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The New Zealand Railways Magazine is on sale through the principal book-sellers, or may be obtained post-free for 6/- per annum.
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Deputy-Controller and Auditor-General.
25/3/35.
A scene in the Eglinton Valley, South Island, New Zealand. “Where torrents sweep cold from white ranges To coasts of the fern-tree and vine.” —William Pember Reeves.
Each first of January the earth girds up its loins for its annual race around the sun, and as that is 92 1/2 million miles away and the earth must “keep its distance” on a well-defined elliptical course, there has to be some fast travelling to complete the circuit in the year allowed.
What makes the going still stiffer is that the sun himself sets out on a stately tour of 150 million miles every year, and the earth and other courtiers of the solar system have to trail along in attendance.
So, what with rolling round itself at a thousand miles an hour or so, keeping up with the sun in his inter-stellar travels, and also making a complete circuit of that same sun before the stroke of midnight on the next 31st December, this old globe of ours certainly has its work cut out to keep to schedule.
But what's a couple of million miles a day to the earth—when it's used to it? What happens on the earth during these travels is more to the point; for the years are the mile-posts of human progress that carry the story of mankind to date.
Education has been the greatest source of material advancement. It has had its ups and downs, but the upward movement has prevailed, until now the course is set for steady progression along well-tested lines.
The days when people drifted into the teaching game more by accident than by aptitude have gone by. No runaway sailor now gets a job through a friendly school committeeman; and a taste for chalk as an article of diet no longer gives prestige for pupil teachership in a State school.
Instead, the younger generation have the benefit of skilled tuition from their earliest years. Truby Kinged and Plunketed babies graduate, as their years go by, through model kindergarten, primary, intermediate, and secondary schools, to the highest branches of knowledge in technical and professional occupations, and they are guided all the way by scholarly, trained and graded teachers.
The profession of Education follows an idealism which ensures a wide and free spread of new knowledge as it becomes available. Revision is constantly carried on to relate new facts to former beliefs and theories.
Educationists have “seen their most cherished traditions knocked higher than Gilderoy's Kite”—and have been glad of it!
There is no “hush-hush” policy in the modern advancement of learning. It stands for a systematic, instead of a haphazard, approach to any problem. It rules out blind-alley methods, and its principal achievements are attained in the clear sunlight of knowledge above the clouds of guesswork.
The applied results of education are seen in all business affairs, and the Railways, in particular, have been apt pupils in learning the modern lessons of transport.
Four main mile-posts stand out to mark the principles of operation on the route of modern progress:
The first: The conviction that nothing happens by chance. This overrules a foolish dependence on the blind goddess “luck.”
The second: That to accomplish anything of value there must first be a clear understanding of the objective. This saves time and avoids waste of thought and material.
The third: That individual good is best served by those things which are for the public good—a valuable corrective against anti-social practices.
The fourth: That “the game's the thing”—bringing the spirit of sportsmanship into all the relations and activities of life.
From the point of view of the Dominion's national transport organisation, the year 1936 opens with distinctly bright prospects.
The Railway equipment is particularly well placed to meet the demands that the business of the new year is expected to make, and the Department has never been in a better position than now to provide cheap, punctual, fast and reliable transport.
Further, 1936 may be expected to see still greater development of those facilities which add to the attractiveness of our service.
We shall have rail-cars operating on important routes for the first time in the history of the Dominion.
The new terminal facilities at the Capital City will be well advanced and the obvious advantages of the improvements will be patent to all.
Improved wagons to deal with such traffic as fruit, butter, cheese and chilled beef, will be running in more plentiful supply than previously. Traffic conveyed in open wagons will be more adequately protected by the new and lighter type of tarpaulin just being introduced. The Department's own road services will be better developed, as well as the co-ordination of road and rail as between the Department and private interests.
The past year has seen a clearer understanding, especially amongst local bodies, of the Department's problem and its relation to the national interests; this understanding may be expected to develop still further during 1936. There will also be a further development of railway effort in combined publicity with the districts concerned in drawing attention to the attractions of the various resorts of the Dominion.
The new year may, in general, be expected to show a steady advance in the utility of the Railways as a national and economic service.
General Manager.
Rly. Publicity photos.)
The illustrations show: (1) Christ's College Boatsheds. (2) Christ's College Quadrangle. (3) Christ's College Memorial Hall. (4) Entrance to Provincial Council Chambers. (5), (8), (7), (8), Peeps at the Quadrangle, Canterbury College. (See article on p. 12.)
The task of defining the word “English” has puzzled world writers for centuries. However subtly-minded they may he, however acute as observers, however highly trained as critics, they are baffled to find the proper verbal symbols to explain the essential qualities of the race that governs, in such a cheerfully haphazard fashion, a quarter of the earth's surface and a quarter of its people. The ceaseless permeation of English ideas makes for them a further problem. One well-known Continental writer says this: “The majority of Frenchmen and Germans have doubtless never been conscious how completely they have adopted the ideals of English civilisation, having made them so completely their own that they have forgotten their origin… To-day social life is English, as in the eighteenth century it was French.”
Millions of words have been wasted to find some explanation for this resistless march and the query remains unanswered. The one truth that remains is that English culture, in its strictest and narrowest nationalistic sense, has a spiritual and practical power that makes it the greatest living and effective force in the world. I dare to suggest that this is due to its intrinsic rightness; so in this article I want to show how this heritage of our British forbears has been cherished and brought to full fruition in our New Zealand, the country farthest away from its land of birth.
This puzzling person, this mystic being, the “Englishman,” is created, in the main, in his school and university, both of which exist in the Dominion. For the occasion, I am choosing to write about the two Canterbury institutions because they are nearest in outward appearance to their English predecessors, and for no other reason. There are many great schools in New Zealand that rival Christ's College; and Otago University with its unique history deserves an article to itself. The two North Island University colleges have their virtues and are worthy younger brethren to Canterbury College. Still, as our illustrations show, there is an atmosphere
Bene Tradita, Bene Servanda, is not merely a Latin phrase about maintaining a good tradition.
The buildings of Christ's College today are of striking beauty. The Chapel is an aesthetic jewel, built in 1867 and quaintly described in the first edition of the School List, “from the designs of Mr. Robert Speechly, the then resident Architect of the Cathedral, and is an admirably proportioned stone building 64 feet in length by 20 feet in width.”
Fifty years ago, transepts and a sanctuary were added and to-day it is worth a pilgrimage, for anyone who appreciates perfection. We had better walk round the “Quad” and take the buildings in their order. On the left as we enter the gateway with its enormous tree sentinels on either hand, is the Memorial Hall (interior shown in our pictures), and next are the Cloisters and the New Classrooms which were, by the way, built sixtyfive years ago. Then there is the Chapel, and sitting next is “Cotterill's,” whose corner abuts on “The Big School,” the oldest stone building in Christchurch with walls two feet thick and a wonderful steeply pitched roof. The rest of the square contains the handsome Hare Memorial Library, School House and “Jacobs.” Through the alley is a nest of handsome new classrooms, the gymnasium, and “lab.” before the playing fields are reached. Parts of it might be a thousand years old, and in some inexplicable fashion, the whole rambling village of edifices blends into one harmonious whole.
It is the work of men who dreamed dreams; English dreams. From the very first arrival of the first body of colonists, the idea of establishing a college on the lines of the Homeland was warmly taken up, and in the fourth number of the Canterbury Papers (May, 1850), there appears the detailed scheme “for the establishment of a College in or near the capital city of the settlement of Canterbury, New Zealand, and to be called the Christchurch College.” This was transmuted to deed; and so the “Big School” and the Chapel rose “for the promotion of sound piety and useful learning more especially within the said province of Canterbury.” The story of the selection of the site is fascinating. It was first in Lyttelton and there was a difficulty in finding where to place it in Christchurch. Bishop Selwyn had to be outmanoeuvred. He was the First Warden and was opposed to having it near a town, but the founders said “Our Englishcolleges are so, Winchester, Harrow, Rugby, Eton.” And so the present
Do not forget, either, that Christ's College has kept pace with the march of progress. It has modern open - air class - rooms, up to date laboratories, and all the equipment of an advanced English public school. Its sports organisation is on English lines, and, in our illustrations, do not miss the river and boating facilities.
Its scholars have earned distinction as well as its athletes. Its roll of Old Boys contains names that are known the world over, and in the Dominion its formative influence has been one of wide incidence and abiding strength. Its Pantheon of masters and governors is worthy of reverence, and I can only say that it includes great names of both England and the Dominion.
The first plan for Christ's College was that it should minister to the needs of two classes, schoolboys and adolescents. They thought, those pioneer bold spirits, that this would be the educational centre of the Southern Hemisphere and that pupils would be attracted from India and Australia. But, as the province rapidly grew in wealth and importance, the need for a University College proper became
Otago was also flourishing and there, with Scottish resolution, the Provincial Government, without more ado, set up a teaching institution, The Otago University. This changed the nature of the problem, and there grew a dislike for the idea of confining university training to one city. The Canterbury Union supported the broader view, led by the able Henry John Tancred. There was a deal of marching and counter marching but the birth of the central Parliament and the abolition of the provinces, eventually brought about the form of the University of New Zealand which now exists. It is simply an examining body to which are affiliated the four colleges.
While all this was going on in New Zealand, the revolution in the conduct of Oxford and Cambridge was taking place. They had become moribund, stifled by religious tests and innumerable restrictions, and teaching was almost at a standstill. In the curiously effectual way of Englishmen, reforms proceeded at a rapid rate and at Cambridge, Girton College and Newnham Hall women were actually admitted. Among the “giants in those days” of Canterbury were many Cambridge men, notably Bowen, Rolleston, and Joshua Williams, and Canterbury College owes much to their advanced ideas.
In 1877, the present College main building was opened, and one of the marvels of the ceremony was the electric light illumination of Worcester Street by Professor Bickerton. From that great day, its growth has been the steady and wholesome development of a living organism. It has always been old-countryish in its air of dignity, its insistence on gown and mortar-board, but it preserved a spirit distilled from the daring of the men of the new land. It had the first
It is sometimes ascribed to luck, but it must be set down to the sterling wisdom and selective judgment of those early great men of ours, that Canterbury College started its life with a trinity of teachers who were complementary in their qualities, and for whose equal the world might have been combed without avail.
Professor Bickerton, the unruly, lavishly hospitable, universal genius, was the first. His fireworks, his partial impact theory, his “free love” discussions, his never-failing fund of spirits “filling the atmosphere with a kind of intellectual champagne.” his endearing oddities of behaviour, stay in memory and make him one of the great figures of all time in the history of the College. Professor MacMillan Brown was the youngest of the trio, but the second to arrive. He became a world figure in literature and sociology but his enduring monument will be the fire of love of literature which he kindled in his lifetime of teaching. He was an Oxford man, winner of the coveted Snell Exhibition, and he arrived in the little colony with honours thick uopn him. He was a teacher of original genius. It is said that in two years his elementary Greek classes could translate from sight any classic author. He was a dominating and tremendous personality, but his Sunday morning break-
Of the numerous Maori-speaking New Zealanders who have studied at first hand the customs and traditions and beliefs of the native race, the most thorough and scientific in method, and the most industrious and copious in recording collected facts, was the late Mr. Elsdon Best. He was a truly great man, a man of strong individuality and natural gifts, who had seen much of frontier life in his day and who was peculiarly fitted by temperament and talent for this research duty which so completely occupied the greater part of his career. His first close study was the life of the Urewera tribes, who retained in their mountain and forest land primitive customs and thought long after most other tribes had adopted pakeha ways and faiths. The thoroughness of his investigations during his life in the Urewera, or Tuhoe Land, resulted in the publication of many volumes that remain as a splendid memorial to an ancient warrior race. Later, his field of research was enlarged, and he wrote Museum Bulletins and Polynesian Society contributions that cover practically every phase of Maori life and culture. Elsdon Best's greatly-varied and useful life closed in Wellington, in his native province, in 1931, at the age of seventy-five.
Tall, lean, short-bearded, with the long, easy stride of the out-of-doors man, the figure of Elsdon Best was a familiar one in Wellington City in the later years of his life. It was easy, even for a stranger, to pick him out as a man bred in the open lands, accustomed to gaze out over wide expanses of country, and to cover the ground with the gait of an old campaigner. Many a swag the square muscular shoulders had carried in their day, many a league of mountain trail had developed that Maori lope. The early settler's life, years of work with axe and saw in the bush, thousands of miles of travel by horse and foot, had all in their ways gone to shape that spare, capable frame, and to give “Te Peehi” that distinguishing air of independence and self-reliance. He was a well-tried veteran of the adventurous life in many fields before he entered upon the absorbing study of his Maori fellow-New Zealanders that filled his hard-working days and nights until the end. For such men as Elsdon Best the days and nights are never long enough to get all the work in hand completed. There is always the task ahead that is the most absorbing pursuit in life, a task of pleasure that is never finished. The publication of one monograph after another, and its quick appreciation by the scientific world, was Best's chief reward. Like most original workers of his kind, his material reward was very small in proportion to the value of his painstaking research and the volume of his output.
Elsdon Best was a product of the pioneering age of New Zealand. The bush filled valley of Porirua and the small rough town of Wellington were his earliest memories. There was no college education then for the colonial boy, unless his parents could afford to send him to England. The primary school gave him the beginnings of education; the wide world of adventure and contact with all kinds of men was his university. His youth on the edge of civilisation, swinging an axe in the Porirua forest, clearing bush and dealing with horses, bullocks, and the men of the frontier, up on the East Coast and elsewhere, developed him physically and strengthened his self-reliant character.
At the end of the 'Seventies he turned to the martial excitement of life in Taranaki, where for a long time the tension between the Government and the Ngati-Ruanui and allied tribes bordered on war. His friend, W. E. Gudgeon, then captain in the Armed Constabulary, was in command of the military post at Manaia—in fact, it was Gudgeon and his men who built that redoubt, a compact little fort wellpreserved to this day. Elsdon Best enlisted in a company of the Constabulary, part pakeha, part Maori, under Gudgeon, and served as a frontier soldier for many months. Drill and marching, trench - digging, redoubtbuilding and road-making in the disputed territory between the Waingongoro on the south and Stony River on the north; and a period as one of the A.C. garrison of Pukearuhe Redoubt, the North Taranaki outpost, under Captain (afterwards Colonel) Messenger.
Then, when conditions eased down, and the Constabulary forces were reduced, the craving for adventure called in another direction. The stalwart young colonial worked his passage to San Francisco, and followed the eternal lure, something waiting just across the range. He roved about the Western States of America, from the forests of California and the slopes of the Rockies down to the Sierra Nevada and the plains of the Rio Grande.
There was adventure enough now, in the lumber camps, on the gold trail,
“They had a rope with them,” he explained, “and this Britisher thought it prudent, under the circumstances, to leave the shanty by the back-door and take to the creek.”
His company obviously not being desired along the Rio Negro, Best travelled unobtrusively as far north as he could get, and he saw a good deal of the Sierras and the big trees.
That was in the early and mid-'Eighties, when life was still wide-open and free in the Western States where the population in these days is chiefly engaged in helping to make cinema pictures and running “dude ranches” for Eastern tenderfeet.
Elsdon Best returned to his native land, and the quiet life, and worked at a variety of callings.
He was, I think, storeman in a Wellington business place, when the formaion of the Polynesian Society, in the early 'Nineties, heightened his already considerable interest in the Maori language and Maori history and folklore. He was a foundation member. One of his early friends in Wellington was Mr. S. Percy Smith, Surveyor-General, the chief founder of the Society. His friendship and advice fixed the course of Best's life thenceforward.
It was early in 1896 that Mr. Smith induced Elsdon Best to make the Urewera Maoris his special study. The Government was engaged in surveying the Urewera tribal lands and beginning the main highway that now links up Rotorua with Lake Waikaremoana and the East Coast. There was difficulty in persuading the Maoris that they would not suffer by the making of this road. Shrewdly and prophetically they foresaw that it would destroy their prized isolation and gradually change the life of the people. The first part of the survey and road-making was carried on under the protection of an armed covering party of the Permanent Force from Auckland and Wellington— a precaution that was not really necessary, after Sir James Carroll had seen the chiefs at Ruatahuna and convinced them that there was no hidden “catch” in the survey. Percy Smith arranged that Best should be given employment in the Lands Department, and he was sent to Te Whaiti as timekeeper on the road works that were to be carried out by the parties of bushmen and navvies. This gave him his great opportunity. For several years he lived at Te Whaiti, at Ngaputahi, and at Ohiramoko, near Ruatahuna, steadily gathering traditions and noting down all manner of curious lore of the mountain tribes.
When the road-making parties were withdrawn, before the works reached Ruatahuna, Best remained, fascinated by the prospects of studying a people so far untouched by scientific-minded enquirers.
It was in January of 1898 that I first met Elsdon Best, spare, sparsewhiskered, hard-faring student of the Maori and lover of the bush life. It was at Ngaputahi, a half-cleared valley a few miles beyond Te Whaiti. His camp was a half-slab, half-canvas whare by the roadside. Burnt logs strewed the clearing; there was a small enclosure with a potato garden surrounding the whare. There the white ruanuku—as he came to be called by the Urewera—lived all alone, visited every now and again by some of the old people of the Ngati-Whare tribe, I was on my way through the country on horseback from Rotorua and the Rangitaiki, bound for Ruatahuna, to see something of the Urewera there; from Mataatua I walked over the ranges to Waikaremoana. After a talk with “Te Peehi,” I went on, and at Ohiramoko, a most secluded little hamlet a couple of miles from Mataatua, I met his great friends, old Paitini te Whatu and his wife, Makurata. Paitini it was who guided me through the bush trails—where often the only way was the river-bed—to the Lake, the first of many such rough journeys through the Urewera ranges. Ohiramoko was Best's headquarters during the years he spent in the Ruatahuna district. Later on he lived at Haukapua above Ruatoki, where the Whakatane River emerges from the mountain gorges.
tapu against white people.
Paitini and his wife, Makurata, both veterans of the war-path, were among the wise old folk of the mountain tribes whose seemingly endless store of history, tradition, legend, and forest lore and all manner of native knowledge filled many of their white friend's notebooks.
Another learned man, the old chief Tutaka-Ngahau, the principal man of Maunga-pohatu, gave him an immense variety of information concerning native belief, customs and traditions which presently found publication in the Journal of the Polynesian Society and in books. From all the learned men of the Urewera, Ngati-Whare, and other tribes of the wild country, “Te Peehi” drew, by long and painstaking enquiry, the data which he put on record for both pakeha and Maori. In later years he came to investigate the history and wisdom of the East Coast tribes in particular, and so the lore which he placed on record deals chiefly with that sector of the island, from the Bay of Plenty and the East Cape to the Wairarapa and Wellington.
The special value of the life work of “Te Peehi” lies in its particularity and exactness. In his writings he did not strive after effect; his purpose was to
He was a man of system and method. One notable service he did for the cause of knowledge was to record many hundreds of words which were not in the Maori Dictionary; these have been included in the latest edition of the Maori Dictionary edited by Bishop Herbert W. Williams.
In putting together all his volumes of notes Best was actuated chiefly by the desire to rescue all he could of the olden wisdom and faiths and folk-ways while his life lasted. He was a student of primitive man for the pure love of the work. Naturally, as the old men who were his mentors passed to the Reinga, he came to be regarded by the Urewera and their kin as the repository of their sacred lore; he was the white ruanuku of the Tuhoe folk.
His history of the Urewera tribe is a work of unsurpassed merit in the field of records dealing with a particular district; the only local history which nearly approaches it is S. Percy Smith's History of Taranaki and the West Coast. The present and coming generations of the Urewera clans should treasure this great history; it is their family Bible and their Domesday Book. There is a truly wonderful range of tribal chronicles here transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, and rescued by “Te Peehi” from the last of the sages of the bush, rescued only just in time.
There is a sympathy, a poetic touch, in much of Best's writings about his beloved bush region that give them a peculiar charm. His first book about those parts, a pamphlet issued by the Department of Lands and Survey in Mr. Percy Smith's time, narrating a pioneer excursion to Lake Waikaremoana, with a Maori party, is a little classic in descriptive guide books.
A little mannerism of “Te Peehi” which readers of his books will note is his frequent use of Spanish terms, a reminder of his adventurous young days in the South and West of the United States, from the Rio Grande to Colorado; that was in the ‘Eighties. He was fond of writing of the village marae or square and assemblyplace as the “plaza.” He would as often as not style his horse his “cayuse.” Another Spanish - American trait was his habit of wearing the poncho as a cape in his bush travelling in wet weather. The old poncho, with the hole for the head, slipped over his shoulders, a bit of a blanket or a shawl round his waist in place of trousers, and often barefooted, thus the tough bushman-student took the rugged and wet forest trail in his pioneer years in the last retreat of the Maori as he was.
In Mr. Best's “Maori Eschatology,” a description of death customs, and the native ways of burial and the beliefs concerning death, there is a vivid and touching account of the home-bringing to Maungapohatu of a little girl called Marewa who died at Te Whaiti while he was camped there in 1896. She was borne by a party of men over the ranges to the Tama-kai-moana village at the foot of the Rocky Mountain; she was a rangatira child of that clan of Tuhoe. The parents asked “Te Peehi” to accompany them. On the third day of the march the mourning party ascended the high bleak range of Te Whakaumu in a storm òf snow and sleet:-
“Through a break in the driving storm we see the great rock bluff of Maunga-pohatu far above and ahead of us. The moùrnful sound of the lament for the dead sounds through the drifting snows. The mother of the dead child is crouched upon a rock nearby and gazing across the forest ranges to the storm-lashed mountain. She is greeting the sacred mountain of the fierce Tama - kai - moana clan, the enchanted mountain of many a wild legend, that, as Maori myth has it, gave birth to the dark-skinned people who dwell beneath it, and gathers them to her stony bosom in death. For she is the mana of the clan—she is the Mother of the Children of the Mist.”
“The mother is in the whare potae (the figurative house of mourning). She is mourning for her child and greeting the landmarks of her home. It is a combination of mother-love and the love of primitive man for his tribal lands. Now the summit of the mountain is suddenly covered with a white pall of mist. An old man said, ‘The mountain is greeting for her child.’ The parents of the child are a little apart; they have chanted a lament for their child and greeted their mountain home. Then, as the mountain-brow becomes obscured by the mists, the whole of the people give voice together in an ancient dirge of their race. The bitter sleet and snow, fierce-driven by the winds, pelt the mourners unmercifully. Through the drifting scud we see the great cliffs far ahead, wherein are the caves of the dead, where lie the bones of many generations of the children of Potiki. And then, the storm fiends lashing us, we go down into the darkling valley bèlow.”
The whitebeard Ngahoro, of NgatiMahanga, thus addressed Best at Te Whaiti: “Son! Great is your knowledge of the sacred invocations of our ancestors; with you are the spells and magic of the men of old. My thought grows—that you will yet be able to slay men by your great knowledge of karakia, not pakehas, maybe, but certainly Maoris.”
In one of his newspaper articles (it was the now defunct weekly the “Canterbury Times,” in which much of his Tuhoe Land lore was published) “Te Peehi” discoursed on the marvellous complexity of the makutu or witchcraft rites and traditions and charms. This was his lightsome method of sketching the methods of the tohunga makutu:
“Should I desire to bewitch you so as to cause your death, I can (if endowed with the necessary powers) take the hau of your voice as you are talking, and so destroy you—that is if you are not quick enough to perform the mata puru,, and by tying the regulation number of bands of flax round your limbs and body, and invoking your atua, so render my magic powers harmless. Before that, however, I should probably have repeated the deadly incantation known to fame as the mapuna, and even if you diverted that by means of the kaiure, I could still bring you down by luring your wairua into the man destroying Rua iti, and slaying it with the Kopani harua, and even if you got tired and went home to lunch, the maiakai would fetch you; or ran away, then my punga would take the swiftness from your feet, or I could take your manea from your footsteps and thereby send you down to Sheol. Of course you might recite Tu-matapongia and so render yourself invisible, but that would not save you from my nene and umu hiki, even though you braced up and performed the tokotea, which is doubtful. By this time you would, no doubt, be assailed by Tumata-rehurehu, which is a pahunu and therefore not a thing to be trifled with; or the miti aitua would descend upon you—which is Hades—so what are you going to do about it anyhow?”
There are Best's characteristic touches in another article, written when he was in camp at Te Whaiti, in the early part of his official sojourn there on the road works:
“One might run on for countless pages describing the customs and traditions of the Maori of old and his thoughts, wise and otherwise, of to-day. The old-time Maori is out of place in the era of the pakeha, and soon shall he be a memory of the past. His descendants will know but little of his doings and history, and that only which has been placed on record by the invading white man. Only the earthworks of his forts, where he fought the battles of his people, shall remain.
“The sullen waters of Whirinaki hurry onwards as of old through the grim Canon of Toi; the great forest of Tane still holds the lands of the ancient Marangaranga and of Potiki; the peaks of Otairi, Tawhiuau and Tuwhatawata are yet guarding the realm of Hine-ruarangi and her famous sire. Toi the Wood Eater. But no sign comes from them anent the history of the past. They have seen the rise and fall of many tribes; the coming and the going of races; the old, old struggle between Ruaimoko and the Fish of Maui; the birth, life and death of primitive man. Changeless as of yore are they, and hold their secret well.
“Across the moonlit valley the hill Umurakau looms black against the mother range, the palisades of the fighting sons of Pukeko, hewn laboriously out with some axes of a neolithic people, are white in the silver light; but below the ancient stronghold and lining the river bank, are the white tents of the Aitangaa-Tiki, and the unholy strains of the souldestroying concertina are making night hideous in the Vale of Toi. A few short decades back we might have heard the mournful chant of the watchman as he kept vigil in the pa above, the merriment of the whare tapere, or the resounding chorus of the war dance. But the old order ever changeth, and the ubiquitous Pakeha has come to stay.
“As old Tikitu of Ngati-Awa left me yesterday, he said—‘Friend! I see before me the day when the Maori shall be no more. That time is very near now; yet a little while and there shall be no more Maoris to trouble you. And it is because we, the Maori people of New Zealand, have lost the mana of our ancestors that we are disappearing so fast. There is no hope for us now, for that mana has gone from us for ever, and we shall pass away like the mao.'”
The Maori is not likely to become literally an “iwi ngaro,” a vanished tribe like the moa. But that mournful prophecy of the ancient man of NgatiAwa is already nearing its fulfilment. The primitive Maori is no more, and the last of the learned elders, the men and women who cling to the old ways, will soon be gathered to their Mother Earth again. The new generation, educated like the pakeha, its very language bastardized and debased by the inevitable hybrids, will have lost the mana tapu and the mana tangata of its fathers. It will have little interest in the traditions of the past. But some day it will fully appreciate the glamour and the wonder of the vanished heroic age, preserved in the notes so carefully and so copiously assembled from the lips of the bushmen and warriors, priests and poets, of the ancient race.
Best's intensive study of the Urewera and allied tribes was not extended to other sections of the Maori people, at any rate not with such a degree of thoroughness. But there were other competent enquirers dealing with many tribes, in particular Hare Hongi, who is the chief repository of traditional knowledge and priestly lore of his people, the Ngapuhi and related tribes; he was schooled by tohungas of the old religion. He is, too, the best living authority on the Maori language. Best did not study the lore of the Waikato, or the King Country tribes; and Taranaki he left to his friends, Percy Smith and W. H. Skinner. He did not know the South Island, which has its traditions and ancient wisdom of its own. He had so absorbed the special knowledge of the Urewera that he was apt to apply their sayings and beliefs to the Maori generally. Students of his books must allow for that peculiarity and remember that most of his great accumulation of mythology and ritual and spiritual concepts came chiefly from two or three districts—the Urewera, the East Coast (the Takitumu tribes) from the East Cape to the Wairarapa, and the West Coast as far up as Wanganui. But those tribal districts he searched thoroughly for the esoteric wisdom of the race.
Two veterans of the cue met in an Auckland billiard saloon the other evening, and while waiting for a table got, talking tobacco, as old smokers will. Said one: “Don't know how it is, Bob, but I don't seem to get the pleasure out of my pipe I used to. Losing my taste for it.” “Reckon you're ‘brand-tired,’” said Bob, “you want a change of baccy, old man. Myself, I've been smoking same old brand for 20 years, and wouldn't change. Why should I? I can't get anything better, or so good. But there are brands, I know, that ‘go off’ a lot. Mine—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead)—doesn't.” “Toasted, isn't it?” asked his cobber. “That's right! One of the five genuine toasted brands—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold. And next to no nicotine in any of ‘em! The toasting does it, my boy! Now you try Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), and I wager a new hat you'll soon relish your pipe again!” And so he did!
There were capable women in the old backblocks days, when life was more or less in the rough and when the wives and daughters perforce had to fend for themselves a good deal. They can do it now, for that matter, but colonial life is becoming so ironed out and standardised that there is not so much necessity for self-reliance as there was in our younger days. I have been reading a capital book of New Zealand reminiscences issued by A.H. and A. W. Reed (Dunedin and Wellington). The writer is the last of the sisters of those plucky brother-soldiers, Major W. G. Mair and Captain Gilbert Mair, whose life stories have been given in the “New Zealand Railways Magazine.” Mrs. Howard Jackson, of Dunedin née Lavinia Laura Mair, is eighty-three, the last survivor of the children of Gilbert Mair, who arrived at the Bay of Islands from Peterhead, Scotland, in 1821. Her story of North Auckland days especially is an epic of colonisation, with many passages of charm in its description of country life sixty and seventy years ago.
Those pioneer daughters could shoot, for one thing. Their brothers had schooled them well with shotgun and rifle. So, like many other settlers' wives and daughters, they often kept the home pot replenished with bush food. “In the good old days, when the wood pigeon was so numerous,” she writes, “a sister and I would go out shooting them. With our brothers, we would make an early start on horseback, reaching the feeding ground about sunrise. The birds sleep in the middle of the day. One day as we were having our lunch there was a movement in the trees overhead and some ripe berries fell. My sister fired into the foliage and down came a pair of fine blue wattled crows. Then, towards sunset, the pigeons began their evening meal, and we would have great sport with our four guns, muzzleloaders at that. With a heavily laden packhorse we would reach home soon after dark.”
Again, a story of survey camp life where Feilding is now:-
“On one occasion we took with us a young Englishman to shoot wild pigeon. I had a beautiful Frankfort rifle, and my bag was twenty-one birds. My fellow sportsmen were not so lucky, as they got only a half-dozen between them. There must have been something amiss with their guns!”
But the pot once supplied, the Mair girls were mèrciful to the bush birds. They kept many of them as pets at various times, and I have read no more interesting little tales of the birds and their habits than those contained in the annals of this old New Zealand family.
“Far away and long ago,” far down the coast of South Westland, in a settler's house on the bank of a swift Alpine river, I saw a piano, a strange item of furniture in those parts. I fancy it was then the only instrument of the kind south of Okarito, a hundred miles to the north. Nowadays that bush backblocks strip between Alps and the surf of the Tasman Sea is more in touch with the outside world. But when I was last there, riding through the rough country of forest and torrent to the Haast Pass and Lake Wanaka, South Westland was the most isolated region imaginable. That piano, “how come?” The owner, a bachelor cattle - farmer, couldn't play it, neither could anyone else within many miles. It stood there in the largest room in the house, and it was used as a rack for the owner's saddles. The story we heard well on towards midnight, before a big fire, in the next-door farmhouse, half-a-day's ride away.
The lone-handed settler, a few years before our look-in at his large bush clearing and his more than half-wild cattle, had imported that piano for a bride, who had yet to be imported. He yearned for a wife to brighten his solitary life, and as all the bush lasses within a hundred miles were already bespoken, there was nothing for it but to send abroad for one. A matrimonial advertisement for the Hokitika paper was composed after consultation with the neighbour, on whose advice four little words were added to it: “No Milking. Piano Kept.” By the same packhorse mail to the north went an order to Hokitika for a piano, price no object. It must be a high-class piano fit for a lady to play. Then the bachelor waited for the steamer, three months hence; piano must of course be in hand before the wife.
The bait for a bride arrived in due course; the little steamer brought it, and the population up and down the coast for forty miles assembled at the rugged beach for “Steamer Day,” assisted to get it ashore from the surf boat. It was sledged up to the house, unpacked with tremendous excitement, and christened with a bottle of whisky when it was set in its place of honour in the big room and decorated with a tinful of rata blossom.
Then the proud owner of the piano set about the more delicate business of procuring the bride who was to play the piano. Six months further correspondence with Hokitika at last brought an offer. The lady who was willing to share the lot of the far-south young pioneer would arrive by the next trip of the steamer.
Alas for human hopes and matrimonial intentions! It was a half-dead spinster who staggered on deck after a horrible storm-tossed passage down the coast. She gave one long look at the desolate shore, the beach and surf, the background of gloomy forest, the fog-draped mountains, the weeping skies. One look, then she staggered back to the cabin, weeping like the Westland sky, and she begged the captain to lock her in until he was off again. Never, never would she set foot in that awful place.
Back to the North she went; and back to his lone lot went the sad settler. No more of that for him, he vowed; no more matrimonial invitations.
Christopher was sad. The world was a dull place, full of aunts who wanted to kiss little boys, of mothers and fathers who arranged to be away for the time when the swimming pool in the Ruawai River was really warm, and his one decent relation, Mollie-ofthe-Wise-Eyes had, for some reason, changed into a person with a cold, hard voice. Christopher was seated on the edge of the creek, and the experiment of joining the back half of a grasshopper to the front of a praying mantis, was a complete failure. What the insects thought about it is not on record; but the unconscious cruelty of small boys, has, after all, its counterpart in larger affairs; and grasshoppers cannot write letters to the papers complaining about the habits of modern children and their ignorance of entomology.
Christopher dozed a little and a riroriro flickered down and perched on his bare toe. It was a tiny jewel of New Zealand birth, a feathered object small enough to appear and disappear like a little microscope slide in a bad light. It dwelt a while, watching Christopher with an eye that was wise and bright, and then, with a flirt of little wings, it vanished into the shadowy bush.
The sun rays slanted, and a coolness came slowly. Christopher woke and remembered that it was always teatime when the sun over the Long Hill turned into that soft rosy roundness. There was a stillness everywhere and the only sound was the tinkle of the water over the creek stones.
Christopher faced a disconsolate outlook. There were certainly raspberry jam and scones for tea, but Mollie-ofthe-Wise-Eyes was so different. She was so lovely to look at, and understood boys, only giving a rough hug when times were extra exciting. Te Maire, the station pride, who had won three hurdle races, was a lamb when Mollie mounted him, and the two heifer calves by the imported Jersey bull, would follow her when she called. What could be bothering her? The tall blue-eyed Hewitt who plaited such marvellous flax whiplashes seemed to have something to do with it. Christopher had seen them standing by the dipping pens, and heard him say: “But can't you tell me? “—and Mollie had said: “Shoes are getting a habit with you, aren't they?” and walked away.
Christopher saw him jolt into the saddle and winced at the cut he gave old lady Frimp, a very washy chestnut, but the best tempered hack for miles around.
Mollie had tears in her eyes, Christopher saw, but they were hard and bright at afternoon tea, and then there came the difference in her voice.
He pondered all this as he stretched before getting up. The riro-riro fluttered back, flicked into the air, made two or three ecstatic circles, and Christopher gasped.
Its elfin form sat on the shoulder of a tall, handsome Maori. He was slender and graceful, but lithe and muscular. In the thick black hair was perched a black and white feather, and in one hand flashed a greenstone mere which in some magical way lightened and darkened in tint, as a leaf does, swaying from shadow to shine.
There was a quality of luminousness in the exquisitely tatooed body, naked save for a sumptuous whiteish skin cloak, and a plaited maro. In the eyes, wide apart and glowing, there was a light of celestial reckless mischief, a supernal disregard of consequences and a hint of the mirth that is part of gay skies, sparkling streams, and green growing things.
Christopher could not have put all this into words as he stared at this age-old Polynesian demi-god, nor had he any thoughts so complex. He simply recognised another boy like himself, and felt thoroughly at ease.
To his eternal delight, more birds arrived from the nearby konini clump, robins, thrushes and tuis which seemed, for some strange reason, to remain friendly with the others.
Christopher sat bolt upright and opened the conversation. He did not smile, but spoke in the grave fashion of boyhood.
“My name's Christopher,” he said.
“Mine is Maui,” said the other. “I heard of you many miles away, and I think I can help.”
Christopher gasped again. He had heard about Maui from Crooked Mick who helped old Bismark, the station cook. Mick was so old that he remembered the first fences on Wainui; he claimed to have helped dig the first strainer post holes, and he remembered the Waikare Stream when it ran through the racecourse, before the big earthquake.
Mick had come from the Speewah River which ran through the middle of Australia, where everything was gigantic. Shearers there were so tremendous that one of them that Mick knew used a half wheel tyre for the spring of his shears; eels barked like dogs and lived on barbed-wire and lambs; the shearing sheds were so huge that if the boss sacked a man at one end he could walk for half a day and start at the other end and no one would know about it. Mick knew the Maoris, and had learned from them how this Maui had fished New Zealand up from the sea.
Here was a glorious chance of confirmation; some of the younger shearers had started to laugh at Mick and said “that the old cow's yarns were getting stale.”
Christopher stood and said: “I know about you—have you ever been to Speewah? Mick told me the billy there was so 'normous they had to send a steamer like the Rotomahana out to see if the tea was drawing?”
There was a ring of melodious
They walked along the creek-bed till they reached the great rata stump that stood on the cliff side facing the Ratanui Bend, that no one had explored.
The papa cliffs round it were a thousand feet sheer, and a reef of cruel rocks was only pierced by the wandering Rekanui River where it met the pounding Pacific between mighty headlands. Mick said that the Maoris had a story that in the flats at the back of the Bend there were places where mysterious folk had dwelt safely from the beginning of time.
“Steady now,” said Maui, as he swung Christopher to his shoulder and entered the huge hollow trunk. Christopher had the sinking feeling that he remembered going down in the lift when his father had been seeing the lawyer in Wellington, and Maui took his hand again. It was a pleasant place—a dream place with rich green grass, odd clumps of bush and little second growth totaras dotted about like Noah's Ark trees. Birds were about in thousands, and Christopher heard the melodious din of apparently millions of little golden gongs, made by countless bellbirds. As Maui tapped the trunk of a tree with his mere, two ungainly creatures with long thin beaks stood blinking with beady eyes, and vanished into the undergrowth.
“Kiwis,” said Maui, “like some women, they hate the sunlight. We will meet my friends soon and discuss all the trouble of your much loved relation. She is a noble lady. I have seen her often.”
It is shameful but true that Christopher had forgotten all about Mollie. There was too much to see.
They stopped at a small green clearing where several men were seated round a Maori oven. One was just taking the earth from the top of the stones and there was a luscious smell. Christopher knew it well, remembering the time Mick had taken him to the pa at Tauwhata. He was introduced to all the men, but remembered only two; Joe Burroughs who kept the billiard saloon at Tauwhata and was always in trouble with the Police—Mick said he was an “omadhaun but a gay-hearted scamp”; and there was a very old blue-eyed man who had the queer name of “Official Assignee.”
“I knew your grandfather,” he said. “He had a great fight, and was one of the few in the Long Valley who was never through my hands.”
“Well you've had most of 'em,” said Joe. “They've all been broke once, some of 'em twice.”
Christopher had his mouth full for the next half hour and did not pay attention to the conversation.
“Here is the cause of all the trouble,” said Maui, producing a pair of red shoes. “It is the story of the senseless, mischief-working tongue of a sly and idle woman. Hewitt, who is in every way a proper man, is helpless with love for Mollie. This visitor from Canterbury, pretty and cajoling, has no real love for him, but she is one of those women who, when they see a man, must capture him. At the dance
“Her mother prized them, she said, and would he get them repaired and remain silent. Hewitt gave the foolish pledge about secrecy and put them in his saddle bag. He arose early in the morning, taking the short cut across the stream for this reason; he wanted to see his loved one go by at the ford crossing. He who is in love has lost his senses; and it is clear that in dismounting to get a clearer view of the lady Mollie as she passed, he dropped the shoes.”
“And I found them, the scarlet useless troublemakers.”
“Now, mark you, the Canterbury woman, days before in the privacy of the sleeping apartments of Wainui, had learned of Hewitt from the other women and that he was treasuring a discarded gold shoe of the lady Mollie. Hewitt made a blundering explanation of the disappearance of the shoes, and so the Canterbury woman made a quiet jest ensùring that it reached Mollie. Hewitt must be treasuring her shoes also, proving that his affections were unstable. It was done, in the manner of women, by whisper and blush and hinted underhand things.”
“Sheilahs don't change much,” said Joe Burroughs, “yet I knew a poor cow once that went up for bigamy.”
There was a silence, and the Official Assignee spoke: “You have a plan, O Maui,” he said.
“I have,” said Maui, “but I want to see if in your pakeha knowledge of customs, there is a flaw in the stratagem.
“I propose to take the lad back to the place where the shoes lay. Let, him sleep. It is drawing late and there will be an outcry and a searching. It will also be necessary to ensure that Hewitt learns of the search, so that there is a chance that he will encounter his beloved . at the ford, and I will place the shoes so that'he must see them. If I know him aright he will say, ‘Why, there are the damthings,’ and all will be well.”
The light danced in Maul's eyes. The Assignee nodded approval, and Joe Burroughs said “Bonser! I'll do me corner.”
Christopher woke in the morning. Mollie with shining eyes and flushed cheeks stood arm in arm with Hewitt at the foot of the bed.
Hewitt said: “You gave us a proper fright, young shaver,” and Mollie gave him one of her really rough hugs. Mick says the 'ole thing was a dream, but the red shoes were there, and Joe Burroughs always gives Chistopher a tremendous wink when they go past the billiard saloon door in Tauwhata.
The explanations of the meanings and origins of Maori names of railway stations on the North Island Main Trunk railway line are continued here. In last month's Magazine names along the line from Frankton Junction southward to the Ruapehu country were dealt with.
Ranga=to parade in ranks; to fall in; taua=war-party.
A modern transposition of the name Waitangi (“Sounding or Wailing Waters”), applied to a stream and waterfall in the vicinity. Tangiwai is the term applied to the beautiful translucent kind of greenstone or nephrite, formerly chiefly obtained from an outcropping reef on the shore of Milford Sound. But the local allusion here is to the waterfall.
River of the West (uru). The Waiouru stream is the most westerly branch of the Hautapu River, the principal tributary of the Rangitikei.
In the absence of definite tradition this name is capable of many interpretations. Mata means eye, face, point of land, spell or charm, swamp, etc. Roa=long.
Hihi is the stitchbird (Pogonornis cincta), now very rare or extinct in these parts. It is preserved on the Little Barrier bird sanctuary, and one or two other islands. Tahi=one.
Turanga=standing; rere=to fly or wave. The reference is to the parade of a war-party, or a haka party, with feathers waving in their hair.
Nga=the (plural); urukehu=reddish hair, fair-haired people.
Originally Otaihape, the home or place of Taihape. The word taihape means an elbow or angle; hape=crooked.
This is a curious name, with a story. Utiku is a Bible name, Eutychus; for the origin we have to go a long way, to Troas, in Asia Minor, and far back in time, too, into the days of the Apostles. For Eutychus, see Acts of the Apostles, chap. 20, v. 9, the story of perhaps the longest sermon on record. St. Paul exhorted the disciples all day at Troas, and continued till midnight, with painful consequences to the young man named Eutychus, who fell asleep and downstairs. And in our pioneer days there lived in the Upper Rangitikei district a Maori chief named Potaka (which means spinning-top). He lived at Rata and Mangaweka; he leased his bushlands to the early white settlers, he built a sawmill, and he was in one way and another an enterprising man, of influence and some wealth. When he came under missionary influence in his early life he chose “Utiku” from the New Testament translation as his Christian name. So we have the place-names Utiku and Potaka in the Rangitikei country to-day. Probably the sound of Utiku took his fancy when he was given his choice of baptismal names by the missionary. (Note: The name is pronounced “Oo-tee-koo.”). The original name of the place was Kaikoura, meaning a meal of crayfish.
Originally Manga-te-weka. A stream (manga) where the weka or woodhen was found. The pioneer pakeha name of the bush settlement here, on the terrace above the Rangitikei River, was “Three Log Whare.”
The tree Metrosideros robusta, plentiful here.
Various meanings—giddy, or stupefied; mad, stupid. Pourewa=Tower or elevated platform at one of the angles of a stockaded pa.
The parakeet.
A name given to numerous mountains and hills in New Zealand. Meaning: “Cloud of heaven,” also “light of heaven,” sometimes referring to the sunshine on a height when the lower world is in shadow. The name is ancient Polynesian, from Tahiti.
Great spear.
A stream blocked up.
Toko=staff, or support; maru=shade, shelter, shield, protected. A Polynesian name originally, the name of one of the ancestral sailing canoes from Tahiti and other Eastern Pacific Islands. From the crew of this canoe which landed on the North Taranaki coast, many present-day people are descended. There is a Toko Maru in the Japanese language, one of many surface resemblances between that language and Maori.
The place where the ancestor Hau camped, on his traditional journey down the West Coast.
The place where Haù marched carrying his staff or spear at the trail, or used it in various warlike attitudes, at the shoulder, the charge, etc.
Literally mullet river, but a specific origin is given in song and legend. In the chant of Te Rangitakoru for his daughter Wharaurangi, the original Maori of which is contained in Sir George Grey's “Nga Moteatea,” it is said that Hau looked askance, out of the corner of his eye (“ka ngahae nga pi”). He likened his eyes to the glistening of the mullet, or to the mullet's eyes.
Parapara=scraps or small waste fragments, chips; umu=earth oven. There is a tradition of a hungry war-party which, on taking a fortified village from which its defenders fled, found only the scrapings of food on the stones in the umu.
Pae=wooden perch, also a place for bird-snaring; kakariki=the green parrakeet.
Bell's Aforeyego
When our Colonial visitors come to England, they most often travel by Main-Line Expresses. A journey in the “Flying Scotsman” from London to Edinburgh, or in the “Cheltenham Flyer,” when the speed frequently touches 80 miles per hour, must be an experiece full of interest to any railwayman; but I am sure the New Zealand railwayman visiting England would be very interested to travel on some of the little side lines in this country, where the whole routine is very different from that of the large expresses, with their wonderful dining-cars and their 100 per cent. efficiency.
I recently spent a holiday in a little village in the heart of the Dorsetshire hills. One day I was cycling, when the weather broke. The rain started to come down in no uncertain manner and I sought the nearest railway station (a place not often difficult to locate in this country of railways) and soon came to a small station, where life seemed quiet and peaceful enough. The man in the booking-office was sitting on a stool drinking tea and yarning to the staff, which consisted of the stationmaster and one porter. Forgetting to mention where I wanted to go, I asked at what time the next train was due to leave. “Well, it all depends on which direction you wish to take,” replied the clerk. This was a great joke and everybody laughed; so I told them the story of the drunken man who, arriving at a railway station, asked for a ticket; and when the booking-clerk inquired, “To which station?” said, “Well, what stations have you got?” More laughter! I was instantly accepted into the friendly circle and asked if I would like to join in a cup of tea. To refuse would have been impossible, so I took the cup of tea, which tasted as sweet as molasses. Personally I loathe sugar in my tea, but rather than hurt their feelings, I drank it with apparent relish; though I quite firmly declined a second cup.
“There is a train due to your village in half an hour,” said the booking-clerk; but in the meantime the Southern Express is due in ten minutes time.” So we went on chatting until the great train loomed in sight.
Is it to be wondered at that trains have such a fascination for children? They fascinate adults, also. How in the world is such a tremendous sense of power conveyed, as by a train travelling at high speed? There is always a feeling, too, of wonderment as to how the wheels manage to stay on the rails and how that huge weight can be made to negotiate the intricate network of lines that are found at various junctions. Of the fact that we place our lives in the capable hands of the signalman, we never think; and how few of us give a thought even to the skill and care of the driver and his mate—of their wonderful accuracy in maintaining, day after day and year after year, distances run to scheduled time. We takè almost for granted, especially in the British Isles, the civility of the men who handle our luggage, and handle it so efficiently. It is only when one goes to Continental countries that these things are brought home to one. When a train stops at a station in France or Belgium, you suddenly find yourself confronted by a porter who throws you aside, grabs your bags, and rushes madly out of the carriage, hoping to dispose of you in the shortest possible time and be back in time for another customer. You charge wildly after him, but he notices you not, his objective is the nearest taxi, into which he throws your belongings.
In England it is all so different—the porter asks you politely if you have any luggage—do you want a taxi? —and tells you where he will meet you when outside the barrier, and you let him go, feeling that you are in perfectly safe hands.
On the little side lines, of course, one gains a much better idea of the people of the country, than one could possibly get by travelling in the luxurious expresses. When the country train stops at each little flag station, or as we call it “halt,” the waiting passengers are hailed by those already in the train; many of them know each other, and there is at once friendly conversation. One hears remarks about the price of milk, sheep, cattle: how badly the country needs rain; and that Farmer Fudge has bought a motor-car for #20; secondhand, but it looked new.
Frequently the guard of the train will lend a helping hand to some woman laden with shopping parcels; or, as he did once in my case, hold up the train a minute or two for a belated passenger. He will carry on conversations with the porters and stationmasters at the little stations along the line; it is all pleasant and leisurely, and one is struck by the human touches one finds on the country railways, which are not possible in the same way on the main lines, though the wonderful politeness that one encounters on all lines, large and small, is a great feature of railways in the British Isles.
Probably one of the most amusing train journeys it is possible to take, can be made in the county of Donegal, in Ireland.
The total length of the railway is 60 miles, and its trains average about 12 miles per hour. It is an extremely narrow gauge, and when put down, was known as one of the Balfour lines, as it was laid during the days of the Balfour Administration.
Many stories are told about this line; one, supposed to be authentic, is as follows: —
The train reached a little village station, when the engine refused to go any further. One of the stranded passengers asked the staff, consisting of one man who combined the duties of clerk, stationmaster and porter, “Is there a hotel in this place?” “Yes sorr,” he replied, “there are two.” “Which one would you advise me to stop at?” asked the tourist. “It doesn't matter,” replied the man, “whichever one ye choose, ye'll be wishing you was at the other one.”
I once had rather an amusing experience on a railway journey I made in Tunis. It was a mixed train—decidedly mixed—comprising two tiny first-class carriages, and some third class, holding about fifty or sixty Arabs. The rest of the train seemed a mile long, and was made up of trucks containing mostly camels, horses, cattle, sheep and goats. When it moved it averaged about fifteen miles an hour and its arrival at every station seemed the event of the day. Hundreds of Arabs in their picturesque costumes came to meet it. The guard informed me that if I wanted dinner, he would telephone to a station up the line, where, he remarked we were due to arrive between 1 and 2 o'clock.
When we reached the spot, a town populated by 40 Europeans and some 500 Arabs, the stationmaster's wife, with the usual capability of the French housewife, had a perfectly marvellous six course meal awaiting us. I got my hostess to send out a bottle of red wine to the engine driver and his mate, and another to the guard, who were most profuse in their thanks.
The train was scheduled to stop for 25 minutes; and when I remarked to the guard that this did not give us long for our meal, he laughed loudly and snapped his fingers, saying, “25 minutes? you can have an hour and 25 minutes if you like.” I could not help asking, “But what about your time-table?” “Oh,” came the reply, “that does not matter at all. There are often camels on the line.” And as a matter of fact this happens to be quite true, because the camels will frequently actually sit on the line, and it takes the combined efforts of the driver with a whip, the fireman with a shovel, and the guard's language to shift them.
But the wonder is, not that a train averages only from twelve to fifteen miles an hour, but that, as a triumph of man's engineering, there is a train to be found at all, across such country.
Without it, the people would be almost completely isolated—they could do nothing, and go nowhere.
In conclusion, may I say, that I have travelled thousands of miles on the New Zealand and Home railways, and as just one member of the great mass of the public, I would like to return thanks in this “New Zealand Railways Magazine,” to the railway men of those countries for their unfailing tact, good humour, politeness, and above all for their efficiency which make train travelling to-day the safest mode of transport in the world.
If we do not express our thanks, perhaps as often as we should, it is not because we are ungrateful, but because we have come to regard these things as part of the Railway Service.
The Maori mind does not, and in my opinion will not, function along accepted lines. I know a woman who lived for many years in the wilds of the Urewera country. She was particularly struck by the proud and forbidding appearance of a large white boulder, perched on a nearby mountaintop exactly as though a pterodactyl, passing by, had halted on the wing and laid an egg at this surprising altitude. As time went on, she grew convinced that the white rock had an especial significance for the Maoris too. Gently but firmly, she commenced to pump. Gentlier but ever more firmly, they shied off the topic. At the end of five years or so, her interest in the white rock had reached a morbid pitch, and precisely at that time, an old gentleman in a blue shirt, a billycock hat and very little else, whom she had sustained at the back door with cups of tea, decided that now she could be inaugurated into the secret of the white rock. (For the interest of the pakeha woman in the white rock was by now a source of amused contempt to the Maoris throughout the district.)
The old gentleman did the thing in style. “You are now one of us,” he said grandly, “Know, then, this is what befell.”
The lady panted a little, but unobtrusively.
“On a certain day,” said the old gentleman, “a giant, who lived at a near distance to the sea-coast, became enraged, though not with any justice, over the actions of a giant who at that time was living under yonder mountain.” (Here ensued a description of the relations of the second giant with the first giant's sister, a bit Biblical for our purposes: and anyhow, as the old gentleman pointed out, the whole thing was a misunderstanding—romance, if you like, but not Reno. However, Giant Number One was a sceptic: “Aüe,” stated the old gentleman, pessimistically, “seizing the white rock like a tooth, which grew then on the sea-shore, he flung it at the head of the giant in our mountain. This he missed, striking the mountain, wherever since the white rock has dwelt. Aüe, aüe.” (Pronounced “'Ow, 'Ow,” and signifying “Tut, tut,” or, “What a pity.”) After this, he looked her darkly in the eye, and what on earth could she do but echo feebly, “'Ow, 'Ow?”
In much the same way, when halfway up the Wanganui River you come upon that interesting and delightful little spot, Pipiriki, it may astonish you to find that the place is so named because once upon a time, on his deathbed, a chieftain ate an extraordinary number of pipis there. It must have been a marathon banquet, the corpse, so to speak, assisting in and starring at his own funeral feast: none the less, to those unacquainted with Maori custom, it may seem surprising that the feat was commemorated. But that's nothing. Look at Kamo, up in Whangatei. Kamo means “Eyelash.” Whose eyelash? When and where and how? Was it that a chieftain here fell in love with the silken lash of some dark-eyed damsel, or merely that an eyelash got in his eye, and, feeling peeved about it. he decided that the happening should be immortalised?
This may seem a digression, and verily, so it is. All the same, when approaching Wanganui, my strong advice both to New Zealander and tourist is to remember that here, just under the surface, is Maori world— Maori talk, Maori custom, Maori charm. You won't get the best out of Wanganui if you eliminate the Maori from your quest.
After which grandmotherly little bit of psychology, let us revert (happily) to Marton Junction, which is the Main Trunk connection for Wanganui, and contains, at a rough guess, more newsboys, cups of tea and large ham sandwiches to the square inch than any place else in the world. Of the two major Main Trunk junctions, Marton always looks to me the more human and inviting, it is full of bustle; the station officials, Redcaps and Lost Luggage Lords and vociferous terrier dogs, all do their best to encourage you, being imbued with the spirit of adventure. It is a place of setting forth.
Here's a trifle of local information. Between Marton and Wanganui are not one, but two things worth viewing, especially in early spring. A milelong avenue of red-flowering mays, very jocund: and, better, rows and
A test of whether you know New Zealand or not is your knowledge of the cabbage palm. The stunted, sad, dingy little dwarf of suburban gardens —how plain it is, and how lifeless! But in the wilderness here, the palm takes back its old supremacy. Its slender height is as untamed as any tree in the world: and that rich perfume, ebbing and flowing on the winds
A little orchard, whiter than alabaster with its freight of blossoms: toe-toe plumes bending down to dip their cream feathers into a wide steel-grey sweep of river: trying to learn to row, in a backwater, with a million bullfrogs solemnly expressing their souls to a papery wisp of a new moon: an old Maori woman sitting on my doorstep, with her black shawl over her head and a fearful little black clay pipe between her superb teeth: eating an unbelievably large and potent beefsteak, plus onions, at “Tony's” on a cold night: staggering to a vertical position: sitting down and eating more (in company with newspaper reporters), when Tony produced roasted wild duck …
Perhaps that's Wanganui. But on the other land, there is that ancient bronze fountain (it was exhumed in Rome somewhere, and has the grave and yet taunting loveliness kept by no other medium except weathered and battered bronze), standing darkish golden-green in the white sunlit entrance of the Sargent Art Gallery. You will like this Art Gallery, overcoming a first impulse to dislike it, because its whiteness, its pillars, its spacious system of halls, and the manner in which it takes and holds the sunlight are so very alien to New Zealand that at first glimpse, it looks theatrical. But it has achieved nobility, and will last. Its extraordinary effectiveness is not only effective… I can visualise now, between the white straight lines of an inner door, glowing yellow, and a dark, angry Eastern face: that is the painting of a Jewish girl at a well. There is some Burne-Jones work here, unfinished for the most part, and thus escaping from the look of sameness which characterises the perfected auburn locks, heavy mouths and long eyes of the dreamer-artist's choice. One lissome Burne-Jones drawing in the Sargent Gallery has escaped from a red thicket of fairy tale… There are lovely little bits of painting on ivory, smooth, flowery, finished with love and grace of those blessed days when Art and Craft were self-respecting brothers.
Then retreat in good order to the shabby (externally) old Museum, and see things from the other world… little bone flutes made from pieces of human thigh-bone (Tutanekei's friend, softly, softly calling Hinemoa over the lake waters with his flute), carved boxes for huia feathers, carved boxes for cosmetics … they were such great dandies, the young men and women of Maori world.
Somewhere in between the Sargent Art Gallery and the carved boxes, you can see a community which plays excellent bridge for sixpenny points, hunts and rides and flourishes at Hunt Balls (Wanganui women dress beautifully), and makes cross-stitch sampler patterns with autumn crocus and magnificent tawny chrysanthemums, in big gardens whose glades shelter karaka