lot of air and light into stuffy minds. Go on doing it. It is good work.”
Palmerston North is the largest inland city in the North Island. It has a population of 23,000, but one would guess more because the place is so spacious. The roads are wide, the gardens are big and well-kept, and bang in the middle of the town is an eight-acre square, with gardens, fountains, rivulets, statues, band-stand and what-not. This is the centre of commerce; all the shops stand around it, and right through the middle of it there runs, very surprisingly—no, Not a river—a railway! I heard Lord Galway, the Governor-General, make a speech from the bandstand. Suddenly everything had to stop till a train ran along under his nose!
Some of the prettiest homes I have seen in New Zealand are at Palmerston North, and no two houses are alike. Some are heavily gabled in the old English style. Some are flat-roofed and verandah'd a l'Americaine. Others are Moorish, with round-arched doorways and circular windows. And the gardens are beautiful. One sees golden kowhai, purple and white lilac, roses and flowering cherries all set decoratively to give the maximum effect of colour and perfume to garland the charming homes.
It is a self-sufficing little town. It has its own racecourse, opera house (municipally owned), municipal baths, public library, sports stadium, and one of the loveliest parks in New Zealand, which they seem to call The Esplanade. In fact, they do.
“Esplanade suggests a concrete seaside walk,” I protested, humbly.
“Well, what about our river?” It is beside the Manawatu River and has an area of 361 acres of beautiful native bush and gardens. Here one may walk for hours along wooded paths shaded by rata, kawakawa, ngaio, titoki, kowhai, rimu, matipo and dozens of other stately native trees I cannot name. “Esplanade!” Three hundred and sixty-one acres! I ask you …!
In addition to this, Palmerston has Municipal Bowling and Croquet Greens. Apart from the Esplanade, there is Takaro Park, Papaeoia Park, Wahikoa Park, Hokowhitu Park and Milverton Park. I tell you, they're the most treesome people on earth; gardens everywhere!
Oh, and I forget to mention Anzac Park. Can you beat it? It is too much. Let us go. But wait a minute … there is the Tiritea Reserve, too, another park! They'll never stop till they have a park each, one sees that.
Before we leave this district we must pop up to look at Flock House, which is eight miles from the town of Bulls. After the close of the Great War the sheep-farmers of New Zealand established a fund for the purpose of helping the sons and daughters of British seamen who lost their lives in war service, and for rendering assistance to men who were disabled. The amount contributed was over £160,000, and was known as the “New Zealand Sheepowner's Acknowledgment of Debt to British Seamen Fund.”
About 9,000 acres of land, with buildings on it, were acquired for the purpose of training the boys who were brought out from the Old Country. Another 30 acres were acquired at Awapuni for training English girls in farm and domestic work. These are the Flock House settlements, built on tragedy of the past and hope for the future.
“In the old days, flax was the mainstay of the Maori modiste.”
We must not pass Bulls without looking at Ormond Wilson, that scion of an old New Zealand family. Ormond has an Oxford accent, a Hitler lock, and an air of expensive carelessness. He is tremendously aristocratic and exclusive and wealthy.
Bulls did not get its name from the Cow's Husband, although it is the centre of a thriving dairying district. No, it was named after a pioneer settler, Mr. James Bulls, who owned the land which afterwards became the township. In this district a good deal of flax is grown, and flax-milling is a staple industry of the place.
For the sake of my overseas readers I had better explain that New Zealand flax, or phormium tenax, is nothing like the European flaxes with their little star-like blossoms. In fact, it is as unlike as if it had just, from malice prepense, set out to be different. Ours is a regular viking of flaxes, tall and arrogant, with coarse, dark-green leaves eight or ten feet long, and a flower-stem of fifteen feet or more, crowned with honey-filled blossoms of smoky flame colour—a hardy and tenacious flax flourishing at its best when near to water. The New Zealander is never at a loss for a bit of twine with a flax bush growing near. He has merely to take one of the long leaves and tear a strip from it, and he possesses a piece of string that it is almost impossible to break.
Long before English settlement the flax was used by the Maoris. In “Nicholas's Voyage” (1814) we read that “the natives, after having cut it down and brought it home, green in bundles, scrape it with a large mussel shell, and take the heart out of it, splitting it with their thumb-nails. The outside they throw away, and spread out the rest to dry, which makes it as white as snow. They spin it in a double thread, with the hand on the thigh, and then work it into mats, also by the hand. Three women may work on one mat at a time.”
The making of flax mats is a dying art, and I am sorry to say that it is almost an unappreciated art as far as the pakeha is concerned. Personally, I use and like native mats on the polished floors in my home, and very unusual and distinctive they look with their mosaics of shining green and white fibre. They are cool and clean and aesthetic, but for the most part the Maori weavers get little encouragement outside the pa to pursue this delightful craft.
In the old days, however, flax was the mainstay of the Maori modiste. Before we ruined their eye for beauty in dress, the Maoris wore but two garments, alike for both sexes—a sort of kilt and a cape. The natives were hardy and healthy then—no sleeves, no furs, no phthisis, no pakeha to set them a bad example. Many tribes keep their beautiful flax cloaks, which were dyed and woven into all sorts of intricate designs, as heirlooms.
The history of flax is very romantic, and somewhat humorous. And by a very great pioneer in this country, Samuel Marsden, the missionary, this plant was once described as the “instrument of God in paving the way for Christianity.”
This was the way of it:
When penal colonies were first established in the Dominions it was thought that the flax-manufacturing industry might be introduced as a suitable employment for the convicts of Norfolk Island, where the plant flourished. Governor King was anxious to establish the industry there, but the methods of treatment used by the Maoris were not known. In his report on Norfolk Island, in 1791, he stated: “The flax plant of New Zealand grows spontaneously in many parts of the island. Every method has been tried to work it, but I much fear that until a native of New Zealand can be carried to Norfolk Island the method of dressing the valuable commodity will not be known, and could that be obtained I have no doubt but Norfolk Island would very soon clothe the inhabitants of New South Wales.”
There is a touch of humour in the story of how this gentleman's difficulty was overcome. In 1792, Lieutenant Hanson, in command of the storeship Daedalus, was instructed to proceed to New Zealand and take away, by force, if necessary, two natives. This project, which was worthy of the old buccaneering days of Elizabeth,
(
Photo., W. G. Weigel.)
Scene at the Arthur's Pass Station, South Island, New Zealand, before the departure of a recent excursion train.
King, who was evidently a wily old bird, not without experience of the native temperament, did not give up hope, but treated them with deference as became their rank. However, although they were royally entertained in his own residence, they would not reveal the coveted secret until King had promised to return them to their homes. When they had obtained this promise they demonstrated the process, which proved to be quite simple.
King personally escorted the two chiefs back to New Zealand and established the friendship of a lifetime with them. The Maoris were impressed with the generous behaviour of their captors. They never forgot it. “Kingi” became a tribal name amongst them in honour of their pakeha friend, and when the first missionaries arrived, in 1814, they found that the memory of this kindness still endured and Governor King's interest in flax had smoothed the way for Christianity. In this way phormium tenax had proved to be “an instrument of God.”
The natives still make all sorts of “old wives’ remedies” from the flax root—cough cures, corn cures and what-not. They make a splendid waterproof tent of the leaves; indeed, its uses are too numerous to mention. With its tough leaves, which are hard enough to stop a bullet, and its dense foliage, which is high enough to conceal a fugitive, it has been closely associated with the history of the native race, and it appears in many delightful legends.
In less sophisticated days the Maori gallant made his love token of a flax strip. A double slip-knot was formed, which, if tightly pulled, ran into one large single knot. The double knot was presented by the bashful lover to his sweetheart, who signified her consent to this shy, silent proposal, by drawing the two knots into one.
However, as a colonial poet puts it, “Them days 'as gone for ever.” This is the age of commerce, not romance. Thousands of tons of flax are now exported yearly from New Zealand, and the milling, bleaching and preparation of this fibre is done by elaborate mechanical processes.
Flax is grown “commercially,” too, but it has its own idiosyncrasies and has to be humoured. Placed singly and in rows the plants do not thrive too well. A highly educated Maori of my acquaintance told me that the plants don't like this. “They should be placed in groups, not lines,” he said. “They're greg—what-d'you-call-um.”
The man with the bit of blue ribbon on his coat had been telling the bus driver what a terrible thing smoking was. “Take my advice,” he urged, “and give it up my friend!” “Bless yer,” replied the bus driver, “if I was to foller all the advice I get from passengers when I'm driving this here old bus, I'd never live to see another birfday! And now you comes along and wants me to chuck me pipe! Well, I listens affable like to everybody—and then I jolly well pleases meself, see? As for smoking, I smoke Cut Plug No. 10, and like all them reel toasted brands it couldn't 'urt a cat! Likewise if there's better bacca to be 'ad I wan to know where I kin get it.” The man wearing the blue ribbon groaned—and gave it best! There are five brands of “the reel toasted”—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold. And they're all as harmless as taking a walk! They're toasted!*
Gregarious! But what does commerce care for the gregariousness of plants? I see that an expert of scientific and industrial research is now growing phormium in large-scale nurseries for comparison and selection. It will be sown by motors and reaped by tractors, and another of the glories of New Zealand will have succumbed to the march of commercial civilisation.
As for me, I shall still use flax mats on my floor so long as I can find some old-timer of a native woman to make them, and I shall grow three flax plants in my garden; three—one for history, two for romance, and three for “greg—what-d'you-call-um.”
Mt. Ngauruhoe (7,515 ft.), North Island, New Zealand.
Overseas appreciation of railways magazine.
In a letter to Mr. G. H. Mackley, General Manager of Railways, the Rt. Hon. Lord Strathspey writes, inter alia, as under:— “Hylton House, 7th July, 1935. Rottingdean, Sussex.
“Your magnificent Magazine … not only gives much useful information, and is well published, but it is a source of great publicity for New Zealand; and, after all, to-day publicity is one of the greatest factors in our modern life.
“New Zealand is on the other side of the world, therefore she must advertise in order to keep the country amongst the foremost in the world.
“Your valuable Magazine is always read with interest by us all, and then I pass it on to The Royal Empire Society, I being Chairman of the Sussex Branch…. Yours sincerely, Strathspey.”
The layout of the platforms at Wellington's New Station, now in course of construction.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
From the Old to the New - - Station Yard at Wellington
preparing for the change-over
The winter is a slack period in most enterprises, but this is not the case in the new railway yard, where provision is being made to have this huge network of lines and sidings ready for the opening of the new railway station in April, 1937. There is usually a falling-off in both goods and passenger traffic during the non-productive period of the year, and advantage is being taken of this to make alterations in the layout from old to new which would prove more embarrassing to the working of the unfinished yard during the busier summer months. By the courtesy of Mr. G. H. Mackley, General Manager of Railways, a Wellington “Post” representative was given an opportunity to view all the work in progress, the following account being taken from a recent issue of that paper:
“The reconstruction of the yard which will serve the new railway station and freight traffic needs of this important terminus is being proceeded with as rapidly as the circumstances permit. Many of the new shunting and car sidings and connections are permanent as far as they can be laid, but until all the old yard has been lifted there are limits to the possible extensions of the new work done. Nevertheless there is much to interest the prospective passenger and the commercial man in the present position, as it shows what will eventually form the goods and passenger yards.
“Not the least attractive of the new arrangements are those being made for the convenience of passengers. At the back of the station will be a large concourse, roofed by an arch springing from buttresses on the main building. This will serve as a well-lit sheltered promenade for those awaiting trains or friends. Beyond this concourse there will be a roofed luggage-trucking platform where luggage may be taken to any of the new platforms without impeding the movement of passengers. On the Waterloo Quay side of the station there will be a deep covered traffic bay where motor vehicles may back in to the luggage platform. A number of old buildings remain to be demolished along the Waterloo Quay side of the railway property, between Waterloo Quay and the most eastern platform. This piece of ground will be retained as a wide sealed roadway, and somewhere here will be the taxi stand, within easy reach of the passenger platforms.
“The close proximity of the Ferry Wharf and its ready accessibility from the new station will be a pleasant change to inter-island passengers. In the case of Wellington, there are no departures of ferry steamers and important trains within a few minutes of each other, as happens at Lyttelton, and there is no need for a railway line to the wharf.
“The new platforms are solidly constructed to a design which has been very favourably commented upon by overseas engineers. Steel moulds, polished and oiled to prevent the concrete sticking to them, are used to give a smart profile to the outer edge of the reinforced concrete retaining walls which form the boundaries of the platforms, the space between being filled with shingle and gravel, later to have a sealed surface. These platforms will be covered from the weather by cantilever roofs on pillars, and one of the new features is that the sealing will give a drainage to the centre of the platform, the water finding its way to the storm sewers through the hollow pillars supporting the roof. The main platforms will be wider than the others, and for these there will be two rows of roof-supporting pillars instead of one.
“It is rather difficult at present for the visitor to visualise the eventual layout of the yards, except from the plans which show them as they will be in a year or two. It is not that the finished plans are not being adhered to, but that so little relation to them is apparent in some of the lines being used to-day; some of them will have to be pulled up and moved, perhaps twice. None of the permanent yard is being treated in this way, but only short lengths of permanent sidings are yet possible in many cases, and these have to be used as “dead ends,” because between them and the as yet un-constructed lines they will eventually be joined to, there lie portions of the old yard which are necessary to keep the yard open for traffic and cannot yet be taken up.
“The most conspicuous and extensive part of the new yard that has been laid to date is the goods sidings passing diagonally west of the goods shed. These will eventually extend in their present direction to approximately twice the length they are now. The connections now in use between these
“The main lines out of the yard will run in a gentle curve from beyond the platforms; they will roughly parallel Thorndon Quay, passing through what is now the Thorndon Station, and the present coaling place, which will be brought more towards the centre of the yard. Before reaching the oil stores, the main goods line joins the main passenger lines, and only two lines of heavy rail continue on to a point a hundred yards past the oil stores. Here are the points where the two lines towards the Wairarapa leave the North Island Main Trunk, which thenceforwards is a welded 100lb. rail double track up the ramp to the tunnels. In a central position in the yard is the 70ft. turntable, a size demanded by the modern K engine. It seems incredible that such a huge table could be turned by hand, but it is on roller bearings, and swings easily.
“The most arresting buildings in the yard, apart from the new station, will be the locomotive shed and the repair sheds. These buildings, with roofs designed to suit the particular purpose of each, will cover an acre and a quarter of ground, and the lines to carry the steam locomotives will be 220 feet long. The roof will be provided with special smoke “chutes” and stacks. Separate accommodation will be provided for the steam and electric locomotives, and towards the eastern side of the building will be the repair shops. As the reclamation has not yet fully consolidated, piles obtained from the Department's own plantations in the South Island have been sunk to carry the building, and piles will also be used beneath the pits for the engines. Provision for the locomotive men is being made in a special building close at hand.
A “smoker's clock” is just now on exhibition in Berlin. The base is formed of a large cigar-box; the hands are two cigars, a big one for the minute hand, a small one for the hour hand. The minutes are indicated by the tips of cigars, glued all round the edge of the dial, and the pendulum is a big briar pipe. Across the dial appear the names of sundry brands of tobacco, the sale of which it is desired to “push.” This clock keeps excellent time and the enterprising tobacconist finds it quite a good advertising medium. But no such novel device as a smoker's clock is needed to push the sale of our beautiful New Zealand toasted tobaccos. They sell themselves! And all five brands of the genuine toasted: Navy Cut No. 3 (Bull dog), Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Cavendish, River-head Gold and Desert Gold, are so popular that smokers innumerable prefer them to anything imported! Not only are they full of fragrance but quite harmless—the toasting sees to that!*
“Another building which is in course of erection and will soon be finished contains the accommodation for the yard staff. There is a well-lit dining-room, a drying-room, and various other accommodation. Several questions have been asked by the curious regarding the style of this building, and one of the answers is that the tower on the top will be occupied by the yard foreman who is given a good outlook over practically the whole of the yard. Provision for coaling is made by an elevated incline, in another part of the yard, the trucks being hauled up by cable. The preparation of dry sand for locomotives, which is used to give grip on grades, in wet weather, is carried out at another spot, the sand being dropped from bins. There is little that has been forgotten in the necessary adjuncts to complete and perfect the yard,
View showing the Main Entrance of Wellington's New Station as it will appear upon completion.
“There are many things included in the design and fittings of the yard the full value of which may not be apparent at the moment, but the endeavour has been made to safeguard its efficient working for many years to come, and the convenience to passengers and users of goods will no doubt be appreciated when the whole is working.
“The several arrangements for the new facilities have been very favourably commented upon by leading business people and others interested in modern transport developments. These opinions will doubtless be still more favourable when the new accommodation is brought into full operation for handling the traffic at this central entrepot of Dominion trade and travel.”
Life's ugliest joke as seen in the united states.
Being of a cheerful turn of mind, we have tried to leave to insurance companies the sombre task of charting life's overwhelming hazards. One particular hazard, however, has increased so steadily that we can hardly be held a spoilsport for calling the attention of 1935's parents to the fact that their children, according to the latest estimates, stand one chance in three of meeting death or serious injury from that deathlike convenience, the motor car. Take a room containing three children: one of them is destined to be killed or badly hurt by a car before he has completed his normal life span. Statistically, the motor car is life's ugliest joke; its toll makes war seem like a spring outing.—“The New Yorker.”
By “)
Dunedinite.”The Dunedin Sunshine Social Club, with a membership of 700, has been in existence for one year. Among its activities a prominent place is given to the arrangement of railway excursions to various scenic resorts in the South Island. One of the most successful excursions of the kind was run from Dunedin to Greymouth on 1st June, two trains being necessary to convey the large number of excursionists who wished to avail themselves of this unique opportunity of viewing the rugged grandeur of Arthur's Pass and the world-famed scenery of the West Coast. The Dunedin Highland Pipe Band which accompanied the excursion, added to the gaiety of the departure, punctually at 9 p.m.
Soon after leaving Dunedin the party quickly settled down in the comfortable steam-heated carriages, some to play cards, others to curl up with pillows and rugs to sleep. Stops were made at Palmerston, Oamaru, and Ashburton, for refreshments, and, without any untoward incident, Rolleston was reached at 5.0 a.m. Here the engine and van were reversed, and with a minimum of delay the excursionists were quickly on their way across the Canterbury Plains towards Arthur's Pass and the Southern Alps, which could be seen, first, as faint silhouettes against the western sky, and then in the gathering light of early dawn, in all their majestic beauty.
At Springfield, a further stop was made for refreshments, and, resuming the journey, the party was soon wide awake, enjoying the grandeur of the alpine scenery, as the first rays of the sun heralding a glorious mid-winter's day, tinted the tops of the snow-clad mountains. Arthur's Pass was reached at about 7.30 a.m., and the magnificence of the scenery, so far-famed, was revealed in all its glory.
Excursion train negotiating the Rewanui Incline.
After the novelty of the 5 1/4 mile trip through the Otira tunnel, Otira was reached at 8 a.m., where breakfast was served. Leaving Otira, the panorama changed somewhat, mist, in places, unfortunately obscuring the true beauty of the bush-fringed lake and river scenery.
Greymouth was reached at 10.30 a.m., where a real West Coast welcome was extended to the visitors by the Runanga Caledonian Pipe Band and local residents. The excursionists soon felt at home in Greymouth, and after a stroll round the town reassembled at the station at noon, to extend a welcome to the Club's sister organisation, the Christchurch Corsair Club, numbering close on four hundred, who had also selected Greymouth as their destination for the week-end.
Arrangements having been made to visit places of interest in and around Greymouth, a special train, conveying the majority of the combined parties left at 1.30 p.m. for a trip up the beautiful bush-clad Rewanui Incline, to inspect the workings of the State Coal Mine. An official of the Railway Department accompanied the excursionists on this trip and kindly explained the various mining activities en route, thus adding considerable interest to the outing.
On arrival at Rewanui a short walk through the winding gorge, richly covered with beautiful native bush and ferns, brought the party to the mouth of the tunnel, where a real thrill was provided by a ride on the hoist for about 600 yards up to the mine workings. This conveyance, used to transport employees to and from the mine, is worked on the same principle as a cable car, and rises for about 600 feet in the distance travelled through the tunnel to the head of the gorge. A delightful afternoon was spent inspecting the machinery at the mine head, visitors being conducted round the premises by official guides kindly supplied by the Mines Superintendent. The party returned to Greymouth at 5 p.m. much impressed with what they had seen.
In the evening a concert in the Opera House, the Pipe Band in attendance and assisted by local artists, was well patronised, and shortly afterwards the tired but happy excursionists wended their way back to the comfort of the warm, clean carriages, in preparation for the return journey. Including stops for refreshments, with breakfast at Oamaru, the long run home was completed in about 12 1/2 hours.
The efforts of the Dunedin Sunshine Social Club in organising such a thoroughly enjoyable excursion were very greatly appreciated, and increasing patronage for similar excursions in the future may be confidently anticipated.
By).
M. S. Nestor
Not merely because it is peculiar to this country, but also because of the very definite flavour of romance which invests the activities of the lonehand gum digger, the kaurigum industry is probably the most interesting in New Zealand.
Kauri-gum is the matured resin of the kauri-tree (Agathis australis), the largest tree in the world, the habitat of which is confined to the Auckland Province. There are two essential varieties of gum, the most valuable of which is fossil resin, dug out of swamps which mark the sites of buried kauri forests. As is well known, the common method of locating gum below the surface of the ground is to probe with light, slender steel spears, which vary in length from a few feet to twenty-four feet. The experienced digger has little difficulty in differentiating between gum and any other hard substance struck by his spear, the “feel” of the blow telling him at once whether he has located a find or not. Of late years machinery has been used with some success, and improved systems (such as “close paddocking” and various washing processes) have superseded to some extent the haphazard methods of the old-time digger; however, progress in this connection has not been made to the extent which one would imagine.
The bleakness and desolation of a gumfield must be seen to be believed; in the first place, the soil is, without exception, poor, consisting mainly of white clay or yellow sandstone, with black peat predominating in the swamps; the only vegetation which appears to be able to wrest an existence from the soil is manuka, fern and rushes. The ground is pitted with holes made by the diggers, whose shanties of timber, sods and corrugated iron add little beauty to the landscape. The greatest extraction of gum takes place during the summer and autumn months—i.e., from December to May.
Besides fossil resin, an appreciable amount of gum is obtained from the living kauri tree by the process of “bleeding” or “tapping,” which is identical with that used in the extraction of resin and turpentine from coniferous trees in the U.S.A. and other countries. “V”-shaped cuts are made in the bark of the tree, horizontally across the barrel. The cut is called the “tap” and is deepest at the apex, where it almost reaches the sap wood. Taps are cut across the limbs and barrel of the tree, and are spaced eighteen inches horizontally, the interval between such rings of taps being about six feet. The gum is then harvested every six months. There are two systems of tapping; in the first case the forests are leased for bleeding purposes shortly before being cut, with the stipulation that no taps are to be made in the barrel of the tree; in the second case the trees are tapped and bled from head to foot. The first system is called “bleeding heads only,” the latter “bleeding heads and barrels.” The gum obtained from the living tree, however, is not nearly as valuable as fossil resin.
Although to the uninitiated there is little difference to be discerned between one heap of raw gum and another, no fewer than thirty-three classes and sub-classes were defined by the Kauri Gum Commission, in 1921. These were based primarily on a division into four main classes, depending partly on colour and partly on origin—viz., white gum (ranging from “dial” or “bright gum” to “diggers’ dust”); white swamp gum (“bold—with heart” to “dust”); black gum (“rescraped” to “washed dust”); and bush gum (“rescraped limb bush” to “bled bush”). The harder, paler and more transparent gums yield a clearer and more valuable product than the sugary or dark gums, so that commercial preference is in favour of the former, and their value is correspondingly high.
Maoris on the kauri gum fields, North Auckland, New Zealand. (
Rly. Publicity photo).
In literature, the first mention of kauri-gum appears in the Journal of Captain Cook for the 16th November, 1769; but although it was again noted during the next few years by M. M. Monneron, L'Horne and Du Clesmeur, its commercial value was not generally known for over 70 years; as late as 1841 Governor Hobson made no mention of it as a possible article of export, but by 1845 a brisk trade in the commodity had sprung up. At first it was used in the manufacture of sealing wax, and then as a stiffener for high-class candles; later it was employed for the adulteration of shellac. However, it was not until the gum was found extremely suitable for the manufacture of high-class varnishes, that the trade assumed sizeable dimensions. The lower grades are used at the present time in the manufacture of linoleums.
Up till 1865 the actual collection of the gum was restricted almost solely to the Maoris, the only gum gathered by the Europeans being obtained by settlers who unearthed it in the course of ploughing. For many years the finest grades of gum were abundant in large masses on the surface of the ground, but in time this surface gum disappeared, and resort was made to the buried gum. The first gumfield thus opened was at Papakura, the next at Henderson's Mill, and the next at Riverhead, all within a twenty-mile radius of the City of Auckland. About 1891, Austrians from Dalmatia and adjacent Slav provinces entered into competition with the colonials and
For the first 40 years the diggers produced only gum of good quality—white “range gum” (i.e., from the hillsides and claylands) and every lump had to be most carefully scraped to remove any encrusted dirt or outside coating of gum of inferior quality. About 1885 the first “black gum” came on the market, and commanded a price of £1 per cwt. “It was hard, solid black of the best quality, showing none of the softer ‘streak’ which characterises so much of the present output of black.” With the steadily increasing demand for kauri-gum, however, the exploitation of even less valuable grades, such as “washed nuts,” “chips” and “dust” became profitable. Soft gums of poor grade, variously termed “sugar,” “chalk” or “sooge-sooge” by the diggers, many thousands of tons of which had been burned and wasted, began to command a fair price. The peak was reached in 1922, when the average price obtained for gum was no less than £98, as compared with the £4/10/0 obtained for the finest gum in 1847. The greatest export in any one year was 11,116 tons, in 1899. Up to the close of last year, the total value of gum exported amounted to an aggregate of no less than £22,000,000.
As to the future of the industry, the outlook is not, at the moment, particularly bright. Kauri gum is not the only fossil resin used in the production of varnish; other competing resins are animi, copal (of various kinds) and manila. The most serious competitor of all, however, is China wood-oil, an extract from the nut of the tung tree. Although a good demand still exists for the poorer grades of gum, the increasing competition has had a deleterious effect on sales of the better grades to manufacturers of lacquer and varnish. It was reported recently, however, that during a visit by the Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. G. W. Forbes) to the British Research Association, the director, Dr. Jordan, stated that kauri-gum, produced by a new solvent process, undoubtedly had a future as a standardised material in the paint, varnish, lacquer and linoleum industries, and that commercial production along the special lines indicated should be established as soon as possible. Developments in this connection will be watched with interest in this country, particularly by gum diggers of the North.
By)
Tohunga.Railway Station Maori Names.
In the following list of Maori place names applied to the Government railway stations, I continue the series dealing with the South Auckland lines. The pronunciation of the Maori language was explained in the opening number of this series, to which readers in doubt can refer. The stressed broad sound of vowels in some names are indicated wherever necessary. The names given here include the short line to Waiuku, the Waikato line, the Waikato-Thames line, and the East Coast railway from Paeroa to Tauranga and Taneatua.
Patumāhoe:
Patu, to strike or kill; or a weapon; mahoe, the tree called whitewood, (Melicytus ramifloris). A tradition of the Ngati-Tamaoho tribe narrated to the writer by the old chief Tohikuri-o-Waikato states that a war-party from the Tamaki district attacked the Mauku - Patumahoe people about three hundred years ago. The pa of the Ngati-Tamaoho tribe was on the Titi hill on the present road from Mauku to Waiuku. The battle began on the western side of the place where the Mauku railway station now stands, near the church. Huritini, the chief of the invaders, was killed with a blow delivered with a mahoe stake, or part of a sapling, snatched up hurriedly from the ground by a Ngati-Tamaoho warrior who had dropped his weapon. The invaders were defeated and driven from the district. Hence the name of Patumahoe hill and settlement.
Mauku:
Small ground ferns.
Waiuku:
Clay water; stream with bed and banks of clay.
Tuakau:
A combination of the words for stand (tu) and shore or coast (akau). The name originally of the high bluff hill on which the Alexandra Redoubt (still well preserved large earthworks) was built by the British troops in 1863.
It stands immediately above the Waikato River, and commands a view for many miles down the river.
Pokeno:
Po=night; keno=the night of death, the underworld.
Taupiri:
Closely-clinging; a lover. Hoataupiri, the beloved one; intimate friend.
Mahuta:
Called after Mahuta, the third Maori king of Waikato, son of Tawhiao.
Rotowaro:
Roto=lake; waro=coal-mine.
Pukemiro:
Hill of the miro tree (Podocarpus ferrugineus.)
Ngaruawāhia:
The food-stores (rua) broken open. Name derived from an incident of olden days when the chief of the place, in entertaining a large party of visitors, directed his men to wahia or break open the stores of kumara lately harvested; these stores, pits roofed over, were usually not touched until a special occasion arose to open them for a feast. The name is sometimes erroneously thought to refer to the meeting of the two rivers here, the Waikato and the Waipa (rua=two and wai=water).
Horotiu:
Swiftly flowing. This is the name applied to the Waikato River above its junction with the Waipa, where its current, as the Maori explorers ascended the river in their canoes, became strong and swift.
Ruakura:
Pit in red earth.
Mātangi:
Wind, breeze; usually wind from the north.
Hautapu:
Hau has numerous meanings. Here it may be taken as referring to a religious ceremony, hau being sacred food used in the removal of tapu from a person, or a newly-built house, etc.; also a portion of an enemy slain in battle, or something used in a rite to ensure good fortune. Hau also is the spiritual quality or essence which ensures the vitality of man. Tapu = sacred.
Piako:
One meaning is shrunk, another is hollow. But the name is an ancient Polynesian place name, given to the lower part of the Piako River by the Tainui immigrants from the Eastern Pacific.
Tatuanui:
Large girdle; the waist-belt of flax, often folded to carry valuables or food.
Waihou:
New river; fresh water.
Te Aroha:
The affections. The two mountain peaks of Te Aroha were so named by explorers of old because of their love and regret for their distant friends. Ihenga, of the Arawa people, and Rakataura, the priest of the Tainui, each ascended the mountain and looking towards the distant lands of their tribes chanted songs expressing their longing for them and they named the peaks Aroha-ki-tai (“Love landward”) and Aroha-ki-uta (“Love seaward”). The beautiful range may therefore be called the Mountain of Love.
Tirohia:
Look, behold.
Mangaiti:
Manga = creek, branch of a river; iti = small.
Paeroa:
Pae = ridge; roa = long.
Komata:
End, extremity, as of a range or hill; various other meanings.
Hikutaiā:
Hiku = the tail or end; taia = neap tide. (On the Waihou or Thames river).
Wharepoa:
Whare = house; poa = bait, or lure; also sacred food.
Omāhu:
The place or home of Mahu.
Puriri:
Ancient hill, pa above the Lower Waihou River, so named because of the abundant and large puriri trees which grew there.
Matatoki:
Edge of the axe.
Kōpu:
Numerous meanings, including the planet Jupiter; the belly; full; several kinds of fish, etc.
Parawai:
The Maori papa-kainga or village site near Thames town, at the mouth of the Waihou River. Principal meaning is a fine kind of flax robe or cloak, white, with a decorative border.
Famous New Zealanders.
(Continued from page 24.)
rived from New Zealand, and forced the mate and crew to take them to the coast near Poverty Bay. Then followed Te Kooti's three years’ combat with the Government forces, and his career as the spiritual leader as well as the military hero of thousands of his fellow-Maoris.
During the 'Seventies Mr. Smith's professional and official work lay largely in the country between Rotorua and Taupo, where he carried out much important survey work, and at the same time gathered all he could of the traditional history of the district from his Maori assistants and the old chiefs of the Arawa. In the early 'Eighties he laid out the new Government spa township of Rotorua, and it was his foresight that gave it its splendid wide streets. Immediately after the Tarawera eruption, when he was Chief Surveyor for the Auckland province, he made an inspection of the Tarawera - Rotomahana region and wrote an excellent report on the occurrence and the results of the eruption. This was followed by an account of the disaster by that eminent geologist, Professor A. P. Thomas, of the Auckland University College. These are the two standard scientific authorities to-day on that event of a thousand years.
An interlude in Mr. Smith's professional work in 1878 was his despatch to Sunday Island and the other islands of the Kermadec group in the Government steamer Stella in 1878, for the purpose of hoisting the British flag and proclaiming the annexation of the group to New Zealand, in conformity with the decision of the British and New Zealand Governments. Mr. Smith, in his later researches, identified Sunday Island as the Rangitahua of Maori-Polynesian tradition, a place of call on the ancient wonderful voyages of the navigators of the Pacific from their Eastern Pacific homes to the new land of Aotearoa.
It was in the 'Nineties, when Mr. Smith was Surveyor-General of New Zealand, that I first made his acquaintance, and greatly I treasure the memory of the friendship that became established when I came to know him well, chiefly through our common interest in Maori-Polynesian research. He was always a most kindly mentor and guide whenever I sought his advice on matters of history and such recondite lore as the interpretation of difficult passages in the olden traditions and poems I collected from the elders of the tribes. Often they were not agreed themselves, those elders; they repeated the songs as they had been handed down, and some words had become obsolete and many passages cryptic. But Percy Smith and his friend, C. E. Nelson, of Whakare-warewa—a greatly-learned linguist who knew Arabic and Hebrew besides Maori and many European languages—were bright torches of enlightenment in the mazes of the ancient tales and poetic recitals.
Percy Smith and his staunch friend and fellow-student of Polynesian problems, Edward Tregear, were the chief pillars for many a year of the Polynesian Society, of which Mr. Smith was the chief founder, and the journal editor for many years. He was its long-term president, and its great pioneer in field work among the islands of the Eastern Pacific. In 1897 he spent his first year of leisure after his long period of Government service in cruising from island to island in his enthusiastic search for the last Hawaiki of the Maoris. His knowledge of the Maori tongue was the basis on which he soon built up his Polynesian linguistics, and he found many willing helpers among whites and natives in the Islands. The result of his enquiries clearly showed that the chief homes of our Maoris before their ancestors migrated to this country in their skilfully-navigated sailing-craft were Tahiti and its neighbouring islands of Porapora (now popularly and carelessly called Borabora), Taha'a and Raiatea (Maori Rangiatea). On their way to New Zealand most of these daring sailors called at Rarotonga. The fruits of Mr. Smith's researches, which took him also to Samoa, were embodied in his book, “Hawaiki,” the standard work of reference on the subject; it has gone through several editions.
Two other great and valuable works of history from Mr. Smith's never-idle pen are “The History and Traditions of the West Coast,” embodying a Maori history of Taranaki from the ancient times, and “Maori Wars of the Nineteenth Century.” Copious in detail, reliable in dates and places, written out of the fulness of his knowledge obtained from both Maori and pioneer pakeha sources, they are the two most useful histories to-day on their special subjects. But for Mr. Smith's intimate knowledge of the Maori and the mutual confidence and sympathy of their relations with each other, much of what is now on record would have been lost for ever, for the old generation has passed, and the young Maori of the North and the West Coast must go chiefly to Percy Smith's books for knowledge of his tribal past.
Percy Smith's work towers above that of all his brother Maori historians. His extraordinarily close and diligent study of the ancient traditions and genealogies and related lore laid a solid foundation for the scientific younger generation of recorders who have taken the Pacific as their field of exploration and enquiry.
In 1901 the Government availed itself of Mr. Smith's knowledge of the Polynesian races and his sympathy and insight in native affairs by despatching him to Niue Island on a special mission to introduce a form of administration somewhat more consonant with British ideas than the then existing one. This proceeding was rendered necessary by the annexation of Niue and many other South Sea Islands to New Zealand under a proclamation made at Auckland on June 11, 1901, by the present King, then H.R.H. the Duke of Cornwall and York. Mr. Smith was an admirable lawgiver; he would have made an ideal administrator for such a place as Samoa, had he lived in this generation, judging by his excellent work at Niue. He modified some of the missionary and native laws, but interfered as little as possible with the patriarchal rule of the chiefs and he won the hearts of the people by his regard for their ancient institutions. The result of his lawgiving for Niue is seen in the consistently peaceable conditions there and the popularity of New Zealand's mild control. Mr. Smith profited by his four months’ stay on Niue to collect data for a book, “Niue-Fekai (or Savage) Island and Its People,” which is to-day the standard work on the island. One of our pictures shows Mr. Smith and Colonel Gudgeon (New Zealand Resident at Rarotonga) at a meeting with the people on the green in Avatele village, with the veteran Niue missionary, the Rev. F. E. Lawes, interpreting the speeches.
To this review of Mr. Smith's distinguished career in the service of the Government, it must be added that his son, Mr. M. Crompton Smith, also saw much of pioneer survey life. In 1883 he was cadet and topographer with Mr. Baber in the first flying survey made of the Urewera Country, a rough expedition in an all but unknown region, in which the survey was complicated by Maori suspicion and obstruction. Mr. Smith was Chief Draughtsman in the Survey Dept. when he retired from the Government Service.
“Green Gold”
(Continued from page 15.)
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Some of the ten year old trees.
The “Three Sisters.”
Garden of Eden, a natural and open air hothouse for arboriculture. We can safely look to our annual timber crop of the future as our passport to national riches.
There is something more I would like to say. It is of course quite late enough, but we have managed a measure of anticipation of the rest of the world in artificial afforestation. We are equipped now with a vast body of experience in the planting, nurture, care and culture of trees and the technique of plantation management. We have a trained army of experts, and a host of experienced workers in every part of the field. I was struck on my visit to the property under review with the evidences on all sides of prudent administration, profound knowledge, and wise foresight. Everything is planned and every contingency anticipated. Probing questions provoked direct and unequivocal answers, but when I waxed enthusiastic myself I got no encouragement to be wordy. It was all so “New Zealandish,” so competent, and free of pretence or glowing predictions.
Here, I thought, is a scheme which is wholly sound. It seemed to partake of the wholesome healthy trees that formed its material wealth. I did not see a sick tree in all those mighty battalions, nor can I see an invalidish symptom in the whole enormous afforestation movement which is going on in New Zealand.
In the years to come, the world's attention will be focussed on our country as the world's best timber farm. I felt sad, coming home on the Main Trunk, to see on the skyline, denuded ridges, and bare hill sides. Tall timber on them would mean such inexhaustible wealth. If we had started a generation or more ago, we would possibly now have no national debt.
Here is a proper use for our special Heaven-sent gifts of rich terrain, mild airs, sunny skies and ample rain. I have called this article “Green Gold,” and the title is genuinely applicable.
Perpetrated and Illustrated by
Ken Alexander
Many people commit gardening and many of those who don't, have troubles, too. The chief drawback of a garden is that it is always wrongly situated. If it has a southern aspect it gets no sun in the winter; if it faces north it gets too much in the summer. If it tilts to the east the plants die of exhaustion through being wakened too early in the morning; if turned towards the west the domestic flora get to bed too late and succumb to deadly nightshade.
The only alternative is to have your garden situated in a biscuit tin so that you can keep it down in the basement or up in the loft or under the gas stove until such time as you strike a day which seems completely propitious to the propagation of floral growth—or words to this effect.
Of course, there are successful gardeners. You meet them on trains and trams and buses, descanting on their success with double-edged speckled spinozas and perennial palliases. In this respect gardening and fishing are somewhat akin; you hear much and see little. I do not suggest that all gardeners are liars. In fact, I once knew one who actually grew things; but he was a passive, spineless sort of creature—wholly devoid of that grand primitive sense of struggle for supremacy—who was content merely to plant things, care for them, and let Nature take her course unchallenged; unlike the average he-man horticulturists who love to pit their cunning against ruthless Nature by planting sun-flowers in the cellar, water lilies on the ash heap and ice-plants in the conservatory.
But the real fact is that the best way to rear a garden is to refrain from rearing it. The “rose that grows in No-man's Land” and the “Snowdrop On the River's Brink” both throve simply because there was nobody to blight them with blight mixtures and fix them with fertilizers.
On the other hand, you spray your pet rose with black lead against white butterfly, with red lead against green fly, with whiting against black-leaf; you inoculate it against prickly itch, you vaccinate it against cauliflower ear and you wrap a piece of sacking round its chest. What happens? It dies on you, of course. But, ignore it during the period a rose is supposed to need a mother's care and, when it is about to bloom, hop out and dot it one on the stamen with a mallet! What happens? You get blooms which even your wife will put in her vases. But such is gardening—and life in general!
And the bulbs you heave into the darkest corner of the garden as unworthy to fraternise with your prize
“Who loves to pit his cunning against ruthless Nature.”
The fact of the matter is that Nature is continually at war with man and misleads him to expect certain things to happen among the spraxias and snapdragons, which never do. Thus, the experienced tactician, after making himself conversant with the accepted laws and canons of the horticultural hotbeds, takes the opposite course. If the experts advise sulphide of semolina or chloride of hydrophobia for the variegated aspirates, the wise gardener administers a dose of prussic or an injection of brimstone and treacle and sits back until the blooms arrive. Otherwise he will discover that his rambling roses are too feeble even to
Seeds are another source of disappointment. Because a packet says “Double pneumonias” such is no guarantee that, after planting, the gardener will not get filigreed filberts or even double-breasted cauliflowers.
No reflection on the honesty of seed merchants is intended. They do their part, but something happens in the packet, or underground, which converts a gardener's hopes to a “mess of potash.”
One must remember that the pictures on the packets are painted by artists who seldom grow anything but hair. They are idealists who gild the lily and paint the rose. Consequently the pansies on the packet look like orchids with blood pressure, and the tiger lilies resemble a floral zoo. Artists are not good gardeners because they always expect realisation to equal imagination.
If flower-gardening is disappointing, vegetable culture is doubly so, because the unfortunate enthusiast has both “roots” and “tops” to contend with. The great difficulty is that “roots” always seem to have an ambition to appear in public as “tops” and “tops” seem to have rooted ambitions. The gardener who knows his vegetables will overcome this by planting the “root” seeds upside down and putting the cabbages and lettuces in splints to keep them on the up grade.
The gardener desirous of growing cauliflowers should always plant cabbages, because cabbages always turn out to be cauliflowers in the end.
Potatoes should be blindfolded before planting because the less a potato sees the more concentration it puts into becoming a worthy member of the tuber family.
“Gardening is somewhat akin to Fishing.”
Potatoes must be dug up every now and again to see how they are getting on. This convinces the potato that you are taking a kindly interest in its welfare and encourages it to keep its mind on the game. Potatoes, being Irish, are very impulsive and respond readily to such kindness. You need never worry about killing potatoes by digging them up and replanting them; they like it and will roll over on their faces, close all their eyes and die, if left undisturbed in their beds.
Now is the time to plant everything which the book says should have been planted at the beginning of winter. Of course all the spring vegetables should have been planted in the late autumn. I am not suggesting that the experts do not know their business, but I know that they don't know mine; for long experience has convinced me that my garden plot is more like a conspiracy than a plot, and the only chance of getting results is to plant everything six months too late or six months too early, thus taking Mother Nature off her guard. This knowledge of the psychology of flowers, fruits, roots, and shoots has enabled me to rear the annual radish which is the pride and joy of my declining years.
There is no doubt that gardening provides a degree of glorious uncertainty, even lacking in horse racing; for in gardening you do have a win sometimes. So
leading new zealand newspapers.
By)
“Shibli Bagarag .”Our New Zealand literary world is enthusiastic over the fact that New Zealand Authors’ Week is to eventuate early next year. It has been so solidly organised that it looks like being an annual affair. The early efforts are already apparent in the daily Press, the reference to New Zealand literary matters occupying a fair share of space. The Wellington “Evening Post,” ever ready to assist a deserving object, has given prominence to a most interesting controversy. That keen literary enthusiast and brilliant writer, O. N. Gillespie, has been appointed organiser for the week.
* * *
In addition to his having established a world-wide reputation as a writer, Hector Bolitho naively confesses to two other accomplishments. In his fascinating book, “Older People,” which has just been published, he admits of the secret vice of blowing bubbles. I must confess to a mutual failing in this respect. I get a rare thrill out of creating and watching those delicate spherical shapes dropping from my clay pipe. The finest effects are secured by leaning from the window of an upper storey and watching the coruscating bubbles float to the ground. Under such circumstances, however, blowing bubbles is not a secret vice. Before many bubbles are blown, one inevitably discovers a small audience of devouring eyes furtively watching from adjacent vantage points, I say furtive, for the adult mind strangely regards such “childish” pastimes with counterfeit derision.
Hector, therefore, is charming for he has never “growed up.”
His other accomplishment is born of practice and skill, for, after all, anybody can blow bubbles. Hector can play faultlessly, and with feeling, “Home, Sweet Home,” with his nose on the piano. He describes in his book how he performed the feat in the presence of a distinguished company which included the late Sir Edward Elgar. I always thought Hector had an unusual, yet, not unattractive, nose.
Mr. F. W. Reed, the world-famous Dumas authority, who lives in Whangarei, was recently the inspiration of an interesting event in the northern township, in the staging of “The Prophecy of Cazotte,” a costume drama of the French Revolution. It was written and produced by Mr. Reed.
* * *
One of Bethune's periodical book sales happened recently on a wet, miserable Wellington day. There was a poor attendance—result, wonderful bargains. A first edition of W. S. Gilbert's “Songs of a Savoyard” came my way for a few shillings. “Tom Bracken's Annual” (1896) and a rare old Wellington booklet quaintly descriptive of the Jubilee of 1890 entered my library for the modest fee of eighteen pence. “The History of Printing” (1771), in mint condition, was well worth the eleven shillings I paid for it (there were two other very acceptable books in the same bundle). The Medallion Edition of Kipling failed to reach the reserve of £8. A de luxe copy (autographed) of D. M. Ross's “Stars of the Mist” was knocked down to me for 2/6.
The bookplate of a well-known Auckland advertising man.
Design by Miss Eunice Buchanan.
This “Bracken Annual” is most interesting. Among the distinguished contributors were Sir Robert Stout, Sir James Carroll, Edward Tregear, the Hon. Pember Reeves, Arthur Adams—all gone now, but the last mentioned. The Annual must have been a payable proposition because it was well lined with advertisements. Government Departments being well represented.
* * *
A thought after the sale: Why do some people commit the sacrilege of mutilating a book by cutting the page on which was inscribed the name of the previous owner. When I die I hope to have performed enough charitable acts to secure permission to return from the other world and be present at the sale of my library, proud in the knowledge that those who buy my books, will find no marauding hand tearing out the evidence of my previous proud ownership. This is where a bookplate is a delight—the symbol of ownership on the inside front cover that may be overlaid, if the new owner wishes, with his own plate.
* * *
From time to time I have inquiries from young artists as to the best method of developing their talent. Undoubtedly the correspondence art school is a great help, although there is a suspicion that in the past one or two may have shown a greater regard for fees than for their pupils. Always a good test is the period over which such institutions have managed to exist. If not run on sound helpful lines, such institutions will discover only too soon that new pupils are difficult to sign up. In the sphere of commercial art I have always understood that The Art Training Institute, Melbourne, is run on sound lines—certainly it has been going for a number of years. A good rule always is for the art student to send for the prospectus of the school concerned and judge from its contents, whether or not to go ahead and take up a postal course.
The sole survivor among old-time digger magazines in New Zealand is, I think “Fernleaf,” a monthly magazine edited and published by Mr. Percy Salmon in Auckland. Despite the elapse of years since the War, despite the depression, “Fernleaf” continues to flourish. The August issue runs to fifty-four pages, and apart from the excellence of its literary contents, shows a satisfactory blood test—the advertising is solid and good. I think the secret behind it all is, once more, personality. Percy Salmon knows how to put it over—both as an editor and a space seller.
Reviews.
I like anything written by Hector Bolitho because it is Hector Bolitho; never more H-B-ish though than his “Older People,” just to hand from Cobden Sanderson (London). His old world air, worn so well on his youthful shoulders, presents itself so pleasingly in this book. Hector Bolitho is here with his dreams. He is always dreaming—such dreams—and he must be happy, for most of them have been realised. This fortunate youth has met such notabilities as Mussolini, King Feisal, Marie Tempest, G.B.S., Quiller-Couch, Dean Inge. He describes his conversations with, and impressions of, these famous people, and the help and inspiration they have given to him in his career. Ever and anon he harks back to New Zealand in a most interesting manner. He is such a sentimentalist that his pictures are always pulsating with memories of all he has seen and done. I don't think that Hector has ever been so sincere as in this book. Truly a volume filled with most pleasant reading.
“Annals of a New Zealand Family,” by Mrs. Laura Jackson (A.H. & A.W. Reed, Dunedin and Wellington), is an interesting addition to the library of the early days of New Zealand. Mrs. Jackson is the youngest of the family of twelve children of Gilbert Mair, a New Zealand pioneer who settled in the Bay of Islands in 1824. Three years later Gilbert Mair married Elizabeth Puckey. Obviously it was a home of refinement, yet, nearby, were enacted many thrilling happenings. Events of great historical importance are mentioned in every chapter. The author's eldest sister was present at
Truly one of the most interesting and sincere pictures of pioneer days.
A word for the publishers who have produced a volume of artistic format. The edition is strictly limited, each copy being numbered and signed by Mrs. Jackson. An opportunity for collectors. The moderate price is 6/-per copy.
“Pearls,” by Tempest Keeping (Eldon Press Ltd., London), is a gripping tale of adventure and romance in the South Seas. Pearling adventures in the Southern Seas always exert their irresistible appeal on the reader. The location of a fabulous pearl bed is known only to the captain of the Swallow, and when he is mortally stricken during a tornado, he leaves his secret and the guardianship of his beautiful daughter in the hands of the hero of the story. These are the ingredients of a thrilling yarn that will keep the reader tied to the printed page until the story comes to its smashing climax.
“Green Light,” by Lloyd Douglas (Angus & Robertson, Sydney), is one of the most interesting novels I have read for a long time. The tragic surgical operation performed in chapter two is the foundation of the engrossing plot. The author's description of this operation reminded me forcibly of a story by the late Sir Fredrick Treves. It was the essence of terrific drama. To shield his superior, the junior medico, Newell Paige (the hero of the story), takes blame for the failure of this operation. How his life is curiously interwoven with that of the daughter of the victim of the operating table, provides a thrilling love story. The strongest character in the tale is Dean Harcourt, a lovable old man whose philosophy and rare understanding bring the story to its happy conclusion. An outstanding novel as well as a deep psychological study.
“The Maori Situation,” by Dr. I. L. G. Sutherland (Harry H. Tombs Ltd., Wellington) is a timely, concise and well-written analysis on a matter that should be close to the heart of every true New Zealander. As the author points out, the present is a most critical moment for the Maori people and “that more complete understanding and the active goodwill based upon it, are most urgently needed and fully deserved.” This clear, arresting survey by Dr. Sutherland of the Maori as he was, to the Maori of to-day, should be in every library of New Zealand interest. The publishers have set a model for neat and effective format. Price 2/6.
“A Drover's Odyssey,” by George McIver (Angus & Robertson, Sydney), is one of the most interesting and vital books in the recent prolific output from Australian publishing houses. In plain, simple language the author tells us of the adventures of a droving party in outback Australia. The predominating figure is the droving boss—a living and most interesting portrait. We are taken through the vast desert areas of the interior, have interesting contact with desert tribes, learn much of their mode of life, feel the terrible loneliness and desolation of the drought areas. The author shows great sympathy with the abo and at times paints harrowing pictures of their distress. Altogether, a strangely compelling narrative. Price 6s.
“Shibli” Listens In.
Rarely a week passes but the name of Anthony Eden figures in the cables. Many New Zealand people have, no doubt, forgotten that Eden passed through Auckland in 1925, en route to the Empire Press Congress in Melbourne. Added to his many accomplishments is that of being a brilliant journalist.
Miss Nelle Scanlan is busy on another novel.
Warwick Lawrence, the young literary enthusiast, who, at the age of 18 published a history of the Wairarapa under the title of “Three Mile Bush,” is now connected with Auckland “Mirror.” He has the ambition to bring out an anthology of stories for children by New Zealand writers for New Zealand Authors’ Week.
By
Helen.Tennis Again.
The buildings shut out sight of the sea, but I knew the sun was glinting there. The early morning haze, precursor of a glorious day, was lingering still at the end of that avenue of stone, commercial stone, that I was traversing. I drifted along, breathing in the nine o'clock promise of the day, just as the last mists, I knew, were drifting in distant valleys and touching the waters of the harbour afar off. Such a feeling of energy overlaid with dream was intensely pleasurable.
Then she came swinging down the street towards me, lithely, vernal as the morning—and it was Eleanor, waving a tennis racquet, but otherwise most correctly accoutred for “morning in town.”
She stopped her swing and I my drift.
“Tennis, Eleanor? It will be marvellous to-day.”
“No, not to-day. But very much all the season, I hope. Three broken strings after its winter rest are the cause of my waving this.”
“But weren't you giving up tennis? Didn't I hear last season ….?”
“I know, Helen. I decided it was time for a staid, married woman of twenty-nine to give up the game, especially as I had never been particularly good at it, and hadn't improved for years. Not that I practised much.”
“You are as good as most of us, Eleanor. Everyone can't excel.”
“Yes, but I wasn't good enough to retain any interest in the game. It was alright when I was younger. We treated it just as a social occasion and hoped vaguely that by week-end play and a few odd week-day games we would gradually improve. Well, we haven't improved, and other social occasions are now as important to me. I certainly decided to give up the game at the end of last season.”
“And now you are having your racquet repaired?”
“Yes, I have developed a new philosophy as regards games. I had lost all interest in tennis and yet I knew the game was good for me. I held a session with myself to find out how I had lost interest. It was because I had come to a stop. I was playing the game in the same way, same style, same strokes, season after season. No wonder it palled. I had lost all hope of playing a better game, and was merely attempting to retain the standard I had reached. I had either to give up the game or revive my interest. I decided to revive my interest.”
“But how?”
“I should really start by investing in a new racquet, but I'm being economical. First of all I'm going to have some lessons. I don't know whether to have several on top of one another, or space them. Spacing them would probably answer best. My forehand, now. There's something wrong with it. I don't get the force I should—and I'm really a much stronger person now than when I was eighteen. I will have my forehand stroke corrected and then, during play, I will play with an aim—to improve that stroke. And so on. I will certainly improve a little, and I will be playing the game with interest. I think I have some years of tennis left in me.”
“And whom are you going to for coaching?”
Eleanor told me; we chatted for another minute or two and then went our ways.
Since then I have been thinking. I am surprised that I myself, ere now, have not arrived at such a sensible conclusion. I must really get in touch with a pro. And then this games philosophy of hers. I'm sure I can improve on it—at least apply it to many other things in my life. Look at the way Contract Bridge is sweeping the country—partly because the game itself is interesting, but also, I am sure, because people are learning something new and improving. Why, the thing applies to nearly everything—games, jobs (from combines to cooking) and even friendships. I must stop writing and think hard.
* * *
Fashion Notes.
Shoes in blues—charming! Whether of glace, smartly stitched for wear with a suit, or something sturdy of the tyrolean or ghillie variety. One pair in blue suede, sensibly heeled and toed, sported flapping fringed tongues. I fell in love with them—but not for golf, as advertised. The removal of mud would be too terrible a task. We shall have to keep our shoes in blues for town occasions.
* * *
In the matter of making undies—usually one of our spring tasks—the shops seem better stocked than usual. Charming silks and lingerie fabrics in all prices are enticing. So are the laces. Nightie-tops in filmy grey or coffee-coloured lace, tops for slips with the lace dipping in a curve or point at the front, silks and satins appliqued on fine double net and looking like the most delicate of hand work, marvellous laces combined with silk with vandyked or scalloped edges, narrow silk lace in charming patterns for edgings. Choose your pattern, buy a wisp of silk and a length of lace and—hey, presto! here is your French handmade lingerie, or so it seems.
And at the lace counter you will perhaps see the new stiffened veils. They are charming, worn with a straw cloche for cocktail teas. I was fascinated by a round veil in fine black net threaded in a simple design of black and gold.
Foot Comfort.
Unless your feet are comfortable your walk and poise will be faulty, and you will have a tired and worried expression.
Shoes should be a really good fit, and suitable for the occasion for which they are worn. If there is any peculiarity about the feet, special care should be taken to have the right fittings in shoes.
Tender, swollen or aching feet should be bathed in hot water to which some salt or washing soda has been added. Then rub with a pad of cotton wool dipped in methylated spirits or eau de cologne and massage for a few minutes. Powder with a good talcum powder or fuller's earth, especially between the toes.
Where corns or calloused skin show a tendency to become troublesome, a visit to a good chiropodist helps wonderfully in the matter of foot comfort.
* * *
If you have a tendency to fallen arches or flat feet, you will be inclined to walk with the toes pointing outwards. This condition may be overcome in the early stages by judicious exercise. Practise walking with the feet parallel and persist in the following simple exercises:
Try to walk up and down the room with a springiness to your gait. Keep the toes well turned in and commence to walk. After some practice it will become quite easy.
Another good exercise for strengthening the muscles and joints of the foot, is to claw the toes, raise the heels, turn the ankles outwards until the weight is resting on the outside toes, then turn the ankles in and lower the heels.
Still another good exercise is to march up and down the room with the knees stiff, heels raised, toes clawed, and walking on the outside of the foot.
It is necessary that the exercises should be done systematically, but they should never be carried out beyond the point of fatigue.
* * *
Some Spring Cleaning Hints.
When contemplating the Spring-cleaning problem it is a good plan to make out a programme of work to be done and adhere strictly to it.
* * *
In these days of vacuum cleaners and other labour-saving gadgets, the Spring-cleaning is not such a formidable task as it once was. For one thing there is not such an accumulation of dust and dirt, but there is always the need to do some extra cleaning.
* * *
As a preliminary, it is a good plan to turn out cupboards and drawers before the actual cleaning begins. Everything that you can find no further use for should be cleared out. Send it to a jumble sale, give it away or put it in the fire or dustbin, but do not hoard useless articles. They only make a clutter and one very rarely uses an article that has once been discarded.
* * *
All drawers, wardrobes, shelves, boxes, etc., should be emptied of their contents, and dusted, scrubbed with soapy water to which a little turpentine or disinfectant has been added, dried thoroughly and lined with paper, before putting the articles away again.
* * *
All heavy hangings, etc., should be well beaten or shaken and hung out in the air. If they are not to be used during the Summer they should be parcelled up in newspapers with naphthaline or other moth preventative and packed away. Seal the edges of the papers so that there will be no possibility of moths getting at the articles.
* * *
All pictures, curtains, curtain poles, blinds, etc., should be taken down and washed or cleaned. Any china vases, etc., should also be washed and ready for their part in the fresh appearance of the rooms.
* * *
If you have not a vacuum cleaner with a brush affixed to do the walls and ledges, the next best thing is to tie a clean duster around the head of a soft long-handled broom, and sweep the ceiling and walls, changing or shaking the duster as necessary.
* * *
After dusting any varnished surfaces with a damp duster, polish with a little good furniture cream and finish off with a soft duster.
730 Headaches In 2 Years
One for Every Day of the Week.
Until He Started Kruschen.
If you are subject to frequent headaches, there is a message of hope for you in the letter published below. It is from a man who had a headache every morning for two years. He tried many medicines with no results. Truly, a chronic case. But it yielded to Kruschen Salts. Read what he has to say:—
“For about two years I had headaches for 3 or 4 hours every morning and often had a bilious feeling, also felt more tired and worn out when rising in the morning than when I went to bed. I can truthfully say that the headaches and biliousness, and also the tired and worn-out feeling have left me, which is due to taking Kruschen Salts. I may mention that previously I had taken many medicines with no good results. I praise Kruschen Salts to all my customers.”—S.O.B.
Headaches can nearly always be traced to sluggish eliminating organs, and to the unsuspected retention in the system of stagnating waste material which poisons the blood. The six salts in Kruschen stimulate the internal organs to healthy, regular action so that no clogging waste is allowed to collect and contaminate the blood-stream. Your inside is kept clean and serene. Result—goodbye to headaches, to that sallow complexion, to that lacklustre eye.
One of the secrets of the effectiveness of Kruschen is the exact proportion of the six different salts it contains. That is why every batch of Kruschen Salts is tested and standardised by a staff of qualified chemists, before it is passed for bottling.
Thus Kruschen can always be relied upon—it will have the same happy results for you that it has had for others.
Kruschen Salts is obtainable at all Chemists and Stores at 2/6 per bottle.
To clean white paint, dust all the ledges and walls first. Wash with a soft woollen cloth, which has been wrung out of warm, soapy water, to which a little borax has been added. Do only a small space at a time. Rinse with clean lukewarm water and dry with a soft duster—linen for preference.
For Enamel.—A sponge is better than a cloth for cleaning white enamel. It should be dusted first, then washed with warm soapy water and rinsed with cold water, dried with a soft cloth and polished with a chamois. A few drops of furniture polish gives a glossy finish to the work.
A wooden skewer is useful for getting dust out of corners.
* * *
To clean carpets: Thoroughly sweep carpet or use a vacuum cleaner. If a brush is used for sweeping, sprinkle the carpet with damp well-washed tea leaves or pieces of damp paper which prevent the dust from rising. Wash the carpets occasionally with carpet soap and warm water. Care must be taken not to make the carpet very wet and to do only a small piece at a time. Rinse immediately with a cloth wrung out of cold water, to which a little salt and vinegar have been added (one dessert spoon to quart). If possible, dry in the open air. If the carpet is left in the room to dry, open all windows and doors. Choose a warm sunny day so that the drying process is not unduly delayed.
* * *
Home-made Furniture Polish: Beeswax, 1 1/4 ozs.; castile soap, 1/4 oz.; turpentine, 2 1/2 gills.
Shred the wax and soap very finely, put into a quart bottle and pour in the turpentine. Shake well. Allow it to stand over night and it is ready for use.
* * *
Health Notes.
Influenza.
Influenza seems to be prevalent at the present time. Go to bed immediately you feel the onset of the symptoms and stay there until the temperature is normal. This is the only way to prevent the risk of complications. Take a light nutritious diet with plenty of fluids, such as fruit drinks (lemons and oranges), barley water, water, etc. Keep away from others for at least a day after all the symptoms have subsided.
To avoid infection, keep in the open air and sunshine as much as possible. Avoid contact with sufferers, and keep away from stuffy and crowded buildings. Sleep in a well-ventilated room. Gargle with a weak solution of Condy's Fluid.
When you feel the onset of a cold, have a hot bath and get into a warm bed with a hot water bottle. Take a hot lemon drink sweetened with honey, and two aspirin tablets may be given. The cold will usually subside after a few hours.
Liver Diet.
The liver diet is frequently ordered by doctors for the treatment of anaemia, and patients are inclined to look askance at the idea, being under the impression that it would become monotonous. This need not be the case, as with care in the preparation, cooking and serving, the most fastidious tastes are not repelled by such a diet. The liver used for anaemia is fresh calf or beef liver. It may be taken raw or lightly cooked, but not fried. Many and varied attractive appetizing dishes may be concocted. It may be served in sandwiches, soups, to stuff tomatoes, onions or other suitable minces, etc.
When liver is eaten raw, it should be put twice through the mincer, then placed in cheese cloth and put in a sieve in a cool place to drain. To make a change and disguise the live flavour, anchovies or a little condiment may be used with it.
While taking the liver diet, fats and sugar are restricted. Not more than one glass of milk or one ounce of cream should be taken daily. Eat plenty of green vegetables, salads, tomatoes, fresh fruit, such as oranges, grape fruit, pears, peaches, apricots, etc. A small quantity of underdone red meat, cereals, potatoes, bread and puddings are required to make up the meals.
Salt and condiments are cut down.
* * *
Some Liver Recipes.
Liver Soup.—Add minced liver to chicken broth or clear soup. Season with little salt and pepper and heat, but do not allow to boil.
Liver in Aspic.—Steam liver in chicken broth until soft, mince liver or push through sieve, season with salt and very little sugar. Use a dessertspoon of gelatine to a pint of chicken broth. Add liver. Set in moulds. Tomato kuree may be substituted for the chicken broth. Garnish with parsley and white of egg and serve on lettuce and sliced tomato.
Shepherd's Pie. — Mince cooked liver, season with salt and pepper, little celery salt and pinch of sugar. Moisten with gravy, and place in small baking dish, cover with mashed potato and brown in oven.
Liver Cocktail.—Pass twice through the mincer 4 ozs. of liver, one shallot and a pinch each of salt, pepper and mustard. Put into a basin, add one tablespoon mushroom ketchup or other suitable sauce, one tablespoon orange juice, and one tablespoon tomato pulp. Mix thoroughly and leave in a cool place till wanted.
Tomatoes Stuffed with Liver.—Cut slice off stem-end tomatoes. Scoop out pulp. Take minced or finely-chopped cooked liver, mix with the tomato pulp and place in tomato shell. Replace lid. Bake in moderate oven. A little onion may be added if desired. Other vegetables may be stuffed in the same way.
ByAndrew Stewart .)
In contrast to the roaring elements outside, it was warm and cosy in the office of the railway station at Bunderoo. With each succeeding squall the driving hail slashed against the windows; drummed furiously on the iron roof, so that the two men seated beside the blazing fire found conversation difficult.
They smoked in silence, each engrossed in his own thoughts. Wisps of blue tobacco-smoke hung in curling wreaths round the green-shaded lamp on the desk.
“Swine of a night,” said Hawley, the road-ganger, moving his chair nearer the fire. “Don't fancy them poor devils’ ride out.”
“They should have been through by this,” replied young McKinnon, the clerk, as he glanced up at the clock. “Overdue!”
With a calloused thumb, Hawley rammed a fresh charge into his pipe.
“Bet Dan Carmichael's gettin’ worried about the rain. Wouldn't take much of this to rise the ‘Burra—that would finish his chances of gettin’ his wool through for the first sale. And just about finish Dan, too, I reckon.”
The bad luck of Dan Carmichael, owner of Yaraka Downs, was proverbial, yet never had another man staged a grander, gamer fight against long odds. Drought, fire and flood had visited him in turn, while he fought a continual battle against ill-health—the result of a malady contracted at the War. “A white man,” was the popular verdict, but unlucky—and none deserved it less.
“I'm clean bust, if I don't get my wool through in time for the first sale,” he had told them at the railway, when he ordered the wagons. “Wool's going to soar at the first bidding—I got that from good authority. And by gosh, I'll need it!”
Between the staggering gusts of wind, from far along the line came the faint cry of a whistle.
“That'll be the loco, on her way out for Carmichael's wool now,” said Hawley.
There seemed to be something unusual about the sound of the approaching engine. She should have been hitting it hard along that straight stretch. They looked at each other, as they missed the familiar beat of the exhaust.
“Funny,” said McKinnon, glancing up at the green of the signal-light, reflected on the rain-washed window. “Seems to be pulling up. Wonder what's wrong?”
He kicked back his chair and opened the door. The rain swirled in through the doorway. The light flared and danced in the wind. He stepped out on to the wet, glistening platform.
The engine, a huge black mass, its single white eye cutting a silver shaft through the rain-swept gloom, stopped some distance further along. McKinnon heard the quick patter of running feet.
“Something wrong, sure enough …”
Standing beside the window of his hut at the far end of the yard, Billy Day glanced out into the howling night and saw the gleam of the engine's headlight.
Not much chance of the weather clearing, he decided ruefully. Hard lines—and to-morrow his wedding day. He mentally mapped his programme for the next day. He had several things to attend to. Directly after the ceremony they would leave, in his old car, to catch the night-express for Sydney.
Mustn't be late…. His young, good-natured face broke into a smile at the thought. Billy Day, who always brought his train in on time, late for his own wedding! Day, whose punctuality had earned for him the sobriquet, “On The Minute Billy.”
No; it would never do to be late.
He thought about the girl who was to be his wife. Nancy, with her red-brown
There came a sudden hammering on the door. Hawley, in dripping oilskins, pushed his way inside.
“Bailey's been taken bad on the way in—went right out to it. His fireman brought the engine in. Don't know what's the trouble. They're 'phoning the doctor at Hurst.”
They stood silent for a time—both occupied with the same thought—Carmichael's wool.
“It's up to me, I suppose,” said Billy slowly.
“Pretty tough on you, Billy. But there's no one else. And you're on leave. What about to-morrow? Can you do it in the time?”
The railway line extended far beyond Bunderoo, but of late years it had been used only in such cases as the present; when there were goods to be taken out, or a wool-clip to be picked up.
“Who's with Bailey?” asked Billy. “What have they got?”
“Denny Marsh. An S-P.”
Billy thought about the long run over the plains. It was level-going all the way, except for that steep pinch beyond the 'Burra. The big S-P would make short work of the run. Denny was one of the best. The wagons would be already loaded, just waiting to be coupled up. He could do it easily—barring trouble. But it would be cutting things rather fine. Still, he owed it to Carmichael and the department. He reached for his overalls.
“I'll give it a fly.”
Standing beside the engine, Billy turned as McKinnon touched his arm.
“Perhaps I'd better ring Belton's place, Billy—just to let 'em know. There's been a lot of rain. You might be late.”
“Don't,” said Billy. “I'll be back on time … or bust.”
He swung himself to the footplate of the big S-P and fed her the steam. They raced into the howling night, the big wheels hammering a merry tune. The driving rain dulled the beam of the headlight, so that it picked out the road only a few yards ahead.
“What about the 'Burra, Billy?” yelled Denny, kicking closed the firebox door.
Billy opened the throttle a shade; the big drivers spun faster; the S-P wagged her tail to the thrust of her pistons.
“She's a dirty gutter when she's in the mood, Denny. But if they haven't been getting a lot of rain in the back, we'll be right enough.”
The storm grew in violence as the hours slipped by. The staggering gusts seemed to rock the engine. Icy rain pelted the front glasses of the cab like driven shot, and hissed on the hot cylinders ahead.
Then without warning they struck water; water that was just touching the rails. Billy swore and eased back the regulator. It was going to be slow work. He daren't give her the steam, for fear of spreading the road behind him.
Twenty miles to the 'Burra, and probably water all the way. By Jove, they must have been getting it in the back country. One consolation, spread as it was over a wide area, the water would not be deep. The only place that might be dangerous—just over the 'Burra.
It was slow going, but he might get back in time for his wedding, provided McKinnon secured another driver to take the train on from Bunderoo—but McKinnon wouldn't know about this.
Had he been sure that there was no obstacle ahead, he might have opened up a bit, and risked spreading the road.
If they couldn't connect with the afternoon goods at the Junction, it was all up with Carmichael's wool. It would be held overnight, and, in consequence, miss the first sale.
An hour and a half later they crawled across the 'Burra bridge, with the water lapping the deck-planks. When dawn was breaking over the rain-soaked plains, they stopped at the end of the line, turned the engine and coupled up the wagons.
Although they were hours late, they still had a fighting chance. But, on topping the rise above the river, Billy knew that all hope was gone. He stopped, and they stepped down from the engine. Denny waved a bare arm towards the yellow flood.
“This is where we chuck in the sponge, Billy. Look at 'er racin’ down. The bridge is under, but we might get over that if it wasn't for the dip at this end. She'd drown our fire and scald us alive in the doin’”
Billy's eyes blazed as he clutched Denny's arm.
“Draw the fire, Denny! We'll ease her off and let her rip down the grade. We'll be hitting the high spots when we strike that water. That'll carry us through the dip, over the bridge and on into the shallow water beyond. It's risky, but the engine's heavy and should hold the rails. How about it? Game?”
Denny cocked his cap over one eye.
“Sure, Mike!”
Denny drew the fire, while Billy hunted for dry sticks. Then he hopped to the footplate and used all that remained of the steam.
They rattled down the grade, gaining momentum in every yard. The S-P rocked and raced faster and faster as the heavy wagons drove them down. The flood loomed closer; its roar was in their ears.
Crash! The water rose in a solid sheet. They flung up their arms to ward off the blinding steam. The water frothed around them.
They were out of the dip, and on to the bridge! It rocked; seemed to be going…. They were across!
They sat still, when they stopped far across in the shallow water, looked at each other and burst into laughter.
Billy's overalls, soaked in oil, helped to start the fire again. Then the agonising wait for steam, while Time crept relentlessly on.
Once more they were under way, with the wheels cascading water from both sides of the engine. Almost clear of the water, Billy smiled grimly, knowing that he had spread twenty miles of road behind him.
At last the dry rails showed ahead, but it seemed hopeless now. Billy hung his watch on the water-gauge and opened the throttle wide. Denny peeled off his shirt, and the black smoke from the funnel testified to his efforts.
The S-P got into her stride. The wind clipped the wrack from the funnel's mouth and hurled it along each side of the flying loco. They tore past the old station at Buckley's Crossing, at better than a mile a minute gait; round the curve beyond the Spinifex with all the wheels screeching.
Billy stole a glance at the gauge—nearly two hundred pounds of steam, and a dead-level road, straight as a die, all the way to Bunderoo.
“Late for your wedding! Late for your wedding!” the pounding wheels seemed to mock.
“Not beaten yet,” muttered Billy, “not by a darn sight. But I hope to Heaven they have another driver waiting to take over at Bunderoo.”
Faster and faster the thud of the exhaust. They were lifting the ballast now; must be hitting over seventy,
A view of Wanganui on the world-famed Wanganui River, North Island, New Zealand.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Denny stuck his head out for a breather, grabbed at his cap and staggered back.
“Holy Moses!” he yelled. “Must be doin’ a hundred, Billy.”
Billy cocked an eye at the watch, felt to make sure that the throttle was hard against the stop, and grinned ruefully.
“We're on our way, Denny!”
* * *
McKinnon glanced up at the clock. Ten minutes to the hour set for Billy's wedding—three o'clock. Billy's girl, who had arrived a short time before, was with the Reverend Strath-bone's wife, across at the Manse.
To himself had fallen the unpleasant duty of informing her of the circumstances. Poor, little kid! Took it gamely, too, though her lip had quivered a bit. Happily, the wedding was to be a quiet affair—no guests.
Should hear news of Billy soon now, though. Hawley had gone out in the motor-jigger….
McKinnon bounded from his seat as he heard the prolonged blast of a whistle. The big S-P, stained with yellow mud, thundered into the yard. Billy leapt from the footplate, even before the huge drivers had ceased to spin, and raced back towards the office.
“Another driver—“ he gasped.
“No. We didn't—“
“Where's Nancy?”
“Across at the Manse. She—“
“Phone the Junction! Tell 'em I'm on my way! Hold her ten minutes.”
Before McKinnon had time to reply, Billy was gone—racing across the yard. He jumped the fence and ran across the road towards the little church. A crowd gathered miraculously, and followed.
His first amazement over, the Reverend Strathbone said it could be done. He broke all existing time records for the reading of the marriage lines.
Billy looked up at the clock, triumphant. On time!
“What's it to be?” he said to his new wife. “Coming with me, or shall I come back?”
“It's—it's bad luck to turn back, Billy,” she blushed.
“I'll give you five minutes to get ready,” he said, then turned and raced towards his hut.
When Billy returned with his suitcases, Nancy was waiting.
“On time, Billy,” she smiled.
“On time?” he echoed. “Why, you've got me slogged. C'mon!”
He grabbed her hand, and they ran across the yard to the waiting train. Willing helpers followed with the suitcases. Denny swung the new bride to the footplate. Billy leapt up behind and linked motion. Denny wiped a grimy hand on his overalls and shook hands with them both.
“Reckon you're the first bride that has driven away from the church on a loco.,” he grinned.
Then he leaned far out of the cab, becoming intensely interested in the gravel beside the track. When he turned, he noted with satisfaction, that the opportunity had not been wasted, for there was a smear of coal dust round the mouth of Billy's bride.
Stout fella, Billy!
They connected with the goods at the Junction. Both trains thundered in to the yard together.
So Billy eased up on the throttle, realising that for a whole month there was no necessity to be on time.
Variety in Brief
There is an unaccountable type of person who regards a train journey as merely a means to an end. What they miss! All my life, the excitement of getting to the station, procuring the ticket, elbowing good-naturedly among one's fellows, getting one's luggage and one's self settled in the carriage, settling down in one's seat to watch the wild scramble of one's fellow-passengers—to say nothing of the beauty of the panorama constantly unveiled as the train speeds on its course—has proved an almost greater thrill than the holiday itself, for right at the start one gets that delicious holiday atmosphere in its very essence.
Leaving for a holiday by train possesses a thrill not experienced when setting off for a motor-tour, for there is the absorbing interest provided by contact with a large number of one's fellow-humans, most of whom, if it is holiday time, are, in common with oneself, bubbling over with that delicious holiday spirit.
Recently, travelling by the Wellington-Auckland express, I was an onlooker, even before the train started, of one of the most delightful little dramas it has been my good fortune to witness.
Two Chinese women with their tiny children were departing by the express for Auckland, and their husbands were seeing them off—and with what deference! That few minutes proved to be a liberal education as far as I was concerned with regard to that little-understood people. To begin with, they were obviously well endowed with this world's goods, for they were beautifully garbed—in expensive fur coats and clothes en suite! And the tiny children—two boys and two girls—were the last word in swank in their tailored coats, patent leather shoes and silk socks!
The journey revealed how thoroughly every possible want had been thought of, and provided for. A few minutes after the train had started the small people demanded to investigate the contents of the various parcels, which, when opened disclosed the choicest of fruit, boxes of chocolates, cakes, games for the children, and books. These were meted round the while the whole carriage looked on with breathless interest, but the actors in the drama were serenely unconscious, and the small fry completely unaware of the wistful, not to say covetous regard of their European contemporaries!—“Jasmine.”
* * *
The father of the railway locomotive was not Stephenson, but Richard Trevethick, of Cornwall, England. Twenty years before Stephenson's engine, “Locomotion,” ran successfully, Trevethick's tramway engine
—A.J.
Wit and Humour
Fortune Knocks at the Smiling Door
Fortune Knocks at the Smiling Door
School's In!
The cockney child had just started school.
“Wot's yer name?” he was asked. “Fred!”
“Blimy! That ain't a nime—that's what yer muvver sews yer pants wiv!”
* * *
Twice around her thumb was once around her wrist.
Twice around her wrist was once around her neck.
Twice around her neck was once around her waist.
And twice around her waist was once around the block.
* * *
A professor was accosted by a little bootblack. “Shine your shoes, sir?”
The professor was disgusted by the dirt on the lad's face. “I don't want a shine, my lad,” he said, “but if you'll go and wash your face, I'll give you sixpence.”
“Righto, guvnor,” replied the boy, as he made his way to a neighbouring fountain. Soon he returned, looking much cleaner.
“Well my boy,” said the professor, “you have earned your sixpence; here it is.”
“I don't want your sixpence, guvnor,” replied the boy. “You 'ang on to it, and get your 'air cut.”
* * *
Two parsons were having lunch at a farm during the progress of anniversary celebrations connected with the Nonconformist church. The farmer's wife cooked a couple of chickens, saying that the family could dine on the remains after the visitors had gone. But the hungry parsons wolfed the chickens bare.
Later the farmer was conducting his guests round the farm when an old cock began to crow.
“Seems mighty proud of himself,” said one of the guests.
“No wonder,” growled the farmer, “he's got two sons in the ministry.”
A Bostonian was showing a visiting Briton around. “This is Bunker Hill Monument—where Warren fell, you know.” The visitor surveyed the lofty shaft thoughtfully, and then said: “Nasty fall! Killed him, of course?”
* * *
A woman who was having a house built for her visited the site. Her keen eyes detected one of the bricklayers halving the bricks with his trowel. With a triumphant gleam in her eyes she approached him swiftly and said: “Isn't that rather a primitive way of cutting a brick in half?”
The man looked up, smiled and said: “Lor’, bless yer dear heart, lidy, there's a far more primitive way than this, believe me.”
“Really, and what's that?” she inquired.
“Biting it, lidy, biting it.”
* * *
“I'll square things, Mr. Smaltz—I'll autograph the ball.”
* * *
“Now, boys,” said the teacher, “tell me the signs of the zodiac. You first, Thomas.”
“Taurus, the Bull.”
“Right! Now you, Harold, another one.”
“Cancer, the Crab.”
“Right again. And now it's your turn, Albert.”
The boy looked puzzled, hesitated a moment, and then blurted out: “Mickey, the Mouse.”
“Good heavens, Dorothy. The steering gear's gone, the throttle won't shut off and the brake's useless!”
“Well, don't fuss Walter—anyone would think you were driving the Bluebird!”
Wife (at dance): “This is the twelfth time you've been to the refreshment buffet.”
Husband: “Oh, that's all right. I tell everybody I'm getting something for you.”
* * *
Old Maid: “Has the canary had its bath yet?”
Servant: “Yes, ma'am. You can come in now.”
* * *
The country stationmaster did not wear a uniform, and one day when the train came in, he stood at the platform gate to take the passengers’ tickets.
A pretty girl came up to him, and when he held out his hand for her ticket she seized it, gave it a tight squeeze, and followed this up by giving him a hearty kiss.
The stationmaster was surprised, but managed to say: “That's all very nice, Miss, but I want your ticket.”
“Oh,” replied the girl, with a blush, “aren't you Uncle John?”
* * *
Wife: “I'm afraid the mountain air would disagree with me.”
Hubby: “My dear, it wouldn't dare.”
* * *
Teacher was giving a lesson on the weather idiosyncrasies of winter.
“What is it,” she asked, “that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb?”
And little Julia, in the back row, replied: “Father.”
* * *
Mrs. 'Opkins: “You're not lookin’ too 'appy, Mrs. 'Iggs?”
Mrs. 'Iggs: “No, it's this 'ere uncertain weather. One day it's 'ot and the next it's cold; yer never know wot to pawn.”