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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.
In all cases where the Administration makes announcements through the medium of this Journal the fact will be clearly indicated.
The Department does not identify itself with any opinions which may be expressed in other portions of the publication, whether appearing over the author's name or under a nom de plume.
Contributions are accepted for publication only upon the express condition that the contributor will indemnify the Publishers of the Magazine against all claims made by reason of anything in the contribution constituting an infringement of copyright or being defamatory.
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 24,000 copies each issue since April, 1938.
Controller and Auditor-General
10/11/38.
“… the gleam—the shadow and the peace supreme!”
—Wordsworth.
Pool of Tapu: the lakelet on an island in Waikare-iti.
See article, “Little Walkare,” page 9.
(Photo. E. D. Burt.)
A Visit to one of New Zealand's four big railway workshops is a source of inspiration to any New Zealander who is interested in the development of his own country. Here he may see one, at least, of the country's resources developed to a stage of manufacturing capacity that challenges comparison with the best railway manufacturing plants of other countries, and that can face with equanimity, and assured knowledge of ability to handle the job, any demands that the future may make through corresponding development of the other resources of this Dominion.
Never before has there been evidence of such intense concentration upon scientific and industrial research into the productive capacities of the country, followed by co-ordinated effort to make our own people more appreciative of the work of their fellow New Zealanders to a point where, other things being equal, they would at least prefer to have the products of their own lands and hands to those of peoples and places which are somewhat unknown to them, and whose interests and standards of life differ materially from ours.
This research and propaganda, devoted to the greater development of New Zealand, is of importance to the whole population. It tends towards the organisation of the country on principles applied to the best-managed businesses. These all use research regarding markets, apply modern publicity methods to popularise their products or services, and make the best use of their own resources to meet the internal requirements of the business itself.
The Railways Department, as the biggest industrial organisation in the country, does all these things: and it stands to gain additions to its traffic as these principles are applied nationally.
If educational trips are organised to let young New Zealand see what is being done in factory and on farm to increase the country's wealth, the Railways are there to carry them. If New Zealand holiday-makers, through increased interest in their own homeland, want to see the best of their country's charm of lake and river, mountain and forest, and the many natural phenomena with which these Islands are so richly endowed, the Railways will carry them by rail or road, safely and cheaply to their desired haven. If more land is developed and farmed, the Railways are ready to carry both the instruments of development and the products thereof.
It is with a view to giving readers further insight regarding the present state of New Zealand's development in the many branches of activity that engage the industrial attention of New Zealanders that, with this issue, we commence a series of articles on the various groups of manufactures and products that go to build up the New Zealand of to-day.
In this way it is hoped to perform a service, not only for our own people, but in other countries as well; for we have the word of Mr. J. W. Collins, the just-returned N.Z. Trade Commissioner in Canada, that the Magazine is depended upon by overseas representatives as a constant source of information regarding New Zealand's scenic resources, its historical associations, and its industrial, social, artistic, and educational developments.
In this, my first Message after the Christmas and New Year holiday period, I wish to say how much I appreciate the response to my appeal for care in the handling of trains and attention to the requirements of the travelling public, a response that resulted in a record of good time-keeping for trains and freedom from accident during what was probably the busiest Christmas and New Year period the Department has ever experienced.
It will, I hope, afford some measure of satisfaction to all concerned to learn that I have received a number of letters and other communications from travellers acknowledging the good service given them by members of the staff. Typical of these is one from an Australian visitor who travelled on Christmas Eve (the busiest day of our year) and who included in his letter of thanks the following: “The members of your staff travelling on the train were all most helpful and informative in answering the many questions, and seemed most anxious to assist passengers.”
Another writer, in indicating the true spirit of helpfulness as shown by one member of the staff in connection with the transport of a passenger who was ill, said: “Nothing was too small or trivial for his personal attention and we are deeply grateful to him.” The same writer also acknowledged the consideration shown by all other members of the Department who had to deal with this case.
As members of the Service and the public alike know, the railway facilities available to the travelling public have been much improved in recent years, but it still rests with the individual members of the Service to ensure, by their courtesy and attention, that passengers obtain on the occasion of their journeys with us as much enjoyment and pleasure as may be possible. For this reason it must be particularly pleasing to all concerned to find that, in the busiest period of the year, the time-keeping performance of our trains and attention to the wants of passengers were such as to give general satisfaction to those who availed themselves of our services.
I desire, accordingly, to express to each and every member of the staff on behalf of the Minister, myself and my Executive Officers our grateful thanks for a job so well done under circumstances that called for the exercise of greater care than usual in the handling of trains, promptness at stations, and careful attention to the many requirements of our Christmas and New Year patrons.
General Manager.
[All Rights Reserved.] (Illustrated by E. D. Burt
)
When I first set eyes on that lake of the woods, Waikare-iti, sleeping there among its ancient forests in a silent basin of the Urewera Ranges, it seemed to me that it might well be christened anew Lake Solitude. In those days, more than thirty years ago, few people saw Little Waikare. There was a rough bush track to it from the eastern bay of Waikare-moana, and a dinghy had lately been sledged up there from the larger lake so that the islands that rose like tree groves from its glimmering waters could be explored. Most travellers who found their way to Waikare-moana contented themselves with boating around its bays and exploring that enchanting western arm Wairau-moana. But Little Waikare lay little disturbed, among its bird-teeming forests and its fold after fold of hills clothed everywhere in a soft garment of unfading green.
There was no human habitation on its shores, not a Maori whare, not a tent even. No camp-fire gleamed in its bays. It was as quiet as could be, unspoiled, untouched; it seemed to have slumbered there, with its little parks of islands, for a thousand years, and more. Moss-bearded ancient trees leaned over the dew-clear water. The islands duplicated themselves in the lake—the green of the nearer hills merged into blue; wisps of mist lay on the more distant ranges that rose into grey-blue jumbles of limestone mountains, the sacred mystery-land of Maunga-pohatu. The night fogs lifted before the sun was high; but all day long a gauzy veil of summer haze, tenderly blue, suffused the landscape—Little Waikare lay there a maiden lake unconquered.
The bush track, where the rata and rimu and tawa trees mingled their branches overhead, was alive with birds. Most of all the tui (it is called the koko in these parts) and the kaka parrot. The one gurgled and coughed and rang its three dropping notes, like a flute. The other screamed and screeched raucously; we brought a noisy flock of kaka about us by imitating its cry.
We would not have been able to explore the green Pleiades of islands
One of our party was just the right kind of companion for a Waikare-iti cruise. Hurae Puketapu, from Waimako kainga, near the outlet of Waikare-moana, was an elderly man of the Ngati-Ruapani tribe, the original lords of all these parts. He had lived all his life on the lake shores. His memories were of the primitive life and the Hauhau war days. He was an expert in canoe-making and canoe-sailing. It was he who in the Nineties, when Mr. Seddon visited Waikare-moana, steered the canoe “Hinewaho” safely across the lake with the Premier on board, one squally evening when nearly all the passengers and crew expected it to capsize. Black-bearded Hurae was full of stories of the earlier times than that; legends and songs, and tales of war and wizardry.
We pulled out across the shining lake and Hurae pointed to this island and that and gave the names of the six we saw—Te Rahui (which is the largest); Motu-ngarara, or Lizard Island; Motu-torotoro; Te Kaha-o-Tuwai (“Tuwai's Snare for Waterfowl”); Te One-a-Tahu (“Tahu's Beach”); and Motu-Taiko (“Petrel Island”).
Long ago, he said, all these islands were refuge places of the Maori. When war-parties invaded Waikare-moana and Ngati-Ruapani were defeated by Tuhoe, or by some other invading tribe—a surprise attack, which presently was reversed—the lake people retreated to the sanctuary of Waikare-iti. Paddling out to these isles of calm and shelter they hauled their wakas up among the trees and camped securely in the all-concealing bush. No enemy could reach them there except by the slow process of felling trees and hewing out canoes. Even in the days of Te Kooti's war, when Government war-parties of Ngati-Porou and Arawa carried rifle and tomahawk into the depths of the Urewera forests—Hurae was an active Hauhau youngster then—Waikare-iti's islets remained inviolate, untrodden by an invader's foot.
Hurae steered for a mound of an island smothered in green to the water's edge. This was Te Kaha-o-Tuwai; he wanted to show us a curious place; a lake in the heart of the island. We startled some meditative wild duck as we rowed round an outjutting point where an ancient rata tree bent its boughs downward until the red blossoms almost touched the water.
“This was a very fine safe place to hide,” he said. We made fast to the big tree, and climbed up a steep bank by a mossy notched log. The island rose about twenty-five to thirty feet above the lake level; it was matted everywhere with bush and ferns.
A few paces from the top of the little cliff took us to a lakelet which filled the heart of the island. It was a silent amber pool—about a hundred yards across, or perhaps less. Mystic, haunted by the presence of all ancient things. Cumbered on its edges with snags and tree-stumps, slippery with the moss and water-weed of ages. Not a sound on its shores but the voices of our four pakehas and the Maori.
Not a bird sang in the trees here. The tawai trees—the beech, popularly miscalled birch—were ancient beyond all reckoning. Their boughs were twisted and contorted into strange shapes; many were white and dead, and everywhere from their branches trailed beards and weepers of grey moss. A ghostly place; it recalled a
These dead trees, Hurae said, lay under the stroke of tapu and makutu. They had been bewitched by a tohunga of old. They looked it. But we did our best to dispel the ghostly atmosphere of Tuwai's Snare Island and the enchanted pool of shadows. We found a clear spot to boil the billy, under a big tree that stood midway between the island's lakelet and the lake below. The blue smoke curling up through the branches humanised the place; nothing like a billy-fire for a home-like and comfortable touch in the wilds. Hurae, after the tea and tucker, told more of the past, full of names of old-time warriors and olden camps, and marches, and bush battles. And another of the party told of the later days of war, for he, like Hurae, had had his part in the era of tupara and rifle and tomahawk.
At other times and on other journeys through the Urewera country with old campaigners, I came to know more of the often dramatic and thrilling past of these lakes high-set in the woody mountains.
It was Captain George Preece, N.Z.C., who told me of the first white man that set eyes on Little Waikare. This was Sergeant H. P. Bluett, who was one of the only three Europeans besides the two officers of the Arawa Armed Constabulary, in the last campaigns against Te Kooti. Preece's fellow-officer was Captain Gilbert Mair, N.Z.C. Bluett was their trusty senior non-com. in the joint contingent of a hundred Maoris. On August 6th, 1871, the contingent moved across Waikare-moana in canoes from One-poto, at the outlet, and leaving ten men to guard the canoes at the Whanganui-a-Parua, set off on a march into the wildest part of the interior. The long single file of warriors entered the great forest, making north-eastward.
On the afternoon of that day Sergeant Bluett climbed a tree to get the bearings, and he called down to Mair and Preece that he could see a lake with several islands. This, as it was found on exploration later, was Waikare-iti. The officers of the force had heard of it from the Urewera Maoris, but until that day no pakeha had seen it. It was a few days after that discovery that the expedition was successful in finding Te Kooti's well-hidden retreat on the Waipaoa River, a tributary of the Ruakituri. In the sharp fight that followed, several Hauhaus were killed and some captured, but Te Kooti escaped, with rifles cracking all round him.
These were the days when the Arawa under their vigorous young New Zealand Cross heroes, and the Ngati-Porou from the East Coast under Major Ropata, N.Z.C., and Captain Porter, tramped for weeks and months through these vast and trackless forests in chase of Te Kooti and Kereopa. Sometimes they struck faint trails and followed them up like Red Indians or Australian trackers; they met ambuscade with ambuscade, and rushed camps and stockades.
Silent camps; cautious bivouacs; often fireless. No fires were ever lit by day, because the smoke rising above the trees would betray their position to the Hauhaus. It was an incautious fire in the Waipaoa camp, rising among a hundred almost similar mists, that gave away Te Kooti's refuge to his keen-eyed pursuers. Up to the middle of 1872 the contingents followed up their enemies implacably.
More than once after the first discovery they had glimpses of Waikare-iti, and even such seasoned bushmen as Mair and Preece were impressed by the vast loneliness, the primeval solitude, that brooded over this blue jewel of a lake.
Waikare-iti is but a tiny size in water sheets—two miles and a quarter in length by a bare two miles in width. But it seems larger, with its many-bayed shore, meandering among the woody hills, and its isles of calm that seem part of the mainland from some points of view until you come to boat in and around them. A true mountain lake, for it lies 2,600 feet above sea-level, and is fed by the clear cold streams that come swiftly down from the central ranges of Maunga-pohatu and Manuaha, snow-clad in winter.
From Little Waikare a stream goes bounding down through the bush to Waikare-moana, 500 feet below. On this little river there are several waterfalls. Two of them, the Papa-o-Korito and the lower Aniwaniwa (Rainbow), otherwise Te Tangi-a-Te Hinerau, are cascades of great beauty, tumbling over ledges of red-mossed rock. Below there are pools holding rainbow trout.
* * *
Waikare-iti is a natural sanctuary. I hope it will never be robbed of that hallowed air of peace and seclusion. Oars and sails and the canoe paddle are the fitting motive power there for exploration and pleasure-cruising. There are some places in our land that should be guarded with loving care against the disturbing touch of modern inventions, and the queen of these sanctuaries is Little Waikare.
The Kanieri dredge, that great land cruiser recently anchored in its little lake a few miles from Hokitika, is now turning over the earth's surface at a speed equivalent to that of ten thousand gold diggers—skilled diggers of those palmy days when the West Coast was in its first golden flush, the 60's and 70's of last century.
There is a Scriptural saying: “The stone that the builders refused is become the head stone… .” So the gravel the early miners rejected is become the backbone of the modern gold dredging industry. The Kanieri dredge is actually working over the same surface as that in which pioneers of the pick, the shovel and the pan have already toiled and moiled—but how different are its methods! Forty men man this ship, which is manipulated entirely by a few levers on the control deck—the captain's bridge, if the nautical idea is to be maintained.
These levers raise or lower the two 65 ton “spuds” or anchors, swing the dredge on its moorings as it eats its way around the half-moon of the bight upon which it is working, elevate or lower the ladder, the elevator and the chain of 2 1/2-ton buckets, and turn on or off the electric power and light on the various decks of the vessel. They also control the pumps and sluicing as the raised gravel is worked and washed down through the grids and over the riffles.
The action here resembles a great obstacle race in which only “light-weights” can make the distance. The “heavy-weights” are all trapped somewhere on the journey—if they get past the swings they are caught on the round-abouts—and they are later given “the woiks” that rob them of the very gold that gave them weight.
The virtue of the big dredge is that it can both dig much lower than the old-time miners could, and also raise the spoil much higher, so that on its tortuous downward journey through the dredge so many are the traps set for it that the gold gets no chance of final escape.
The dredge is licensed to work in any direction over the company's territory, the only navigating endorsement on the ship's papers being that it must not travel more than a hundred miles from its present anchorage!
The surface of the pond in which the pontoon floats is 25-ft. below the general surface of the flat where the dredge is working, and the buckets dig below water level to a depth of 85 feet, turning this gravelly land into lake as they do so.
But with dredging, as with most other matters subject to the law of gravity, “what goes up must come down,” so the boulders, gravel and earth lifted at one end of the dredge are dropped with resounding thunder at the other, only the residual gold being kept as a souvenir to mark their passage. Thus the pond in which the dredge plays gets no bigger for all the digging, but it keeps on moving along in the desired direction.
The Kanieri, the largest dredge in the Southern Hemisphere, was built by the Railway Workshops at Addington and erected by the Railway staff at the site where the dredge is now operating.
This was a great achievement, not only for the Railways but for New Zealand, as the dredge would not have been built here had the Railways not made their great resources in men and machinery and mechanical skill available for the purpose. So the Railways, as when the Otira Tunnel was built, are again associated with the romance of West Coast development.
New Zealanders are by nature and historical background essentially adventurous. No job looks too big for them, and no potential danger daunts them. “Give it a go” is the average New Zealander's attitude to anything that is new and looks hard to do. The early gold diggers, the early settlers and home-seekers, are responsible for this present adventurous spirit, this confidence in capacity to achieve. So the busy Railways took on the job of building the biggest dredge, and they made so good a job of it that it has worked without a hitch from the day of opening.
And what a typically West Coast opening that was! Crowds and speeches, and cheers and inspection in the morning, and then a “Luncheon” that lasted from noon to dewy eve. And then a West Coast ball that saw the sun rise on the following morning. Never was such a launching!
But science and invention have almost eliminated the risks associated with gold winning in these days, compared with the older times of the West Coast diggings. The only “gamble” is in regard to the price of gold. How much can be got from a given area is worked out very accurately before the first rough draft of a specification for the dredge is drawn. When the plans are completed it is then known how much gold can be obtained in a given time, in just the same way as a flour-miller knows what the output capacity of his new mill will be.
These modern gold adventurers—of whom such men as J. M. Newman, Geo. Watson and J. W. Ellis, of Kanieri Gold Dredging Ltd., are outstanding examples—have as much confidence in the general gold content of the land they are working as a man cutting into a loaf of bread has in its general food content. And just as it is known that every loaf of bread will have so much vitamin B (or whatever the analyst calls it), so careful prospecting has shown that there are so many pennyweights of gold in every ton the dredge will turn over. That assurance is, of course, necessary before the huge capital expenditure required for a modern dredge can even be contemplated.
(Continued on page 15.)
(Continued from page 13
)
How different from the old “hit or miss” methods of the early alluvial diggings, or from the world's first gold dredge—the invention of a Chinaman working on the Otago goldfields sixty years ago!
How various people view this great enterprise—the re-working of the great alluvial flats of the West Coast with modern dredges—is as interesting as the actual operations.
To the Minister of Railways (the Hon. D. G. Sullivan) the enterprise is a further sign of faith in New Zealand, its accomplishments and resources, and the faithful building of the dredge is just an additional opportunity taken by the men of the Railways to do the best they could for the people of New Zealand.
To the General Manager of Railways, Mr. G. H. Mackley, there is satisfaction in the fact that the great Railway organisation could with equal facility turn from the manufacture of rolling-stock to the manufacture of dredges that would bear favourable comparison with the best in the gold-dredging industry.
To Mr. J. M. Newman, a Director of the Company, it is just one among a number of gold dredging enterprises with which he is connected in various countries, now brought satisfactorily to the production stage.
To the Minister of Mines (the Hon. P. C. Webb) it is a further step in the development of the mining industry, a source of revenue, and a chance to turn some rough and ugly country on his beloved Coast into level, well-forested land.
The dredge has a total weight, in working trim, of 3,443 tons.
But to the average person it is an impressive and exciting spectacle of tremendous power devoted to a purposeful exploitation of the West Coast's potential riches. Here one thrills to the sight of the majesty of machinery in action, where boulders are the playthings of an octopus which reaches down with one huge arm to pluck out the bowels of the earth for its own consumption, and then after shaking them and sifting them and sluicing them and nibbling them—searching ceaselessly for the gold among the dross—throws the whole lot into the air with another monstrous arm and drops them crashing and barren back to the earth from which they were reft. And all the while it mutters menacingly, to the gold that glitters and the gold that hides—the Spanish “No Pasaran”—it shall not pass.
And to the eye of the man of vision, of whom Mr. James A. Murdoch (Chairman of the District's County Council) is an eloquent example, it is the dream ship of M'Andrews’ Hymn come to life:
Production from modern dredges, like those at Kanieri, or Rimu Flat, or Barrytown are bringing a second spring to the West Coast; but unlike the earlier unorganised wild rush of the gold fever days, this promises a steadier industry, with years of work ahead. And in place of the desolation left from the former workings—the abandoned townships and waste areas of boulder dumps—there will grow levelled and smiling areas of forest and farm land.
The modern version of “Keep the Home Fires Burning” is “Keep the Factory Furnace Going.” The countries of the world are exploring all the methods by which their own people can supply their own needs.
Superstitions about some “outlander's” ability to make better articles cheaper, are almost daily being blown to tatters. Human ingenuity has no limits; the resources of man are without end; distance has been annihilated; longitude and latitude in the matter of making things has disappeared; all the handicaps of environment, scanty populations, and the well worn “distance from markets,” have been overtaken.
New Zealand should be in the first rank of this army of progress. Our proper position will be taken as soon as we realise the actual and exciting magnitude of our achievement in industrial production, and the almost infinite possibilities of the future. We not only Now make a vast range of articles of world parity in quality. We can still do better.
Did you know this? We make in New Zealand in our own factories, omnibuses and tennis racquets, bricks and picnic ware, oils and paints and artificial limbs, drugs, and soap, and cigarettes, hats and bathing gowns, “K” engines, and exquisite underwear, books and radios, and matches, boots and shoes, and toothbrushes, and golf clubs and balls, and a thousand and one other things which would use up, in a list, all the space allowed for this article.
I crossed on the trans-Tasman steamer once with two world travellers who were observers of more than ordinary capacity. They were Heifetz, the great violinist, and Petersen, then Dominion's Editor of the London “Times.” In the course of many hours of talk which ranged from Brahms to the All Blacks, and Carbine to geysers, I steadily excavated to get from these two brilliant folk some sort of joint verdict on New Zealand and New Zealanders. An hour or two from Sydney Heads, Heifetz produced his conclusion. “You New Zealanders are proud of quite the wrong things in your history.” The newspaper man said it differently. “Why not shut up,” he said, “about being the Empire Dairy Farm, and talk about your marvellous woollen rugs and your excellent walking shoes.”
Heifetz was a book collector; his mind was on our astonishing literary achievement; he respected a country which had produced Katherine Mansfield and Peter Buck, Guthrie Smith, and Pember Reeves in less than a century. The “Times” world traveller was more impressed with our good breakfast foods, our modern transport systems, and our hydro-electric development. He regarded Lord Rutherford and Mellor as the true New Zealand type.
For some years now I have been paying calls on country towns in New Zealand for the purpose of writing about them. One astonishing feature, common to all of them, is industrial activity. Regularly and consistently, a pleasant, tree-planted, green-gardened, ordered centre, would have one or more flourishing factories.
Added to these are the huge establishments in our cities; with modern equipment and up-to-date plants they are pouring out articles of all possible types every day.
Yet, if a score of people were asked at random to say what constituted the most important factor in New Zealand's prosperity, it would be safe to assume that most of them would say at once, “Our Primary Production.”
Without actually visualising it, most of us have in our minds a shadowy image of a cow, fat bullock, woolly ewe and chubby lamb, as the sole wealth spinners of our country. Now and again someone mentions gold, kauri gum or apples, but they only pass for casual notice.
Yet, of our New Zealand men who work, three-quarters are not engaged in any form of farming whatever, and only one-twentieth of our women workers are listed as following “agricultural or pastoral pursuits.”
Over one hundred thousand of our New Zealand working population are engaged in the special occupation of making things in factories, and the number is steadily growing.
I do not want to minimize the importance of the direct output of our lands. Our pastures are known all over the world for their richness and permanence. I helped for a day or two in the task of taking pedigree rye-grass seed from a farm in the Manawatu district. The expert said that nowhere in the whole world of grass cultivation could such volume and quality of seed be taken from a similar area. The machine, by the way, was a revelation, for it gathered the seed, graded it, threshed it, bagged it, and did everything but sell it. It was made in Australia, but could easily be turned out in one of our Railway Workshops. I wonder if many readers know that a perfectly efficient machine gun was turned out at the Petone Railway Workshops during the middle year of the Great War, made without samples from very inconclusive blue print drawings. That was before the installation of the modern, superb plants at Otahuhu, Woburn, Addington and Hillside, which “at one leap brought New Zealand within the ‘heavy industries’ area.”
Our prodigal gifts of soil and climate make it possible for almost every growing thing to do well here. We can ripen oranges at one end of New Zealand and sea-kale at the other. Our animals can live in the open throughout the year, and every animal from the rabbit to the red deer, and every plant from the radish to the pinus insignis grow “bigger and better.” They also mature more swiftly.
All this applies to our manufacturing industries.
In our short history, there has developed in our midst a multiplicity of factories and industrial plants making a bewildering complexity of articles for human needs.
This is only a preliminary article, and I simply have not the space for a detailed catalogue. However, here are some figures; last year the value of our factory production was £105,941,722. The wages paid out were in the neighbourhood of £20,000,000. The added value to our country's production was £35,000,000. The value of the premises exceeds £70,000,000.
Now this wealth did not exist before. It was brought into being by the brains and hands of New Zealanders. It is the fruit of New Zealand endeavour, enterprise, and skill. This added value of £35,000,000 is new wealth created by our fellow countrymen.
There are several traditional observations about manufacturing things in New Zealand which call for answers.
Firstly, there is this one: “The population of New Zealand is so small that no large plants can justify themselves, and large scale production is not worth while.”
This fine old crusted story overlooks the purchasing power of each New Zealander. It is not over-stating the comparison that as a market, New Zealand's people quite equal an average of six millions in most older lands. Bruce Lockhart in his last book uses motor car ownership as an index of purchasing power. We have in New Zealand round about two hundred times as many motor cars on a population basis as Bulgaria or Roumania, and, which is of real significance, we have between five and six times as many as England herself.
The next tribal lay of the critics sounds more convincing still, at first saying: “New Zealand is so far from the world markets that things cannot be sold abroad at competitive prices.”
The truth about this is best put this way: the distance from Wellington to San Francisco is no farther than from San Francisco to Wellington. I remember once paying a visit to a fruit cannery at Hastings. This institution
The next standard objection is that “New Zealand cannot afford to instal the modern plants necessary for modern production methods.” The first answer to this one is that we have done it. And, we keep on doing it. There is a New Zealand factor here which can never be emphasized enough. An industry being newly established has all the advantages. Its founders can search the whole world and make a selection which is eclectic.
For a variety of reasons, the great manufacturing countries of the world, over a long period of development, tend to attain special skill in certain distinctive lines. Owing sometimes to the work of some genius in design, one country will run ahead of another in the form of production plant in some particular branch of manufacturing. The other side of the question, too, is that when industrial concerns attain size and age, alterations and improvements become a matter of huge cost and enormous difficulty. Then there are the considerations of weight of tradition, dislike of change, and the complex fabric of financial alliances and vast property ownership.
The New Zealand manufacturer, starting afresh, is free of all this, and has the opportunity of making a world selection, based on his local needs and conditions. I can point out our own four great Railway Workshops as brilliant examples of this phenomenon. Many countries are represented in their array of mechanical Titans, and I have heard a British expert of high standing say quietly of the Woburn workshops, “There are larger works in the world, but none any better or more up-to-date.”
The actual fact is that to-day we are making a mass of goods which are equal to the world's best in design, construction, durability, and efficiency, simply because we have modern plants having the same qualities.
I shall, in later articles in this magazine, give more particulars of some of these, “giving reasons” as an examination paper asks.
I shall just touch on the last general objection to the further development of New Zealand industries. This is expressed in the well-worn phrase “high cost of production.”
Now in our dairy industry we have high wages, high price farm lands and dairy cows, and a twelve thousand mile sea haul; and yet our butter manages to compete very easily with the countries of the world in their own home markets. English farmers complain of being “under sold.”
When I was an executive in the amusement business, I was besieged every year for collections of our New Zealand woollen rugs. They were much prized by the film stars, and dozens of these rugs were transformed into winter coats. No such fabric, my American friends said, could be procured in the Northern Hemisphere, whatever the cost. But, above all, they were amazed, delighted and puzzled in turn at the “ridiculously low price” of these articles, which as we know are made here every day.
We can take it as amply proven that there is no vestige of a valid reason why we should not only make a larger proportion of all the material things we need, but also that we can enter the world's competitive markets for many types of goods, with every reason for optimism.
The raw materials produced in this country are, in most cases, the best in the world; our tradesmen and craftsmen, being what they are by race,
There is a further element in our national make-up which needs mention. I have it on the authority of a leading designing engineer that New Zealanders lead the world on a per capita basis in patent applications. We are mechanically minded, ingenious, adaptable and resourceful.
These qualities are the heritage of a pioneering history. In the old days when a “gadget” was not procurable for shop or farm, the man of the place had to contrive one. I am continually in a state of being slightly dazed, at my age, at the uncanny ability of the average New Zealand schoolboy to mend a radio, fix up a choking carburettor, make a substitute bolt for a tractor, and play about with volts and ohms as if they were both tame and intelligible. I mentioned that I have just had the experience of watching complicated harvesting and hay-making machinery at work. A dozen or more men attended these many-armed, many-wheeled steel mammoths, everyone of them seemed to understand the operation of every part, the reasons for each
My general conclusions are that we have so many advantages in New Zealand that there are countless lines of manufactured goods in which we already lead the world for quality. The costs difficulty can be overcome, and all other difficulties have no more obstructive strength than tissue paper.
Now when we hear the slogan “Buy New Zealand Goods,” we are often asked to remember many patriotic reasons for doing so. It is obvious that if we are to maintain and improve our standard of living, we must have a more balanced economy.
New Zealand could easily support ten millions of people, but this would entail the wide expansion of our secondary industries. Obviously, too, as our population grows, the internal market for our farming produce increases in scope and absorption power. Our young folk leaving school at the rate of more than twelve thousand every year, must find employment to suit the natural trends of their abilities. Secondary industries are necessary to satisfy this demand, and make a fuller life available for more and more of our people. All these truisms have been stated a hundred times and in a hundred different ways. If we are not going to depend for our material prosperity on the vagaries of a necessarily restricted market for a narrow range of primary products, we must provide ourselves with a better balanced and better ordered utilisation of our total resources of men and materials—of Nature's largesse. These are good reasons, and they have a background of practical commonsense.
But there is a better reason still for buying New Zealand made goods. I believe it can be proved up to the hilt; I believe it is the plain and sober truth; I believe it will continue to be true in an increasing degree as the years go on; I believe that the world will come to recognise this truth about many lines of New Zealand goods, and buy them from us as readily as they do our pedigree sheep and thoroughbred horses, our butter and our lamb. It is this: “Buy New Zealand Goods Because They Are The Best.”
Rly. Publicity photos.)
A Sample of New Zealand Railways Craftsmanship
A feature of the new standard railcar “Aotea” (one of a number built in the Railway Department's Workshops at Woburn), is the drawing-room comfort of the seating accommodation provided for passengers. These illustrations show the first and second-class compartments respectively.
Interior of sleeping compartment on the “Simplon Orient” Express.
London'S main-line passenger termini, set in a ring around the City, have been immensely improved in recent years. Notwithstanding these betterments, however, there are times, notably at the height of the summer holiday season, when it is only with the greatest ingenuity that it is possible to handle the enormous traffic offering. It is, of course, impracticable to enlarge and rebuild all the metropolitan stations, but whenever opportunity offers an endeavour is made to extend the accommodation available, and to remodel the existing facilities to meet changing conditions. At the moment, good progress is being made with the modernisation of the Euston terminus of the L.M. & S. Company, while important electrification works are being carried out in the neighbourhood of the throbbing Liverpool Street terminus of the L. & N.E. line.
The honour of handling more trains than any other London station falls to Waterloo, on the Southern system, with a total of 1,424 passenger trains in and out daily. Liverpool Street, however, actually deals with the heaviest passenger traffic, some 209,000 people passing through each day. A recent official census of passengers and trains arriving at fourteen of the principal London termini on an ordinary weekday shows that 1,294,000 passengers use these gateways daily, and 4,217 trains arrive at their platforms every twenty-four hours. The problem of the morning and evening rush hour remains acute. At Waterloo, 24,300 people arrive in a single hour during the morning, and in the evening 22,800 passengers leave in the same period of time. At Liverpool Street, where the suburban traffic is exceptionally heavy, 32,900 passengers step out on to the platforms between 8.30 and 9.28 a.m., while between six and seven o'clock in the evening some 31,675 people depart.
The remodelling of city passenger stations, and the electrification of the tracks in and out, affords an opportunity for introducing signalling betterments of the greatest value. The Southern electrification works were accompanied by elaborate resignalling schemes, involving new signal boxes at Waterloo (309 levers), London Bridge (311 levers), Charing Cross (107 levers), and Cannon Street (143 levers). On the L. & N.E. system, two interesting resignalling schemes just completed are those between Shenfield and Chelmsford, on the former Great Eastern section; and between Shenfield and Southend—the nearest seaside resort to the capital. In both cases modern colour-light signals have been installed, with three and four-aspect signals of the searchlight type, controlled by d.c. track circuits. The same company has also recently completed new power signalling at the east end of Waverley Station, Edinburgh. The former mechanical signal-box at this point comprised 260 levers. This, and a second signal-cabin some 1,056 yards distant, have been replaced by a new box with 207 miniature levers.
One of the outstanding attractions of the Railway Pavilion at the Empire Exhibition at Glasgow last year was a model railway over which operated miniatures of our more famous expresses. A few weeks ago the happy thought occurred to bring this alluring show to London, and so for the Christmas and New Year holidays this fine railway exhibit was open to public inspection free of charge at Charing Cross Underground Station. The main exhibit consisted of scale models of the “Cornish Riviera,” “Coronation Scot,” “Coronation,” “Southern Belle” and other renowned trains, threading their way through a picturesque panorama representing attractive types of coastal and inland scenery. The trains were operated from a single control panel, and the display, among other features, showed automatic colour-light signalling. Also included in the exhibition were some of the newest pictorial railway posters and enlarged photographs of railway activities. Rumour has it that this outstanding exhibit is to go for display at the New York World's Fair, where the L.M. & S. Railway will feature a complete “Coronation Scot” train for the edification of our American friends.
Preparations for the summer holiday season are being steadily made by the Home railways. A feature of the holiday programme will be the placing at public disposal of a greatly increased number of camping coaches, this facility introduced in 1933, having grown in popularity by leaps and bounds. Some 385 camping coaches will this summer be available in different holiday districts, the weekly rent of a coach for a party of six varying from £2/10/- to £5/-/-, this including all equipment, bed linen, lights, etc. For the 1938 season, more than 3,800 weekly tenancies were booked in England, 875 in Scotland, and 200 in Northern Ireland, and already the whole of the available stock of camping coaches has been booked up for next August Bank Holiday week. The coaches are placed in particularly picturesque seaside and inland centres, enabling holiday-makers to choose a district where their particular desires or hobbies can be well satisfied. The areas covered include many places where opportunities abound for such pursuits as riding, golfing, fishing, swimming, and mountaineering. Holiday-makers renting the coaches must travel to and from their vacation point by rail, and the scheme has been the means of attracting much valuable business.
Home railway sleeping cars are the envy of the world. These luxurious coaches are really comfortable bedrooms on wheels, assuring the traveller of a splendid night's rest, and all sorts of little luxuries from a hot and cold shower to a “nice cup of tea” on awakening. Third-class sleepers, introduced a few years ago, have proved an unqualified success, and by thus popularising night travel relief has been obtained on some of the more crowded day expresses. In Italy, an interesting experiment is being conducted by the State Railways, taking the form of the provision of patent hammock berths in certain of the night trains operating between Rome and the northern winter-sports resorts. Each compartment is equipped with four hammocks, providing, with the ordinary seats, sleeping quarters for six passengers. On the mainland of Europe, the majority of the sleeping cars are operated by those two well-known organisations, the International Sleeping Car Company, and the German Mitropa Company. Wherever one journeys in Europe to-day, one has striking evidence of the growing popularity of night travel. This is all to the good, alike from the viewpoint of the railways and the public.
Unfair road competition, which is hitting the Home railways so hard, has also seriously affected railway revenues in many continental lands. Because of changed conditions, railway managements are reorganising their operating sides, and in Holland and Belgium this move has been most striking. Electrification is one way in which the Dutch authorities are seeking to keep passenger traffic to rails. Another advance is the introduction of diesel railcars in place of the conventional heavy steam trains, while further economies are being secured by the closing down of many roadside stations.
This is the story of a journalist who went to sea, but had to use the New Zealand railways to get home. It gives an insight into the workings of the light-house service of the Dominion, a great sea-signalling system maintained at high point of efficiency through the work of the Government light-house tender, the Matai.
Four times a year this trim little steamer makes the regular round of our three thousand miles of coast, going into waters which the average seamen likes to shun, but this is the job of the Matai's commander, Captain Burgess, to get as near to the light-houses and automatic beacons as possible, for on the Matai everything depends. With her white hull delicately picked out in blue, her cruiser stern and an ample supply of smart-looking boats and a launch on the top deck, one might take the Matai to be a particularly well equipped yacht, until one finds out how business-like is the whole equipment, built for the roughest of conditions. Look down into the forehold and see the piles of Westport coal, which the crew will bag up for precarious handling out of surf-boats so that the light-keepers’ families shall not go short of fuel. As for the rest of the cargo which I saw there before we left Auckland, it resembled an auction-room for miscellaneous variety, including even a consignment of live poultry and a sewing machine.
The run up the East coast from Auckland was certainly a yachting experience, with the sunlight, calm seas, and the lovely islands dotted around the Gulf. It gave one time to reflect on the value of the light-house service, its contribution to the safety of travel by sea, just as the signalling system ashore makes possible the combination of speed with safety which has to be provided nowadays. Fast passenger schedules now have to be maintained on the sea routes, but it is not very satisfactory to speed across the Tasman at twenty knots, and save more than a day on the old schedules, if visibility has been bad and much time spent in making a safe landfall.
Dead reckoning enables the captain to realise that the coast of New Zealand is ahead, but exactly what part of it? He is looking for the distinctive flashes of the light-house to fix his position beyond doubt, and once these are seen, the course is set with confidence on the next “leg” which brings the boat nearer port. But bad visibility may persist, and here the radio directional signalling system provided at the most important light-houses gives a bearing, and the land-fall can be made just the same. A couple of these radio bearings from the land, and the ship's exact position can be fixed almost to a few cable-lengths.
Twenty-six important light-houses carry staffs of keepers, but there are 170 lights around the coast, most of them automatic.
Matai did its first job, replenishing the gas supply for a light on the Hen and Chickens group. The light is nearly 500 feet above sea level and it was the job of the Matai's crew to load a surf-boat with cylinders filled with gas dissolved in acetone, and reduced by immense pressure to liquid state. There is a porous material in the cylinders which eliminates the danger of explosion, a highly essential precaution seeing how these 200 lbs. weights have to be man-handled up a track more fit for goats than sailors. Empty cylinders had to be taken away, the lenses of the light polished, and the delicate mechanism carefully overhauled, so that it could go on doing its duty quite infallibly for four months, if necessary.
These automatic lights depend for their operation on the well-known physical law that light is heat. The governing valve is called a sun-valve, but it is not dependent on what we feel of the warm rays of the sun. What we see is a central rod coated with lamp-black, which absorbs light. Surrounding it are three highly polished rods, light-reflecting. These readily expand in the light, and a lever connects them with the black rod,
We came to a different type of lighthouse at Cape Brett, where there are three families living. This is one of the old-time light-houses, with its immense lenses making the most of the light from incandescent mantles fed with kerosene gas. The occulting of the light is done by a revolving screen, operated by weights and pulleys. It is the job of the light-keeper on duty to wind up this immense grandfather's clock mechanism at intervals, and one was interested to see that it was made in Scotland. The visitors’ book suggested that although Cape Brett is fairly handy to the mainland, visitors are rare, for we could go back twenty years by turning over a few pages.
The light-house keeper's life in many stations is a lonely one, though the men and their families get so used to it that they never ask for sympathy. Children are brought up in these isolated places, and receive a thoroughly sound education through the medium of the Education Department's correspondence school, ably assisted by radio broadcasting. Some have even been successful in secondary school courses. There comes a time, however, when it is highly desirable to introduce these healthy well-educated youngsters to a wider civilisation, and these first contacts with the outside world are vivid experiences. One light-keeper's wife found the experience highly embarrassing when she took her two young sons to the mainland and they went to church for the first time in their lives.
It was all very strange to the youngsters, and when a gentleman of benevolent appearance came around with a plate, well filled with coppers and silver, one little boy took twopence, and shyly said “Thank you.” His brother selected a bright sixpence with gratitude, and also politely said “Thank you.” I am not going to spoil this very human story by detailing what the horrified mother said afterwards!
The pleasant green undulations of the coast were disappearing as the Matai steamed further north. Long stretches of sand took their place, broken here and there by bold cliffs. Soon we were to be round the northernmost corner of New Zealand, and a deep depression which, according to the weather prophet appears to be always crossing the Tasman, was rapidly approaching. Cape Maria Van Diemen was fringed with heavy surf, rolling in immense volume under the impetus of a south-westerly swell. The light is on an island, so small that a big sea makes itself felt even at the comparatively sheltered landing place on the side facing the mainland. To work surf-boats just then was out of the question, so the Matai anchored, patiently awaiting an opportunity. Next morning she was rolling heavily, and the cliffs to leeward resembled a long-extended Niagara, with the cascades running up, instead of down.
“Not much chance of working the light-house,” I remarked to Captain Burgess.
“We'll go round and have a look,” was his attitude, so up came the anchor, and cautiously feeling the way by the use of the lead, the Matai got within sight of the landing, a heavy concrete pier standing out into the
Ranging up and down alongside the Matai, the surf-boats provided a problem in smart winch work. A sling of cargo went up, and was slung overside. Then upwards and inwards surged the boat, and at the exact moment down came the load with a rush, to be instantly stowed by a couple of sailors who could do the double job of cargo handling and keeping their balance.
Having been towed to a point beneath the crane jib, the loaded surf-boat was anchored, and the launch cruised in circles, its crew closely watching for any dangerous drift of the surf-boat. Landing the cargo called for the same quick action as its loading. Down into the rolling sea came a looped wire from the crane, and when boat and wire approximately coincided—which would happen for a split second—the load was hitched on, and light-keepers at the winch lifted it clear of the rising sea. Passengers had to land in the same way, and it was no job for the nervous—grab the wire, foot into loop, and hold on, while the boat surged from beneath.
This job finished, the Matai steamed into the open to resume acquaintance with the “Deep depression” and the heavy south-west swell. We were bound for Kaipara, an all-night run under stormy conditions, so the skipper kept well away from the lee shore. The journalistic voyager, fortunately well enough to be observant, got interested in the great sea hollows into which the little steamer plunged, to rise buoyantly over a crest, and into the next one, to the accompaniment of rolling, the like of which ordinary passengers surely never experience.
A surveyor's level was borrowed for an experiment, and the scale set so that when the Matai rolled to 45 degrees—half way between vertical and horizontal—the bulb would show “level.” But the little ship rolled the bulb completely out of sight, and it was set nearer to the horizontal, at 30 degrees, before we managed to measure the exact degree of the roll.
Walking without holding on to something substantial was quite impossible, and we spent a social evening in the cabin of “Sparks” stowed comfortably on the floor, from which we could not fall off. The calm voice of the radio announcer and the other indications of normal life ashore sounded strange amid the roar of the storm and the lurching of the ship.
“Blackie,” the ship's cat, having double the leg supply of humans, managed better in getting about, but became annoyed over sliding around when it curled up for sleep, and eventually found a snug spot between the steps of a small ladder, stowed on the floor in the engine-room. “Blackie” during an adventurous life, must have exhausted all his nine lives, for he is, alas, only a memory, though a vivid one. Adopting the Matai as his home for many years, he sometimes sought change of scene, or possibly a change of rat diet, by walking across from the Matai's Wellington berth to the southern express steamer for a trip to Lyttelton. After a few days there “Blackie” would walk into the fo'castle of another express
(Continued on page 41
).
Rly. Publicity photo.)
A recent view of the Wellington-Auckland “Daylight Limited” crossing the Makohine Viaduct. The viaduct, which is on the Main Trunk Line, is 238 ft. high and 750 ft. long.
Every schoolboy knows why this country is named “New Zealand,” but perhaps the fact has been forgotten that about a hundred years ago it was seriously proposed that the name should be changed. One reason advanced was that Tasman did not land in New Zealand, and therefore could not have taken possession of it in the name of his country.
It was also argued that the Dutch did not follow up the discovery, and that in any case it was doubtful whether Tasman was the first white explorer to discover New Zealand. Though the evidence to support the claim is far from conclusive, it is possible that Portuguese navigators knew of the existence of this country long before the time of Tasman.
However, the crowning reason was that a British colony ought to have a British name. Various names were suggested, including New Britain, but no official notice was taken of the proposal, and in time it was forgotten.
The names, North, Middle, and South Islands persisted for a long time. As J. A. Bathgate says in his book, “Colonial Experiences,” “The individual who first gave the names … must have possessed a mind somewhat resembling that of the worthy minister of the Cumbraes (two small islands in the Firth of Clyde) who used to pray for a blessing on the Great Cumbrae, and the Little Cumbrae, and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland.”
Dunedin has been Dunedin ever since the first settlers arrived there from Scotland, but the name of the town when it was only a plan on paper was New Edinburgh. This was chosen after such names as New Reekie, Edina, Ossian, Bruce, Burns, Duncan-town, Napiertown, Holyroodtown, and Wallacetown had been rejected.
W. W. Stewart Collection.)
An excursion train leaving Auckland.
In 1843 William Chambers, one of the editors of the well-known “Chambers Journal,” wrote to the “New Zealand Journal” (a paper published in London for the purpose of promoting interest in emigration to New Zealand) and suggested that the old Celtic name, Dunedin, was infinitely superior to New Edinburgh. This happy suggestion was adopted, but it was not until 1846 that the projected settlement became known officially as Dunedin. The same idea was used when the river Clutha was named. Clutha is the ancient name of the Clyde.
In his letter suggesting the name, Dunedin, Chambers wrote: “I would at all events hope that names of places with the prefix ‘new’ should be sparingly had recourse to. The ‘news’ in North America are an utter abomination, which it has been lately proposed to sweep out of the country. It will be a matter for regret if the New Zealand Company help to carry the nuisance
Rly. Publicity photo.)
Picton—the ever popular holiday resort in the Marlborough Sounds.
A year or two before this the country had been officially saddled with three “news.” The charter for erecting “The Colony of New Zealand,” signed by Queen Victoria on November 16th, 1840, declared that the three principal islands should be known respectively as New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster. Governor Hobson, who was an Irishman, is said to have been responsible for these names. Happily they were soon discarded.
Port Chalmers was to have been called either New Leith or New Musselburgh. Perhaps Chambers’ hint led the Scottish Free Church founders of the settlement in Otago to name the port after Thomas Chalmers, one of the leaders of the Free Church at the time of the Great Disruption in 1843.
Invercargill was named after Captain Cargill, one of the leaders of the Otago pioneers. The name was suggested by Colonel Thomas Gore Browne, Governor of New Zealand from 1855 to 1861. He also suggested the name Southland, neither a happy nor a brilliant idea, considering that the beautiful Maori name, Murihiku, might have been used.
When Southland separated from Otago in 1861 some of the southern settlers who had no great love for Cargill, suggested that the name of their principal town should be changed to Clinton, the family name of the Duke of Newcastle, who had taken a great interest in the welfare of New Zealand. However, the suggestion was vetoed on the ground that Invercargill was a very suitable name for a Scottish settlement.
The name of Wellington before the town was moved from Petone to its present site was Britannia.
In view of this enthusiasm for the name Wellington, it is rather amusing to find that the same journal only a few months previously had highly commended Britannia as “a good name because till now unappropriated by any town and therefore distinctive in its character.”
Wanganui was first named Petre, after Lord Petre, one of the directors of the New Zealand Company. The name was officially proclaimed in November, 1842, but it did not appeal, and in 1854 it was changed to the more melodious Maori name.
What a wealth of pleasure New Zealand offers to those who love the outdoors! There are literally thousands of places within easy reach of rail communication, so many indeed that in the annual leaves of a lifetime they would remain unexhausted, and their appeal varies so that at any season of the year they delight. A little prospecting round the Waikato River in the neighbourhood of Wairakei opens up scenic and characteristic spots that inevitably lure the holiday maker back. Too many people, intent on covering ground rather than in fully absorbing the atmosphere of each spot, pass swiftly through this region. They know the Wairakei geysers and the Karapeti blowhole, but as they vanish northwards amongst the pines, shrouding the sunlit distance with a veil of dust, or skim south over the good roads to Taupo, they pass up a treasurehouse of memories if they have not seen the Aratiatia Rapids or the latest thermal offering in Orakei Korako, apart from which there is a wonderland of sun and distance in the Atiamuri region, where the trout are large and the river obligingly creates just the “fishing water” that anglers love.
So different is this entire district from the rest of New Zealand that those who have travelled overseas wonder sometimes if they are not in the Karoo or the drought-parched plains of Patagonia, yet the New Zealand rainfall provides, even on banks in the driest of tea-tree flats, luxurious lycopodium that brings the traveller back to the realisation that he is seeing something new.
When the “Lofty Rock,” a former Maori fastness still cicatriced with the crude fortifications of hand-to-hand fighting in the tribal wars, is sighted, the do-New-Zealand-in-a-week specialist should get out, light his pipe or cigarette, and do a little saunter about on foot, making inquiries what there is to see and do. This pine-clad area offers something exotic in New Zealand scenery. It is almost like a glimpse of the pine-covered buttes of the States, and the dry desert air completes the illusion. Though the pines have their own appeal, and provide the something different which is the spice of life, one cannot forget that they will seed themselves and mean the doom of the unsuspiciously sheltering manuka. Along the main road dark phalanxes of pines provide striking contrasts to the sun-splashed white road in long, tunnel-like vistas, but it is with relief that one emerges again to the dry desert atmosphere and the straggly native growths.
Anglers do not worry much about scenery, though it is a subconscious joy to them. For them the prevailing wind, the fresh air, and the sunlight that turns the skin a golden brown are sufficient, if there is enough moving water of the speed that just keeps the rainbows’ tails busy to maintain their lazy place in the feeding places. Every river is beautiful, but none more so than the Waikato in these higher reaches, where its frothing rapids or slow flow form a contrast to the dry shimmering manuka and the cricket's chirp. The days of giant fish in New Zealand rivers may be over, but there are plenty of rainbow from three or four pounds upwards, and they are less wily than the brown trout of more southern waters.
Motorists will see the Aratiatia Rapids sign. Few people alighting on the circular turnway at the close of a short run from the Rotorua road are prepared for them. They have followed the slow glide of the Waikato, where fishing tracks cut through the bracken and tea-tree give glimpses of tied up row boats, and they emerge on a welter of waters that would not disgrace the Rockies, but which has a distinct and arresting charm, say people who have come from overseas more than once to see them. Moving sleepily along above the rapids, the colour of the Waikato is as hard to describe as an eel's back, but once it begins to tear through the narrow chasm in the rocks, it has all the vividness of a glacier's blue, with
Three streams meet at the head of the rapids, and the contrast of glide and cataract strikes the eye. Thence, by following a well-worn trail downstream, one comes out on rocky points of vantage below which the whole of the Waikato River roars through the gorge. One has to yell to be heard, and the further down one goes, the steeper are the rapids. The black splashed rock and the egret feathers-and-washing-blue-coloured torrent hold a fascination not excelled in any other sight in New Zealand. Bold rounded promontories succeed one another until there is a look-out reached by a bridge. Still further down is a whirlpool where battered timbers gyrate imprisoned as in a Poe nightmare. In its last leap before reaching this the rapids are confined in a width of fifteen feet, and it is easy, in the tumult of smothered wrath, to imagine that the solid rock underfoot is trembling.
Not far away, on the main highway from the north, are the Orakei Korako thermal wonders. This is the latest opened tourist sight, and it is still much as the Maoris knew it in old tribal warfare days, when the springs were put to cuisine uses strange to-day. Thermal regions are much alike in their features, but Orakei Korako has the distinction of having the only existing white terrace, a reminder of what was lost in the Tarawera eruption. There are also the “Dragon's Throat,” a rumbling imprisoned geyser whose discharge is caught internally, other terraces in process of formation, and a wealth of springs, pools, and fumaroles each with its appeal, and with a strange trickle of colourings as the hot chemicals meet the air. Except for a path defined for safety, this spot is unspoilt as yet. To many the crowning wonder is Aladdin's Cave, an almost vertical abyss which ends in a clear green alum impregnated pool 170 ft. from the entrance on the summit of a conical hill. It is a huge sound shell.
Fine rapids are seen on the way to Orakei Korako, but, though the Waikato has its own scenery just here, the wish persists to visit this place again in the shooting season. It is a proved anglers’ spot, but what pleasure could be had behind a good dog out on the surrounding plains, where more quail were seen than anywhere else in a three weeks’ run. Pigs and deer are found in the hills and amongst the bracken. It is rough going, but the sport would make it worth while, and there are few places left where one would be so utterly alone as out on the plains here in winter.
“The first pipe of the day! Can you beat it?” asks “Old Smoker,” in a South Island paper. “I rise at 5 a.m., winter and summer, and the first thing I do is to light up! I smoke all day long, but that first pipe is easily the best! Sometimes I am asked if I never suffer from burnt tongue. I never do! But then you see, I am particular in my choice of tobacco. Were I to be continually puffing some of those foreign brands we wot of, I certainly couldn't indulge so freely as I do. But my tobacco is ‘New Zealand toasted'—the pick of the basket for flavour and ‘allure.’ It contains so little nicotine that it is hardly worth mentioning! This tobacco undergoes special treatment at the factory which destroys most of the nicotine in it.” Another feather in the cap of “toasted.” Five brands only remember: Riverhead Gold, Desert Gold, Navy Cut No. 3, Cavendish, and Cut Plug No. 10. But ‘ware of imitations.*
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The visitor who approaches Saint Mary's Church in New Plymouth for the first time, is filled with delightful surprise at finding in our young country a church breathing an atmosphere so truly saturated with reverence and tradition. The massive grey stone walls speak of strength and security, the green, oh! so green, grass covers tenderly the sleeping dead, the lich-gate speaks of old churches far away, whose Sabbath bells have tolled “Come and Worship, Come and Pray” to countless generations of English lords and villagers.
St. Mary's is a very old church, as we New Zealanders count years, for New Plymouth was one of the earliest s