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The New Zealand Railways Magazine is on sale through the principal booksellers, or may be obtained post-free for 6/- per annum.
Employees of the Railway Department are invited to forward news items or articles bearing on railway affairs. The aim of contributors should be to supply interesting topical material tending generally towards the betterment of the service.
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Short stories, poetry, pen-and-ink sketches, etc., are invited from the general public upon New Zealand subjects.
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I hereby certify that the publisher's lists and other records disclose that the circulation of the “New Zealand Railways Magazine” has not been less than 23,000 copies each issue since August, 1937.
Controller and Auditor-General.
2/12/37.
(Photo., W. W. Stewart collection).
A scene at the Auckland wharves, North Island, New Zealand.
“Where a peace infinite, broodeth, calm and still.”
A scene in the beautiful Tangarakau Gorge, North Island, New Zealand.
All the while in this changing world the values of most things vary in relation to each other as well as in an absolute sense. The relative values of space and time as they affect life are instances of the rapidity of change in elemental matters. From London to New Zealand, a trip that took half a year a century ago, six weeks fifty years ago and to-day, for the average individual, is not done in less than a month, has been reduced by Clouston to a 4-day journey— this daring, born and bred New Zealander, thus circling half the world in half a week.
The increase in the value of time in relation to space is seen also in land transport. The trip from Auckland to Wellington which was a matter of weeks in the early days of settlement is now only a matter of hours.
Factory production, methods and means of distribution, education generally, and most of the exact sciences have made progress in some ways equally impressive. Each step of progress changes the value of each unit in the matter affected. For this reason it is the essence of good living to keep in step with the times by recognising the changing values as they occur and getting rid of dead stock, either in ideas or commodities, to make room for the new.
The clogging effect of superstitions and outmoded traditions holds back some individuals and some nations from their full share in the benefits of progress. They have not got their values right.
All people place a higher value on peace at the end of a war than at its beginning. This is just as natural as that a pork pie should mean more to a hungry man than to one who has just finished a full-course dinner.
One of our philosophers has said that there are three wants which can never be satisfied: “that of the rich, who want something more; that of the sick, who want something different; and that of the traveller, who says, ‘Anywhere but here.'” The Railway Department, however, would go a long way to satisfy a traveller of this kind and, in the course of its efforts, send him a long way too.
So we must also be prepared to re-value our philosophers who, good in their day, would doubtless, if they lived in ours, revise their own philosophy.
Even health varies in value according to time and country. But just as nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, so nothing can replace health for full and free living.
Luckily the most valuable things cost the least and their real value does not vary greatly.
A swim in the sea, a bask in the sun, the smell of new-mown hay, plain living and fair thinking, a bright idea, cheerful conversation—these are among the things of value that most may share and that do not usually lead either to economic stress or social disappointment. But it often requires an earthquake, a war, or a pestilence to make most of us realise the full value of the comparatively costless blessings which are normally available to the bulk of mankind.
It has been well said of the transport industry that everybody has an interest in railroad recovery. Hence the fact that the Railways here are finishing their 1937-1938 financial year with the highest revenue ever recorded is of general interest, and is a hopeful sign for the country as a whole as well as for the future of the Railways.
The records of business transacted reaching me week by week, and my personal observation of traffic movements in the course of visits from time to time to the various districts of our system all prove the marked activity in every branch of railway operation. Our four main Workshops, considered by some just a few years ago to be far in excess of any possible needs, are all working to capacity and have required some further extension and increased machinery.
Goods shed and shipping work has increased at every centre, and the passenger traffic has been maintained with remarkable steadiness, the latter this year missing the sag that usually occurs between the Christmas and Easter holidays. Besides the increased use of the Railways for travel by New Zealanders, there has been a notable stimulus through the increased tourist traffic reaching this country for travel during our summer months. Many visitors whom I have seen have explained just why this country is now proving so attractive to them. First there is the increased publicity given to New Zealand by the Government Departments concerned in this work. Then there are the general travel agencies and shipping companies engaged in filling cruise ships and other vessels visiting New Zealand with general tourists, as well as health and home-seekers.
Amongst Americans I find that New Zealand's attraction lies largely in the peace and quietness it promises from both the pace and the incessant activities of their home country and also what they believe to be the existing uncertainties and risks of travel either in Europe or the Orient. There is also a greatly increased exchange of travel between Australia and New Zealand.
I am sure it is good for the members of the Railway Department to make contact with the increasing range of travellers from so many overseas countries, and that in learning their wants and in providing them with a pleasing, courteous service, they will gain a greater knowledge of how to make all travellers and other users of the Railways contented and happy while they are in the care of the Department.
General Manager.
It is true in a sense that is quite distinctive and, moreover, peculiar to our history, that the railways made New Zealand. The boundless vision of Sir Julius Vogel used a far leaping railway building policy to serve a double purpose; to bring a magnificent class of immigrant here; and to give the settlers their badly needed transport. The building of our railways was a titanic achievement. They had to be driven through a terrain of lofty mountain, myriad river torrents, ravine, precipice, and swamp. The countless scenic wonders that make our land a universe of natural beauty, created a cascading riot of engineering problems.
The achievement itself was a romance, and it is strange that so little of this gripping epic of human endeavour has been preserved in our literature. There are more than thirty thousand New Zealand volumes in the Turnbull Library. I have spent weeks of search, and I have been observing and writing about New Zealand railways so many years that I can claim to be completely “railway-minded.”
I find that the total output of imaginative literature inspired by our railways is quite small, amounting to one collection of short stories, and a few scattered platoons of verse. I can say, however, by way of comfort that New Zealand has produced the best railway verse of any land.
The world's imagination has always been stirred by great engineering deeds. Such books as “The U.P. Trail,” “Whispering Smith,” “The Iron Trail,” and a dozen others have thrilled readers by the tens of thousands, bringing home to them the breathless romance of the linking by rail of the American coasts.
When “Brogden's Babies,” the handpicked lusty giants of immigrants, started the task of railway construction in New Zealand, they needed all their mighty thews and roaring vitality to overcome the formidable obstacles in the way of road making.
From daylight to dark, New Zealand skies resounded with the thundering strains of “So Early in the Morning,” and other hearty ditties, as “Brogden's Babies” tunnelled, dug, ripped and tore their way through range and swamp, bridging foaming rivers, and levelling huge earth barriers. As the work went on, we mobilised here an imposing army of engineering miracles. The Main Trunk line has thirty-two tunnels and the bizarre and amazing Raurimu Spiral; the Otira tunnel piercing the towering Southern Alps, is the longest tunnel in the Empire, and is approached by the incredible “Staircase” with fourteen tunnels in seven miles and an awesome complexity of slopes and steps. In the words of an American engineer of my acquaintance it was the “height of human impudence to build a railroad through such an Alpine geological curiosity shop.” I suppose it takes time to embalm great deeds in poem or story. While men are doing things, they have no time to write about them. Still we are approaching our hundredth year as a country, and we have established claims to a literature of our own. Our sheep stations have sponsored many good novels; but never our railway stations; our Maori wars have produced fine romances, but never our battles with flood and fire, rubbled slips and quaking morasses. Even the quiet suburban life of our town dwellers has its meed of story-tellers and verse writers. I find, after thorough research that there is not one novel dealing either with railway building or the lives of railwaymen. There is one collection of brilliant short stories, written by C. A. Jefferies, himself an ex-stationmaster. He had the makings of a great writer. His “Shepherd Kings of Canterbury” was a vivid picturising of an epoch that is past, the wide and prodigal days of the squatter ruling classes and their feudal splendour and boundless riches. “By Rail and Semaphore,” however, is sparkling from first page to last. I select from it “Driver Bruce's Walpurgis Night,” a roaring comedy of the rail, set round the innocent consumption by a Scottish driver of a bottle of Benedictine which had been well warmed, according to hopelessly muddled instructions. The subsequent nightmare drive from Duntroon to Timaru is described with rich gusto, but there is no train wreck. The driver's railway training asserted itself… . “There was a screech of brakes. They shot past the distant signal, but beyond it again, the starting signal (sic) gleamed blood-red. A short succession of jerks brought them to a standstill at the platform.” It is a noble effort, a story utterly and completely impossible, but the atmosphere is authentic, and Driver Bruce is a figure from a railway Homer.
I should have thought that, in
Rly. Publicity photo.) On the Wellington side of the Tawa Flat deviation.
But the whole panorama is disappointing. Yet we find no less a person than Mr. Edmund Vale declaring that “Railway rhythm in its perfected form is one of the most profound poetical manifestations of the mechanical world.”
This has not permeated English verse to any extent. The commoner mood is a sort of weariness as in Harold Monro's “Week End.”
“Now we sit Reading the morning paper in the sound
Of the debilitating heavy train. London again, again. London again.”
The great Robert Browning made a queer mistake in his “Easter Eve,” thinking that the rhythmic clacking he heard was made by the engine and not by the turning wheels of the coach on the lines.
“A tune was born in my head last week Out of the bump, bump and the shriek shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester
And when next week I take it back again
My head will sing to the engine's clack again.”
Now I am going to show quite easily, I think, that not only the august loveliness of steam and steel, but the human warmth and romance implicit in the craft or calling of the railway service, has reached its highest expression in the verse made in New Zealand.
I ran across a book of railway verses by a poet from the railways of Scotland, that land where “one pen in ten is a poet's quill.” Alexander Anderson was a surfaceman and he lived in Dumfrieshire, where Burns spent the last years of his life. There is a sincerity about the work of this poet and he had the culture common to his race, but his feelings are stronger than the poetic value of his work.
Here is a verse from “The Engine.”
“But how well he can bear it, this Titan of toil
When his pathway yields to his tread,
And the vigour within him flares up to its height Till the smoke of his breath grows red.
Then he shrieks in delight as an athlete might When he reaches his wild desire,
And from head to heel, through each muscle of steel, Runs the cunning and clasp of the fire.”
Many of the poems are stories of real life in rhyme, and they have a definite homely beauty of their own. His Muse was naturally not assisted by his job, and this is finely said.
“I leap aside, the train roars past, And all my fancies, worn and sick, Come slowly back, to die at last In the sharp raspings of the pick.”
However, I am not being over-patriotic when I say I like the following sample better. It is from George Gordon's “The Driver.”
“What makes a driver? From the time his little heart could thrill, His little ears could hear the magic train,
The movements in the shunting yard, the engine's whistle shrill…” and then—
“School done, he seeks a cleaner's job, and loves it from the start, The healthy smells of oils and waste cheer his full-engined heart,
Delight he feels in ponderous wheels, in steam-dome burnished bright,
In ‘pinching’ engines round the shed, and setting fires alight.”
There is a ring of reality about this, and it is touched with the true gleam.
Here is another craftsmanlike set of verses, “When the North Express Comes In,” by John MacLennan. This is the real thing:
“It's a dusty road from the North to the South, A dusty road and long,
And the glinting cranks must needs be true, And the boiler tight and strong.
The driver sits on the right-hand seat,
And his heart keeps time with the rhythmic beat
Of the valves, and he's grimed with the smoke and heat, When the North Express comes in.”
And here is the splendid last verse:
“There's a prayer in the cab of the North Express, As the driver shuts off steam,
And grips the lever of the brake, For the home-light soon will gleam
On the tired train; then he'll leave his seat
On the right-hand side; and sound and sweet
Is the sleep of a man and his mate, dead-beat, When the North Express is in.”
There is a railway sound about these, and both poems are worth reading as a whole.
The railway train is also mentioned in Quentin Pope's polished and brilliant “The Song of Speed.”
“The engine stutters its fiery song As the things of earth flash by,
The race to the swift and the strong, the strong, The turn to the sure of eye.”
I have left Will Lawson to the last for he made the railways his private province, and explored it assiduously. Many a night journey he spent in the cab of a hurtling train; he spent hours and hours in engine sheds and clattering workshops. The engine room of a steamer and the form of an A.B. engine were twin sources of his highest inspiration. He spared no pains to plumb the mystery of this fascinating organism of steel and steam, of speed and human travail.
Listen to this.
“Stoking on the ‘Paekok’ With thirty wagons on,
Choking in the ‘Paekok'. When air and daylight's gone,
And hear her roaring funnel
A-thrashing in the tunnel, A-firing in the ‘Paekok'
With just your trousers on.”
Then there is a real pulse in the tragic poem “The Cattle Train.”
“With thump and rattle of springs And clatter of undergear
The long train rumbles and swings Till the tail-lights twinkle clear
From the plain lands down to the coast, Over the hills between
That is the engine's boast,
That is where she has been A thousand times; and each time she brings
A load of quivering, captured kings.”
Here is a vital memory of a night drive—“The Flyer.”
“And e'en when the day is ended,
And heavier builds outstrip,
She'll come in the moonlight splendid,
And blow where the crossings dip,
And men laid dead in the distance
Will turn in their sleep, I know
To hear the rush of her pistons,
And smile when they hear her blow,”
But my choice is “Drivin',” with its curious refrain:
“Oh, I'm drivin'—drivin'
There's many thousands strivin’ Some men drive cows, Some foamin’ bows,
I set six wheels a-drivin’ …
Now hear the words my engine speaks Slow, rhythmic yet not singin'
As by the peaks and tumblin’ creeks Her eighty tons goes ringin'
Man's life is just two far-stretched rails, With many a curve and crossin',
S. A. Rockliff, photo.)
A goods train near Deep Stream, Otago Central line, South Island, New Zealand.
The levels change, the wide curves range Up grades and down, a-tossin'
And men must live and men must die,
So what's the use of growlin',
The ‘Danger’ falls, the whistle calls
Full Steam—and take it howlin', These words are cheerin’ like to those
Whose lives are full of strivin', The smooth valves gape, the smooth valves close, And I am drivin'—drivin'.”
I am proud of New Zealand achievement in the matter of poetry about the railway. However, It is not enough. As time goes on, the mightiest industrial brotherhood of our country must and shall produce its writers of epics-and its creators of romances. There is so much glowing material; the superb fellowship of the service; the selfless-gallantry of all ranks; the panorama of gigantic past difficulties overcome; the weird and wondrous beauty of the land through which our iron lines are laid; the mightiness and mystery, the power and magic of modern mechanisms; these should produce a continuous fountain of great literary creativeness.
There is a novel in every journey of a night goods train; there is a poem in every white jet of steam as a “K” locomotive climbs to Horopito. They will be written.
Mr. W. F. Barton's Tribute
Warm praise for the New Zealand railways, which taking into account the difficult physical nature of the country and other unavoidable difficulties, compared favourably with others that he had seen in different parts of the world, was given by Mr, W. F. Barton, signalling and telegraphic engineer to the New South Wales Government (states “The New Zealand Herald”).
Mr. Barton spent a week investigating signalling systems in the Dominion and travelled to Auckland by rail-car from Wellington. He has travelled in many parts of the world for his Government and is a recognised railway authority.
“Your railways are wonderfully up to date,” said Mr. Barton. “They are excellently maintained, well run, the staff shows every courtesy, and the whole system, suggests the working of an efficient and well-oiled machine.
“The New Zealand signalling systems, including telephonic communication and telephonic train control, are well up to world standard,” continued Mr. Barton. “In addition, the lines are in excellent maintenance throughout, the rolling stock good, while the locomotives appear to take exceptional loads, which testifies to their high class and servicing.”
The Auckland and Wellington stations compared very favourably with the best abroad, commented Mr. Barton, and the large sums invested in these buildings had been very well spent. They would be distinct assets to the country for many years to come. Mr. Barton was particularly enthusiastic in referring to the children's quarters on the roof of the Wellington station. The service in caring for the children, including cheap meals and sleeping accommodation, was an excellent and pleasing innovation. There was only one such service in Australia —in Melbourne.
“A wonderful spirit existing among the staff impressed me greatly,” Mr. Barton continued. “This appears to be largely due to the methods employed by the General Manager, Mr. G. H. Mackley. He seems to be universally popular and undoubtedly has the happy knack of treating men as men.”
The only criticism that Mr. Barton offered was that there were far too many level crossings, the danger of which appeared to be unnecessarily increased by the lack of care and consideration by motorists.
“There seems to be plenty of money being spent on railways in New Zealand,” said Mr. Barton in conclusion, “but it is being spent wisely. I am a great believer in constant expenditure on railways, especially in such a country as this, where a first-class service is a great necessity.”
From Mr. H. B. Duckworth, Chairman of the Rotary Reception Committee, Christchurch, to the District Traffic Manager, Christchurch:—
The Annual Conference of the Rotary Clubs of New Zealand, held the week before last, was voted by everyone a very distinct success, and the arrangements for the reception of visitors was specially commented on.
The arrangements made by yourself for receiving our guests at the Christchurch Station worked admirably, and these to a very large extent were responsible for the manner in which we were able to make contact with visitors arriving by train and steamer.
Would you please accept, on behalf of the Christchurch Club, our very sincere thanks for the favours conferred, and. I would appreciate if you would also convey to the Stationmaster at Christchurch and his officers our appreciation of the courteous treatment and many favours extended by them during that week.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Top: A photograph showing the various displays to be used in the New Zealand Railway Department's portion of the New Zealand Government's exhibit at the Exhibition. For further details see page 64.
Left : This perspective gives a general impression of the layout of the buildings dominated by the 300 ft. observation and beacon tower. The Exhibition, which is to be held from May to October, will occupy 175 acres in Bella-houston Park, Glasgow,
Illustration courtesy “Railway Gazette.” London.
The battle of Pilot Bay, at Mount Maunganui, Tauranga, in 1820, is a magnificent, if terrible epic in our New Zealand history.
Under Te Morenga, that raider chief of the Northern tribes, the Ngapuhi fleet sailed for Tauranga, and fell upon the Ngaiterangi at Pilot Bay, that lovely and peaceful anchorage beneath the shadow of the Mount. In the fierce strife between the armed men of the North and the Ngaiterangi with their native weapons, three hundred warriors of the Tauranga tribe were slain.
The Ngapuhi halted in their triumphal advance to prepare a great canriibal feast of the bodies, and their chief went out upon a scouting expedition across the harbour to Otumoetai, that long slender finger of land which runs out opposite to the Tauranga point, across the narrow estuary of Waikareao. He left his men in the canoe, and sat down under a ngaio tree to think over his triumphs, and fell asleep. As he slept, Te Waro, the head chief of the Ngaiterangi, crept upon him alone, and made him a prisoner. The Ngapuhi prepared to meet death as a chief should, but amazingly enough Te Waro led him down to the Waikareao within sight of the canoe and warriors, and cut his bonds.
“Now bind me …” said Te Waro, “And carry me back to your people at the camp beside the Mount.”
The whirligig of Time brings many changes in our social life. Fifty years ago our old friend “Mr. Punch,” in his humorous way, wrote: “The ideal wife is one who allows smoking all over the house.” In that day smoking was tabooed by most wives, and if hubby wanted a whiff he usually had to seek the seclusion of the summer-house or the coal cellar. But most wives smoke themselves now and would be simply lost without their cigarettes! Yes, we are living at a faster pace than they did in Victorian days, and the “weed” is more appreciated than ever before—especially if it's “toasted,” with its beautiful flavour and rare fragrance. There's no “bite” in “toasted.” Toasting takes it clean out, and the tobacco is left as pure, sweet, mellow, cool and comforting as it is possible to make it. Once you change over to Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold or Desert Gold, you'll never be content with ordinary tobaccos. “Toasted” makes friends—and keeps them!*
This the Ngapuhi did, and, when they landed, and the warriors gathered round swinging their long-handled tomahawks, and exulting over the capture, Te Morenga held up his hand for silence.
“Now hear how this man treated me when I was bound and at his mercy!” he cried.
The old Mount must have looked down upon a strange scene, as the two stood there in the ring of blood-thirsty fighting men, in the flickering gleam of the fires from the cannibal ovens, that fierce raider Te Morenga, and Te Maru, with his bearing of a chief, bound, and calm and dignified.
Te Morenga cried aloud the. story, and when the Ngapuhi men heard it, they threw down their spears and tomahawks, and the guns of the white man, and said … “We cannot fight against such a man as this. Let there now be a covenant of peace between the Ngapuhi and the Ngaiterangi.”
As the seal of their good faith, the Ngapuhi went to the ovens, and took out the bodies prepared for the feast, and gave them honourable burial in the rock caves, and, in the dying smoke of the quenched fires, the treaty of peace was pledged.
It was impossible not to think of the old story of honour and cruelty and chivalry as we stood upon the rocky crest of Mount Maunganui, looking down almost a thousand feet into the lovely curve of Pilot Bay, like a shallow bowl filled with liquid jewels. The ring of radiant white sand shelved into the transparent water; blue and emerald and violet shadows cast a mingled iridescence where the walnut shells of the fleet of pleasure craft lay motionless, with painted canoes like tiny yellow water bugs skimming the surface. Beyond the slender finger of Salisbury Avenue Wharf, a speed-boat left two delicate out-curving pencil lines in its wake, and infinitesimal triangles of sail drifted white against the blue.
Rly. Publicity photo.) The waterfront at Tauranga, and the Mount, North Island, New Zealand.
It was a dazzling summer day. It had been so hot toiling up the steep winding track that our perspiration had bedewed the stones of the way, but it was worth every pang of weariness and every drop of sweat a dozen times over to stand there on the crest and look down upon the amazing panorama, so comprehensive and colourful that the brain almost refused to take it in.
The inner harbour lay blue and silver and tranquil, long cool fingers thrust up into the hills, the jagged and intimidating silhouette of the Kaimais looming across the west, running into the blue uplands of the lake country, taken up by the misty outline of the Coromandel ranges. Between sea and hills was the sprawling white line of the town of Tauranga, looking out on its own white shimmering reflection in the blue water. From the slender spiderweb spans of the railway bridge, tiny puffs of smoke mushroomed upwards from a passing train. While we watched, H.M.S. “Leith” left the town wharf, and moved slowly down the deep-water channel. It was a curious sight to see her tall wireless masts and grey bulldog silhouette passing the white bluffs of the old Military Cemetery where so many of the men of the “Esk” and “Miranda” and “Curacoa” and “Marrier” lie buried, where, to this day, according to tradition, each visiting battleship sends a party to keep in repair the weather-beaten crosses, and
Toward the north we looked over the long sweep of Matakana Island, looking between the ocean and the placid harbour reaches, between the main entrance, at our feet, and the bar of Bowentown Heads, twenty miles to the north. From that height Matakana was flat as a map, shaped like a letter E, with three points of low sandy bluffs facing inwards, with long miles of dark pine plantations. With the most glorious ocean beach imaginable, its treble lines of white fretted surf stretched away and away to a dim infinity of distance.
Out of the harbour entrance a yacht was beating, the line of the tide rip running white on the ultramarine water, the tall pillar of canvas heading north toward the dim columns of the Aldermen, toward the dazzling sunshine that lay upon the far horizon. Straight out to sea, from the skyline mists, the shoulder of Mayor Island loomed. To the east the long line of the shore and the snowy surf stretched unbroken until the eye could take it in no longer; until, like a dream, Cape Runaway rose from the sprindrift haze, with the faint head of East Cape lifted behind it.
When our eyes became bewildered with distance, we looked close at hand again, down at our feet to the narrow strip of low land, zig-zagged by white roads, patched by green and red and orange roofs and dark windows in white walls, by squares of pine plantations where the peaked tents of campers looked like a glimpse of a military encampment. On either hand was the water. The ocean beach was broad and smooth and white, with lines of dazzlingly white surf upon a poster blue-and-green sea. A multitude of ants disported themselves in the surf and upon the sands; the lines of parked cars looked for all the world like rows of shiny-backed beetles.
Off the dark bush-clad cone of Rabbit Island there were fishing boats at anchor, and low rocks loomed purple through the blue water. Out from the reefs of Blow-Hole Point, the sea was breaking white, but it was too calm for the spout to be playing. To see the Blow-Hole at its best, you must see it in an easterly wind, when the swell, slow-moving, thunders magnificently into the confines of the narrow rock passage. Driven by some terrible and irresistible force it spouts upwards in a mushrooming explosion of thick white spray, to crash back on the surrounding rocks, and pour from them in white waterfalls back into the boiling maelstrom of the Hole.
Photo., courtesy Stationmaster, Rangatava.) Portion of a consignment of 600 wagon loads of posts and battens for the Public Works Department, being railed from Rangatana station, North Island, New Zealand.
We sat there watching, and a fishing boat clove the still jewelled waters of Pilot Bay, a feather of white at her prow, a great trail of snowy seagulls swooping and diving and mewing behind. It was all very peaceful, and it was hard to believe that the blare of the war-conches had once echoed under the drooping pohutukawas, that the savage prows of fighting canoes had lashed the still tide to foam. On the beach where the children rode small meek donkeys and the bronzed surfers laughed and plunged, the songs of blood-stained and victorious warriors had once drifted upwards, and the red smoke of the sacrificial fires stained the peaceful heavens.
Now the “Leith” was heading for the entrance, passing down the deep-water channel, beneath the shadow of the Mount. Her grey bulldog hull moved slowly against the blue water, her tall masts reared a stately web, white dots of sailors stood about her decks and the colours flew at her stern. For an instant she made a curiously impressive picture, but the old Mount that had seen the bloody conflicts of tribal warfare, that had watched the red-coat soldiers and their muzzle-loading cannon and their wooden warships, looked down, wrapped in its own memories.
Deliciously-tender Canterbury lamb was featured on my dinner menu to-day. A dainty pat of golden New Zealand butter was served with the biscuits and cheese. Crisp, rosy-cheeked Cox's Orange Pippins from the Little England overseas invitingly filled the fruit-bowl at my elbow. Here were New Zealand products of the finest quality, brought thousands of miles by rail and sea, and attractively marketed at most reasonable prices. The experience was not new. Every day, New Zealand products appear on my table, as they probably do in seventy-five per cent. or more of English homes. How was it done? What was the story that lay behind this constant flow of prime New Zealand products into the Homeland? To the docks I went, there to glean the truth.
This Empire capital of ours has always taken a special interest in the development of New Zealand trade, and the phenomenal increase in the volume and variety of those products prepared for export has been materially facilitated by the machinery and power of the London Market. The Port and Market of London are inextricably interwoven, and the Port of London Authority—since its inception twenty-eight years ago—has played a vital role in ensuring that the New Zealand producers’ wares should look just as immaculate and as attractive in the shop windows of Britain as on the day they were despatched from the native farm, orchard or creamery.
The Port of London includes about 70 miles of the course of “Old Father Thames” and the docks off its banks. The commercial heart of the Port, where the bulk of the annual traffic of 62,000,000 tons of shipping and the 43,000,000 tons of merchandise is handled, may be said to extend over the 26 miles between Gravesend and London Bridge, all the docks and most of the riverside wharves being in this section.
For the year ending March 31, 1936, the estimated tonnage of imports into the Port of London from New Zealand was 456,000 tons, and for the year ending March 31, 1937, 472,000 tons, or roughly 70 per cent. of the total New Zealand imports through all Home ports.
While New Zealand goods shipped find their way to many warehouses and depots all over the Port, the principal shipping lines trading between London and New Zealand berth in the Royal Docks system. Although only one of the five great dock systems of the metropolis, these docks are equal, in area, accommodation and traffic, to many creditably large ports.
The Royal Docks (Royal Victoria, Albert, and King George V. Docks) cover a total water area of 247 acres. They form, in reality, one huge dock in three sections, and constitute the largest sheet of enclosed dock water in the world. An elaborate network of dock railways links the water-front with the main-line railways which, in turn, carry New Zealand products to every corner of the kingdom at express speed. As many as fifty vessels, with a total displacement of 500,000 tons, are at times berthed simultaneously in London's Royal Docks, meat, butter, cheese, wool and fruit forming the principal imports from New Zealand.
Annually something like 200,000 tons of New Zealand meat reach the Home market through the Port of London, and in the story of these imports refrigeration looms large.
In 1880, the sailing ship Strathleven landed 40 tons of Australian meat which had travelled in a frozen condition. In 1881, an Edinburgh firm chartered the sailing ship Dunedin, and
Dunedin arrived in London in May, 1882, after a passage of 98 days, bringing nearly 5,000 carcases of sheep and lambs in good condition. To-day fleets of vessels with refrigerated chambers containing thousands of tons of mutton, lamb and beef, discharge in the Port of London. Among the leading Shipping Companies engaged in this trade are the New Zealand Shipping Company, the Port Line, the Shaw Savill and Albion, and the Blue Star Line.
Meat imports are dealt with in the Royal Victoria, Albert and King George V. Docks. Special berths are set aside for the accommodation of meat-carrying vessels from New Zealand. Parallel to the quay is a double-storey shed, the lower portion of which is used for transit berths; while the upper portion, which is refrigerated, has accommodation for 250,000 carcases. No. 6 Cold Store, connected to the quay shed by insulated conveyors, has accommodation for a further 250,000 carcases of lamb or mutton.
The meat is discharged from the steamer holds by hygienic slings, on to electric quay trucks. After being sorted to marks, the carcases are transferred to insulated lighters, road vehicles, and special meat trains. Much of the meat goes to the main London Market at Smithfield, and by rail and road to the provincial cities. That not immediately required in the market is warehoused in one of the adjacent Cold Stores, to be drawn from as required.
For the storage of all butter and cheese imported into Britain special arrangements are made by the New Zealand Government. In London, the whole of these imports are delivered from ships discharged at the Royal Docks to barges for storage nearer the markets.
Cheese is stored at Surrey Commercial Docks in specially-designed refrigerated warehouses. There are two Cold Stores with a capacity for over 12,000 tons, each divided into chambers of various sizes maintained at temperatures of from 14 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Elaborate arrangements are made for expeditious delivery of samples to merchants’ wholesale premises.
Wool has loomed large in London's trade for centuries. In the Middle Ages it was the country's greatest export. To-day, it is one of our principal imports, and large quantities are received from New Zealand. There is wool storage accommodation in London for 1,000,000 bales, and Show Floors for 40,000 bales. The main Wool Warehouses and Show Floors are at the London and St. Katharine Docks. The roofs have northern lights, to facilitate inspection, and the Port Authority maintains a staff of experts whose accuracy and impartiality in weighing and sampling wool are implicitly relied upon by the Trade.
Six times a year, the London Wool Sales are held at the Wool Exchange, in Coleman Street. Each Sale lasts-about three weeks, and is attended by buyers from Yorkshire, France, Belgium, Germany, and other consuming countries. Before a Sale, the buyers make a tour of the Port Wool Warehouses, to inspect the lots to be offered and to fix their basic prices for bidding. It speaks well for the efficiency and organisation at the Wool Warehouses at the London and St. Katharine Docks that deliveries are made from the warehouses for the English manufacturing centres like Leeds and Bradford, or the Continent, within twenty-four hours of a Public Wool Sale.
The development of New Zealand fruit imports has been greatly assisted by the provision at the Port of London of suitable discharging berths and premises, equipment and delivery facilities. The discharge of fruit is effected by modern cranes and conveyors, and sorting is carried out in spacious transit sheds. Deliveries are effected rapidly to rail and road vehicles at conveniently situated loading bays adjacent to the sheds. Covent Garden Market takes a large proportion of the imports, the balance being dispatched by rail and road to all corners of the country.
It is indeed a wonderful experience to visit the London Docks and see just how the many New Zealand imports are handled.
The names used in this story are entirely fictitious. The incident described, however, and the method used for stealing sheep from the large mobs which were driven via the East Coast of the North Island, in the early days, may, perhaps, be recalled by many of the older generation.
The evening went rapidly with much mirth and song, although Jim could not rid himself of his misgivings. Many times he looked searchingly at Monty across the table seeking to read his inmost thoughts. Neither Jim nor any of them were prepared for the bomb which exploded on the morrow.
Jim walked home with Mabel, while Fred, the cadet, some distance in front, took charge of Hilda.
“Jim,” said Mabel, “tell me what Sergeant Kelly has come about. I couldn't get a word out of Dad.”
“And I'm afraid you won't get much out of me, simply because I have nothing certain to tell.”
“But you have an idea, Jim, and you shouldn't keep anything from me.”
“Yes, I have an idea. You are a sweet, charming, inquisitive young person,” he said, laughing down at her. Then his face grew grave. “But whatever I think, or what ideas I may have, you'll agree that the best thing to do is to keep dumb. Now have you nothing to tell me, Mabel?”
“Oh, I could tell you lots, but I know I should not.” Mabel looked rather distressed.
“Very well, old girl, we are quits,” and they proceeded to talk of things that concerned themselves only.
Monty had a feeling that a crisis was pending. He surmised from the presence of the sergeant that he was going to have a gruelling next day, but to all appearances he was just the same old Monty. He had chatted away to Sergeant Kelly and had joined in the games and music just as ever. When parting with the sergeant he said he expected him over in the morning. “You know it wouldn't be quite fair to leave me out,” he added.
“I'll be there, Mr. Carden,” answered the sergeant. “Good-night!” The sergeant's unspoken thoughts were: “I wish the beggar would clear out so I could never find him. He is too fine a chap to spend eight or ten years in jail. Why is he mixed up in this sort of business? It's not because he's hard up. There isn't enough evidence to arrest him and if I don't get hold of something else to-morrow, I'm afraid it will be a washout for the present.”
* * *
Monty saw Sergeant Kelly coming in the front gate, so he rode down to meet him.
“Morning Mr. Carden, another fine day. I must congratulate you young farmers on the splendid condition of your farms. You all must work hard— not much time for other activities, eh?”
“Yes,” agreed Monty. “We work hard, but yet find time for plenty of enjoyment. Come up to the house, I'm due for a cup of tea and I'm sure you can do with one, too.”
“Let us forego the tea awhile, I'm not here for a pleasure visit. I have a search warrant in my pocket, although I feel sure you'll render me all the assistance I want without my presenting it. You must know that I've heard that several hundred sheep have been stolen while passing from the south and the drovers have thinned it down, by checking tallys, to within a few miles of here. The Maoris have not taken them and they've not been drowned, so it really confines itself to this Valley.”
“Go on, sergeant, I'm listening, although I can't see why you have settled on me as a suspect. However, you are welcome to currycomb this old farm of mine from end to end.”
“I know you'll not put any obstacles in my way, but I warn you anything you say or do may be used against you,” the sergeant answered.
“That I'm surprised and hurt you can well understand, but why you've picked on me as a possible delinquent I can't imagine. Surely,” continued Monty, “I'm entitled to know what has led you to concentrate your attentions on me.”
The sergeant began to realise that he was fencing with a man quite out of the ordinary—that nothing Carden said, although he gave apparently straight and clear answers—would be of any help towards the solution of his difficulties.
“You asked me, Mr. Carden, why suspicion was directed towards you. First, because you've been shipping bales of pelts far beyond the usual, and beyond the carrying capacity of your farm. Account for the extra bales of pelts satisfactorily and I will beg your pardon and depart.”
“You've laid your charge then on the supposition that these extra bales contained the pelts of stolen animals. Such being the case, sergeant, the onus is on you to prove the pelts came off stolen sheep. Don't forget, though, that I buy quite a number of sheep the receipts for which can be forthcoming when necessary. There is a bale of pelts in the shed, also a number of fresh skins awaiting to be dried and trimmed; perhaps you would like to open them up? Another thing I would like to ask you. Has anyone seen me stealing sheep or with stolen sheep in my possession? No, I'm sure, and when we've mustered and gone through the 2,000 odd flock, you'll find the number within very few of the right run tally. And now I'm going to show you fifty or sixty of the lost sheep which have been in my paddock for about two weeks awaiting an owner. They are marked with red ochre on the head so that if they got mixed up with the flock they could be easily picked out. We'll yard them up and you can identify the earmarks by your drawings. You'll have at least the credit of finding some of the missing sheep. This is all I can tell you or help you, except that these sheep must have broken away at the junction of the Valley road and found their way down here to save their lives. I put them into a paddock where they would do all right until they were claimed.”
“That'll not account for four or five hundred,” said Kelly. “Anyhow we'll get them in. There is little doubt that they are part of the missing sheep, Mr. Carden, but why did you not notify Te Ako?”
“I think if you make inquiries the storekeeper will tell you I sent word. Anyhow,” continued Monty, “I can't see that I can help you any more. You'd better come now and have lunch. I'm not the least alarmed about the final result of these investigations, and I think you must see that you are on the wrong track and making the whole position damnably unpleasant to me. A nice thing for me if my neighbours hear that I'm suspected of sheep stealing!”
“I'm afraid it is a bit more than a suspicion and you must consider yourself under detention, Mr. Carden. I'm trusting you this far, that you'll make no attempt to escape while I go to Te Ako and bring the Chief Inspector back. I shall be back to-morrow night.”
Monty said nothing. He realised that he had a day and a half to put things in order. He realised also that it was the end of happy relations between himself, the Jeffreys and Chadwicks. Well, he had had a fair run. He would take his gruelling, but he would be the first to let his friends know. It would be a test of their friendship, but Mabel—! As he thought of what he had done, the frightfulness of it began to dawn on him. He, Monty Carden, loved by his neighbours, trusted and honoured, had fallen so low as to be arrested on suspicion of sheep stealing. “I would have brought dear old Rex down with me, also,” he thought.
It was a grey-faced and haggard Monty that sought Jim Jeffreys that afternoon.
“Jim! I have to go away for a couple of weeks. Will you keep an eye on things for me?”
“Monty! Monty, old chap, of course I will. I won't ask you why, but I thought Kelly was up to no good.”
“No, Jim. Kelly is only doing his duty. He has a good reason to be suspicious and though I'll have to go to the city to clear the matter up and am not afraid of the ultimate result, yet the damage is done. It'll never be the same here. I shall not be able to look them all in the face again, and yet I can't go away and not see the Chadwick's, Jim. What a mess of things I've made, Jim. What a fool I've been! Just for an obsession—to prove that I could steal sheep and cover my tracks so no one would know. Believe me, Jim, it was not for gain—beyond paying back an old score. I did not even think that suspicion could fall on me, but there it is. The only one of us that has done a dishonourable thing and yet I didn't think it dishonourable. I set out to prove I could take sheep—I won't say steal, because it didn't occur to me in that light—in fairly big numbers so that no one could find out. Say good-bye to Phil and your mother. I know you'll make it as light for me as you can. I'm going to the Chadwick's now.”
“Monty, old man, I'm sorry, but in the face of all you have told me I shall still be your friend.”
“I can't see how you can be, Jim. I have taken sheep that didn't legally belong to me. I also tried to take Mabel from you, but to love a girl like her is an honour, although sometimes I have thought Hilda was your favourite.”
“I'm still very fond of Hilda, Monty, but I never thought she cared a rap for me and somehow Mabel's friendship seemed to grow into affection, and finally I asked her to marry me. However, it's not a time to be talking of this, but rather to see the best way to get you out of the mess.”
No one can get me out of the moral side of it, Jim. There is no evidence
“Never fear, Monty, I'll look after things for you and will count the days until you come back to us.”
* * *
Monty went to the Chadwicks and found the old man in the workshop.
“Mr. Chadwick, I've come to say good-bye. I'm going away to-morrow for a few days,” he said.
“Anything to do with Sergeant Kelly's visit, Monty?”
“Im afraid it is. Kelly has only done his duty, and I'm going away with him to answer a charge of sheep stealing.”
“Good Lord, Monty! Is it as bad as that?”
“Yes, but whatever the punishment it will be nothing compared with my sorrow and shame for having to lose the goodwill and kindly regard of my Valley friends.”
“You'll not lose that, my boy. Why, boy, whatever you've done, you are your father's son, and your father, with Jeffreys, were my sincerest friends and companions in hardship and toil from the time you were a little kiddie.”
“Anyhow I must get it over—where is Mabel?”
“She is somewhere up the bush track with Hilda building a summer-house,” said Mr. Chadwick.
Monty found them happily engaged in putting a nikau roof on a summer-house.
“Here! catch me, Monty,” cried Mabel as she slid from the eaves.
She was dexterously caught and held until she wriggled free.
“Mabel!” said Monty, “I've something very serious to tell you, if Hilda will be good enough to run away and cut some more nikaus.”
“Better than that, Monty,” said Hilda. “I will go and fetch the billy and something to eat. You have a fire going and we'll have a picnic.”
“Dear Hilda, what a darling she is. Now, Monty what is it you have come to tell me. You look pretty blue, anyhow—and on a day like this!”
Monty told her everything, nor did he spare himself.
“What can you all think of me, Mabel! but please believe this, I didn't commit this theft for mere personal gain. I had an uncontrollable desire to prove that I could steal sheep without anyone finding out.”
“Monty! Monty, what can I say? What can I do to help you? I have thought such a lot about you of late—ever since that evening that I had to say ‘No'—and now you are going away.”
“I'm not worth thinking about, but if I can still retain your goodwill and kindly thoughts, the knowledge will be something to help me lead a life you could respect.”
“Monty, nothing will make me ever believe you other than a gentleman—nothing will alter my respect for you and I'm going to kiss you good-bye now with a wish that things will go right with you.”
“Mabel, don't dear! if you did it would be wrong to Jim. I love you, girl, and I could not stand it. Thank God! here is Jim and Hilda,” and Monty Carden wiped a brow wet with the perspiration engendered by intense feeling.
“No fire for the billy! Where is the fire, Monty? You are a bright one, isn't he Jim? Here get to work at once. You've been a long time telling Mabel this secret,” said Hilda, with bright mischievous eyes.
Jim guessed what it was. “Never mind, Hilda,” he said. “See if I can't find a secret to tell you.”
Hilda bowed her head and only Monty saw the scarlet flush that spread from her soft cheeks to her throat.
Rly. Publicity photo.) The Auckland—Wellington Limited crossing the Walkanae Bridge, North Island, New Zealand.
“You never tell me anything, Jim—except about your horses and sheep, and you never bring me a horse to ride.”
“They would buck you off,” Jim answered, teasingly.
“Oh! you wretch! you know I can ride anything you can.”
By this time Monty had made a fire, the billy was put on and in due time was boiling. They all gathered round and tea cakes and scones were handed round. Somehow it was not a happy picnic and before the meal was over, Monty got up to go.
“Good-bye all of you. I'm awfully sorry, but I must go. Will see you to-morrow, Jim,” and with a wave of his hand and a long look at Mabel, he was gone.
“What's the matter with Monty?” asked Hilda. “I've not seen him like that before. I'm sure it is about something he told Mabel. What is it, Jim? You look like a Sphinx and Mabel has the blues. Tell me at once,” and she looked questionably from one to the other.
“Can't Hilda,” said Jim, laconically.
“Well then I'll worm it out of Mabel, won't I dear? There's a kiss to drive away the blues,” suiting the action to
(Continued on page 44.)
(Concluded.)
We left Kehu the Fair-Hair re-united to her man Jack Hardwick at Taumarunui, after a stormy passage with stern parent and offended tribe.
Now all was serene. The barometer of life set fair. Had the lovers elected to remain in the nest of the bush-folk the sequel to this passionate elopement might have been an untroubled existence in primitive comfort, in that heart of the island at watersmeet.
Kehu's pakeha was not attracted by that prospect of a blanket life. It might suit his kinsman-by-marriage the solitary pakeha trader at Taumarunui. But Hardwick was young and the world was still before him. Kehu would not hinder his plans; she was ready to bundle and go. Tiaki was her man, and where he rode she could ride too. Within certain limits, of course. The husband must find employment if he left the hospitable community that gave him his wife and offered him a share of the tribal land. He was a bushman, a timber-worker, a stockman, a handyman. There was work enough with sheep and cattle to be had for the hunting; but most of all he wanted Kehu's company without the company of all her Maori family-groups comprising most of the population of Taumarunui and fifty miles down-river.
So Hardwick and Kehu packed up and left the valley of kindness and gossip and the full food-baskets, the “Tokanga-nui a-noho,” as the Maoris say. “Haere, haere,” the old chief, of Ngati-Hau cried as they rode out of the marae, with all their gear stowed on a packhorse, tarpaulined and lashed for the bush trail. “Farewell! You leave behind you the full food baskets; for you two now the short commons of the traveller.” That is a proverbial saying of those parts. The “Tokanga-nui-a-Noho” symbolises the well-fed stay-at-homes; the “rourouiti-a-haere,” the hard-faring ones who take the long trail and meagre rations. None the less, the old man had given Kehu a generous supply from his well-stocked pataka.
The pair halted a few moments on the brow of the hill to wave a good-bye to the stay-at-homes, then turned to the far journey and the adventure of the unknown that lay beyond the dusky forest curtain.
By the way of Tokaanu and the great plains the lovers rode east. It was summer time, and life soared on a joyous wing. They camped where it pleased them, and where there was good foraging for their horses. They hunted for fresh food when there was good hunting to be had. Hardwick had his shotgun and there were pigeon in every grove of bush and often a chattering kaka, and there were duck and teal in every stream and swamp. Sometimes they met Maoris, and stayed awhile at some remote kainga but not long, for the open road and the far-stretching parae called. Parae is the open grassy or ferny plain; a word curiously like it is to the French-American prairie.
Far away were the hills of fairy blue, ranges upon ranges, a broken-topped wall, like a saw-edge, true sierras. They bounded the tussocked parae of the Kaingaroa. Nearer on the right were the supreme high places, the volcanic peaks smoking or ice-capped.
Kehu breathed a long sigh of pure delight; tears came to her eyes; she murmured a little song of love and worship for the beautiful world that spread before her. All the world for her man and herself. What lay beyond those blue walls of mystery? She turned to Tiaki.
He was singing, too, a song that was new to Kehu. He gazed at the Kaimanawa Ranges, bathed in rich colour and flecked with wisps of mist from the ravines; and he sang to himself about “The Blue Alsatian Mountains.”
“We have been travelling to the rising sun all this time,” said Kehu. “How many days now? I kept no count. I wish we could always go towards the sun. How far is it to the ocean, Tiaki?”
“A long way yet, my girl,” replied Tiaki. “We shall see it together some day. But we must make the most of this good raumati weather. This is happiness, Kehu. You know the pakeha parsons tell us about heaven. This is my heaven—ours, Kehu. What a grand world this is around us!”
After a while he said: “But what a pity it is that I shall have to go to work for some pakeha or other soon! For when we cross over yonder”—he pointed to the mountains — “when we reach the other side and the plains, we'll need money for clothes and food—and this is all the money I have in the
“Oh, money!” said Kehu in a tone of the utmost scorn. “Money!”
* * *
Many days on those free and quiet ways for Hardwick and his wife, taking the most roundabout track, wherever it looked good to their eyes, shooting, eel-fishing (a generation later they would have been trout-poaching), bathing in the sun-warmed streams, camping under their pack-tarpaulin and the trees, or the stars. In that midsummer weather it was the perfect life for roving lovers to whom the rough-faring came easily. Make the most of soft summer while it lasts; the winter storms are coming.
* * *
Journey's end, for the present, was reached when the lovers, travelling by way of the hill tracks, skirted round the Ruahine mountains and on the uplands of Hawke's Bay camped at a sheep station. The run was in the breaking-in stage; plenty of rough work ahead for men who knew their jobs.
Hardwick called at the manager's house and asked for work. He was of the right sort and he had the job for the asking. He and Kehu were quartered in a slab hut not far from the manager's house, and there they were happy together; rest awhile for Kehu after far travels.
As the days went on Hardwick was often away long hours on station duty. He did not know that the manager had turned a roving eye on the charms of Kehu Fair-Hair. I have forgotten his name, but “The Brute” will serve for the present as well as any other. In his eyes any Maori girl was spoil for the white man. He bragged of the girls, white and brown, he had entertained for a brief spell of promotion to the managerial house. So it came about that most of the jobs at the distant parts of the run fell to Hardwick, leaving the coast clear for the Brute.
It required two, however, to play his game, and Kehu was not one of them. He called at the hut on one excuse or another and made love after his fashion. One day when he was particularly unpleasant Kehu struck him and threatened to tell Tiaki when he returned. The manager laughed. He played on her fears and ignorance with mean threats of trouble for Hardwick. But the girl steadily held true to her man.
For a time Hardwick was the only man on the station who did not know of the manager's siege of his wife. He would come home at night and find Kehu troubled, or tearful, but she would never tell him what disturbed her. At last he returned unexpectedly and found his wife weeping after a more than usually importunate visit from the boss. Gradually he brought from her lips the story of her persecution.
Next morning he learned more at the men's hut. He said quietly that he would shoot the swine. They vowed to him that Kehu detested the boss; and he knew in his heart that she was faithful.
Next morning Hardwick was at work chopping firewood for the station cook. The other men, standing near, had just had breakfast and were about to start their jobs for the day. One or two chaffed Hardwick in a good-natured way. They wondered whether he would be sent to an out-station for the day. Hardwick chopped away silently.
Just then the Brute walked up to Hardwick. “I've got a job for you,” he said. “I want you to ride across the river and down to the Rukuwai hut, and see what wants doing to the fences. You can take your tucker-bag with you, and camp at Rukuwai for the night. Your missus will be all right, I'll look after her if she's scared.”
And the grinning fool laughed a cackling laugh that set the others grinning, too.
In an instant Hardwick jumped at the Brute with his axe raised. With an inarticulate roar he swung the blade above his head and brought it down with all his force. It struck the manager obliquely on the neck and shore through flesh and bone, decapitating him. It was as clean a stroke as that of a scaffold headsman.
Hardwick stood there dazed. His sudden fit of passion had passed. He could only look with a dull wonder at the red axe blade and what lay on the ground.
The men were staunch comrades. “He asked for it,” they said, “and he got it.”
Photo. by J. L. Macdonal.) The Panirau Rapids on the Mokau River (30 miles from the sea), North Island, New Zealand.
“We'll bury him, old man,” they told Hardwick, “and say he died of a broken neck if any one asks questions. The police never worry us up here with inquests. Just you take to the bush as quick as you can and make back to the Maori country. You'll be all right there.”
* * *
Hardwick and Kehu left the station that day. They rode west. They rode into the hills and the forest; the friendly bush country took them to its arms again.
* * *
The truth about the manager's taking-off could not be suppressed; in fact, one of the men, fearful of being implicated, at last told the Hawke's Bay police. But from that day no white man set eyes on Kehu's pakeha. A report was spread that a skeleton discovered some years afterwards in the Ruahine Ranges was that of Hardwick, and that he had hanged himself, to forestall the law.
But I do not place much faith in that story of the skeleton in the bush. I remember that moonlight night of long ago, when a shadowy figure on the riverside stood waiting for Kehu as she paddled her canoe across the Wanganui with her basket from the pakeha-Maori's little store.
Whether the faithful pair lived out their lives in some secret camp deep in the great forest between Taumarunui and Taupo I do not know. No one can say now. All that life has vanished with the old Taumarunui. Joy and sorrow, the laughing and the singing, the tragedy, the weeping, all, all have passed. This is but a shadow, a memory, all has faded into the past. Dim bush shadows, vague, trembling, spectral in the moonlit mist, the shadows of the Atarau.
“Not in vain Shall England's sons dwell by thee many a mile;
With verdant meads and fields of waving grain,
Thy rough uncultured banks ere long shall smile;
Heav'n-pointing spires shall beautify thy plain.”
The settlement of Canterbury was to be the replica par excellence of all that was best in England. The inspiration and the implementing of this high-souled plan to establish “This Other England” fell, however, to the lot of an Irishman, and the terrors of an Irish famine brought the scheme into being. In the heart of his English-planned City, this Irish Founder contemplates, with bronze calm, an English Cathedral and gazes on an English Square. At the foot of his statue, in Christchurch, is inscribed the briefest of inscriptions, yet it speaks more eloquently than the utmost verbosity—its only words are:
John Robert Godley, son of a large Irish landowner, was born at Killegar, Country Letrim, Ireland, in the year 1814. Although delicate from birth, he showed great intellectual promise and took full advantage of the educational privileges the social elevation of his parents were able to bestow upon him. The early years of his education were spent at home; then he went on to Harrow and later to Christ Church College, Oxford. He read for the Irish Bar, and was called in 1839.
During boyhood and youth, Godley had ample opportunity to witness for himself what havoc could be wrought by absentee landlordism when the dire poverty of an overpopulated country-side reduces its dwellers to a potato subsistence. From the degradation of such conditions, an acute observer like Godley could clearly perceive the grim forebodings of dangerous reactions. These reactions were ominously thrust home to him when he and his father were forced to enlist the shelter of an armed guard as security against assassination.
As the early ‘forties ticked themselves towards the end of their black decade, even that last refuge of famished Ireland, the potato crop, failed. Whole communities became penniless; rents could not be collected and many died for want of nourishment. To the sensitive mind of Godley, such conditions were the occasion of acute distress, as revealed by the letters written by him at the time. But Godley was no negative type of personality content to merely sit back and bemoan the conditions around him without attempting to do something about it. He sought some constructive solution to the problem. Long investigation and careful analysis convinced him that there was but one way out of the impending catastrophe of a nation depressed to the desperation of a starvation level. Writing to a friend, he said: “A gigantic immigration scheme for the Irish people is the only solution.”
Force of circumstances had impelled this Irish aristocrat to seek a solution to overcrowding. Having reached the conclusion that immigration was that solution, it was but natural for him to go further into the matter and to study the theories and the practical problems that beset this question of immigration.—So we see the wheels of fate, slowly, but surely, carrying this first-rate man into a first-rate destiny.
To study the immigration problems of the nineteenth century is to study Edward Gibbon Wakefield. An indiscretion of youth had not only sent Wakefield to prison, but had effectively ruined his ambitions for a political career. Dreary months of prison life diverted Wakefield's active mind from politics to colonial reform, which henceforth was to be his life's work. Apart from writing extensively on colonisation, he was the driving force behind many immigration schemes for which he worked day and night. But throughout twenty years of endeavour, he never succeeded in establishing a colony that matched up to his ideals, for he seemed to be invariably at war with the Colonial Office and the powerful missionary section, and as he lacked sufficient prestige to exert influence with people in high places, he was forced to rely on the powers of second-rate men for the carrying-out of his schemes. These men ignored Wakefield's ideas and instructions just whenever it suited them, and so the Wakefield settlements invariably deviated from the way their inspirer and originator would have them go.
Years of endeavour and countless struggles against a pitilessly unsympathetic Colonial Office eventually wore out his spirit and battered his health. Wakefield, sick nigh unto death from watching “the things he gave his life to broken,” sought a place of retreat where he might rest awhile, and from where, after renewing his body and mind, he could come back to his darling colonisation schemes once more “and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools.” Wakefield chose as his place of retreat, the Hills of Malvern.
The, Hills of Malvern—what's in that name? There must be something magical about it, for even in Canterbury, the Malvern Hills have been associated with some of the great names in New Zealand's literary and cultural development. Henry Tancred, first head of the Canterbury Provincial Government, Minister of the Crown, and Chancellor of the New Zealand University, was the owner of Malvern Hills Station. Following him came Bishop Harper, first Bishop of Canterbury, and then Archdeacon Harper, first Archdeacon of South Canterbury. The Hon. J. B. Acland, life member of the Legislative Council and
It was at Malvern that the Romans battled with the Britons; here was fought the bloodiest war in the Wars of the Roses, and here, too, Cavalier and Roundhead fought out the Battle of Worcester. Macaulay talks of “the beacon fires that blazed from Malvern's lonely heights,” Queen Victoria lived at Malvern as a child, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Jenny Lind, Lord Byron, and Fanny Burney, all lived at and learned to love Malvern.
These are great associations, but for Canterbury the greatest association is that from the heights of Malvern the idea of the foundation of Canterbury was born. It was at Malvern that Edward Gibbon Wakefield met John Robert Godley. When things seemed blackest for him, and in the hour of his great need, fate sent to Wakefield the man who had both the social influence and the intellectual ability to bring to fruition the dream that Wakefield had given the best years of his life to accomplish. The meeting of Wakefield and Godley was quite accidental, although Godley was conversant with Wakefield's writings and Wakefield knew of Godley's schemes for Irish immigration to Canada.
Ever an adept in using other people to carry out plans which he had prepared, Wakefield was not long in seeing what valuable use he could make of Godley. Scarcely had Godley left Malvern when he received a note from Wakefield saying “I have a suggestion to make for your consideration, relating to yourself and a very pleasant colonising object, which I fancy you are likely to embrace.”
Godley came. The possibilities of the “very pleasant colonising object” immediately appealed to him, even though he was shrewd enough to see that Wakefield wished to make use of him, largely because of the power he could exert in high places. Writing to a friend, Godley said: “Did I tell you that the New Zealand Company are flirting with me to get me into their direction, so as to work the labouring oar in the business of colonisation there. If I take up this affair, I have a scheme for the formation of a Church of England colony. While writing to you there came a definite offer from the New Zealand Company, which I shall accept, so you will see me in full work there next month.”
True to his word, Godley became, within the next few weeks, a Director of the New Zealand Company, and forthwith set to work with an energy and an enthusiasm that soon induced powerful friends to interest themselves in the project, as shown by the following letter sent from the Secretary of the New Zealand Company to Colonel William Wakefield: “Mr. Godley has lately been elected a member of the Direction. Through the intervention chiefly of that gentleman, the Archbishop of Dublin, the Bishops of London and Exeter, Lord Harrowby, Lord Lincoln and other gentlemen of great weight and influence have been induced to take a lively interest in the undertaking.”
March, 1848, saw the publication of “The Plan for the Forming of the Settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand.” The Plan was prefaced by a weighty list of sponsors which, headed by His Grace the Achbishop of Canterbury, stepped down the social scale to Peers, Bishops, Members of Parliament and prominent Clergy. A General Committee was set up with Lord Lyttelton as Chairman. Matters were advanced a stage further when Captain Thomas, acting as chief surveyor and agent for the Association, was dispatched to New Zealand to select the site for the Settlement.
When Captain Thomas arrived in New Zealand, he was approached by the Governor, Sir George Grey, who endeavoured to induce Thomas to select the Wairarapa District as the location for the Canterbury Association settlement. But Thomas had different ideas on the subject. Already stories of the productivity of the plains of the South Island had reached him, and he determined to go down there personally to see what these plains were like. When he saw “An immense tract of level country, well covered with grass, and watered with abundant beautiful streams,” it did not take him long to make up his mind as to where the settlement should be.
The plans for the settlement were proceeding peacefully when consternation was caused by the announcement that Godley had developed lung trouble and his doctor ordered that he forthwith make an extended sojourn in Italy. To Wakefield, the news was particularly distressing, for he realised only too well that, without the active and influential help of Godley, the whole scheme would be perilously near to jeopardy. Acutely suffering from ill-health, and disliked by many in high places, Wakefield could never hope to successfully float such a colonising scheme alone. But ever fertile in his imaginings, Wakefield suddenly hit upon the idea of inducing Godley to go himself to the new colony instead of to Italy. Wakefield told a friend, “I am moving Heaven and Earth to induce Godley to go to New Zealand.” In November, 1849, Godley sailed for New Zealand to prepare for the arrival of the colonists who were by this time making arrangements to leave England.
As might be well supposed, the immigrants of the Canterbury Association, which in the words of Wakefield, would be “a slice of English Society,” were carefully selected by a most august selection committee. Starting with a Bishop and an Earl, this “slice of English society” would graduate down through groups of doctors, lawyers, clergy, teachers, artisans, farmers and labourers. The committee investigated the “religious and educational qualifications” of the applicants, no “desperate and flighty and irresponsible people”
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There is a kind of dreamland which can become the permanent park-land of the mental dwelling-house. It takes to itself the semblance of reality, and, indeed, may gravely disturb much of our fixed belief in the actuality of the appearances round us.
This vision of mine, this place I have named “Te Reinga the New,” with the great Ratanui Bend, hollowed out of the sunlit New Zealand coast as by a monstrous cannonade of mammoth guns, is a constant companion.
On a hot summer afternoon, I welcome its pleasant arrival; I lazily watch it take shape and substance; the inhabitants of it become companionable and personable; the very mistiness of it all has the charm of warmth and amity.
Do you remember that delightful story of the old Chinese mystic:—
“I dreamed last night that I was a butterfly hovering over countless nodding blossoms. As I flew hither and thither, it seemed to me as a butterfly, that I was conscious of the attributes and the memory of a man, a man dreaming. Now that I am awake, am J a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming that he is a man?”
Then there is the exquisite story told, I think, by A. P. Herbert, of the young Duke of Devonshire who dreamed that he was in the House of Lords making a speech; and when he woke up, he was!
This fabric of dreams has caused some wonderful thinking, and the inevitable outcome, wonderful writing. Old Pliny, whose letters are as modern as “Letters of a Self-made Merchant to his Son,” wrote a precious note to Suetonius Tranquillus who was worried by a bad dream. Pliny explained that when his first brief came along, his mother-in-law appeared to him in a dream and warned him that it was dangerous; his relations pointed out that the opposing side was in with the current Caesar, and so on. However, Pliny took the case, won it handsomely and, as he points out in the Letter, it proved the firm foundation of his fame and career. No omens in dreams for Pliny.
But the printed word that is in point for me comes from Pascal's “Pensees,” that wonderbook of commonsense lit by the magic glow of humour. It should be a handbook for politicians and after dinner speakers and, sadly enough, is nearly unknown to them.
Pascal always strikes me as a mental cocktail, a mixture of ingredients of genius assembled in some supernal shaker, and poured out for the stimulation of mankind.
Here is his combination of science and poesy on dreams ….
“If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day. And if an artisan were sure to dream every night for twelve hours’ duration that he was a king, I believe he would almost be as happy as a king who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was an artisan.”
Then, after more examples, Pascal the scientist finishes with this …
“For life is a dream a little less inconstant.”
Now, returning to my dream, this established inhabitant of my dozing time or any time when I “set my fancies free,” I have no difficulty in finding its structure real.
It returns regularly, and has, by now, become a sort of sublimation of errant ideas, straying thoughts, and those hazy plans for happiness that stay about in the background of everyone's mind.
Here are the details: I imagine a vast enclosed piece of the New Zealand coast; there is a roaring rock-bound barrier across the whole breadth of the foreshore; against jagged pinnacles of stone, heaped up as if by an earth cataclysm, the Pacific pounds and thunders. For miles there is not a landing spot in this bay, whose shapely curve is fanged with thrusting teeth of stone at fantastic angles, sharpened and ground by the everlasting rollers.
Inside this barrier of wave-riven rock there is a huge half circle of flat land, green with velvet turf and dotted with ti-tree and many branched cabbage trees, and here and there small totaras and puriris looking exactly like toy trees from a large Noah's Ark. This area is ringed completely by perpendicular cliffs of papa, blue, stark, and so immense as to be impossible of ascent or descent.
It is as impregnable to human exploitation as Conan Doyle's “Lost World”; but—I have been there dozens of times. I made my way into it with one of those falling sensations one gets in dreams. Just as I nodded off, I seemed to make a swift and tremendous plunge downwards—whether through a hollow tree or a water-made cave, I did not seem to mind. I found myself effortlessly
Again and again I have descended there by different routes and the delightful lack of any rationalisation in dreamland always tells me that, for the moment, I am the “first to ever burst” into that silent scene.
However, it never remains silent for long. Bellbirds and tuis are a full-time orchestra, and the first person I meet is always Maui. This handsome Polynesian demi-god always has a black and white feather in his hair, a greenstone mere flashes in his hand, and his shining body is bare but for a golden cloak of some sort of skin. He always greets me with a smile which is the jewel of all smiles. It hints at a supernal disregard for consequences, a daring in mischief which is from the primal pagan world, and a mirth, primeval in its earthly splendour.
Maui is always laughing; the tiny riro-riro joins in at times, as its ridiculous little feathered body flits about from the tip of Maui's mere to the bare point of his shoulder, as if it were the animated eye of a magic needle embroidering a pattern of nonsense.
Maui's great friend and constant companion is a white-bearded venerable old gentleman, with eyes as blue as the forget-me-not. He is the Official Assignee who had served the country above the Ratanui cliffs for seventy years, and in the words of one of the other exiles: “had seen all of the county broke once and some of ‘em twice.”
In my various visits I saw several candidates applying for admission, and there seemed to be little knots of happy folk here and there about the broad expanse through which the Ratanui River ran. This was one of those wayward New Zealand streams that changes its course on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and its mouth was decorated with a clumsy lacework of spars and spiky fragments of the only vessel that attempted the stormy bar.
There were sandy reaches running up to grassy slopes, and on one of these one night, I heard the court of inquisition at work. It was moonlight, and Maui sat in the centre with the Official Assignee next. The moon threaded the scene with a tinily woven network of silver, and the river was a trembling whiteness.
As I watched, Maui's laugh sounded loud and clear. I stole nearer. The old Assignee's eyes had become blue wells of laughter and Maui and he made a terrific effort to become grave and judicial.
The candidate was a queer specimen, cheery of face, but with a certain sort of impudent hardihood. He was talking rapidly and this is how it sounded: “I ask yer—a man ‘unted by sheilas oughter getter break.”
In the peculiar fashion of dreams I understood his case without any explanation. He had kept the billiard saloon at Tauwhata township, where no licensed hotel existed, and his activities were various, including a bookmaking practice of genuine merit. In his own words, “I always shaded the city books with me double prices, and I ‘eld on even when it was ‘shut the gate.'”
It appears that he had the support of the leading citizens though much of it was, of course, unofficial. It appears that everything was going well until the arrival of a certain lady. I cannot use the excuse even of a dream for he purpose of giving Joe's description of this lady's appearance and attributes. But what had really upset the apple-cart was the fact that a leading citizen had “got on the slate for a motza,” and Joe tactlessly pressed his claim. The leading citizen and the lady “teamed up,” and action was their watchword. The saloon was raided with startling results, his books were seized, and he had decided to “turn it up” if the Bend was open to receive him. The Official Assignee enquired the name of the leading citizen, and when Joe gave it, he smiled: “I remember him,” he said. “One of the worst bankruptcies I ever handled.”
Joe Burrows, billiard saloonkeeper, of Tauwhata, grinned — and instantaneously I saw something—I saw that this grin was a recognisable descendant of Maui's smile. It had got slightly tattered and shop - soiled in its journey down the ages from Maui to Joe Burrows.
Maui's smile answered back and Joe was obviously safe And then, the smile winged its way about the ring of faces, just as a melody is taken up by a singer here and there in a camp chorus.
It seemed to me to be the first smile of Time; the jewel-sign of mutual enjoyment of the oddity of human affairs. These exiles, I said to myself, have made the Great Discovery. Their brotherhood is a working entity. Here is a place with none of those small things that represent our modern progress.
Here men joined in laughter as a benison; a golden cup of mirth to be passed round for all to use. Here was the only sign-manual of their fellowship; the only password to the lodge; the only entrance feet to the order—here it was—a smile.
Suddenly it seemed to me to be a sunny morning and the smile seemed all about still, lazily drifting or darting swiftly from river ripple to leaf tip; it gilded the dropping green of young rimus; it shone from the golden kowhai showers; and burnished the purple kaka berries till they glowed like sunlit grapes. Maui and his blue-eyed old companion joined in again; it was a sun-made smile; it might have been the first smile of the old wrinkled Earth when he saw the queer little beings that had somehow got upright on his surface and learned to talk; and lastly, the paling daytime moon slowly smiled itself away.
I heard someone say—” Here's your tea, Dad, what were you smiling at?”
I was awake, but it didn't matter. There will be another summer afternoon and I'll be back again at the Bend.