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Deputy-Controller and Auditor-General.
25/3/35.
Funds to keep the Children's Health Camps active in New Zealand are greatly needed. Any person who has had experience of what these well-organised Camps, with their proper supervision by the Health Authorities, actually do in the way of improving the well-being of under-nourished and weakly children, cannot fail to feel that the Camps constitute a very important welfare feature in the life of young New Zealand.
This year special organisation has been undertaken with a view to greatly increasing the return from the Health Stamps issued at 2d. each for penny postage use—the extra penny going as a direct contribution towards the Health Camp funds. Other efforts will also be made to supplement the funds. The movement, in which the Health Department and the Post and Telegraph Department are co-operating, is certainly worthy of general support.
Wairua Falls, On The Wairoa River, North Island, New Zealand.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The North Auckland District offers, in this photograph, an interesting river scene. The great Wairua Falls, over 300 feet across, are seen in the background, and the Wairoa River brawls before the camera, between banks of native growth.
“The fall of waters! rapid as the light, The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss; The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, And boil in endless torture.” —Byron.
New Zealand is becoming aware of itself as a youth emerging from childhood or a girl at her first ball. Wherever one goes round and about the country there is found an intense, earnestness to attract the attention of visitors. In Progress Leagues, Expansion Associations, Chambers of Commerce, Harbour Boards, City and Borough Councils and editorial sanctums there is determination that the attractions and amenities of that particular locality shall be made better known to fellow-New Zealanders and throughout the world. Local patriotism is at a high temperature; and gradually, as greater advantage is taken by people, all over the country, of the Dominion's now vastly improved facilities for travel, the fact is borne in upon our people that the time has come when the world must pay court to this Dominion. For it is the home of all that is fairest in nature's most choice selection of scenic wonders, of all that is most remarkable in thermal and subterranean phenomena, and of all those other things that make for the healthy enjoyment of life as it should be lived.
Thus local patriotism is being welded into a national patriotism founded on knowledge that transcends provincialism and permits the story of New Zealand's tourist attractions to be told with one firm voice by the people of New Zealand to the rest of the world.
Accustomed as we are to the contours of our home mountains, lakes and bays, and familiarised as so many of us are with the more easily reached other portions of this country, it is difficult to realise the tremendous uplift which the spirits of overseas visitors, coming here for the first time, must receive in the loom of the vast mountain masses of the Southern Alps and the Southern Lakeland, the wide range of forest—from northern kauri to southern beech—in the lake and river scenery, the richly cultivated fields of the south and the many dairied farmlands of the north, or in the flowering shrubs of Canterbury's home town and the bewildering wealth of colour in Auckland suburban gardens.
But we can, at least, believe their transports to be genuine, and we should be able to waft them on towards further travel in the country, assured that as even the most indefatigable of our own explorers has never yet seen all that the Dominion has in store for the traveller, the visitor will find that the further he goes the more new things he will discover and the greater will be his appreciation of the country as a place of endless charm.
The flow of tourists from overseas is setting in. There is a greater tendency to compete in bringing travellers to New Zealand. Besides the regular sea liners and the rapidly developing business in tourist cruising by steamer amongst these southern seas, the early running of express air-liners may be expected. These, by cutting down the time of travel from Europe and America, will bring New Zealand within the vacation scope of many thousands who never previously could leave their home-country for a long enough period to visit in the Southern Hemisphere. Those who come may be well acquainted with northern countries, but in all their travels they will find the greatest treasures, in scenery, sport and healing waters, round and about New Zealand.
It
is very pleasing to the Board and myself, as I am sure it is to the public and the Railway staff generally, to find that the daily effort in every part of the Railway system to make the service as pleasing as possible to the public is showing results in increased passenger and goods traffic.
But railwaymen everywhere know that in the natural progress of transport much work lies ahead for the Department, and many new features are destined to become part of the existing system.
The Wellington new station forms the nucleus of these coming developments, for with it are associated the assembly of the whole headquarters' organisation under one roof, with much improved facilities for the transaction of business and for prompt co-ordinated action to meet emergencies or to deal with new conditions.
The new station will also see the introduction of electrification to North Island lines and on a greater scale than anywhere previously in New Zealand. From this and the rail car services which will by then be operating on certain routes, much additional suburban and long distance traffic may be anticipated; whilst the special facilities provided at the new station for the comfort and convenience of the travellers, its proximity to city and wharves and the close co-ordination with other transport services which it ensures, may be expected to give a strong stimulus to general passenger traffic by rail.
Every effort is being made to improve the working conditions of Railway employees and the provision of such desirable amenities as hot water services, and electric lighting where possible, in Railway houses will be welcomed.
Track improvements, by grade and curve easements, by level crossing elimination, and in other ways, are amongst the works ahead which will ensure additional employment and improve travel and operating conditions upon the Railways.
Altogether it may be concluded that, whilst much remains to be done in the way of general transport co-ordination, the Railways are pursuing a well defined policy of service and development which calls for the best that each member is capable of, and promises well for the future stability and expansion of the National Transport System.
General Manager.
Rly. Publicity photos.) (1) Blythe's Display Windows. (2) West Shore Reclamation. (3) The Cellars at the Mission Vineyards, Greenmeadows. (4) Blythe's Tea Room. (5) A glimpse of Clive Square. (6–7) Anderson's Nursery Glass-houses. (9–10) Afternoon Tea at National Tobacco Coy.'s Factories. (See article on page 12.)
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
A Clear blue day, and the vision through the carriage window of the snowy Kai-manawas in the far faint distance show us that we have entered the porta is of Hawke's Bay. The journey is an intensifying progression of ordered beauty until the capital is reached. They have a new calendar in this province and it is time that it was suppressed. Its abbreviations, as I shall use them in this article are B.Q. (Before the 'Quake) and S.Q. (Since the 'Quake). If there is a place on earth that can laugh at earth rumblings it is Napier. Its reconstruction is such that if it ever strikes trouble through the land getting into motion, then the rest of New Zealand will be under the sea, and a section will have slipped from Sydney.
The one lasting and wholesome result of that old time cataclysm, is that it made possible the building of a modern and lovely city, justifying my title to this article, “The World's Newest City.” It acted like an annealing fire on the courage and enterprise of the inhabitants, and the matchless results of their high endeavour are on view for all beholders.
There are many splendid towns among our provincial capitals and they all have some distinguishing feature. If I were asked to specify the particular, personal and individual possession of Napier, I would name “The Hill.” This really, of course, consists of two hills, and theirs is a twin beauty. After the long fertile cultivated Hawke's Bay plains, the Napier Hill suddenly rises, as if some Titan had decided, at the dawn of time, to vary the prospect. Seen from a little distance it has a fairy air, its dwellings looking like dolls' houses, their eaves showing above the multicoloured shrubs and flowers.
But to get its proper savour one has to go about its winding roads. These wind and twist, and climb, and wander, and every intersection is a gateway to romance. They are lined with glowing gardens, and nearly every home has that most precious of gifts—a sea view. Then it must be remembered that, under Napier skies, the ocean is mostly a washing blue, and so it was when my friend of the camera and I clambered out to the Bluff Hill point to take the accompanying “shot” of the Parade.
This sea-front view is one of the world's sights. The city glows in the sun and you get an impressionistic blur of the faint greens, pale creams, dull pink and other tints of the cement buildings. The esplanade seems to stretch indefinitely, the last tall pine appearing to stand in the ocean. Our view shows something of the charm of the vista, but of course lacks the vivid green of the lawns in the foreground, the darker tone of the mile of giant Norfolk Island pines, and the silver edges of the sea rollers.
At night-time, it is a scene of Titania's realm. Some of the mighty pine are festooned to the top with coloured lights. A floodlight plays on masses of scarlet and purple and blue cinerarias. On the great tesselated pavement in front of the pergola building, gay folks in couples and racing singles, skate gracefully. There is a modern Shell for the band, and the children's recreational facilities are all that the brightest youngster can dream about. With all this, there is an air of modernity, of skilled planning, and of very fine cultural taste.
The natural loveliness has been utilised by beauty lovers with loving care and an appreciation of simplicity and grace of outline. The citizens are still at work, devising, improving and working with unimpeachable taste,
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The distant Kaimanawas as seen from the train on the way to Napier.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
We made our way back from the eyrie where the picture of the Parade was taken, passing through a formal garden which would be remarked upon for its dignity and range of blooms in Monaco or Nice. The house itself would take its place anywhere in the world among spacious and luxurious homes; and on “The Hill” there are very many of the same rank.
We dawdled about on our way back to the town, trying new roads and seeing changing vistas of the waterfront with the placid silved-edged sea that borders a scene of life and colour and movement.
I do not, as a rule, worry about the look of streets in a city, nor do I feel much impressed when a local enthusiast shows me the biggest building in the town, and “all that.” Napier thoroughfares compel attention. They are new, and here architects have discovered and explored the possibilities of coloured cements. In the vivid sunshine, these soft tints have a jewel-like appearance. The variety of tones is wide, but they remain harmonious. The compulsion of town-planning and re-building (S.Q.) has led to many other modernities. There is no disorderly tangle of overhead wires, telegraph poles, tramway cables, or trolley standards. They are underground and the streets wear, therefore, a demure and pleasant air of neatness and order.
Zoning is also apparent, as will be seen from our picture of the Bank corner. The other bank is only a step away, out of the view. As is perfectly natural, nearly all these new buildings have positive beauty of design, and Napier streets have a symetry and aesthetic value which, sadly enough, is denied to most of our towns of any age.
The feature of the flat suburbs of Napier is the palm-bordered street. These feathery things of beauty are planted in wide ribbons of grass beween the footpath and the asphalt and give an exotic touch to the street-line which is most charming. Napier, too, is a paradise of cottage gardens.
There is evidence of cultured taste in the public parks. Clive and Nelson Squares are the products of knowledge and imagination, knowledge which has utilised every advantage of climate and soil constituents, and imagination which has made the grouping of blossom and foliage as gracefully artistic as a modern stage setting. My friend of the camera was always finding, “Here's a good shot,” “Better have this one”; but, unfortunately, this is an article, not an illustrated volume.
The cleft between the hills has been made into Botanical gardens, and it is a bush dreamland. We passed through its cool and pleasant bowers and went to see The Port. This, like all its brethren is rambling, straggling and purely utilitarian. That is why the Hollywood-like front of the National Tobacco Company came as such a surprise. Our picture shows the handsome front elevation, and the entrance lobby is a domelit and imposing hall with exceedingly beautiful oak doors and walls. But the factory itself is a revelation. We took the girls at afternoon tea (provided by the management) and the clatter of tongues and ripples of laughter made one think of birds on a summer afternoon. The men were also at tea, Adam and Eve in this Eden having separate dining rooms. There are rest rooms, bicycle sheds, and every conceivable comfort. The word “National” in this company's title is a “mot juste” or, as an Australian would translate it, “fair dinkum.” Its annual business runs into millions, and it provides work for hundreds directly, and more, indirectly. I was thunderstruck at the scope of its operations and its widespread activities, and the number of allied New Zealand industries in North and South that are dependent upon it. It saves vast sums of money leaving the country, but all this, after all, shrinks into insignificance beside the spectacle of a management that has made a day's work a time of happiness. I believe plenty of the workers in this model institution find their holidays
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
National Tobacco Company's Handsome Premises, at Napier.
Another surprise awaited us at Anderson's Nurseries. I have urged before in these pages that New Zealand is gifted, more than all other lands, as a nursery garden locale. Our special heritage of terrain and our unique range of mild airs, sunny skies and copious humidity enable us to grow anything. This great Napier concern has been established for half a century, and, if it can be said to have a speciality, it is in the art of decoration, particularly in palms. Anyone who remembers the Mayor's Ball at Wellington for the Duke's visit will know what can be finally done with ornamental plants in interior decoration. However, the range of plants is very wide, and the glass houses seem endless. They are indeed the largest collection in Australasia. Plants are exported to the world in general, mainly to India, England and Australia. The Duchess of Westminster's Hampshire home has now a display of plants which she saw growing in Napier soil. We were escorted round this botanical wonderland by the owner of a voice whose richness had lost nothing from his Dublin scientific training, and with his guidance, the trip amounted to an educational journey through the flora of New Zealand and the world.
But, I suppose, our research into Napier's industrial activities had its most pleasant hours at the Mission Vineyards at Greenmeadows. Below the noble Seminary Buildings, where eighty young men are receiving instruction, there are the buildings where the wines are made and stored. We took the accompanying picture of the enormous oval barrels, properly called “tuns,” I learned, where the amber, rose, and red precious liquids are matured for their minimum period of three years. The industry was started by the French clergy many years ago but the Brother who escorted us had an accent whose precision could only have been formed in an English school. The vines grow on the sunlit hillsides in the open air, and the distilled sunshine in the Mission bottles is their natural product. The sweet sherry we sampled was a definite temptation to linger awhile and put off the rest of the tour for a day or two. There is an old world air about the whole place.
We went to see Taradale, dreaming in the sun, and came back past the racecourse, one of the oldest in the Island, with the usual good running track, handsome stands and astonishing set of amenities and provision for public comfort.
Then we reached the area about West Shore, where there lies the greatest gift awarded by the tragedy of four years ago. Here (B.Q.) was a sea lagoon. Now West Shore has a perfect beach, and there are 7,500 acres rapidly being put into order for settlement. A network of drains, dozens of roads and all the huddle of public works activities are in evidence. It will carry some three hundred families. On the way back we visited the “475” acre block which is on the way to completion as a town-planned area. Much of it is already taken up and I should love to revisit it in ten years' time, remembering the miraculously quick growth of all plant life in New Zealand, and how lawns and gardens take on an air of ages in a matter of months. Nearby is the Richmond settlement, a small farm area; and a successful one, made possible by the generous donor whose name it bears.
I enjoyed the Breakwater afternoon. After almost a surfeit of beauty, natural and designed, it was a treat to see this scene of toil. Half a million pounds will be spent here, and there will emerge a safe harbourage. To-day it has that look of plentiful disorder, men scurrying for no apparent purpose, cranes behaving like mechanical lunatics, the whole bearing the appearance of a Meccano set that a cross schoolboy has taken apart and fired into a pool of mud and water. However, it is all very enlivening and behind it all is the settled objective and the really orderly planning of the engineers. Hawke's Bay Province needs a good port, and Napier will provide a modern set of facilities for this rich exporting district.
It is little wonder that there is a calm confidence in Napier's future among its people. However, they do not let it rest at that. They have had experience (S.Q.) of the value of continuous and untiring effort. Their team work is splendid. The Napier Progressive Association is the latest organisation to deal with the task of getting Napier known, and it has the energy and cohesion of an All Black combination. It is true that Napier citizens have a wonderful canvas on which to paint their picture. They have marvellous advantages of position, of climate, and natural riches. It is just possible that the variety of these, even in our land of exquisite
(Continued on page 50.)
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
“Ko Tongariro te Maunga; ko Taupo te Moana; ko Te Heuheu te Tangata.” (“Tongariro is the Mountain; Taupo is the Lake; Te Heuheu is the Man.”) “Ko Rongomai te Atua; ko Te Heuheu te Tangata.” (“Rongomai is the God; Te Heuheu is the Man.”)
These are the proverbial sayings or pepeha of the people who live on the shores of Lake Taupo, or Taupo Moana, regarding the hereditary Chiefs of the Heuheu family, the heads of the Ngati-Turumakina section of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa tribe. Most tribes and some families of high aristocratic lineage have their special sayings, slogans, or honorific aphorisms; but that of the Heuheu line is the proudest of all in its lofty-sounding and poetic symbolism. The tradition and history of the heart of the North Island are for centuries the history of this long-pedigreed family. The most celebrated of the line was the majestic old chief Te Heuheu Tukino, of whom some of the pioneer travellers and missionaries wrote, and who was killed with many of his tribe by a landslip in 1846. It was his son, Te Heuheu Horonuku, who presented the New Zealand Government with the sacred peaks of the Tongariro volcanic country, a gift that was the nucleus of the Tongariro National Park. The present chief, Hoani te Heuheu, is the grandson of Horonuku.
Te Heuheu Tukino (Horonuku),
who presented to the State in 1887 the mountain peaks now the Tongariro National Park. He died in 1888.
The genealogy of the Heuheu family line of South Taupo is a family tree that is worthy to stand alongside any chieftain's pedigree in the Scottish Highlands. No Lord of the Isles can point to a longer line of fighting chiefs than the members of some of our New Zealand first families, whose ancestral names go back into the Hawaikian era, generations before the first sailing-craft from Tahiti and other Eastern Pacific islands touched the New Zealand shore. The old families preserved their word-of-mouth lists of descent as tapu things; the very recital of the revered ancestral names had the virtue of a prayer. Now many of these lists are preserved in print; the ancient tapu has gone, but the wonder and the magic of old, old traditions remain. The hereditary paramount chiefs of Ngati-Turumakina came of a line not only of warrior leaders but of high priests. The most revered of all the ancestors of the Heuheu family was Ngatoro-i-Rangi, who was the priest of the Arawa canoe and who discovered the volcanic mountains, the history of which is so interlocked with that of the Heuheus.
The unusually dramatic quality of the Tongariro landscape is in keeping with the heroic traditions of the olden overlords of the country. It is a place of classic Maori-Polynesian mythology in which the nature-legends of the dim and faery past are blended with the long warrior history of the Heuheu family and their clans. The high chiefs and the high peaks alike were tapu; they were as gods and guardians of the land and the people. That wide view of water and mountain that comes to the eye as one looks from the north end of Lake Taupo gives you the domain of the ancient line whose beginnings in the whakapapa or family-trees go back to the gods and the personified powers of nature. Those flashing pinnacles of ice and snow; those fuming craters and nests of steaming mountain-springs and heights moulded by the never-resting powers of the under-world, they all have entered into the making of the soul of the Heuheus and their people. The chiefs identified themselves with the volcanic peaks. “I am that Mountain,” said the great Heuheu to those who asked his permission to climb Tongariro and Ngauruhoe. “You cannot tread on me.” Or again, “That Mountain is my ancestor; it is tapu to alien foot.” This sacredness was intensified in the Maori mind when the bones of the great Heuheu who had scorned to acknowledge Queen Victoria as his superior in mana were given mighty sepulchre, in a cave high on Tongariro's side.
There is material for a bookful of legend, song and history intertwined with the story of the Heuheu line. I have a great deal not only from the late Te Heuheu Tukino, who was a member of the Legislative Council when he died in 1921, but from his elders, such warriors of old time as Tokena Kerehi and Waaka Tamaira, Whata-iwi and their contemporaries. But for the present it may be more interesting to quote, for one thing, what was written about the greatest of the Heuheu family by an enterprising pioneer traveller, that noted character and entertaining writer, Edward Jerningham Wakefield.
There is a splendid declaration of royal authority in a speech made by Te Heuheu to Wakefield, who gives it in his book, “Adventures in New Zealand.” He was on an expedition
After the usual greetings had passed, he (Te Heuheu) told me at once that he suspected our two parties had met, one from Wellington and one from the Waitemata, to consult over his land, with a view to buy it, or even seize it forcibly, at a later season.
“‘If this be your wish,’ said he, 'go back and tell my words to the people who sent you. I am king here, as my fathers were before me, and as King George and his fathers were over your country. I have not sold my chieftainship to the Governor, as all the chiefs round the sea-coast have done, nor have I sold my land.
I will sell neither. A messenger was here from the Governor to buy the land the other day, and I refused. If you are on the same errand I refuse you too. You white people are numerous and strong; you can easily crush us if you choose and take possession of that which we will not yield; but here is my right arm, and should thousands of you come you must make me a slave or kill me before I will give up my authority or my land. When you go you will say I am big - mouthed, like all the other Maoris who have talked to you, but I am now telling you that by which I mean to abide. Let your people keep the sea-coast, and leave the interior to us, and our mountain, whose name is sacred to the bones of my fathers. Do not bring many white people into the interior who may encroach on our possessions till we become their servants. But if you can make up your mind to come yourself now and then and visit this mean place, whose people are your slaves, you will find the same welcome. The place and the people are yours. Go to Wanganui.'
“The old man,” continued Wakefield, “said all this calmly and without working himself into a state of excitement; but while he disclaimed any intention of swaggering, and on holding up his right arm from beneath his mat, displayed his herculean proportions unimpaired by the sixty years that have whitened his hair, I could not but help admiring his calm and manly declaration; and believing it to be, as he said, true, I succeeded after much trouble in making him understand that we had all come to Taupo out of curiosity only, and with no view of acquiring land, and assured him that the Southern pakehas, at least, would never annoy him by any attempt to wrest from him his chieftainship or his land.”
The chief told Wakefield also about the missionaries and their faith. “Te Hapimana”—the
tapu still dwelt on the sacred mountains.”
Not only did Te Heuheu decline to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, when an agent brought the sheets to Rotorua but he prevented, by his mana and his arguments, any of the Arawa there from signing. His brother Iwikau te Heuheu had previously been persuaded to sign the document, but the elder brother insisted that he should return the red blankets which had been given to him, as to all the other chiefs who signed, by the Governor's representatives in the North.
G. F. Angas, the Australian artist, who visited the Taupo country in 1844, travelling by canoe and on foot from Auckland, spent some time at Waihi and Tokaanu and painted the picture of Te Heuheu and Iwikau which is one of the treasures in the celebrated portfolio of Maori life scenes and portraits. Angas was not always successful with his Maori faces but he preserved for us in this drawing the air of dignity and majesty which the early days' travellers to Taupo have described as the distinguishing characteristic of Te Heuheu the Great. An official visitor to the home of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa in 1845 was Donald Maclean (afterwards Sir Donald), who while a very young man became a trusted and able Government intermediary in native affairs. He was impressed by Te Heuheu's intellectual powers and his strongly patriotic and nationalist attitude. The old chief stoutly supported Hone Heke, at that time engaged in his little war in the North; and he expressed his fears that the pakeha would soon become dangerously numerous and powerful in the land. His vision was prophetic; but his tribe's position far in the heart of the Island gave them a security which many of the coast dwelling tribes presently lost.
The tragic end of kinglike Heuheu, with fifty of his tribespeople, in 1846, is spoken of to this day by the old people of the Taupo country as an act of the Maori gods. It was the gods of wild nature at any rate; the forces of Ruwaimoko against which man is powerless. The story of that historic landslide from Hipaua's steam-soaked and flooded slopes was told me by one of the only three people who escaped from Te Rapa village.
This survivor, whom I was fortunate enough to find at Waihi village in the year 1900—fifty-four years after the disaster which entombed his people—was a white-haired ancient warrior named Tokena te Kerehi. He was one of the younger sons of the great Te Heuheu. He said he was grown up and tattooed on the body as well as the face, at the time of the midnight landslip. His narrative, which I have placed on record, is too long to reproduce here; but one or two leading incidents may be mentioned.
(Born 1865, died 1921).
The son of the chief who gave the sacred mountains to the Government of New Zealand.
He said that the high priest Te Pahau had prophesied that Te Heuheu would not die by the hand of man, but by the stroke of the gods; and truly this was fulfilled. There was a thunderstorm early on the night of the disaster, and it was alarming to the people of Te Heuheu's household, and seemed to threaten the village as the lightning flashed downward and the guns of heaven crashed. Te Heuheu took his famous sacred greenstone máeráe Pahikaure in hand, a weapon of wondrous mana, and climbing to the roof of his house he essayed to quell the spirits of earth and sky. He loudly recited his prayers to avert the death-stroke from the sky, and after thus invoking the gods of his race and the spirits of his sacred ancestors he returned to his house. It was in the midnight hours when all but one or two were asleep that that destruction fell on the kainga. Te Rapa was close to the lake shore, fair in the mouth of the valley of the Wai-mataii and the steamy gulch and slopes of Hipaua. It was a challenge to fate. A fortunate wakeful one was young Tokena te Kerehi. When the hillside came down and buried the village he was outside his house; he was restless, for the night was ominous. He was all but buried as he ran—there was no time to warn the sleepers—and only escaped at last by climbing up a leaning tree, a moari or swinging tree of the young people, at the lake edge. Old Heuheu might have escaped but he tried to save his wives. When the horror-stricken people from the other villages gathered, and, after many days, were able to dig out the buried chief and his household, they found his favourite wife lying near him with the precious myáeráe Pahikaure, the sacred talismanic weapon of the family, clasped to her breast. The chief's house was the only one uncovered. The great hole dug there was still to be seen when I was there in 1900. The other houses overwhelmed were left under the deep covering of clay.
In the year 1910, the bones of the great Heuheu were searched for on Tongariro. The cave in which they were deposited in 1850 was found, and the skeleton was recovered and brought down to Waihi. A few days later another horo or landslide came down the water-logged steaming valley alongside the landslide of 1846; it was a larger slip which went out a long way into the lake. There was only one person killed by this slip, which took place in the daytime. A curious coincidence, one of several strange occurrences at that time discussed by the Maoris.
The late Te Heuheu Tukino, M.L.C., told me that the skull of his grandfather, which he viewed and wept over when it was borne down from the sacred mountain, was exceptionally large; and that the great man must have been 6 feet 5 inches or 6 feet 6 inches in height.
The name Heuheu has puzzled many people interested in native nomenclature. Its right pronunciation, too, is difficult to some, but it presents no trouble when the Maori vowels are learned. “Hay-ooh-hay-ooh,” pronounced quickly so that the vowels easily coalesce, gives the correct sound. The story of the name-giving, as told to me by the late Te Heuheu Tukino, takes us back a hundred and fifty years—six generations. The story is over-long to tell here; enough just now to explain that it means “brushwood” or jungly growth; the story of an over-grown grave, the tomb of a near kinsman of the chief Tukino, the first Heuheu's father.
The great Te Heuheu's younger brother Iwikau became head of the clan on the death of the sacred Ariki in 1846. He had been a warrior of renown, a famous wielder of the taiaha. He was a kindly old man, in the experience of early pakeha visitors to South Taupo. In 1849–50 he accompanied the Governor, Sir George Grey, from Auckland to Pukawa, which became the headquarters of the tribe after the destruction of Te Rapa by the great landslip. The first resident missionary at South Taupo, the Rev. Thomas Samuel Grace, who settled there in 1850, found in Iwikau a friend and protector. The chief was a leading man in the movement to set up a Maori King, and he was offered the kingship himself but declined and suggested Potatau te Wherowhero as a more suitable head. Upon that suggestion the chiefs assembled at Pukawa acted—the date was November, 1856—and old Potatau was proclaimed King at Ngaruawahia and Rangiaowhia.
(Continued on page 41.)
The world is too full of “fixers.” I don't mean people who fix things, but rather people who say: “Let me fix it”; “Leave it to me”; and “Here! I'll show you how to do it.” Most dictators are “fixers in a big way.” All the “Nosey Parkers” of this trying world are “fixers,” whether they “fix” egg-beaters or empires.
The mark of the fixer is that he leaves everything he “fixes” in a fix. He is the owner of an addled ego which deludes him into the belief that anything he thinks he can do must be better than anything anybody else can do. Thus the trail of devastation left in the wake of the world's “fixers.” whether domestic or dynastic.
For ages the wild works of the big-time “fixer” have smeared the pages of history with the blood of innocent non-fixers and, until the earth is finally “fixed,” this urge to pull things to bits just to see if it is possible to put them together again, will keep popping up in the methylated mentality of the fuddled “fixer.” People who do things because they know from training and experience that they can do them are the antithesis of the “fixer.” The completed job is their only advertisement. But the way of the “fixer” is strewn with bits that won't fit.
The household “fixer” can't make and break empires, but these are about the only things that are safe from his morbid machinations. We know his works because haven't most of us been household “fixers,” or domestic dabblers, ourselves—before we learnt that it is cheaper to get a plumber to fix the gas than a doctor to fix the result of our fixing the gas?
If there is one quality the household “fixer” has in plenty it is courage. He will tackle anything from the drainage system to a wristlet watch. Nothing that can blow up, fa” down, unwind or come unstuck, is safe from his misplaced ardour.
He can put up swinging bookshelves which are one-tenth bookshelves and nine-tenths swinging. He can assemble a radio receiving set which will do everything except receive and which looks like a cross between a boiler-house in Bedlam and the plan of a jam factory done by Heath Robinson in shorthand. He builds fowl houses which are so tottery on their pins that the hens lay scrambled eggs. His dog kennels are calculated to drive the best dog to the dogs. He can repair the sewing machine so that it goes—in leaps and bounds (one leap, two bounds, and one for his knob). The rooms he papers look like the hanging gardens of Babylon after a midnight garden-party thrown by the Babylonian Borstal boys. He mends taps so that they fail to flow through the faucet but squirt out through the top like Pohutu at play. If the caliphont won't run he “fixes” it so that it can't even walk. Locks and clocks are as putty in his hands. He can take a lock to pieces as prettily as a professional and if, when reassembled, it is no good for locking purposes, it makes a good sinker for deep-sea fishing. He can rejuvenate the grandfather clock so completely that it becomes infantilely inarticulate; but (household hint) old grandfather clocks which have been “mended” make handy meat safes.
Saturday is the “fixer's” big day (no, sir! handy men never play golf; they would rather stay home and “fix” golf clubs). In the suburbs you hear him with hammer and saw and axe and wrench adding a few more grey hairs to his wife's permanent wave.
How many brave feminine hearts miss a beat—even a whole octave—at the sound of those sinister syllables. “I'll fix it”? How many of the nearest and drearest of the fecund “fixer” wish that their husbands were just ordinary lazy dull duds like you and me? But the actual destruction and annihilation is not all. There is the weekly hunt for the fixer's tools, to add bitterness to the aloes in the cannubial cup of the “fixer's” bitter half.
As the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, so sounds the horrid cry of the maddened fixer.
“Where's that saw?” “Who's had the pincers?” “Find the axe!” Little children fly whimpering to their mother's skirts; the cat takes off for the rhododendrons; the dog moans beneath the wash tubs, the hair bristling on its neck; for the shadow of
The saw is found under the wood pile where Willie has been sharpening it on the crowbar. The coalman has deposited half a ton of Westport on the pincers. The axe! Well, who ever had an axe that could be found? Little Lancelot (being too young to realise that “we men must stick together”) divulges that Willie has been engaged in erecting a fort, somewhere in Noman's Land, to resist the Italian invader. On such slender evidence is Willie taken away to “another place,” and wild cries testify to dirty deeds “down under.”
Even a spot of plumbing is powerless to deter a real he-man fixer. (Fixers, anyway, are only plumbers who have been cheated by Fate out of their birthright—or wrong).
No fact is stranger than fixing. Have you never heard a fixer's wife imploring him, with straws in her hair, to spare the plumbing? No? Well you have never seen the depths of despair plumbed. A ship's fireman sobbing for beer, a cow calling its calf, even a citizen paying his income tax, sound as glee songs compared with the passionate poignancy in the voice of the fixer's wife. But all in vain!
“Leave it to me,” says the fixer. “It's only an airchoke in the what'dyer'call'it; I just unscrew the thingamy, pull out the brass gadget and blow through it.”
Says his wife. “You know what happened last time we got an artichoke in the what'der'call'it. I can still see the mark on your head.”
But of course the fixer must fix. The dread virus clamours in his veins. Result: One doctor, one fire brigade, one plumber with mate!
The average “fixer” can do more damage with an axe than the average
Watch him build a fowlhouse with only his trusty axe and a tin of nails. As casually as the man who mapped Melbourne he scratches out the ground plan with a stick. Then he puts in the piles. Then he lops off the joists with his axe to the required length. Then he finds that he has amputated too much. Then he extracts said piles and replants them. Then he finds the joists are too long; he slices off another length, but discovers that he has overdone it again. So he replants the piles and repeats the aforesaid processes until the fowlhouse, which originally was designed to hold twelve hens, has shrunk, until a china egg would feel crowded in it. So he decides that he won't build a fowlhouse, after all, and uses the joists for a wireless aerial, which falls down on grandpa. Of course there are husbands who can mend things that will stay mended, and make things which stay made; but they are so rare as to be practically museum pieces. There are few men who have entered upon the “sere and yellow” who cannot say:—
We gathered a deal of amusement from watching the crowd upon the Junction platform. Innocent passers-by were invested with the most fantastic characters which we created for them from the way they wore their hats, the shape of their noses, the manner in which they walked and talked. Three of them we wove into the following story, and should they happen to recognise themselves, a circumstance that is extremely unlikely, I hope we may be forgiven!
Sidney Harris woke from a sound sleep with a sense of security such as he had not enjoyed for many weeks. For a while he lay contentedly listening to the patter of wheels and watched the pale sunbeams of early morning weave back and forth across the floor of his sleeping car compartment. His compartment! To the man who for years had travelled in nothing more pretentious than a second-class smoker the privacy and quiet luxuriousness of his surroundings was impressive. He basked in a feeling of substance and power; the power of wealth, the power that had transformed him from a pinch-penny clerk to … Abruptly his eyes dulled with something akin to fear and the tense lines about his mouth deepened as his thoughts went creeping back through channels grown darkly familiar.
Back to the evening when three thousand pounds in unchecked notes lay in the Walton Company's safe, that impregnable safe of which he had by chance acquired the combination.
Back to the nerve-racking days which followed the discovery of the theft.
The gruelling cross-examination to which each member of the staff had been subjected. The mutual suspicion. The thought that one was being spied upon, watched, for some incautious move that would betray him as the guilty party.
But nobody had seriously suspected Sidney Harris. Why should they? That ineffectually conscientious rabbit of the staff had been able to establish a perfect alibi on the night of the theft, and his conduct since had been absolutely above suspicion.
He chuckled to think of his cleverness, many a man would have given himself away, he reflected, unable to resist the temptation to spend. He had not so much as bought an extra tin of tobacco. In his shabby clothes and patched shoes he had carried the fortune home, and in his shabby clothes he had come to work for many weeks after it had been secreted beneath the flooring of his bed-sitting-room.
For two months Sidney Harris had spent not a penny more than his salary had warranted, and then one evening he was drowned. A bathing-shed caretaker had found his clothes still hanging on their peg long after the beach had grown chilly and deserted.
A strong ebb-tide was swirling past the rocks at the seaward end of the bay, and it was greatly feared that Sidney Harris would never be seen again.
While the coroner's inquest was discussing the uninteresting relics, the patched shoes, the cheap flannel trousers, and the boarding-house towel, a Mr. Maxwell was emerging butterfly-like from the chrysalis of Sidney Harris.
He emerged very slowly and un-obstrusively in a mean lodging almost next door to the police station in the heart of the city. Where Harris had thinning hair, Mr. Maxwell's pate was covered with a well-thatched, almost fool-proof toupáee. Harris had been clean-shaven, Mr. Maxwell sported a moustache. Harris had worn spectacles, baggy trousers and a felt hat. Mr. Maxwell, though it hurt his eyes to do so, spurned the use of eye-glasses, and dressed in a very neat blue suit and bowler hat.
When Mr. Maxwell was fully emerged from his chrysalis state, he spent a night and a day at a comfortable family hotel, and reserved a whole sleeping compartment for himself on the Limited the following evening. He needed a whole compartment because in one of his immaculate suitcases were carefully packed two thousand nine hundred and sixty pounds in un-checked bank notes.
It had all been ridiculously easy, he told himself as he lit a cigarette and watched the smoke go drifting upwards, although there had been bad moments. The feeling of utter loneliness that had at times oppressed him. Nights when he had started awake in a sweat of terror. Days when his imagination had played him tricks and he crouched panic-stricken in the stifling heat of his little room. Then there was the afternoon when venturing out to a cinema, a man, mistaking him for an acquaintance, had tapped him on the shoulder. The evening when thunderous blows had resounded upon the door of his room and, paralysed with fear, he had cowered helplessly on his bed. The blows had not been repeated, and stumbling footsteps had retreated while a convivial voice sang:
That had been a bad moment, right enough, but … there came a sharp rap upon the door of his compartment. Sidney Harris, or rather Mr. Maxwell as we must now call him, started, letting fall his cigarette. The knock was repeated.
“Who's there?” he gasped.
“Frankton Junction in fifteen minutes, sir,” a cheerful voice replied, “time for breakfast!”
Mr. Maxwell groped under his pillow for his handkerchief and wiped the beads of cold perspiration from his forehead, then he climbed out of his bunk and fumbled through the pockets of his overcoat until he found a travelling flask. He swallowed a mouthful of brandy.
“Musn't get the jim-jams,” he muttered, making a wry face.
In less than three hours now he would be in Auckland. Courage returned to him at the thought. Although he had never been in the northern city, it had always presented itself to him as a fine adventurous place, the gateway to the Pacific—the World. There would be no possible chance of his being recognised there. He would slip across to Australia, then, changing his identity once again—Canada, the United States, London!
Beyond the windows, meadowlands were giving way to scattered groups of houses, a water tower on a hill wheeled
After breakfast, Mr. Maxwell decided to sit for awhile in the smoking-car, and, having removed the suitcase containing his fortune from his sleeping compartment to the rack above his head, he settled himself comfortably in a corner seat. All about him was the buzz of conversation, all-night travellers refreshed by their meal were discussing the morning papers with crisp looking men who had boarded the train at the stop to make the early morning run in the interests of business. There was an atmosphere of briskness, of suppressed excitement almost, as the train settled down to the two-hour gallop that was the last lap of its long journey.
The country was growing vaguely familiar to Mr. Maxwell. Long years ago he had lived, a barefooted youngster of seven or eight in a farmhouse back in the low range of hills to the east. He pondered a moment. Somewhere just before Taupiri it would be, a rambling sort of place with toe-toe bushes all around it and a belt of gloomy pines at the back.
Memories came thronging, but were interrupted by a stout, red-faced man who entered the car from the vestibule, and, glancing about him a moment, seated himself with a friendly nod opposite Mr. Maxwell. He lighted a cigarette, unfolded a morning paper and after reading for a little while threw it aside in disgust.
“Heaven help us!” he exclaimed, then noting Mr. Maxwell's stare of surprise, “Don't mind me,” he laughed. “I'm not in a very good humour this morning, and the paper does nothing to improve it.” He paused looking keenly at Mr. Maxwell.
“You know,” he said presently “whenever I travel by this morning train I am filled with a spirit of what the Americans call ‘boost.’ It comes from watching the activities of this district as one passes through it,” he indicated with a sweep of his hand the countryside speeding past the window. The warm red roofs of farmhouses, the dairy cattle, cream wagons and butter factories.
“They present themselves to me as a drama, if I may be permitted to be so flowery; the epic drama of a young nation going to work. So I want to know all about it,” he added with a smile, “and feel that everyone else knows about it, too. I should like to read about it in the newspapers and feel that all this work and industry and nation building is being recognised. And do I read of these things?” He picked up the offending news sheet.
“Listen,” he said, “this is what I read. ‘New development in the Walton safe-robbing case. Police are reticent, but it is understood that they are investigating a fresh clue to the identity of the thief who, last November, rifled the safe of the Walton Company, making a clear get-away with £3,000.’”
Mr. Maxwell's heart missed a beat, his mouth went dry, and a wave of nausea swept over him.
The train roared over the Ngaruawahia bridge.
“Do you suppose,” the red-faced man waved his hand again, “that these people, these toiling farmers are any better off for hearing about the Walton Company,” he jerked the question sharply, “What is the Walton Company?”
“A—an importing firm, I believe,” Mr. Maxwell managed to reply.
“Exactly, well, imagine yourself a farmer. Say, for instance, that you lived in that house over there—” Mr. Maxwell followed the direction of the man's hand, and his jaw dropped. There, exactly as he remembered it twenty odd years ago, stood his old home. The toe-toe bushes, the rust-
“Suppose you had just come in from the milking shed,” the man was saying, “four hours of hard graft before breakfast, the cows are feeling the hot weather, and the yield of milk is down. So is the cream cheque. There is a letter from the factory manager informing you that from the first of the month the price of butter-fat is to be further reduced.
“Then you open your paper, hoping against hope to read of something that will give you a grain of encouragement, that will make you feel your efforts are not all in vain, that prices will soon mend, and what do you find? The Walton Company has fresh hopes of recovering its £3,000!”
The stout man paused triumphantly, his eyes, cynical, very blue eyes they were, seemed to be probing Mr. Maxwell's inmost thoughts.
“Wouldn't you say, under the circumstances,” he continued, “'Devil take the Walton Company!'”? You'd feel, knowing that as soon as you had finished your breakfast, you had to go and pull turnips, mend a fence, maybe, and dig a drain round the pig-sty, a
“Just as I had?” Mr. Maxwell's voice in spite of himself, rose in a panicky crescendo.
“Not you personally, of course,” said the stout man, reassuringly, “I was referring to our hypothetical farmer!”
Mr. Maxwell rose from his seat and reached for his suitcase.
“Well,” he said, more steadily, “perhaps you're right. I think I'll get back to my compartment.”
“Sure,” the stout man nodded, “excuse me,” he said, “it's getting very warm in here,” and with a quick movement let down the window half-way. The sudden uprush of air caught Mr. Maxwell's almost fool-proof toupee and lifted it from his scalp.
“Oh, forgive me!” said the man retrieving it with a grin, and Mr. Maxwell, scarlet-faced, thrust it into his pocket and hurried down the car.
Back in his compartment he sat a long time, trembling, and nervously biting his knuckles. All the security that he had felt earlier in the day had vanished. All the hunted fear of the past weeks returned, overwhelming him, so that once again he cowered unable to move.
Huntly with its slag heaps, then … the broad Waikato with a big stern-wheel steamer breasting the current, brimmed close to the line before he regained a measure of composure. Then he arose, adjusted his toupee, brushed his clothes, and was about to extract a novel from his suitcase, when the train plunged into the tunnel at the southern end of Mercer Station.
In the clamour and darkness he did not hear or see the door of his compartment opened, and, turning, as the station buildings flashed by, was shocked to find the stout, red-faced man regarding him with a faintly cynical smile.
“You've made a mistake, haven't you?” Mr. Maxwell demanded curtly, “this is my compartment.”
“I don't think so,” the man replied, “and that answers both your question and your statement. Your name isn't really Maxwell, is it?”—indicating the reservation label.
Mr. Maxwell made a movement towards the bell push which would summon the sleeping-car attendant.
“I wouldn't do that,” said the other drawing from his vest pocket an identification card in a leather case.
“You see I'm from Police Headquarters—and it's my duty to arrest you, Mr. Harris, in connection with the Walton Company robbery.
“Now,” he added briskly, “shall we take it easy, or do you want me to call in a couple of the boys and make a fuss?”
Mr. Maxwell stared at him in silence. It had come then, the dread moment through which he had lived a thousand times in the past three months. But it brought with it none of the sensations that he had experienced in imagination. There was none of the fear that had started him from his dreams, no panic, no bitterness of remorse; rather, a sense of overwhelming relief that he
“Let's take it easy,” he said, and, sitting down, buried his face in his hands.
“That's the idea,” said the stout man, “no weapons, I suppose?” touching him expertly here and there.
The train swept on, green fields, orchards, suburban villas. Buckland, Pukekohe, Drury, the passengers in other parts of the train began to fidget and tidy themselves, stowing magazines into suitcases, rolling up rugs, all unconscious of the little episode drawing to a close in a compartment of the sleeping-car.
“Would it be against the rules,” said Sidney Harris to the stout man, “for you to tell me how you bowled me out? It might help to pass an irksome twenty minutes.”
The stout man scratched his chin—then he rose and, opening the compartment door, called “Peters,” and a burly man with a clipped moustache entered.
“Pencil and notebook,” the stout man commanded, waving him towards the seat, and the other producing the articles required, sat down.
“If you know your poets fairly well, Mr. Harris,” said the stout man, “you will remember the quotation ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!’ In your case she was apparently not only furious but vindictive. She had, I understand, auburn hair, grey eyes, and a somewhat outspoken manner; she works on the staff of the Walton Company.”
“Madeline Brown!” cried Sidney Harris.
The stout man inclined his head, “You ought to know,” he said. “Anyway she thinks you treated her rather badly. Before the robbery it appears that you had what might be called an ‘understanding’ with each other. You exchanged photographs, went to the pictures and several dances together, and even, I believe, went so far as to discuss ways and means of marriage.
“Then came the robbery, and a slight rift in the lute. A woman's intuition, particularly that of a woman who imagines herself in love, though not altogether to be relied upon, is a very subtle thing, Mr. Harris. It picks up unconsidered trifles and turns them into facts. It might easily turn pre-occupation into deliberate slight.
“Doubtless you were preoccupied; a man with three thousand pounds unlawfully come by naturally would be. I expect you were secretive, too, and not so frank as you had formerly been.
“However that may be the old order was changed, and the seeds of suspicion planted, for it seems that she was not quite convinced that you were drowned.
“The day after the tragedy she went round to your lodgings at lunch-time, and found amongst your effects a bathing suit!
“Bad slip that, Mr. Harris,” the stout man shook his head gravely, “and had Miss Brown not appropriated it, it might have started a few inquiries there and then. Of course, you may have had two bathing suits, but Miss Brown who knew you pretty well didn't think so. At any rate, her suspicions were increased, although she did not impart them to anybody. Possibly she was still loyal to you, possibly her intuition having assured her
“One of the differences between a professional and an amateur criminal, Mr. Harris,” said the stout man after a pause, “is that the amateur in the case of a man like yourself, is a creature of habit. All your life you have been doing the same things in very much the same way, and so, because you had always gone to the Van Diemen Hotel when you wanted to make a bit of a splash, you went and stayed there the night before you left.
“Miss Brown watched that hotel pretty closely, and the evening you left, saw what she took to be your back, at a telephone. You probably don't know it, but your back, unless you can grow a hump on it or otherwise distort it is a difficult thing to disguise. She was so sure that it was your back, that, even when you turned round and revealed yourself as Mr. Maxwell, she hid behind a pillar and took stock of your features.
“That momentary hesitation on her part was your final undoing; for immediately upon leaving the telephone, your luggage was brought out and you got into a taxi.
“Miss Brown's indignation boiled over, and from the Van Diemen she went down to Police Headquarters.
“The train had left before they got her story—not that we should have tried to stop you even if it had not. We wanted further proof, and so I was acquainted by phone with all the facts and instructed to come up to Hamilton from Auckland last night.
“The rest was really very simple, you had often talked to Miss Brown about the old home at Taupiri. The registrar supplied any other details I might have wanted, and the window which I opened in the smoking car dislodged that little extra bit of hair you have grown!”
Sidney Harris shrugged his shoulders, and, smiling faintly, turned towards the window. Blue water, sparkling in the sunlight, trim pleasure craft, a big steamer making port. Peters shut his notebook with a snap, and the stout man began to gather up the late Mr. Maxwell's suitcases.
Presently the train, panting as though with the exertion of its eighty-six mile sprint, drew alongside the platform. The crisp business men hurried towards the barrier, tourists and holiday makers followed more slowly.
At the last, walking between two tall men, looking neither to right nor left, went Sidney Harris to the lengthy requittal of a moment's indiscretion!
As the year of New Zealand's Centenary as a British Colony approaches, interest in the records of the country's many-coloured story will increase. There are still with us many old people who can tell a tale of adventure in the breaking-in period and the days of the Maori War. The older generation of Maoris, too, in the Waikato, Taranaki and Bay of Plenty could, if they liked, add their stories to those already put on record. But all the old chiefs have gone; the men who were the leaders of their tribes in the numerous campaigns repose in the soil for which they fought. Fortunately their stories have not gone unrecorded; their side of the long struggle is in print.
But the pioneering period within the recollection of most of the old New Zealanders is narrowing in. We must now include many who came here after the close of the Maori Wars, and who still found a vast amount of adventure and hard-faring in the task of making homes for themselves in unbroken country. The end of the period of the pioneer settlers must be fixed approximately, I think, as corresponding to the end of the sailing-ship passenger period. After 1880 few British and other immigrants came to New Zealand in a “wind-ship.” The beautiful clippers and semi-clippers of the New Zealand Shipping Co. and the Shaw Savill and Albion Co., carried in their day many thousands of new settlers out to the new country. One of the last to bring passengers was the Lady Jocelyn, a splendid old three-skysail-yarder, troopship of the Crimean War and Maori War days, whose last important immigrant voyage was with the second party of North of Ireland settlers for Katikati in 1878. The Lady Jocelyn, wonder of the merchant navy, is still afloat on the Thames, her moorings down for good.
Those pioneers of Katikati, 1875–78, found no militia duty to complicate their efforts at home-making, but it was sufficiently rough and wild without that. They had no roads at first, the only access to their scrub and fern sections was by the harbour and creeks of Tauranga. They lived in raupo whares at first; it was a bewildering place to the farmers and men of various professions from well - settled secure Ulster. But they buckled in with success, a quicker success than that which came to the bush pioneers of North and South Auckland, where the great forests of tall timber had to be attacked. Katikati, which celebrated last month (September) the sixtieth anniversary of its founding, had a comparatively easy victory over untrimmed nature, albeit they had many reverses of prosperity. But the ups were more than the downs.
Many people no doubt have been a trifle puzzled by that name, the site of the Taranaki aerodrome where thousands have waited to greet trans-Tasman fliers from Australia. Bell Block has nothing to do with a city block. There is a story of pioneer pluck and Maori war-thrill in the name. This pleasant rural spot, with its small farms and its aircraft ground, eight miles from New Plymouth, was a battleground in the fighting Sixties, when the English settlers who had been located there, refused to abandon it, and built a stockade to defend it. The Maori name is Hua. The English name is accounted for by the fact that this block of land was bought from the Taranaki Maoris by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Dillon Bell, father of the present Right Hon. Sir Francis Dillon Bell. He was the New Zealand Company's agent in New Plymouth, 1847–1848.
Originally consisting of .1,500 acres, the Bell Block was enlarged by further purchases, and in 1860 when the first Taranaki war began there were about seventy Englishmen and their sons of fighting age in the settlement. These sturdy sons of Devon and Cornwall soon had a hundred bullock-cart loads of timber on the spot selected for their fort, a leveltopped hill overlooking the little village.
Sketches of that day, by an artist settler, Frank Arden, show a stout stockade, a blockhouse and flanking towers. This compact little fort was occupied for several years as a useful half-way post between New Plymouth and Waitara. In 1860–61 it was customary to send a column of two hundred soldiers, with a howitzer (drawn by bullocks) to escort the provisions and ammunition carts from New Plymouth to Bell Block, along the rough Devon Road, the main thoroughfare northward, where hundreds of motorcars now speed daily along a smooth highway. Not a trace now remains of that hill-fort; the farmers' dairy cows graze on the rich grass where the palisades bristled and field-guns sent shot and shell over the fields at the Maori raiders on the bush-edge.
Dr. Heber, our recent visitor from Monte Video, Uruguay, in his travels through New Zealand viewing the land and the products thereof, has expressed pleasure at the increasing use of the horse on the farms of the country. Machinery for some time displaced the horse-power throughout the land, and those who liked to see a good horse grieved to contemplate its gradual disappearance. But the horse is coming back; the tractor is being discarded by many a farmer.
It has been noted, too, that there is a decided tendency to return to the horse in America. In England, Scotland, and Ireland, of course, the horse has never been displaced so largely as in New Zealand; the strong hold the saddle- and the plough-horse and carthorse have in the Old Land will never be shaken loose by mechanical contrivances.
Motor highways prevent the horse coming back for roadster use; but in a pastoral country like this there will always be great use for the saddle-horse. A good horse is excellent company; I do not think any motorist has ever felt disposed to pat his shining radiator on the neck or address kindly soothing words to the magneto or the carburetter.
Please get out your thick woollen undies. Don your heavy sweater and your furlined coat. We are going up into the King Country. As a matter of fact, the King Country is gloriously warm in the summer, but in the winter (which is the season in which I saw it) it is cold.
“Bracing,” say the inhabitants, sturdily. But bleak as it was, I could not help seeing that Ohakune was beautiful. I stayed at the King's Court Hotel there, and the view from my window was something one never forgets. There, the hills compete with each other for height, grandeur and beauty. The closer hills are bush-clad in a hundred different greens; the further ones are blue with shadowy snow, but the topmost ones are gleaming white, glinting crystalline and opalescent in the sun
Thirty years ago Ohakune was a dense primeval forest. When the Main Trunk Railway line was put through it, it suddenly became a commercial proposition—a vast source of wealth. The tall trees which had been for centuries the home of bellbird and tui, were now seen as material for the homes of men. Sawmills were quickly established all along the line, hundreds of men were employed, wages were good, and a happy and prosperous colony of men and women took charge of the lonely forest clearing.
The forest giants issued their challenge to the axeman, and he valiantly responded. In a few short years the landscape became plentifully dotted with spirals of steam-exhaust from the busy mills. Where all had been silence for thousands of years, now all was noise—the whistle of the saw as it slid quickly and easily through soft wood, the harsh scream it gives when it rips its way through harder timber, the short sharp bark of the log-hauler as it dragged its burden from its ancient bed, and, above all, the deep-voiced singing of the men at work.
But now the steam spirals are gone, leaving a certain desolation in the landscape. The mill was a remorseless foe to beauty, and it left the country littered with stumps and small trees usually battered and ragged looking, depressing beyond words. But some courageous and far-seeing souls have already started to tidy up the debris. What was formerly forest is now emerging as beautiful dairying land. Root crops grow to perfection in the ash which remains from the fire which the farmers put through the gutted bush. When the rest of the North Island was stricken by drought and most root crops had failed at the beginning of this year, little Ohakune sent 1,490 tons of greens and potatoes to the various markets. Ohakune is gradually becoming famous as potato land. Ten tons to the acre is not exceptional, and a crop of seventeen tons to the acre is authentically recorded. Whilst there, I was told of one man who made £100 an acre (gross) from peas during a good year. So, you see, though the forest is done, forest land is not. The King Country has still a great future ahead of it.
And now I must introduce you to my friend, Mr. Johnnie Murdie, who drove me all over this district. Johnnie is a small farmer with a large intellect, and a dry sense of humour. He took me to the place on the railway where the line going South joined the line coming North long ago.
“Sir Joseph Ward drove a gold spike to commemorate the half-way mark,” he told me. “There's still a sort of memorial stone with the spike embedded in concrete in memory of the great day.”
“I wonder you don't go and remove it,” I said.”
“Two reasons why I don't,” said Johnnie quizzically, “First, it isn't real gold; I tried it. Second, you can't get it out; it's too firmly set in the concrete.”
“You tried that, too, eh?”
“Look at that hillock,” said Johnnie, disregarding my question. “That is one of the highest points on the New Zealand railway; it is 2,457 feet above sea-level. It is called Horopito.”
We came to a viaduct built at a dizzy height above a wooded gorge.
“This bridge,” said Johnnie, “is more than 200 feet above the ground, and if you drop a hammer off the bridge it takes you a whole hour to climb down and fetch it.”
“Why a hammer? Why not a stone ? Does a hammer fall slower than a stone?”
Johnnie grinned. “I mention hammers because that's what we used to drop when we were building it. I was one of the carpenters. When we got sick of the bridge we used to take an excursion into the gorge, after dropped hammers.”
The day we went to National Park, Johnnie lost his best cap and borrowed
“If you imagine for an instant that I would have such a disreputable, villainous-looking man for my chauffeur, you're mistaken,” I said. “But as a friend of mine you're quite de rigueur.
So in we went. Mr. and Mrs Cobbe, hosts at the Chateau, received us kindly and showed us all around. The lounge is particularly fine—a lofty, imposing room with plate glass windows larger than any I have ever seen. These windows frame the landscape—beautiful views of Tongariro, Ruapehu, and Ngauruhoe. The room is furnished fatly and voluptuously, and in the centre of it is a very good floor where the young visitors may dance o' nights.
Mrs. Cobbe took me upstairs to see some of their more sumptuous rooms, including the royal suite where Prince Henry stayed early in the year. The bedroom had two beds, a double and a single one. The carpets and hangings were of old rose, the furniture of beautifully figured walnut. The bathroom adjoined, a simple affair of white tiles and chromium plating.
We went to inspect the bridal suite, which I liked better. The two beds (one double, one single) were of silvery ash and sycamore; the furniture matched, the hangings were bright and cheerful. It was not so imposing as the royal suite, but it was considerably more pleasing.
Then, with Mr. Cobbe, we went to visit the ski-house and the cellars where people dry their clothes after coming in from the mountain. Everything necessary for mountain sports may be hired at the Chateau—skis and ski-sticks may be had for half-a-crown a day. Waterproof capes may be had for 1/6, so may boots. Strides are hired for 2/-, socks for 9d., gloves for 3d. If you go for a day or two it pays to hire them; but those who stay long usually take their own.
There are six guides attached to the Chateau; they will go with you and direct a mountain ascent for £1 a day; also they teach ski-ing. The chief guide is Carl Risberg, a Swede, a wonderful mountaineer and a delightful personality.
Mrs. Cobbe offered us afternoon tea which I accepted with joy. Johnnie Murdie hesitated.
“If we take their tea, we're the guests of the Government,” he growled, taking me aside.
“Uh-huh.”
“But I'm against the Government. I'm against the increase of the police force.”
“Well, you can't do anything about it till the election. If we eat two shillings-worth of their cakes, they'll have so much less to spend on the police.”
Johnnie sat down at the table.
“Pass those sandwiches,” he said firmly.
The next day Johnnie invited me to go with him to the local sheep-dog trials. Reader, you had better come with us. Put on your oldest tweeds, and bring your shooting-stick or a rug to sit on when you get tired. Ready? Off we go!
The sun sparkles with a sort of crackling brilliancy. The air is like iced champagne. The hills seem to have heaped themselves a little nearer to the town and the road is thronged with bronze-faced men. They are all going to the dogs.
Have you ever been present at sheep-dog trials? If you have not, you have still much to learn of what Kipling calls “the true first friend.” No dog is quite so wonderfully specialized in his intelligence as the sheep-dog. Another sort of dog will do wonders in the drawing-room or on the garden lawn. Command him to “beg” and he will beg your dear wee pup to be, or bid him “die” and he will die with great solemnity.
A sheep-dog is unique in that he can be controlled when he is half a mile away. At the trials we saw this done time and again.
On this green circle, which is outlined by upturned sods, stands the shepherd and his dog. Far away on yonder brown hill are three white specks—the sheep. Ready? Off!
“Whee-hee-oo!” whistles the shepherd, meaning “Go and fetch them!”
The dog bounds away, through fences, over hills, down gullies. Suddenly, on a rise, he stops, crouching, and gingerly slinks off to the right. He has seen the sheep. So as not to frighten them he makes a wide detour and works round behind them.
“Whee-hee-oo!” whistles the shepherd.
The dog drives them down towards us. He is trotting rather too quickly, and the sheep are stampeding.
“Whoo!” whistles the man, meaning “Stop.”
The dog stops. The sheep slow up; the dog walks forward sedately. The sheep come quietly over the hill, down the gully, through the gate. Now they see the man and run wildly to the right.
“Whee!” goes the whistle and the man points to the right. The dog trots quietly round and heads them off.
“Whoo!”
The dog stops, one foot in the air, alert, poised. Then very gently, very quietly, he drives them into the turfed ring. The man stands in the middle. The sheep go round as in a circus, the dog gently driving them and stopping like stone when they become frightened.
“Reverse!” calls the judge.
The dog turns and gently heads the sheep the other way, round and round. Ah, wonderful, wonderful… .
The spectators clap and cheer, But I cannot clap. I stand there wringing my hands, my eyes glazing. There's something about a dog that goes right to my heart.
Another man and another dog stand in the ring. This dog has a humourous
“Whoo!” whistles the man, meaning “Stop.” But Rover does not stop. Not he! The sheep are in a panic. They scatter all over the face of the hill.
“Split sheep,” writes the judge in his little book.
“Whee-hee-oo!” whistles the man, meaning “Fetch them here.” Rover turns and barks defiance at his master.
“Rover, you—–!” yells the man.
“Wait till I catch you!”
“—–—–—–!!”
Rover brings the sheep. His tail is a-quiver with merriment. He laughs aloud. The sheep run among the spectators. Rover flops down and fairly splits his sides at the joke.
“Time!” calls the judge.
“Damn!” says the man.
The training of a sheep dog is a labour of patience, tact, and discrimination. The well-trained dog does not bark and stampede the sheep, but moves about with precision and restraint. He will stop immediately upon command, sometimes with one foot in the air as he was about to step; but there he will stay, as if carved from stone, until his master's whistle releases him. Sometimes sheep, being headed, will turn upon the dog and stand at bay, and here is where the dog shows his admirable self-control. Crouching patiently, he backs the sheep, inch by inch, until they are in the required position. An ill-controlled dog, on the other hand, will lose his temper before an angry ewe. When confronted he will bark, snap or even bite. In judging the trials points are given for silence and for the master's command of the animal.
I had the pleasure of seeing a champion dog at work. If his owner could control his own right hand as he controls his wonderful dog he would be a master of any handicraft.
The two old mates chanced to meet in Auckland Domain and got talking about the old days. “I 'member the time,” said one, “when you could buy a prime leg o' mutton for a bob.” “Ah,” said the other, “and I mind the time when beer was threepence a pint and bacca sixpence a ounce. Not this here toasted bacca 'most everyone smokes now, of course.” “Not likely,” agreed his mate, “toasted's diff'rent to other bacca. I been smoking it this dozen years—and can you beat it?” “There's nothing to touch it!” declared the other with emphasis, “and mind you it couldn't do you no 'arm not if you smoked a pound of it a week. That's what toasting does!” This being carried unanimously the pair lit up and toddled off in quest of “'arf-a-'andle.” “Toasted” certainly has an irresistible appeal for smokers. Look at the demand for all five brands: Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold, and Desert Gold. Yes, and look at the imitations!—and avoid them!*
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“That's a nice pipe of yours,” remarked a passenger by the Tauranga express to a fellow traveller. The man addressed pulled the handsome silver mounted calabash he was smoking out of his mouth and regarded it fondly. “I won that there in a raffle,” he said, “and I wouldn't take two notes for it.” “Looks wo