Contents
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29/¼0.
“In the far-hidden heart of the mountains.”—
Trowbridge.
A scene on the upper reaches of the Arthur River, near Milford Sound, South Island.
(Rly, Publicity photo.).
New Zealand
Railways
Magazine
Railways
Magazine
Registered at the G.P.O., Wellington, N.Z., for transmission by post as a Newspaper.
Service Copy
Published by the
New Zealand Government Railways Department
Vol. XV. No. 3.
Wellington,
New Zealand
June1, 1940
The Stalwart British Spirit
The fearless spirit which created the British Commonwealth of Nations—nations of free peoples—will save them and keep them for the welfare of humanity. Through the centuries, that indomitable spirit has been shown in great warriors of land and sea, navigators and explorers, statesmen and scientists. That spirit is not dismayed to-day by the mechanised hordes of Germany.
That spirit moved Captain Cook to sail boldly into uncharted seas of the Southern Hemisphere and to prepare the way for the settlement of New Zeland. That spirit sustained the pioneers of a century ago, and enabled them to triumph over many difficulties. That spirit animated a hundred thousand of this country's sons for a strong fighting part in the war of 1914–18, and the same spirit is sending thousands to-day into the crusade for humanity against barbarism.
Our men will do their duty with that stalwart British spirit which covered their fathers with glory on the battlefields just a generation ago. They will not falter; they will not fail.
In the grim days immediately ahead, it must be expected that there will be further destruction on land, sea and in the air; from time to time, there will be confused situations and that, with a battlefront flung over such a huge area, the fortunes of war will vary. There may be disappointing reports of ground gained temporarily by the enemy in his furious advances, made with a prodigal disregard of cost in men and equipment. But any initial disappointments will surely be met with confidence in the British will to win, and any inclination to gloom will be dispelled by recollection that, in this war, as in the last war and in all other wars, preliminary skirmishes do not win the struggle. It is the last great battle that counts! Britiain and France will meet the German onsets. In addition to their control of enormous material resources, and their command of the sea, they have the inspiration that they are fighting for right against the ruthless forces of savagery which are seeking to extinguish the torch of liberty and religious freedom.
The British Commonwealth, whose peoples have won their liberty through centuries of struggle will not be broken. It will survive in greater strength than ever to help the people of the whole world to enjoy similar liberty. The pitiless despot who has challenged the champions of democracy will be conquered, and the German nation will never be allowed another opportunity to destroy the world's peace.
General Manager's Message
The Railways and the War Effort
Up to the time of writing this message, over a thousand members of the Railway Department have joined the military forces for service overseas.
Recent developments emphasize the gravity of the international situation and impress upon all citizens the necessity for further efforts, whether with the military forces or in serving their country on the home front. As one who has had long association with the personnel of all branches of the Railway Department, and who holds a deep and abiding pride in his association with the Service as a whole, I make a confident appeal to all members to give a maximum of effort and efficiency in the nation's cause at the present time.
I make a further appeal on behalf of New Zealand's soldiers who are fighting our battle overseas. It is our duty to help in providing for the welfare and comfort of our comrades, particularly the sick and wounded. With this object in view, I suggest the establishment of a Railway Patriotic Fund to assist the National and Provincial funds already approved by the Government.
A similar fund has already been sucessfully established in other Government Services and I feel that railwaymen whose patriotism, loyalty and charitable instincts are second to those of no other section of the community, will not wish to lag behind in such a worthy and humanitarian movement.
Whilst realising that the question of making small and regular contributions to such a fund is a matter for the conscience and circumstances of the individual member, I propose calling a meeting of officials of the four service organisations to discuss details of the suggested fund in order that members of the Service generally may be assured that the moneys contributed by them will be controlled by their own representatives. The decisions and recommendations of this meeting will be forwarded to all members at an early date.
Knowing the spirit of the men and women employed in the Railway Department I feel confident of that unanimous support which will ensure the Railway Patriotic Fund being worthy of the Railway Service.
General Manager.
By
O. N. Gillespie
(Rly. Publicity photos)
New Zealand Industries Series
No. 16.—
Soaps And Chemicals.
As this series of articles on our country's industries comes to its close, I am indeed a proud New Zealander. I have visited over one hundred manufacturing units of all sizes and types, producing with precision and skill all manner of things. I have watched a mighty “K” engine being made, and a scooter; a twenty-ton vat of soap and a tiny tube of junket tablets. I have been alternately impressed by gigantic plant installations and comforted by the beauty of factory buildings and appointments. Above all, I have been struck by the ingenuity and resource of our experts of all degrees, and by their habit of world travel in pursuit of world knowledge. I have the backing of more than one distinguished observer from overseas in making this statement: the distinguishing and universal characteristic of New Zealand plants is their adaptability, accompanied by an “outstanding proportion of original devices.” In other words, more “gadgets” are first thought of in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. I do not pretend to have made a comprehensive survey, but the articles do comprise, in retrospect, a reasonably adequate cross-section. The broad generalisation to give is that we can make most things here which minister to modern needs, and make possible a modern standard of living. I can foresee the time when we shall make everything; it is purely a matter of development. What we now make is of world parity in design and efficiency; what we make is the work of fellow-citizens who are thereby provided with a proper return. “Buy New Zealand Goods” is not a patriotic motto; it is civic commonsense and commercial prudence.
Most folk have the sensible habit of keeping their medicine cupboard in the bathroom, so that, before I deal with the high pitch to which soap-making has been developed in New Zealand, it might be as well to look at an institution which makes basic drugs and other chemical preparations. I paid a call on the Q.-F. Laboratories, Wellington. This familiar landmark is usually regarded as the manufacturing unit for two famous proprietary articles, but the range of its activities is astonishing.
When a chemist, in dispensing your prescription, reaches for one of those large brown bottles of mystery, he will often be using a pure chemical with a Latin name. Ranking first in this line of activity is Hydrogen Peroxide, here titled “Proxogen.” Ethereal soaps, green, soft soap so much used in the operating room, brilliantines, macassar oil, shampoos, milk of magnesia, and other close relatives, stand in picturesque rows on the shelves, and toothpastes, shaving creams and codliver
Modern equipment at the Q.-F. factory, Wellington.
The wounded mill manager wrought better than he knew when long ago he wrote a letter of praise saying that the Fluenzol gargle was “Quicker Than Other Liniments.” Those initial capitals were to lead an army of production units outside the scope of any possible prevision.
The history of the company is typical of many New Zealand organisations. The founder, the late Cecil W. Palmer, was famous for his almost fanatical belief in his preparations. He was succeeded by Mr. W. H. Stevens, some sixteen years ago, and the policy of expansion has been steady ever since. The present imposing edifice stands foursquare as an important addition to New Zealand's array of utility producers.
I went over the factory with the brilliant chemist whose long line of letters behind his name only represents part of his attainments, for he is a man of long overseas experience in the science of manufacturing.
The Q.-F. factory is packed with original and effective new designs in mechanisms. Stainless steel is everywhere, and there is an air of cleanliness and wholesomeness, helped by the lustral white of the machinery, walls, and overalls.
I examined a contrivance that tests with exactness the lasting powers of Proxogen, the tintometer which checks uniformity in the colours of essences, ointments and so on, and I was intrigued with the ingenuity displayed in adapting a tablet coating mechanism till it played the role of a pill-rolling vehicle.
In the Q.-F. laboratory.
Q.-F. Laboratories make the whole range of tablets, a complex and precise series of processes, requiring the use of granulating methods, careful drying, sieving, compressing, and finally, a sugar coating contrivance. The latter is done by a large hollow sphere which rotates on a canted axis. The tablets swing round and round and the sugar coating adheres to them. A regulated current of hot air dries the coating gently, and inspection proves whether or not the unpleasant-tasting interior is completely protected from the palate. The same spheres will make pills, the particles rotating till they become perfectly shaped little globules.
The Proxogen plant is worth special study. The output is one hundred gallons a day, and the process is too long to describe in detail here. A distilled water plant is installed, and there are serried rows of filter presses. An impressive apparatus makes ointment, using white paddles rather like small steamer propellers which work in a mixer furnished with smooth stone millstones to reduce all the materials to the needed fineness. It should be mentioned that every now and then Mr. Harvey would pause and say: “This was made in New Zealand from my own design.” And the observation covered mechanisms ranging from large metal vats to more complex apparatus.
Filter presses consist of hollow plates which force the liquids through canvases, and it was noteworthy that in the Proxogen department these were all coated with oxygen-proof paint.
In the granulating room, there are 180 trays in enclosures steam-heated from underneath, and the resultant tablets are turned out by the machines at the rate of 4,800 per hour. I saw 84,000 tablets in one hollow sphere being sugar-coated, and next door a similar number being polished.
In another large workroom I enquired about masses of neat coils of slender iron wire, and found that these went into Bidomak along with phosphates and calcium. Everywhere I saw that regular and frequent tests were made at each step in the manufacturing processes. What Q.-F. Laboratories turn out is right up to B.P. standards. I accept the statement, too, made with quiet confidence, that in many preparations, noticeably Milk of
Cutting bars of soap at Lever Bros.
As one door opened, there came a whiff of perfume, heady and seductive. I was shown a bottle of rose perfume containing £215 worth of essence, which is easily understood when I learned that it takes a ton of rose leaves to make one pound of oil.
I should like to say, in leaving this admirable establishment, that it displays confidence in its future in a most practical way. The chief chemist has made provision everywhere for “doubling up,” and the roomy premises give ample facilities. The wide scope of Q.-F. Laboratories, the sturdy determination to adhere to stability and purity as watchwords, and its “chemically pure” composition as an all New Zealand company, are all features that call for high praise. Moreover, a full page would be required to contain the list of enterprises in New Zealand devoted to the making of drugs, chemicals, and kindred products. Vast premises such as those of Kempthorne, Prosser & Co. exist in many New Zealand centres, making everything from familiar toothache drops to stupendous outputs of our farming “life-line” fertilisers.
Everyone who has made the East Harbour trip to the Bays of Wellington will have noticed the spreading collection of modern buildings which house the vast enterprise of Lever Brothers, a household word from “China to Peru.” In an issue of the Port Sunlight quarterly, “Progress,” there is an article which describes the Petone site as combining “utility with beauty of surroundings,” and elsewhere in the same issue there are pictures of
But the most famous creation of the late Lord Leverhulme was Port Sunlight. “Some day to build houses in which work-people will be able to live and be comfortable” was the modest outline of his dream, in 1888, and the brilliant realisation is known the world over. Port Sunlight is a gracious model town of six thousand people, where life is pleasant, and planned, where modern standards of physical comfort are common to all its inhabitants. I value more than the material amenities the noble realities of brotherhood and communal endeavour for which Port Sunlight stands. Pensions, educational facilities, sports fraternities, holiday provisions and other civic advantages, are matters of right for the workers in this great British institution.
All honour to the founder who made the affirmation, startling at the time, that “the cheerfulness of the Port Sunlight community was the measure of the prosperity of Lever Brothers Ltd.”
The Petone works are extensive and the journey through them is no pilgrimage to be measured in minutes. Characteristically, by the side of the main gate, a handsome, one-storey building stands in its own green and flowery grounds.
The modern lunch-room at Lever Bros., Wellington.
A boiling pan of soap at Lever Bros.
I was soon initiated into the mysteries of modern soap-making on massed production lines. Here is nothing of “hit or miss” methods. Scientific precision, analytical research, and endless, scientific and thorough testing go into every process.
In the main laboratory, with its technical library and intricacy of glass tubes, retorts and complex apparatus, I was shown the shelves of “standard” preparations. Every new batch of soap, bottle of glycerine, tube of shaving cream, tablet of toilet soap, and every other of the long list of Lever products, has to conform in every minute particular to these, or be immediately rejected.
“No soap; so he died” is more than the opening line of a superb piece of nonsense verse. Soap was known in the misty dawn of time; there was a soap factory in Pompeii when it was overwhelmed by Vesuvius, and our own hardy pioneers made soap from the fat of New Zealand sheep and the potash got from the burning of New Zealand timber. The scientific basis of the processes of soap-making were, however, only dimly understood until a century ago.
For the layman, soap production is managed by the union of a metallic salt with a fatty acid. Fats, as we know them, whether vegetable or animal, are composed of fatty acids and glycerine. “Saponification” takes place when the mineral salts take the fatty acids away from the glycerine. The minerals used are alkalis, sodium and potassium, because these are soluble in water.
This job being done, the soap-maker has then to separate the soap from the glycerine, and this is done by using salt to which soap is unfriendly, as anyone who has tried to lather in sea water will readily believe. The panroom at Levers is an example of this process on a large scale. The vats hold twenty tons of soap at a time, and an ingenious system of movable levels, steam pipes, and inlets and outlets, contrive to drain off the glycerine remainder and precipitate the soap.
A huge boiling of Sunlight soap was
“Lifebuoy” has the familiar reddish colour, and as the vats recede in content, pinkish stalactites make their appearance on the sides. The distinctive blending of the ingredients means that every huge vat has not only a distinctive scent but a different con - sistency and colouring.
When everything is found to be in order with a boiling of household soap, it is run into long cooling frames, rectangular tall boxes whose sides let down. The great slabs are cut into bars by wires pulled through by pressure. These are dried and proceed to a pressing machine which stamps the tablets. I noticed an occasional deep notch in the large slabs and found these were for laboratory testing purposes. The packing in cartons is the usual mingling of almost human mechanism and incredibly dexterous fingers.
These household soaps differ in make-up, and the gradations are got by kilful adaptation of materials, and the use of different alkalis, resins and other chemical ingredients.
Now, toilet soap-making is quite “another story.” Here the processes are more complex, the ingredients highly selective, and infinite pains are taken. The soap itself, delicately pure, goes over water-cooled rollers which make it into an incredibly thin film which is scraped off by set knife edges. Drying chambers concentrate this film till it becomes 63 per cent. pure soap, but it has still more troubles ahead. It has a seven-fold milling and refining journey. To ensure the full permeation of the perfume, an elaborate set of happenings takes place. After the usual frame cooling, toilet soap is milled into shavings and matured again in a carefully regulated oven. Then the perfume is added and again the strips are worked until they are plastic and come out from the marbling mills like ribbons that have been accordion-pleated. Finally, the ribbons are pressed into bars, cut into neat tablets, and double stamped under tremendous pressure.
But one begins to see life in earnest at Levers’ factory in the preparation of Lux. This is made in a many-towered court of white where the intensive purpose is to get complete dryness in the flakes. Here you can watch the Lux diamonds pressed out in thousands, dried and dried again and again, finally ascending a lofty turreted flue. At long last there emerges a snowy white flake powder of ethereal softness and almost unbelievable purity. Here seemed to be the very soul of soap.
Finally, we looked in at the making of Persil and kindred preparations. The constituents for these are weathered in bags for six weeks. They then pass through sifting grids, go up in conveyers again to grinding machines, and generally are tormented, bedevilled and purified till they pass the tests of the laboratory experts.
The oxygen content of Persil is most ingeniously effected, and is a potent agent in this unique preparation.
In the beginning, readers will recall that brine is used to separate the soap from the glycerine, and nothing is more interesting than the care taken with this, the most important by-product of soap manufacture.
There is a newly-installed great department here which is reminiscent of a modern liner's engine-room, with its big boilers, steel-plated floors, and huge pipes. Here, in great vacuum boilers, the glycerine can be seen through the peepholes, furiously boiling, and eventually it emerges, chemically pure and completely colourless. This plant is the very last word in this branch of the scientific utilisation of soap-making by-products.
The activities of this vast establishment which provides opportunities for so many hundreds of New Zealanders are almost countless. Sunlight products, from Rinso to shaving cream, are known wherever cleanliness is considered worthwhile.
While in Auckland, I spent an interesting morning in the old-established works of the “Union Oil, Soap, and Candle Company.”
In this great factory is made the famous Taniwha soap, and here again I saw the up-to-date and scientific method in use which has revolutionised the cost and quality of soap. I saw copra being ground into its component parts in an enormous mill, which separates the pure oil and leaves a pollard-like substance which becomes a nutritious pig and poultry food. The oil is extensively used in Taniwha products.
Here is made the famous “Sylvia” starch. Starch is made from rice; it is ground into a fine powder first and then put through a number of processes which take out the gluten content and other impurities. Next it goes into drain boxes, and, after a period, is cut into squares. These are carefully wrapped and put into a “crusting” room, where great heat is applied. As these parcels are unwrapped, snowy starch is revealed. The qualities of Sylvia starch are genuinely due to the infinite patience and thoroughness of the preparation. The rice silo has to be seen to be believed, and the huge flat tanks where the starch is seen to be slowly solidifying into white flaky masses are imposing. Three hundred tons of rice are held at one time, and from this is distilled the milk-white liquor which is finally to become starch.
For sheer scenic value, however, I recommend this company's department devoted to the manufacture of soda crystals. A trip through this gleaming place with its changing panoramas is rather like a trip to the Franz Jozef glacier. Here are ice caves, miniature crevasses, overhanging transparent ledges of strange beauty and variety.
The Union Company specialises in this form of housewives’ help.
The making of candles is an art, and to my astonishment I found that the demand for this form of lighting is keen. “The more things change, the more they are the same,” seems to be as true in New Zealand to-day as when the French cynic first said it.
I had forgotten the variety of shapes, colours and materials in candles. There are the transparent wax, the graceful fluted taper, the stearin, and the solid, every-day sperm. The tallow, paraffin or other constituent, has to be carefully treated to give it the solidity required. The big vats hold eight tons at a time, and the contents are steamed into them, distilled, and then set out in trays for cooling. A high-powered hydraulic press takes the next step, extracting out all the oil. The candle-making machines are uncanny and complicated mechanisms which are the nearest examples of perpetual motion I have seen, particularly in the surpassing ingenuity of the wick-drawing method. An endless string draws through in a continuous line through the moulds which are set in rows like a colonnade of small pillars.
The Union Soap, Oil and Candle Company is one of New Zealand's veteran enterprises. Its name derives from a combination between two manufacturers whose actual start was made in 1865, the company dating in its present form back to 1882. I found this big organisation a happy family, many of the seniors having a lifetime of service behind them.
It is a fine example of New Zealand initiative, enterprise and pioneering courage. At the Otahuhu works I was conducted by a trained chemist of high scientific attainments, and I would like to stress that in these three great units visited, I was impressed with the number of experienced and enthusiastic experts of high practical and academic standing employed by the firms in question.
In these branches of industry, New Zealand is marching with the times.
Mr.G. G. Stewart
—Photo., S. P. Andrew & Sons
Mr. G. G. Stewart
Mr. G. G. Stewart, Manager of the Publicity Branch of the Railways Department and Editor of the “Railway; Magazine,” has retired on superannuation after 42 years of varied service.
He came as a young lad from Scotland with his parents who settled at Nelson. There he received a sound primary and secondary education which gave him good qualifications for a railway cadetship at Westport in 1898.
He served in various districts, including Hawke's Bay, Wairarapa, and Nelson. In 1915 he was transferred to the Auckland district, and served at Mercer, and was stationmaster at Thames. He then went to Auckland, where, until 1924, he was in the District Traffic Manager's Office. He was then appointed a commercial agent, with headquarters at Wellington, and after service in that branch was in the Transport Department. From this position, because of his wide general railway knowledge and his literary versatility, he was appointed Editor of the “Railways Magazine” in 1925, and was made officer in charge of the Publicity Branch when this was established in 1926. He became Publicity Manager in 1927. For the greater portion of 1930 he was also acting commercial manager.
When he started on the work there was no “Railways Magazine” and no Publicity Branch, and he had to organise both, beginning with one assistant. With a widening of the range of activities the staff grew, and a photographic and plan-printing section was established, which has proved an important part of the Publicity Branch.
Mr. Stewart was an early President of the Wellington Publicity and Advertising Club.
A scene in the Waioeka Gorge between Opotiki and Matawai, North Island.
On 13th May (the eve of his retirement) his colleagues of the Publicity Branch gave him their good wishes with a set of reference books. After warm tributes to his successful career in the branch, it was predicted that he would win further distinction as a writer.
(
Rly. Publicity photos.)
Scenes at the Railway Department's exhibit on the closing day (4th May, 1940) of the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition at Wellington.
A pioneer surveyor in bush working: costume: Mr. H. F. Edgecumbe, from a photo., Waikato, in 1882. His son, Frank Edgecumbe, was a surveyor in the King Country, and a grandson, L. F. Edgecumbe, is also a surveyor.
ByJames Cowan
[Copyright]
The entrance to a town is one of those things that the traveller notes first and often remembers most, after other impressions have become faint and blurred and merged with a hundred memories. Our provincial towns and townships have, to a large extent, lost individuality. One little market place or producing centre has its local Babbitry and Main Street, its Rotarians, its Chamber of Commerce and its Progress League, its golf links and town hall and mayor, just like the other fellows along the line. Quick travel, the radio, tinned music and American uplift, have standardised the whole boiling of them. The farm is no refuge, neither is the lock-up. But there is one characteristic of the provincial town or townlet that often retains some individual touch, and that is its entrance. The approaches to it remain different. Man's reading hand and his architecture modify, spoil or improve the landscape.
This is all by way of preface to my cursory review of some memories and impressions. Here are two contrasts in town approaches. You enter Putaruru between two churches, each perched on its hill cutting. Fifty miles away you enter the township of Kihikihi between two hotels, face to face at the elbow of the main road. The one seems to set out to respectable-ize the town to the traveller's eye at the start; the clergy's certificate of character.
At first acquaintance Kihikihi—you have its life here and there as on the West Coast—does not trouble about testimonials; it is content to remain what it was fifty, sixty, seventy years ago.
My selection of township types is merely at random; yet when I come to think of it one is a fair working example of a comparatively modern brisk little business town; the other an easy-going old-timer, comfortably farming away, and rather given to retrospective satisfaction with its place in the making of New Zealand history. It is not exactly a has-been; but it has a past, even a lively and a bloody past, the interest of which I can supplement with the remark that it has also a gloriously boozy past.
Who should know if not I? For I knew the place when the Native Land Court era was in flower, the era of free trade in Maori lands, the like of which we shall not see again. My home was not far away; “my father was a farmer upon the Maori border”—to adapt a line of Burns, and Kihikihi was our nearest township.
The military story of Kihikihi (the name means cicada, one of those ono-matopoetic names so numerous in the Maori tongue) goes back to the war of 1863–64, when all this Waikato country passed to the strong hand of the pakeha. There is no need to go into all that; we of the elder generation know it and its repercussions only too well.
But one recalls the fact that this was Rewi Maniapoto's home, and the place of his council meetings; his headquarters and the muster-place of his tribe. That fact made it important in the military and political sense; important, too, was the fact that it was the only part of the huge Ngati-Maniapoto territory which was confiscated by the Government in revenge for the temerity of the Maori King's party in demanding local-self government. However, we won't go into that. Waikato unhappily lost all their land; and they remained as refugees in Ngati-Maniapoto territory for a-quarter of a century after the war.
Kihikihi, first a strong place of the Maori, then a British watch-tower of the frontier, was a military post well into the Eighties. In my boyhood's memories the rifle and the blockhouse and redoubt are the foremost features. All the frontier, on our pakeha side of the Puniu River, was studded with fortified places, either of earthwork or of timber stockades and those topheavy-looking loopholed blockhouses which stood on hills and knolls all the way round from Cambridge and the Pukekura hills to Orakau and Kihikihi and on to Alexandra.
But, except for the busy camps, the drilling of Armed Constabulary and the Waikato Cavalry troops, and the occasional shooting or tomahawking affair on the border, farming progress was little disturbed.
Then, as we grew up into the early Eighties, the changes came. Old King Tawhiao came out of his retirement; we saw at close-hand his great march of peace; Te Kooti was given the glad hand of peace by the Government; the frontier was opened, the barriers of racial hatred were removed; peaceful trade began and increased; schools went up, military watch was no longer needed; the unoccupied blockhouses and redoubts crumbled or were demolished by the township people regardless of historical values and forgetful of the protection those little forts gave the families of the frontier.
The partition of the great King Country began; the beginning of the ruin which the land-buying of Government and private individuals and syndicates brought upon the Maori.
The frontier went crazy over the quick exchange of blocks of land for the pakeha cheques which were cashed in the stores and the public houses. Hundreds of the native people camped in the townships—Alexandra and Cambridge, as well as Kihikihi.
Thousands of pounds were spent in those hotels and stores; they were scenes of such noisy revels, such mad drinking and rowdy shouting and dancing, such shopping regardless of expense. What impassioned protests from the business people of Kihikihi in 1886 when at last, and not a bit too soon for the welfare of the Maori, the Government removed the Land Court sittings into the interior of the King Country. Yells of rage from the hotel-owners especially, for Otorohanga where the first Land Court in the King Country was held, with Major Mair as the presiding judge, was “dry,” by decree of the Maori Big Three—Wahanui, Taonui, and Rewi. They were determined to save their people from the scandalous traffic in Waipiro, and they succeeded, for Otorohanga was a place of model behaviour for the duration of the Court, several months, and afterwards until the pakeha came for good. And there was soon no more of the old King Country we knew, in the wide fenceless time of the Rohepotae.
“When I heard they were growing and manufacturing tobacco in New Zealand,” writes Mr. Jas. Scattergood, a retired wholesale tobacco dealer, in a London trade journal, “I was not keenly interested, concluding that probably the stuff wasn't worth smoking. But last year, when I visited New Zealand to see my married daughter, I found to my surprise that the New Zealand toasted tobacco had actually become a serious rival to the imported article—and that it is not only of superfine quality but that thanks to the small amount of nicotine in it, it may be smoked ad. lib. without a particle of harm resulting to the smoker. After 50 years in the trade I can say unhesitatingly that I know of no other tobacco like this.” Well Mr. Scattergood there 1825 according to his son, the late H. V. Gully.Is no other tobacco like it! It is unique. And the five toasted brands, Riverhead Gold, Desert Gold, Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), are as well-known as Mount Cook. The comparative absence of nicotine in them (eliminated by toasting) is the secret of their harmlessness.
Kihikihi now had its real school, succeeding the primitive era of the Seventies. In the first little one-room school I knew the master made hot buttered toast for himself every winter morning at the fire while we hungry tantalised youngsters looked on and shivered. Not a crumb for us. He was a German, or Swiss; at any rate his name was.
The next teacher had a basin of gruel brought to him by his daughter every morning; he ladled in the burgoo with one eye on us and his cane ready to his hand at his high desk. I can't recall that I or my Maori mate, Billy Puke, who rode in from Orakau daily, ever learned anything under those two pedagogues.
In the early Eighties our first real teacher came and really taught us something—he was a good old Waipu Nova-Scotian Highlander, Mr. Norman Matheson, whose memory I love to this day. He had been one of the Rev. Norman McLeod's Gaelic flock, and the Highland tongue was strong upon him. As was the way with those who had “ta Gaelic” he had his own way with English consonants; he called me “Chimmy,” and called the school-kit a “kid.”
The surveyors came, for there was much pioneer work defining boundaries of blocks of newly-purchased Maori lands, and cutting the blocks into farming sections. There were parties of the kai-ruri and their men exploring bush and fern and swamp lands; and the stores were busy in a new enterprise, supplying pack-horse trains for the camps from the line that is now the Main Trunk westward to Kawhia and Mokau and inland to Taupo and the upper Wanganui.
And that period, 1886 to the end of the century, was the end of the King Country as we knew it in the Hauhau days and the transition era when barb-wire, policemen and white collars began the new invasion of the Maori sanctuary.
By
Una Auld
(
Govt. Publicity photo.
Mt. Ngauruhoe in winter garb.
National Park is a national all-the-year-round recreation resort which too many New Zealanders fail to appreciate. Its attraction as a snow-sport centre in the season is undisputed, but when I said that I would be there for the greater part of my annual holiday, the almost horrified reaction of dozens of people was, without exception, “But what on earth will you Do there in the summer?”
Two added scornfully: “That desolate, colourless spot!”
Desolate and colourless? I gasped. A place that is drenched in subtleties of colour for those with eyes to see: eddies of low, purple-tinted flowers against the tawny brown of the plains; masses of white-flowering shrubs lying like drifts of snow on the silent hillsides; the sudden warmth of golden broom flaring against grey boulders; starry patches of mountain daisies standing primly on silver stems beside silver-white rapids; exquisitely-tiny white bells swinging blue-tipped petals on thin brown stalks above beds of deep green moss, heads of creamy bells with their stems tinged with rose-red, or clusters of four-petalled golden-stamened flowers with green leaves closing compactly up beneath them and tight buds packed securely in the centre.
Of all the hundreds of folk who flock down for the exhilaration of the winter sports, how many realise how much they are missing by not seeing the Park in summer time, when so many of its diverse attractions are visible and accessible as they never are during the winter?
James Cowan, in his exceedingly well-written and well-informed book, “The Tongariro National Park,” describes these attractions in the following words:
“Steaming craters, sulphurous pits, a boiling lake, ice-cold lakes, glaciers, snowfields, alpine slopes, torrents and bubbling springs, rapids and waterfalls, huge cliffs and rocky pinnacles, forests and wild fern gardens, mountain meadows bright with leagues of flowers—to enumerate the varied scenes of the Tongariro Park is almost to make a catalogue of all New Zealand's landscapes.”
Even a casual stroll up the metal road of the mountain gives glimpses which are superb; a dazzle of white at a corner as Ruapehu comes into sight, its massive shoulder thrusting into the burning blue sky; on the right the beeches dropping down the hillside in tiers and conveying, through the wide spacing of their boughs and the smallness of their leaves, an indescribable quality of light and airy loveliness; on the way back, a different vista as the great cone of Ngauruhoe soars into the sky, its grey flanks striped with long claws of snow.
From the Chateau itself the panorama is rich with colour: dull green of the beech woods, tawny gold of the rolling hills; emerald green of the golf course slashing the landscape like a sword; dim brown of the plains broken by a range of hills as deeply-blue as a bird's wing. Far off, the flat-topped distinctive outline of Hikurangi. In the distance, tier on tier of further hills, merging from smoky-blue into grey-blue, from grey-blue into silver-blue, from silver-blue into the silver pallor of the skyline.
Or let the “no colour” critics take a walk to the Waiuku Gorge, starting through the beeches where the path is dappled with shifting light and shade, where a cold, clear stream cascades over boulders that its minerals have painted a bright golden-brown; through the open country and up a hillside till a fantastic outcrop of grey-black rock gives a look-out over the Gorge.
Sheer below the rock face, the delicate airiness of the beeches slants steeply down, the leaves of the trees directly below glistening in the sun as though each one were plated in pure silver. To the left, the river, far above the Gorge, gouges a narrow passage through the rock-cliff and hurls a veil of water down, down to the heart of the valley below—to thread the silver-grey boulders together with a ribbon of quicksilver, while on the farther hillside a half-hidden waterfall is a white flash behind a screen of lacy green.
Or, at the Taranaki Falls, let the critics again watch a river fling itself through a narrow chasm in the rock face and, thundering downwards in the light, carry a living rainhow with it to the pool below.
Of a certainty, delicate beauty and rugged grandeur dwell side by side in this domain of 149,700 acres, where “almost all New Zealand's landscapes” meet and mingle.
Of the Red Crater on Tongariro
“The last-born of the craters which once discharged lava within the walls of this basin of black scoria rock and cinders is the still active Red Crater—a mouth of glowing colour set round with jagged rocks, and venting hot sulphur and acid-laden steam and strange noises, and fearful pulsings and thumpings from the depths of the volcano. This Red Crater is 600 feet above the floor of the main crater and is about a quarter of a mile across. The scoria forming the sides is wonderfully coloured in red, orange, blue, yellow and black, with bright yellow sulphur incrustations….”
No wonder Maori legends, as Mr. Cowan says, embody weird stories of “the multitudes of genii and demons with which the native imagination
Looking across the golf links towards the Chateau Tongariro. Mt. Ruapehu in the background.
(Govt. Publy. photo).
The origin of the name Ngauruhoe as related in Mr. Cowan's book is interesting:
“When Ngatoro reached the foot of the range now known as Tongariro, he decided to ascend it in order to spy out the country, like the modern surveyor.” He was, however, caught in a snowstorm, “a new and terrible experience for an immigrant from the tropical isles of the ocean. In his extremity he prayed for the fire of the gods.
“His priestess sisters heard him and appealed to the fire-demons, Te Pupu and Te Hoata, who sent the saving fire. The flames of life burst on the peak-top and his body gained warmth and he was saved. The words ‘riro’ (carried away or seized) and ‘tonga’ (south wind) in his prayer to the goddesses were the origin of the name Tongariro… When Ngatoro-i-rangi put forth his prayer, he slew a female slave as an offering to the gods. This slave, who was a personal attendant and food bearer, was named Auruhoe. When the god-sent flames of life burst forth Ngatoro threw the body of the slave into the blazing crater and that was how the volcano came to bear its name…”
Very interesting to the pakeha, but most unfortunate for poor Auruhoe, who had to pay the price of death for the perpetuation of her name!
There are variations of this legend, of course, just as there are variations of the tale of Egmont, Pihanga, and Ruapehu. Mr. Cowan, retelling one tale, says that in the old days:
“…. An assemblage of great mountains stood in the heart of the North Island. Like gods they stood there…. Tongariro was chief of them all, but… lofty snow-topped Taranaki stood there … and there also stood Tauhara and Putauaki” (now called by the pakehas Edgecumbe). “They were males, all these mountains; they were gods and warriors—all except one, who was a female. Her name was Pihanga… and these mountains loved Pihanga and each wished her to become his wife. But the one she favoured most was Tongariro” (Tongariro and Ngauruhoe being regarded as one). “He won her by fierce combat; he turned upon the other mountains and forced them to depart. He fought them and defeated them; Pihanga was his…
“And the defeated mountains debated among themselves whither they should go.” Tauhara and Putauaki decided on the Bay of Plenty, Taranaki” the setting-place of the sun.”
All one night they travelled. At daylight Taranaki halted at the west coast, where he stands now under the name of Mt. Egmont. Tauhara and Putauaki travelled north, Putauaki, halted by the dawn, standing still “at the northern end of the Kaingaroa Plain, nearly a hundred miles from his original standing place.”
Tauhara, however, was “the slowest of the three rejected lovers. He travelled with tardy, lingering steps; he paused many times to look back towards Pihanga, whom he was leaving. And when daylight came and stopped his march he had only reached the place where he stands now, near the shores of Taupo Moana. And he ever looks back across the lake at beautifull Pihanga.”
Taranaki mythology differs, and as Mr. Cowan points out, there is a remarkable similarity in this kind of animistic symbolism between the mountain folk-tales of New Zealand and those
Of the place names round the Park, one which owes its origin to actual history is that of Whakapapa—“to lay out flat-like boards or flat rock.”
“On the upper parts of the Whakapapa River a battle was fought about five generations ago between Ngati-Tuwharetoa, led by Pouwhare, and a war-party of Whanganui men commanded by Manako. The Whanganui invaders were defeated and many of them were slaughtered, and their bodies were laid out side by side on the rocks and tussock. This level array of corpses was compared to a flat rock or table…”
The story of the Haunted Whare also has its source in fact. In the early days when sheep-stocking was being attempted in the mountain country, a Maori shepherd, by name Wi Takerei, was found dead on the floor of a slab whare built near the waterfall on the Whakapapanui, one of his eyes being missing. “The lonely desolate spot on which the whare stood had been regarded by the Maoris as haunted by the ghost of a young woman who had come to a violent end near there, and now the people were disposed to believe that the kehua or ghost had had something to do with the young shepherd's death.”
The Haunted Whare now standing is not the original whare, but stands about a quarter of a mile from the site of the original hut. Soon after it was put up, “it was occupied for a time by a surveying party working around the mountains, under an assistant surveyor named Springall, who had a Maori wife. Some time in 1883, Springall and his wife and another Maori woman were snowed up in the whare. Late one afternoon they were playing cards at the table facing the one window when suddenly the woman saw a face at the window. The apparition seemingly was that of a young Maori woman, of a handsome and fair type. The two wahines were overcome by the shock. Springall rushed outside but could see no one, and there were no tracks on the snow.”
Later, after the whare had been deserted for a time, a traveller camping there for a night reported seeing the same face at the window, and an old recluse who was stationed there as a shepherd “used to say he was visited by a mysterious Mohoao woman several times.”
But for a last impression of National Park, let us make a summer-time ascent of Ruapehu. As we go up to the Salt Hut area by car, an extraordinary sight lies spread before us—the whole of the landscape right out to the horizon obscured by an immense snow-field of curling white cloud apparently frozen into immobility, the sensation of unearthliness at the sight being exactly the same as that received in a plane, when great banks of cloud below shut out the solid earth and open up another world.
Yet around us the world of valley and hillside, of green trees and running water, was so clear in the early morning light that it seemed to have been purified, and the air was so thrillingly clean one wanted to taste it.
From the Ski Club hut the climb really began. Up over rock faces, trudging heavy boots whose soles were lavishly bestrewn with hobnails, past a waterfall from which the spray was cold on the lips, on up to the glacier, where only the slip-slip of footsteps in the snow broke the silence, a rhythm that became hypnotic. On and on, up and up, till the vast sweep of the glacial fields stretched pure and lovely under the morning sky, with three or four skiers making dark patterns against the background of blinding white. Then, at the summit, a stillness and whiteness so profound that it could he felt. Ice-cliffs rising from the hot lake in the crater, the white spire of Te Heuheu slashed by black lava ridges; then, lower down, as we descended, to the right the gleaming waters of Lake Taupo, beyond it the outline of “trady Tauhara.” In front, the stretch of the plains now visible, with all its nuances of rich and dim blues and greys, greens and browns, and far to the west,
The Chateau Tongariro.
(Govt. Publicity photo.).
Then the thrills of the descent—and what thrills! Taken on a “private toboggan” formed simply by sitting on the snow, clasping the hands round the lifted knees to keep the feet from impeding speed—then rushing down, down, down in a dizzying whirl that for sheer excitement and exhilaration would be hard to beat. And so, finally, back for late afternoon-tea in the Chateau lounge, a sun-bath on a Lilo on the big sun-balcony, a bath, dinner, dancing, music, billiards, table tennis—all the unlimited comfort and social fun of a superluxurious hostel in a national park which is a national asset, offering superb facilities for all-the-year-round recreation.
Written And Illustrated ByR. R. L. McLachlan
A good example of full tattoo.
Along with a number of other primitive people of the Pacific area, the pre-Euro-pean Maori practised the art of Tattooing, or Moko. According to a native myth, Moko was introduced by one Mataora, who long, long ago visited the subterranean spirit world of Rarohenga, and after a short sojourn there brought the practice back to the mortal world. Some see in this story a perverted remembrance of a voyage made by some far-off ancestor to a land where tattooing was in vogue.
The prevalence of the custom among the Maoris was accounted for by the belief that it made the appearance of the warriors more terrible in war, when fighting was carried on at close quarters; and also caused them to be more attractive to the opposite sex, as well as its significance from a religious point of view. Tattoo showed at a glance, also, the rank of the wearer. The great chiefs had their faces and bodies covered with a variety of designs of extreme beauty, while all the freemen were more or less decorated in this manner, slaves only being denied the privilege. In the case of females the tattoo—which was purely to enhance their beauty—was usually confined to the lip and chin.
The process of tattooing was a long and painful one. The first step was the removal of the subject's beard, which would not be allowed to grow again until he reached old age, and was then a proof that he had ceased to care for his appearance, and thus the hairs were pulled out by the roots. In olden days a pair of mussel shells was employed for this purpose, but with the coming of the Europeans large tweezers took their place.
The instruments used for making the incisions in the flesh were like small narrow chisels, “usually made of bone, but in some cases a sharp stone or shark's tooth took the place of these. Of the bone chisels some had merely a sharp edge while others were furnished with comb-like teeth. These chisels were of various sizes and shapes so that they could be applied to different parts of the body and were used for fine or coarse work. The average width of a blade was about a-quarter of an inch, and all were hafted to wooden handles by binding with native twine.
After the removal of the subject's
Hafted tattoo chisel. (Original in the Otago University Museum.)
Tattooed woman.
The method of applying the colouring matter seems to have differed with the districts, for some authorities state that the cutting instrument was dipped into the pigment, for each cut; others that the colouring matter was rubbed into each incision, or that a wisp of tow was drawn across the separate incisions.
A good account of a typical Moko operation is given by John Rutherford, one of the six of the crew of the Agnes, captured by the Maoris in 1816. He says:
“The whole of the natives having seated themselves on the ground in a ring, we were brought into their midst, and being stripped of our clothes and laid on our backs, we were each of us held down by five or six men, while two others commenced the operation of tattooing us. Having taken a bit of charcoal and … produced a thick liquid, they then dipped into it an instrument made of bone and having a sharp edge like a chisel and shaped in the fashion of a garden hoe, and immediately applied it to the skin, striking it twice or thrice with a small piece of wood. This made it cut into the flesh as a knife and caused a great deal of blood to flow, which they kept wiping off with the side of the hand, in order to see if the impression was sufficiently clear. When it was not they applied the bone a second time to the same place…. While I was undergoing the operation, although the pain was most acute, I never either moved or uttered a sound, but my comrades moaned dreadfully… Although the operators were very quick and dexterous, I was four hours under their hands, and during the operation Aimy's (a chief) eldest daughter several times wiped the blood from my face with some dressed flax. After it was over she led me to a river that I might wash myself (for, it had made me completely blind) … and then conducted me to a great fire … In three days the swelling which had been produced by the operation had greatly subsided, and I began to recover my sight, but it was six weeks before I was completely well. I had no medical assistance of any kind during my illness.”
To tattoo a person fully was, in fact, a matter of time, for if too much was attempted at once it positively endangered life; therefore weeks, months, and even years might be required to complete a piece of work.
As if the physical torture of Moko was not sufficient, the subject, while under the hands of the tattoo artist, was subjected to the laws of tapu or taboo, by which he was forbidden all communication with people who were not in the same condition as himself. In eating he could not touch his food with his hands, but was either fed by another appointed for the purpose, or took it up on a fern stalk as a fork, since according to the old superstition, the man who dared to raise a finger to his mouth before his Moko was completed for the time, would find his stomach invaded by the Atua or fiend, who would devour him alive,
An assortment of bone tattoo chisels. (Originals in the Otago University Museum).
Before the coming of the white man to New Zealand the pigment employed in the Moko process consisted of either the burnt and powdered resin of the kauri pine, kahikatea, or that of koromiko, a veronica, the latter being considered to give the best results. In European times, however, gunpowder was used as a colouring agent. This was rubbed into the cut and produced a blue mark which time could not efface.
The earliest form of Moko pattern was probably that called by the Maori “Moko Kuri,” which consisted of a set of short lines successively set at right angles to its neighbour, on either cheek, with the variant of the form S in the middle of the forehead, but the designs employed at the time of the coming of the Europeans were much more complicated, of which the accompanying illustrations are good examples.
Certain features were common to all Moko patterns, so that at a distance one fully tattooed man looked exactly alike another. Chief among these features were curved lines on either check-bone, four curving lines on each side of the forehead, lines between and below the check-bones and ears, lines on each side of the nose, six lines on either side of the chin, and lines on the centre of the forehead, the latter usually taking the form of eight radiating bars with a V-shaped central recess. From the nose to the end of the chin on either side were sometimes three or four sets of lines passing the corners of the mouth like a parenthesis. The upper lip was adorned with varied and suitable patterns, while the lips themselves had rows of closely-placed horizontal lines. The
It is clear from the above that the majority of the lines and curves which go to make up the Moko design follow the course of the facial muscles and wrinkles, giving emphasis to the whole.
The operators or artists in Moko were usually professionals who worked for hire. The reputation of a skilful man became well-known, and he was regarded by his less talented countrymen as a person of great ability. The professionals acquired their skill by practice, which was only made possible by the fact that some Maoris, being unable to afford the fee of a fully-fledged artist, considered the efforts of a beginner better than no Moko at all. To secure the services of a distinguished artist men would travel considerable distances, while presents and payments flowed into the coffers of the widely renowned operators—double-barrelled guns, canoes, clothes and even slaves were presented to these distinguished persons. A certain Aranghie, one of the most famous of artists in Moko, according to Mr. Earle, draughtsman to H.M. survey ship Beagle (1827) “… was considered by his countrymen a perfect master of the art of tattooing, and men of high rank and importance were in the habit of making long journeys in order to put their skins under his skilful hands … I was astonished to see with what boldness and precision Aranghie drew his designs on the skin and what ornament he produced. No rule and compasses could be more exact than the lines and circles he formed … It was most gratifying to behold the respect
In addition to enhancing the appearances of the wearer and showing him to be a man of rank, it ensured that upon the death of the tattooed one, his head would be severed from the body, preserved, and become one of the family treasures. The chief object of this custom appears to have been the perpetuation of the memory of the dead, and the preserved heads of mokomokai, as they were called, took the place which statues and other monuments fill in European society. In the case of a departed chief his mokomokai was a sign that in some mysterious way his presence still dwelt among his people, inciting them to emulate his virtues and to follow in his steps. Mokomokai of a slaughtered warrior served to keep alive the memory of the injury received by the tribe in whose possession it remained, and afforded a constant challenge to revenge or retaliation. The heads of relatives or friends were kept carefully hidden awaay in some secluded spot, being brought forward for the public gaze only on great occasions, such as tribal gatherings.
The process used for the embalming of the heads differed from district to district, but in a typical case the first act following decapitation was the removal of the brain from the skull by way of a perforation at the back of the latter, the cavity of which was carefully cleaned of all fleshy matter. Next came the removal of the eyes, and a small manuka stick was inserted between the skin and bone of the nose to preserve its form, and in a great number of cases the tongue was also removed. Thus far completed the head was next exposed to the rays of the sun, and then smoke-dried over a wood fire. When the desired stage of desiccation was reached, this process ceased, and the eye sockets were carefully filled with flax or in some cases artificial clay and shell eyes were placed in them, but if the former filling was used, the eyelids were simply closed and sewn together.
The first example of mokomokai to reach Europe was a specimen taken home by Captain Cook, and was only given over by its owners with very great reluctance. With the arrival of unscrupulous traders, however, a regular business in preserved heads sprang up, and all the beliefs and ceremonies of ages were swept away, and no man with a well-tattooed face—other than a chief—was safe since such individuals were constantly watched with the hopes of being caught off guard, so that they might be killed and their head sold to the traders. In 1831 Governor Darling, of New South Wales, issued a proclamation prohibiting this form of trade, and so successful was it, that when an expedition from America visited New Zealand in 1838, only two heads were obtained.
byArthur L. Stead
New railway records, are being set up in Britain these days. Freight traffic has attained undreamt of proportions; passenger business steadily grows; locomotive and wagon shops are turning out new equipment on an immense scale; and new junctions, running loops and sidings are being brought into use by the hundred to facilitate the war effort.
The summer passenger rush, which normally extends from Easter to the end of September, would, it was thought, prove this year to be on a greatly reduced scale. Actually, experience is showing that there is every prospect of the summer vacation bookings being well up to average. Because of the petrol rationing, large numbers of travellers are being brought to the rail route; then, there is the regular movement of parents visiting their children in the evacuation areas; and, curiously enough, there has sprung up another big passenger movement in connection with the periodical visits of members of the staffs of big city firms to their London homes, from which they were dragged away when many banks, insurance offices, and business houses transferred their headquarters into the country early in the war. Unlike the German railways—which have placed the severest restrictions on civilian movement—the Home lines are everywhere available for civilian travel. Additional trains are placed at public disposal at week-ends and public holidays, and cheap fares of various kinds continue to operate. The principal cheap bookings consist of monthly return and weekend tickets, while for day outings cheap day-tickets at single fare for the double journey prove most popular.
Limited though passenger publicity necessarily must be, the Home railways have thought it well this season to issue as usual their annual holiday handbooks. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and it is recognised that hardworking civilians will find refreshment and new vigour through a brief seaside or country vacation. I have before me as I write two of the new holiday guides—the Great Western “Holiday Haunts,” and the Southern “Hints for Holidays.” The G.W. publication is a splendidly produced volume of 744 pages. There are descriptions of about 600 resorts and 5,000 holiday addresses, and illustrations are again a special feature. The attractive wrapper depicts a couple of beach belles basking in the summer sunshine somewhere in the West Country. The Southern Company's “Hints for Holidays” handbook runs to 512 pages, and it has been published largely at the request of many proprietors of hotels, boarding houses and apartments, who regard the work as one of the most important channels for their publicity. Like the Great Western handbook, “Hints for Holidays” provides wonderful value for sixpence, and a generous proportion of first-class illustrations has been maintained.
New works, other than those directly called for to facilitate our war effort, have been reduced to a minimum on
The Imposing frontage of the new Leamington Spa Station.
The Metropolitan Railway forms one of London's most important transport links, and recent official figures tell of the striking growth of traffic over this route, and of the increase in the population served. In 1933, some 25,348,000 passengers bought tickets at Metropolitan stations. In 1938 the figure was 38,446,000, an increase of 52 per cent. Including passengers who purchased their tickets at other stations, it is calculated that some 53,300,000 people made use of the Metropolitan line in 1938. The Metropolitan Railway passes through thirteen administrative areas, and the population of these areas grew from 727,000 in 1931, to 958,700 in 1938, since when even more striking increases in population have occurred. To meet increased demands for travel facilities, the London Transport Board extended the running of Piccadilly trains to Uxbridge in 1933, and in 1935 embarked on a big improvement plan on the Metropolitan line. Recently, Bakerloo Line trains have commenced to run over the Metropolitan as far as Stan-more.
Cinema publicity is growing in favour the world over. Here at Home, we have just witnessed the release of a fine film production styled “Carrying On,” devoted to a review of the part which railways have played since the beginning of the war and how the growing effort of the nation is being served. The film was shot in different parts of the country: locomotives and trains, men, women and children, merchandise, guns and foodstuffs form the “stars.” The story opens towards the end of August last, when thousands of holiday-makers were being handled by the railways, while behind the scenes the transport officials were perfecting their plans for any emergency. Then, evacuation scenes are pictured, with 3,000,000 people being carried to places of safety in the biggest mass movement ever attempted. At midnight on September 1st, the Government took over the railways, and we are shown war work in progress. Carriages and premises were blacked out; trained A.R.P. personnel took up their stations; armed guards appeared at strategic points; the rapid movement of troops, guns, tanks and munitions commenced; reinforced concrete control rooms were completed for use in emergency; over six miles of passenger carriages were converted into ambulance and casualty trains; and hundreds of special trains were provided at short notice, carrying the machinery and man-power of our fighting forces. The film gives us shots of every phase of war-time railway activity, and apart from its propaganda value provides an invaluable record for posterity of the magnificent effort of one and all associated with the Home railways war machine.
Railway buildings of various kinds continue to be turned over to the authorities, and many railway hotels now house servicemen or Government departments. One of the first railway buildings to be acquired for national use was the Southern Railway Orphanage, one of the finest institutions of its kind in the country. Fortunately, it has been possible to find suitable homes for all the children, and to-day the orphanage serves as a splendidly-equipped hospital. Four of the largest establishments run by the Railway Convalescent Homes movement also have been transformed into hospitals. Waiting-rooms and other
Casualty Evacuation Train Rehearsal on the London and North-Eastern Railway.
Up to the time of writing, no great use has been made of the casualty evacuation trains constructed in the Home railway shops. These trains, however, form a vital part of the A.R.P. programme, and they are ready for use at a moment's notice. The trains are each composed of twelve vehicles, and are primarily intended for the evacuation of civilian casualties from First Aid or Clearing Stations to the Base Hospitals. They are stabled at suitable points throughout the country, and each train is made up of two corridor brake thirds, nine brake vans and a vestibule vehicle. The third brakes are equipped for the storage of domestic, food and medical supplies, and have cooking facilities and compartments for the train staff. The brake vans are fitted with brackets on both sides of the bodywork to carry stretchers, of which more than thirty are available in each car. The remaining vehicle is used by the train staff for mess and recreational purposes. The exteriors are in the railway companies’ own standard colours, and no special finish is given inside.
ByD. G. Edwards
When the barque “Tory” sailed into Port Nicholson on 20th September, 1839, the settlement of New Zealand was begun. This is a landmark in our history as clear-cut as Tasman, Cook, or the Treaty of Waitangi. The arrival of the “Tory” was the first step in the development of Wellington. Cook Strait was full of whaling-ships, dozens of them, but with the exception of a small missionary schooner, Port Nicholson had not been visited by any ship for many years. The voyage of the “Tory” is a very important, interesting, but little-known story in the growth of this colony.
The barque “Tory” in Port Nicholson, 1839
(Detail from a sketch by Charles Heaphy).
The settlement of New Zealand by the New Zealand Land Company in 1840 was preceded by the preliminary expedition in the Tory, led by Colonel William Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The expedition was dispatched from London to make necessary arrangements for the settlement of the colonists who were to arrive early in January, 1840. The Tory herself carried no colonists, in fact, apart from the officers and crew, there were only six cabin passengers aboard. Of this important party, many later played a conspicuous part in the development of the colony. Colonel Wakefield guided the infant city of Wellington through its first critical years. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Edward Gibbon's only son, was prominent in the political life of the colony and published a most exciting account of the first years of the settlement, Adventure in New Zealand. He came out as a mere youth of nineteen, as he said himself, in search of adventure. Another mere youth, Charles Heaphy, was employed as draftsman to the company. His record is a particularly creditable one. He left behind a magnificent collection of paintings and drawings, did great exploration work, was Commissioner of the Thames goldfields, fought in the Maori Wars, reaching the rank of Major and earning the Victoria Cross. The naturalist was Ernst Dieffenbach, New Zealand's first political refugee, a Berlin medical student who had been exiled to London. His explorations and reports were notable contributions to the development of the colony. He was, incidentally, the first white man to climb Mount Egmont. Dr. Dorset, a popular figure in early Wellington, was surgeon to the company and was proprietor of a well-known establishment in Wellington, the Medical Hall. The only other passenger was a native Nayti. who had found his way to Europe in a French vessel, and returned as interpreter to the expedition. His services were dispensed with soon after the arrival in New Zealand. He is the only member of the party who is lost in oblivion. The pace of European development was too much for his simple outlook and like so many of his fellow natives he has been disregarded as a factor in the bestowing of the blessings of civilisation. The master of the Tory, Captain Edward Main Chaffers, a distinguished naval officer, had been master of the H.M.S. Beagle, the survey ship with Charles Darwin aboard, which had called at the Bay of Islands in 1836. He also remained in Wellington as unofficial harbourmaster, where he rendered incalculable service by charting the harbour and discovering the passage at the entrance which bears his name. Several of the crew also remained in New Zealand, but the master and his cabin passengers certainly occupy a most prominent and creditable position in the history of the colony.
The Tory was a three-masted barque of a trifle over 384 tons burthen. Her length was only III feet. She was regarded by all who saw her as a particularly trim craft with fine lines and exceptional sailing qualities. Captain Chaffers was most enthusiastic about her ability and reported on the voyage out that they passed every vessel they had come up with, including some large ships. He even expressed the desire to fall in with a man-of-war to put her to a real test. One interesting feature was her figurehead, which was a large reproduction of the Duke of Wellington, and which strangely enough had nothing to do with the naming of the city. The Tory was the only vessel the New Zealand Land Company ever owned, all the others being chartered. She was built in 1834 and purchased in November, 1838, for £5,250 from Joseph Somes, the Deputy Governor of the
He died in 1845 worth something between one and two million sterling. The London Times in his obituary stated: “… in the city he was very highly esteemed and naturally enjoyed the great influence which arose from high character and ample capital.” He was, however, a very able man and performed valuable services to the Land Company in arranging the shipping even though he may have been performing valuable services to his own company at the same time. Of the details of the arrangements we are not here concerned. After many setbacks the vessel finally left Gravesend on 5th May, 1839. A very elaborate public luncheon had been held on 29th April, at which the Earl of Durham was present and on 5th May the passengers of the Tory dined with a few friends before going aboard.
The Tory ran round to Plymouth, nearly ending her voyage at the beginning by fouling a schooner on rounding the breakwater. After a delay of four days she finally left England on her adventurous expedition.
The trials of the past few weeks soon disappeared, with the hills of England, which many of them were seeing for the last time. The next day running before a fair channel breeze at a steady
The meeting of the “Tory” and the “Cuba” in Cook Strait, March, 1840.
(From a sketch by Charles Heaphy).Tory began to settle to her long voyage and the passengers to the details of their life aboard. Captain Chaffers kept to the east and ran down the coast of Portugal. On the 22nd, the little party saw in the distance the hills of the island of Palma, one of the Canaries. This was the only sight of any land on the whole voyage. Captain Cook had remarked on one of his voyagers on not seeing land for 1,098 miles but the Tory did 16,000 with a faint glimpse of Palma and 14,680 without any sign of land.
On board, life was very dull, and a weekly manuscript paper and a debating club helped to pass the long hours. One interesting, if dangerous experiment, was performed by Edward Jerningham, who hypnotised Charles Heaphy. Colonel Wakefield reported the incident, giving details of Heaphy's conduct, which was apparently very violent. Some days later Heaphy was again, “magnetized” as they called it and Colonel Wakefield this time tersely dismissed the incident by reporting: “Nearly same effect as before.”
The Tory, though an excellent craft, was particularly foul in the hold, and various efforts were made to destroy the foul air which was so strong as to blacken the paint in the forecastle. The health of the crew was very bad during the voyage, but they did not appear to see any connection between this and the ship's condition. It is strange to think that to-day this would be an obvious explanation.
On 7th June, the Tory crossed the Equator, twenty-six days out of Plymouth. On 10th July the Cape of Good Hope was doubled and the run, almost direct to New Zealand, along the Roaring Forties, began. On several days, runs of over two hundred miles were registered, and finally to everybody's delight land was sighted on 16th August. This proved to be the high land on the West Coast not far south of Cape Farewell. The voyage had taken 96 days, which was a remarkably fast passage. This was the fastest passage for many years to come and certainly the fastest of any of the company's ships. I have been unable to find the date that the Tory's record was beaten, but it was certainly many years later. The speed in reaching New Zealand was very fortunate for the company as there would have been much confusion if she had taken even a moderately long voyage. The Cuba, with the surveying party aboard, took 157 days. Then the immigrants had left England well before word was received of the Tory's arrival and it can well be imagined what their plight would have been if the Tory had not made such a fast passage.
On the morning of 17th August the vessel slipped slowly between Long Island and Motuara into historic Ship Cove in Marlborough Sounds. The next morning she was moored within 300 yards of the shore by a hawser to a nearby tree, thus occupying nearly the same position as Captain Cook during his three earlier visits to this anchorage. The Maoris who spoke “more or less English,“
“A basket of potatoes weighing 20 lbs. sold for a pipe, and a blanket which cost eight shillings in London fetched three pigs 80 lbs. each and this was considered a liberal scale of barter on our part.”
On 31st August the expedition left Ship Cove for Te-awa-iti, even then corrupted into the now familiar “Tar-white.” Here the ubiquitous Dicky Barrett came aboard and though the confident visitors were not aware of it (they were reduced to mirth at Dicky's appearance) the new settlement was at last on the road to success.
Three more weeks were spent in the congenial if roystering company of the whalers, and Captain Chaffers charted Tory Channel (and its western extremities) naming it after the ship. Points Dieffenbach and Heaphy; Colonel Wakefield took an expedition up the Pelorus River. At daylight on 20th September the Tory weighed anchor and slipped through the narrow and treacherous entrance, across Cook Strait and under all sail raced along the rugged coast to Port Nicholson heads, where even against a stiff nor'-wester, no difficulty was experienced in beating into the harbour under the instructions of Barrett. Somewhere up the channel probably from Seatoun, two canoes put out and the two principal chiefs of the harbour. Te Puni and Wharepouri, came on board, where they were welcomed by Barrett, who was related to them by marriage.
The Tory stood on up the harbour and finally anchored north of Somes Island (Matiu). The chiefs stayed aboard and even at this early stage excellent progress was made with negotiations for the sale of land. They invited Colonel Wakefield to inspect the land immediately and during the next week the ship and all on board were kept busy. Colonel Wakefield and Edward Jerningham explored the valley, Dieffenbach and Heaphy went on a huia expedition into the Orongorongo Valley, and Captain Chaffers and Te Whare spent five days with one of the boats surveying the entrance of the harbour, of which an excellent chart was made. There were fishing expeditions led by the chief mate, Richard Lowry, to a small bay which thereafter carried the name Lowry Bay.
Amidst this hurly-burly of activity Colonel Wakefield arranged the details of the purchase of the land. On the deck of the Tory on 27th September the goods were displayed and the deeds signed by the chiefs and witnessed by Barrett, Lowry and Nayti. On 30th September, the famous celebration took place on the beach. Thus was the city of Wellington born, and on 4th October the Tory slipped out of the harbour leaving a contented Maori people enjoying the full benefits of the muskets, jews harps, razors, nightcaps and sealing-wax.
The Tory put into Cloudy Bay on 5th October, but Colonel Wakefield decided that it was unsuitable, and left on the 13th for Te-awa-iti.
Facsimile of the first page of Colonel Wakefield's diary, now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
Tory anchored off Kapiti just too late to see a battle between the Ngatiawa and Ngatiraukawa which had taken place that morning and had finished on the beach in view of the whalers. Eventually, however, the sale of land was arranged, a sale which was later repudiated by Te Rauparaha and a further sale was arranged in East Bay in the Sounds where Barrett rejoined the party.
On 17th November, after many delays, the Tory set off up the coast calling at Wanganui and Sugar-loaf Islands (New (Continued on page 34
).
The Voyage Of The “Tory.”
(Continued from page 31).
Plymouth where Barrett was left to buy land and Dieffenbach made arrangements for the ascent of Mount Egmont. The Tory headed north to Hokianga where no sale of land was arranged and on 19th December, she put in to Kaipara but was wrecked on entering the channel. Great difficulties were experienced and all the passengers were nearly lost in the long boat, but after much cargo had been jettisoned the Tory was taken up the harbour, run ashore and repaired near Beacon Point.
This long job necessitated Colonel Wakefield's hurrying across to the Bay of Islands and chartering a small brig to return to Port Nicholson to receive the first immigrants expected early in January, 1840. The Tory was finally roughly repaired and arrived back in Wellington on 7th March. No further use could be found for her in Wellington so on 19th April she set out for Sydney for repairs and cargo for home. The first mate, Richard Lowry, was in command.
The rest of the story is shortly told. It is a sordid ending to such a romantic performance.
The Tory arrived in Sydney on 7th May, and refitting was begun. This was a costly process and was made more expensive by large expenditure on liquor. Finally, on 15th September, she left for the East Indies for cargo, with Richard Lowry as master and Nicholas Lowry as first mate. Richard Lowry died after leaving Batavia and Nicholas was often confined to his cabin, drunk, leaving the ship virtually in the hands of William Elgar, the boatswain, who, incidentally, was the father of the well-known Elgar brothers, prominent settlers in the South Wairarapa.
Apparently, Nicholas Lowry's habits were known to the company, for on hearing of Richard's death, efforts were made to remove Nicholas from the command of the vessel. However, Nicholas unwittingly managed to forestall them by wrecking the ship on Half-moon shoal in the China Seas on 21st January, 1841. Here, however, we meet one of those episodes of the sea, so many of them unrecorded, which are epics of endurance, hope, despair and frustration. Two small boats with twenty-nine men, no fresh food, in a treacherous sea, surrounded by islands inhabited by head-hunting natives, were a thousand miles from a European settlement. These hardy men, however, set off for the nearest land, 55 miles away, and after landing, cooking the beef, and filling every available vessel with water, set out on the long voyage back to Singapore. This port was 900 miles distance, but the necessity of keeping land in sight added another weary two hundred miles to the voyage. The dangers from the sea were added to by dangers from the shore and on at least two occasions Malayan proas gave chase and were only avoided by a long run out to sea. One moonlight night a sail was seen and after frantic efforts to come up with it, it was found to be a small rock covered with guano, like white-wash. However, on 10th February, twenty-nine exhausted men reached Singapore after a voyage of seventeen days. After recuperating the men returned to England, Nicholas Lowry meeting death on the way home by being lost overboard.
Thus ended the career of the splendid little Tory after an important and romantic voyage. She has left behind a name that will live with the names of her celebrated passengers when the discreditable epilogue to the voyage is forgotten.
Purchase Of Wellington.
The following is the approximate cost of Wellington to the New Zealand Land Company. In some cases the amounts are doubtful, but the available information makes it clear that the total must have been very close to this figure:
John Gully (1825–1888).
ByMona Gordon
Landscape art reached its zenith with John Gully.
Some years ago, I called him “The Turner of New Zealand, the greatest landscape painter of this country as was Turner of England,” a designation which no one has cared to dispute and which has from time to time been quoted in newspapers and periodicals in various parts of the country. His grandson, Mr. Lincoln Lee, who wrote a short biography of the artist, says that “Gully lives as a patriarch painter”; and it is true that his almost legendary figure gleams through the mist of years head and shoulders above his fellows—unapproachable, unchallenged, serene.
He was born at Bath, England, in 1819.
After a while, Gully, who had been trained as an accountant, entered the Bath Savings Bank in that capacity, and later took up accountancy with his father. While still in his twenties he married a widow, Jane Moore, formerly Miss Eyles; their home was at Bath and the family consisted of four boys and a girl.
In the early 1850's many young Englishmen in good circumstances felt the call of adventure in their blood, and the urge to try the swifter channels of enrichment which the colonies offered. These desires were no doubt kindled by the books written about that date on New Zealand and the wonderful opportunities open to those taking up virgin land, wherefrom the crop returns were lavish, and winter practically nonexistent. These glowing accounts may still be read in those volumes which form the early literature of the country,
(Print, courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library)
John Gully's painting of Mt. Egmont.John Phillips, which had laboured six months on the voyage, via Auckland.
Six miles west of New Plymouth lay
(Print, courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library).
One of John Gully's fine alpine studies: Mount Cook and the Hooker Glacier.
So one day, when his Maori workers had withdrawn from their somewhat feeble onslaughts on the land, he sat down among his unfelled trees and drew the sweeping curves of Egmont, the far sublimity of its cone, the long snow-swathed skirts where the mountain seemed to gather itself from the plain, and the range of hills from which it emerged, madder-purple in the sunset, as if stained with the west country bell-heather. In the foreground he painted his own trees; he saw them now as things of beauty—not as so many difficulties to be wrestled with.
As the light faded and gathering shadows gloomed over the heather-purple hills, smearing with chill greys the snow's far radiance, Gully the artist must have sighed as he packed up his brushes and trudged homeward, for he already knew that as farmer and settler he could never succeed.
It was not very long before Gully gave up the land. He had gone through a period of trial and disappointment; he would now lose the home he had managed to acquire, and a good deal of money. However, he found the life of a pioneer settler altogether too much for him, so he came into New Plymouth and took up his old business of accountancy for which the small tradesmen there provided an opening.
On the outbreak of war in Taranaki he volunteered for active service, but his health was quite unfit for its hardships, and in a short time he was forced to give that up also, whereupon he decided to leave Taranaki for good and to settle in Nelson, the sunniest province in New Zealand. So in 1860 he set sail once more with his family and the little he had managed to retrieve from his unfortunate venture.
Nelson provided the atmosphere that Gully found lacking in Taranaki. It gave him the easier type of suburban life that he required, far removed from the difficulties of a settler. Here he obtained a position as draughtsman in the Provincial Government Survey Office, and also as drawing master at Nelson College; and in a short time was able to maintain a standard of living equal to that “of most well-to-do people in the Nelson of his day.” His home, described as “a relic of bygone days” was surrounded by orchard and garden; and here Gully spent many happy hours cultivating his flowers. Roses were his favourites, of which he was said to possess one of the best collections in the town.
Besides painting and gardening, the artist had a great love of music which he gratified by belonging to various musical societies and by joining a church choir. At this time we may imagine him as rather tall and slender in build, with something “almost Spanish in his appearance,” with “a firm wide mouth, broad receding forehead … and deep-set eyes under strong curving brows.” His sense of humour and the cheerful kindliness of his disposition endeared him to all, as well as the generous nature of his criticisms of the work of others. Among his many friends, Bishop Suter, of Nelson, became a great admirer of his personality, as of his art, and has left many written statements in his praise.
In the large garden Gully soon built for himself a studio, “which became the rendezvous of his intimates and family,”
From this happy home, Gully made many sketching tours, one of which nearly ended his career. On January 28th, 1865, he accompanied the Superintendent of Nelson Province to the West Coast, and at the mouth of the Buller River their small boat capsized on the bar. Four members of the party were drowned before help was forthcoming, but Gully was fortunately among the survivors.
Other journeys for the purpose of getting sketches took him as far north as the Ruapehu region, and south to Milford Sound; sometimes J. C. Richmond, a friend of Taranaki days, accompanied him, or Charles Mantz, both artists of lesser skill. On these tours Gully would make careful pencil studies of foreground detail, adding “marginal notes,” often in colour, to drawings that were later to be worked up into finished pictures. He was very careful to remain true to nature, the only teacher he had
Lincoln Lee.
Sir James Fergusson provided the artist with some of his finest material by offering to take him on a sketching tour round the West Coast Sounds, using H.M.S. Blanche for the purpose. Here Gully revelled in the sublimity of New Zealand's mountain scenery; and many of his paintings, afterwards lithographed in a folio volume, were secured on this trip.
Gully rarely spoke in praise of his own work; he was modest about it, but he knew its worth. In the late 1870's and early ‘eighties he reached the “peak period” of his art, discarding the conventional forms in which he had formerly worked as a sort of tradition. He loved the “calm, wide” aspects of New Zealand landscape rather than the weird or the wild, and preferred sunshine to storm. “His pictures have more of heaven than of earth in them,” writes his friend, “more of sky than of land, but a passing shower he enjoyed, only it must be passing, or if there was a mist it must be exhibiting signs of haste to lift and get away before the ascending sun or the rising wind.”
The peaceful happy tenor of Gully's life was clouded towards its end by a long and painful illness, during which, his grandson tells us, the unfailing humour and cheerfulness of his disposition never deserted him, and he would often make little sallies of wit from his bed. He died on November 1st, 1888, having had the satisfaction of selling his work at good prices both in England and in Australia, but without, I think, a realisation of the position his name would occupy among the landscape artists of New Zealand.
Throughout his life Gully was faithful to water-colours; he is only known to have painted one small picture in oils when still a youth. His first New Zealand painting he sold in Nelson for a guinea; but later his work was to command the high prices it deserved, and which were necessary to support his family during the years of his retirement.
He was a well-known exhibitor at all exhibitions of the New Zealand Art Societies, and also in Melbourne. His “Mount Cook and the Southern Alps” was hung at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1871; and in 1886 he sent several paintings of the Kaikoura Mountains, Lake Wakatipu, the coast of Tasman Bay and the Waimea Plains, Nelson, to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition. To his surprise they were all sold. His work was also well known at exhibitions of the Royal Water Colour Society, London.
Nov. 3rd, according to H. V. Gully.
His grandson says that Gully awoke to the new art, and became in later life, more modern in his treatment of foreground, but he seldom introduced figures or cattle which he had never studied. An exception to this generalisation occurs in a beautiful painting of the Wairau Gorge (in the possession of the author's mother). It shows a herd of Jersey cattle on a grassy slope descending to the river. A drover on horseback is also shown, and these animals, although drawn to so minute a scale, are very lifelike, even to the faces with tiny indications of horns.
The Wairau attracted Gully in autumn no less than when summer threw a veil of blue over the mountains which provided him with background. In the abovementioned picture, his treatment of the blue, shadow-filled gorges, paling to forget-me-not where sunlight catches the ridges, is especially remarkable; and the buff-brown tussocks of the ravine
A scene in the vicinity of Nelson.
(Print, courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library).
In 1877 the folio volume was published in which Gully's paintings were reproduced in chromo-lithograph. Most of these had been secured by him during his trip round the Sounds in H.M.S. Blanche, and they were chosen with a view to showing the sublimity of New Zealand's finest mountain scenery. Unfortunately the process used was not a very successful one. In Angas's work of thirty years before, the colours had come true, but Gully, we are told, was to view the printed reproductions of his masterpieces with bitter disappointment. Indeed, they all bear a general tone of dull grey-green, to the total exclusion of the blues, the silver-greys, the tender snow-lights and the deep umbers where his mountains sleep in shadow. Dr. Julius Von Haast wrote a short explanatory slip which was fixed to the back of each lithograph; but to those unfamiliar both with the artist's work and the country he was so well-chosen to illustrate, the impression
In “Mount Cook and Mount Tasman from the West” Gully drew the giant mountains emerging from a misty veil of cloud, their summits hoary against a stormy sky, the flanks of the nearer ranges glacier-gashed, the foreground, a sombre sweep of sea. Von Haast says that “Mr. Gully, when passing in H.M.S. Blanche along the West Coast was not so fortunate as to have a clear view of this grand panorama, as the weather was stormy, and the sky dark and cloudy.” However, he worked up the scene into several remarkable pictures including “Running for Milford Sound,” and “Captain Cook's Ship Endeavour off the West Coast” (1887)
It is quite apparent that Gully loved the sky, and that his treatment of it was “truly poetic.”
Her glory of mountains, her placid river reaches, her ravines deep with the green wealth of bush, her ineffable heights of gleaming glacier and windtossed cloud, her skies shot through with the fire of sunset, her hills blue with the peace of summer or wrinkled hoar beneath the icy touch of winter, her atmosphere, her very self—all these have been caught by Gully's art in such a way that no other interpretations of New Zealand can at all compare with his.
Modern criticism of Gully finds in his sketches and unfinished work (mainly in the possession of his family) grounds for supposing that he lost some of the freshness of a first impression in the completed pictures on which his fame rests. It is known that he did spend much of his time on foreground detail, making use of the notes which he had jotted down on the spot in order to preserve truth to nature. But art is still so young in the country of his adoption, its tendencies having leaned of late towards a retrograde style of impressionism, that it is unsafe to judge such mastery of landscape technique by standards lower than those established over sixty years ago. That is to say, that art in New Zealand has in a hundred years produced some notable painters, but it has also given rise to a fair number of daubers, and it is the daubers who do most of the talking, and whose efforts clutter the walls of some of our galleries to the exclusion of the “masters.”
The largest collection of Gully's work is in the Suter Memorial, Nelson, where over thirty pictures show the development of his powers from the earliest to the latest periods. The galleries of all the capital cities have also secured representative examples, of which the Dominion Museum and Art Gallery (Wellington) is said to possess two of the best.
That Gully was well able to catch the spirit of native vegetation in some of its most characteristic forms is shown in a painting of open country round the Motueka River, where flax, cabbage palms and toe-toe grasses form a foreground backed by misty purple hills. The graceful sword-like leaves of these plants give a particularly New Zealand flavour to many of his studies whose river reaches, wild ravines and towering mountains could scarcely be those of any other country. Raupo fringes the shores of his “Lake Taupo”; pungas (treeferns) smother the foreground of his
The late J. P. Firth was among Gully's many patrons. He purchased two other large pictures in addition to the Wairau Gorge. These paintings are before me as I write, and are of exquisite beauty. Unfortunately they are not named, but the treatment of water into which the surrounding hills sink without a ripple to mark their submergence and the limpid calm of their reflections equal anything of gallery standard, and show that, although undated, they belong to the peak period of his art.
Gully was one of the few men who could really paint snow. He knew the colour of its shadows, neither blue nor grey, but a perfect mingling of both. He knew how to make his clouds rise from it and his mists cling to its cold whiteness, which he attained without the use of body colour. And above all, when his peaks were outlined, his skies washed in, tender as pearl or faint from the passion of sunset, he could call down the mountain mist upon the scene, winding its luminous veils of mauve among glacial ravines, or trailing them upward to mingle with the brooding clouds.
Such art is above the criticism of lesser men. Modern methods can no more emulate his achievements than can the thistle by intensive cultivation become a rose; and when the daubs of futurist anad impressionist are alike discounted, the masterpieces of John Gully will remain upon the walls of those fortunate enough to possess them.
New Zealand
Verse
* * *
* * *
(In Memoriam).
Ken Alexander
We know what makes the world go round, but what makes it go flat? Why does man continually slip on the orange peel of ambition and break his record? Why does he prefer multiplication to simplification? What is the reason, in general, for the martyrdom of man? Essaying an answer to these riddles, philosophers have applied a solution of philosophate of opprobrium without success. Sociologists have pondered the paralytic pranks of the human will and won't, without profit. Psycho-analysts have performed postmortems on living brains to discover what makes them move in the opposite direction, without result.
But we, in our wisdom, know that these things are the result of sheer exasperation with the tiddley-tootling trials of our daily persistence.
Take the tyranny of top-dressing, the comedy of clothes! In this, strangely enough, it is the male of the human “speechies” who is the special victim of the cover design. The male has to worry because he has too much to wear; the female kicks because she never has a thing to wear; but she gets her kick out of her kick. Of course a man couldn't reasonably expect to moult off his winter suit and moult on his summer suit like many of the other animals to whom he is sometimes likened; but it is a pity—chiefly because the more fortunate fauna have no buttons to complicate the art of dressing.
It might almost be taken as a truism that the man with the fewest buttons has the most success. Going back a mite, there were no buttons on the breeks of the Greeks, and look what they produced. The Roman legions were as buttonless as a bare majority, and look where they got—that is, before they got. The Zulus and Hottentots and Oozey-Woozeys were the happiest of folks in nothing but the old school tie; but that, of course, was before their energy was sapped by buttons, aided by mouth organs and gin. On the other hand all the Nazis are practically asphyxiated by Buttons, which is perhaps the greatest indictment of buttons possible to imagine. In the words of the Buttonless Bard:—
Men boast that they're fully aware of their muttons—
The good and the bad, and the fat and the phut ‘uns—
And yet they're in trouble the most of their time,
Their policies palsied, their verse out of rhyme.
Some say that the reason such policies vex
“We have all longed to sit on tables.”
Is merely that living is far too complex. Some say it's the fault of the opposite sex;
And others that Progress has taken the fence
And galloped to glory with man's common sense.
But don't you believe it! The reason why man
Is constantly leaping ‘twixt embers and pan
Is merely that he, in extreme agitation,
Is faced every day with a devil's creation.
His temper is frayed ere he faces the fray,
His passions are purple; his outlook is grey,
Through twisting and turning and grunting with pain,
While buttoning buttons again and again.
The reason why men make a mess of their muttons,
Is mainly that moderns are gluttons for buttons.
Thus, dear lady, when your connubial flat-tyre arrives at breakfast with a face like “Storm clouds at Grimsby” and an eye like a hard-boiled snake's egg, remember that he has just completed his matutinal mat-maul with about twenty-four buttons, not to mention a brace of studs as nimble as the jumping bean of Mexico, and a possible pair of cuff-links designed by a Maltese juggler. If he appears to regard the new day as a crime against decency and a threat to the “status quo,” remember that he has prepared himself to face it with as much pain as the Spartans who used to park the palliasse on the rock-garden and bath with a bunch of porcupine quills before lining up for a spot of frightfulness on the “sock” exchange. If he lacks the Stoic restraint of the old Spartans, recollect that the only part of a Spartan that buttoned was his pride.
It seems that men's clothes are part of Adam's punishment. Nature must have said “O.K.! If he will be a sissy and do a sheep out of its overcoat, let's make it as tough as we can for him.” So she bribed the tailors by allowing them to sit on tables (which is something we have all longed to do but have never had the nerve), to inflict men's clothes with a blight of buttons.
Contrarywise, women (who usually are) employed their cunning which has privileged them to boss man and claim his protection at the same time, to the task of coming unbuttoned. They discerned some years ago that a girl couldn't continue to capitalise the swoon or succeed with her traditional “shrinking violet” act with a barrage of buttons up her back that would make a blacksmith blanche and a contortionist come unjointed. So she completely debuttoned with the result that, to-day, women's clothes stay on by sheer luck and elastic. To-day, a buttoned girl is as rare as a zipped banana. And the time she saves by leaping into her petals she uses to prove how little Nature knew when she designed the female face.
“Definitely take ‘But’ out of Buttons.”
But why does man continue to submit to the blight of the button? Isn't life sufficiently complex without beginning the day with a practice as arduous and exhausting as pushing pickled onions through a keyhole? It is all so unnecessarily heroic; and all he gets out of it is a reputation for amiability that would cause a hyena to blush and take up folk-dancing. Man submits to it because he lacks the courage to cut himself adrift from buttons. He fears that such an action might result in a come-down. But this is not necessarily so. We have a solution which is not a dissolution. We will probably have the button-makers, the liver pill merchants, the divorce lawyers and the psychoanalysts, who all batten on buttons, after us; but we're all for buttonless boys, elastic-sided lads, bonny breakfasts and clothes that cling. We know that there are many who will reply: “What was good enough to hold up dad's pants is good enough for mine.” Our answer is merely: “How pants the hart!” And, after all, the hart could have saved his pants without actually depanting if he could have had the advantage of our advice. We say that you can't slip up if you slip on; or, to be more explicit (for, after all, we are not actually advertising our idea) we advocate a combination of kilt and sailor suit. How easy to fling on a kilt and slip on a blue-jacket blouse. We submit that this would definitely take the “but” out of buttons, close the breakfast breach, cause little children to disbelieve the legend of the Hooded Horror, and practically solve the riddle of the universe. You might say that a man garbaged in such a manner wouldn't know whether he represented “Scots wa hae” or “Nelson's drum.” But what would it matter if he looked a bit ambiguous and amphibious? There are men walking about who probably look much better but feel much worse.
We are warned that to achieve full freedom we must burst our bonds. We go further and submit that to gain the full fruits of freedom we must “bust our buttons.”
Who hasn't discovered the personality of a railway train is cheated of a choice fragment of happiness; has, indeed, failed to share in one of the grandest experiences of life. He to whom a train is at best a rattle of steel and smoke, and at worst a necessary evil, owes himself a great deal.
When he wrote “An Artist in America,” Thomas Hart Benton opened his heart on the subject—and made a host of understanding friends. “To this day,” he says, “I cannot face an oncoming steam train without having itchy thrills run up and down my backbone. The automobile and the airplane have not been able to take away from it its old moving power as an assaulter of space and time. Its whistle is the most nostalgic of sounds to my ear. I never hear a train whistle blow without profound impulsions to change, without wanting to pack up things … and go anywhere.”
All the world loves the lover of a railway engine—that first love of every fortunate boy—and no man in that category is, so far as trains are concerned, more than the little boy that used to be. Bigger days bring bigger engines and longer trains—to the initiated, scarcely related to their predecessors. But the true train-lover knows that at heart they are all the same—the essential soul of the railway never dies, cannot be relegated, is unchanging. The rhythm, the beat, the drive, the very song of the “Ka,” “Kb,” and the “J,” resplendent in their rearing boiler boxes, are essentially the same as those of the old “B,” “Wab,” even the “Fa” and the “F.” They are, of course, all personalities of the one big railway family.
For myself, dearest preference (because it is my first love among all engines) rests with the “Fa” … and if you would be particular to a point, with “Fa” 251 and “Fa” 41. Where they are now I don't know, but I have a notion their days in the south are by no means over. Cheeky, efficient, brave, fussy perhaps, they have pulled their weight—and many a heavy train—in preparing the way for the “Ab's” and their ilk. I've never known an “Fa” to be quite beaten. There is a confidence in its build quite undeniable.
Years ago—well! More than a decade (before the peculiarly depersonalised motor bus took over that particular route)—“Fa” 251 and “Fa” 41 performed a noble service “up the branch,” and always their train comprised car A31 and van F420 with varying rakes of wagons. They are memories now, but how rich only those who shared their fortunes know. There were nights when, coming down the Forks hill in driving rain before a howling winter's gale, they negotiated the treacherous “blue reef” section with cautious success. Nights, too, when the rails were greasy and the load was great, and “Fa” required the aid of a run from the hill to negotiate the last rise to the Downs. It was indeed a rare occasion when they had to split the train.
There were prosperous days, and busy ones, after the Great War, when farmlands yielded their full quota of wheat—and the railway carried it all. Days when “Fa” headed a daylight special with long rakes of fully-loaded L's and La's of grain … times when the
Members of the Railways Department who controlled and operated the Railways Exhibit at the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, Wellington, 1939–40.
But the summer evenings and early mornings saw “Fa” and her train at their best … I know of nothing more nostalgic than memories of the dignified little train reaching her destination ten miles up the branch punctually at 7.20 p.m., the guard's van fragrant from the raspberry and strawberry cases that had packed it during the day … the single carriage glad to be rested … and “Fa” placidly sleeping with her fires drawn. She must have been an ancestor of the Good Morning Club, for she always greeted the new day after the best traditions. Radiant in her jetblack boiler box and tank, and with her brasswork sparkling in the early sun, she was an engine par excelsis, replete to make nodding acquaintance with the express “Ab's” at the Junction.
The branch is different now; “Fa's” 251 and 41, “F” 420 and “A” 31 are there no longer … neither are the men who worked them … some are off “the job” … some have gone to patrol their last length and grasp their last throttle. Sometimes another engine and another van work a goods train as traffic requires … but to me they are almost as interlopers, for they know not of other days.
But I'm quite content … we who care to remember have still the rich memories of those days before yesterday … and the youngsters of to-day who feed its spell may make friends with this other engine. I hope they discover how nostalgic a whistle can be.
Leading New Zealand Newspapers
Written And Illustrated
ByJoyce West
The Wellington traveller who keeps to the new coast road to the north merely skirts the edge of the township of Plimmerton.
Plimmerton is a beautiful and a historical spot, lying side by side with its twin beach, Karehana Bay, between the blue sea and the brown rolling hills of the Strait coast. A white sea wall winds around the rocky shore; the houses are scattered along the road, and up into the dark bush of the valleys, and perched on the tussocky hill shoulders where the toe-toe waves its windy plumes.
Out to sea rises the silhouette of Mana Island, crouched like a grim fortress upon the rock-bound beaches that break the thundering might of the Tasman swell. The seas that splash along the Plimmerton strand are never furious, never bitter with the stinging hail of salt sea-spray. Flowers bloom in the gardens right down to the sand's edge, winter geraniums and roses, all manner of warmth-loving blooms that wither before the cold breath of Wellington's winter.
The railway runs through Plimmerton; Karehana Bay lies beyond, over the low hill shoulder. Its beaches are wilder; the pale-yellow sand gives way to tumbled rock stretches, with seaanemones, and deep green sea-pools, and great boulder crags that brood against the sky. Sheep browse on the rough sea-grass, and cicadas sing in the tussock.
Plimmerton is an old settlement. It was named after John Plimmer, whom Seddon called the Father of Wellington. Plimmer came from England to Wellington in the ship Gertrude, in 1841; he was a great patriot and pioneer. One of his most picturesque exploits was the purchase of the damaged American barque Inconstant, which he had towed ashore and beached just about where the Bank of New Zealand now stands at the corner of Customhouse Quay and Willis Street. Then he started the first reclamation scheme in New Zealand; he had soil carted, and built up the land around the derelict vessel, and turned her into a trading store. Known as “Noah's Ark,” the store flourished for twenty years. Plimmer was the founder of the Wellington-Manawatu Railway Company, and one of the chief supporters of the Main Trunk scheme. It is fitting that a station on this line should to-day bear his name.
It is just over a hundred years since the New Zealand Company's ship Tory, anchored off Petone Beach. The complicated proceedings of the purchase of land completed, other ships followed rapidly, the Aurora, the Oriental, the Duke of Roxburgh, and the Bengal Merchant. The sound of axe-blows and the clatter of adzes was heard up and down the beach, and the city of Wellington was born.
There was one man who heard the sounds of civilisation as a knell, the knell of the passing of the old Maori days. Te Rauparaha, the great warlord, secure in his stronghold on Kapiti Island, swore that no white man should ever buy land in his domains. With the war-trumpet he proclaimed it. Conflict between his men and the company was inevitable. In the first clash more than twenty Europeans were killed. The company had neither sufficient men nor sufficient arms to take redress. An ominous change had come over the demeanour of the Wellington Maoris. In the undergrowth there was the first flickering of the fire of war that was soon to set the land ablaze.
Looking over Karehana Bay.
Governor Grey took action. He built a Redoubt at Paremata, near Plimmerton, and garrisoned it to keep a watch on Te Rauparaha's comings and goings. He marched a detachment of six hundred men of the 58th and 99th Regiments into Wellington. The Maoris rose to the challenge with a series of brutal and marauding sorties. The white settlers were called in from the outlying farms to the military garrisons, and Wellington made ready for siege.
Te Rauparaha and his nephew, Rangihaeata, chieftain of Mana Island, marched boldly through their territories, calling out the fighting men of the coast villages, and, on the night of 16th May they attacked the military garrison at Boulcott's farm, on the Hutt River.
The story is well-known. The British command was taking the situation very easily, and, if it had not been for the boy-bugler Allen, the soldiers would have been massacred as they slept. Struck down by three tomahawk blows, the dying boy managed to raise the bugle to his lips and sound a feeble alarm.
Once roused, the troops fought fiercely, and drove the Maoris back over the hills. The Maoris, dispersing, gathered again at the Taupo Pa, at Plimmerton, where Te Rauparaha had made his mainland headquarters. There, under cover of a guise of outward friendliness, the chief waited, like a wily old spider in a web, spinning his final plans for assault on Wellington.
Karehana Bay from the sea.
But there were forces against him. Wiremu Kingi withdrew his followers. That good and peaceful chief, Te Puni, was on the side of the white man. And in Governor Grey, Te Rauparaha had to deal with an adversary as shrewd and implacable as himself. Governor Grey understood the native mind; he knew the full value of a leader's prestige … his mana … and that was exactly where he prepared to strike.
To carry out his plan, he chose a young adventurer, a mere boy named McKillop. McKillop began his naval career as a midshipman in charge of a patrol rowboat armed with a toy brass cannon, in the Paremata Estuary; he ended it as Lord High Admiral of the Turkish Fleet at Constantinople.
He had already proved his mettle by discovering Rangihaeata's secret fortress at Pahautanui. Grey sent troops there, and drove Rangihaeata's men back into the hills.
Then Grey turned his attention to Te Rauparaha. Under cover of night, the little gun-boat, the Driver, landed McKillop and a small party on the Plimmerton beach. Warily they crept up to Te Rauparaha's whare, fell upon him as he slept, gagged and trussed him, and carried him down struggling to the ship's boat. Thus ended the career of New Zealand's greatest war-lord … kidnapped by a midshipman.
It was the end of the Wellington Wars. Te Rauparaha's followers scattered; the troops were withdrawn from the blockhouses, and the settlers returned to their farms.
In Te Rauparaha's last days he was released from restraint, and he spent his time, a bent old man, in a tarnished naval uniform, building a Christian church at Otaki.
His tomb is at Otaki, but the Maoris say that his body is buried on Kapiti Island, where his shade still walks. Perhaps it walks at Plimmerton, too … pathetic old shade in a battered naval uniform … treading again the path to Taupo Pa, last scene of that bitter and humiliating defeat.
The site of the old Taupo Pa is opposite the Plimmerton Railway Station. There is a sheep-run there now, and you may read the name on the shearing-sheds—“Taupo”—as the train flashes swiftly by. And out to sea broods Mana Island, grim and grey, implacable as the cold-hearted Rangihaeata who once ruled its spray-lashed hills.
It is only in stormy weather that these wild days of the past return.
When the sun shines, the bay is blue and vivid, sparkling with foam under a yachtsman's wind and white sails like butterflies, or tranquil as a mirror, reflecting the grim purple outlines of the wave-worn cliffs.
Loveliest of all is a calm morning, before the sea-mists are abroad, when you may look across the broad planes of the still water to the blue horizon, and see the ghost-mountains of the Kaikouras floating in a shining range of silver in the sky.
)Shibli Bagarag ”
Those who have seen the small volume, “New Zealand Poems” by Eileen Duggan, just published by Allen & Unwin Ltd., may wonder how it is that such precious verse is contained in a book of such modest format. I think I can sense the reason. Eileen Duggan is a great lover of New Zealand and its people and I feel that she wanted her New Zealand poems produced at a price that would not worry even the most slender purse. There are forty-two poems in this collection and they range from the grand, triumphant notes of the Centenary Ode, to the simple homely beauty of “The Drayman.” This comparison is only one striking example of the art of Eileen Duggan, whose songs are of uniform artistry.
Here are some of the titles: “The Whaling Master's Song,” “A Maori to Mary,” “A Maori Lullaby,” “Swampland,” “The Ewe,” “Tua Marina” and so on. There are also rare tributes to rare New Zealand people. Probably the grandest poem of all, and one that will live always, is her ode to New Zealand.
This is a book that I am sure will be treasured in every New Zealand home and for generations to come.
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At an auction sale held in Wellington recently I had knocked down to me for a few shillings, a copy of George Meredith's “The Egoist,” containing a letter from the author dated 9th April, 1909. The date is of interest for it is recorded in the “The Letters of George Meredith” (Constable, 1912) that the last letter written by Meredith was to Theodore Watts-Dunton on 13th April, 1909. The only letter recorded by Mr. Meredith, junr., as having been written prior to this was on 28th March, 1909, so that it is possible that the New Zealand letter was the second to last written by the Victorian novelist. It is addressed to Mrs. W. J. Trimble of Dunedin, and states inter alia:
“As to what you gather from newspaper …… they deal in gossip and gossip gets its fee in these days. I forebear to contradict them in the Press, thinking it useless when once a tale has been started. And besides an author should not value himself so highly as to join in any temporary buzz concerning him.”
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New Zealand poets will be interested in the following letter I have received from Miss Edith Fry of the British Authors’ Press (7 Broadway, Ludgate Hill):
“I should be grateful if you would kindly bring to the notice of New Zealand poets, members of the P.E.N. Club and others, an Anthology of Empire Verse we are compiling. The book will be sold for the benefit of the Red Cross, but authors are not asked to give their work free. They will be paid a royalty of ten per cent., which will be reckoned as part of the production expenses. We have already received poems from John Masefield, Lord Gorell, Mr. Ernest Rhys and Mr. Christopher Hassall.
The owner of this book plate is interested in horticulture and so the artist has introduced New Zealand native flowers—kowhai, kaka beak and manuka.
“While only poems of established reputation can be invited, any writer of verse may submit work, if this is done through the competitions of the British Annual of Literature, winners of a prize or hon, mention in the short poem competition will be eligible for publication in the anthology. The last date for receiving entries in the competitions has been extended to 15th December for competitors living overseas, and owing to war conditions they may be sent in unnumbered, accompanied by the coupon from the Annual, instead of returning the coupon to receive an entry form with number. We hope to bring out the Anthology early next year.”
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Two further numbers of “Making New Zealand” (Pictorial Surveys of a Century) have appeared. No. 13 is “Power,” telling the story of the steam engine, the gas engine and then the oil fuel engine, how electricity took its all-powerful place in this evolution of energy and then the tremendous force provided in hydro-electric development. The humble wind-mill and the water-wheel were the main sources of energy before electric power came into general distribution in this country. The social and economic changes brought about complete the interesting story so simply and effectively related by A. Buckinghim.
No. 14 has the simple title, “Bread,” and here A. H. McLintock (layout by J. D. Pascoe) tells us of the sowing, harvesting and milling of the grain that gives us the flour for our daily bread. The first wheat growing in New Zealand, the Maoris and wheat growing, the evolution of harvesting methods and the vital part played by scientific research are all dealt with interestingly. Some of my readers wish to know if back numbers of the surveys are available, and details as to binding, etc. A letter to the Centennial Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs will elicit all such information.
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The March issue of “Art in New Zealand” features in picture and letterpress the art of the late Mrs. M. E. R. Tripe. Four beautiful colour plates and several in black and white show some of the best work of this distinguished New Zealand artist. Other art features are devoted to the work of Elsie White and of Dr. A. H. McLintock. The letterpress includes a final pathetic poem by the late Robin Hyde, also verse by Helen Brookfield and a number of interesting articles on art and literature.
Reviews.
“The Fishes of New Zealand,” Vol. 1, by W. J. Phillipps (Thomas Avery & Sons Ltd., New Plymouth) is an important addition to our natural history library because of the reason that, until 1927, only two books had been issued on this subject. The book is published at a moderate price and is after the manner of a handy guide to the Dominion's fishes. Mr. Phillipps has, for some years past, built up in the Dominion Museum, to which he is attached, a valuable reference collection covering most of the fishes found in New Zealand waters. His twenty years’ experience on this subject has enabled him to write this work which will be completed in two or three volumes. The descriptions, habits, distribution, etc., of each fish, are clearly set out under separate headings, with illustrations.
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“History of North Otago” by K. C. McDonald, is the official centennial book for that district in the South, of which Oamaru is the presiding town. It is written in a thorough and interesting manner by one who has apparently searched every available record for his history. No record in book form has been published about North Otago since W. H. S. Roberts’ “History of Oamaru,” published in 1890, and now a collector's item. Mr. McDonald acknowledges his indebtedness to this book for the period 1853–89. Other valuable information was secured from local newspaper files and the whole was checked by Mr. G. L. Grenfell, an old resident of the district. The history of North Otago really opens with the colourful early days of Moeraki and its whaling activities, a period of adventure. The establishment of John Hughes’ whaling base there in 1836 marked the beginning of European occupation of the district. Pastoral settlement followed, but it was not until 1858 that Oamaru could boast
The illustrations are good and the appendices helpful. The format is old-fashioned but no doubt many of the old settlers will view this with pleasure.
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The gold lettering and Maori design on the red cloth cover of a centennial book, “Historic Maketu,” written by Enid Tapsell and printed by the Rotorua “Morning Post,” make the volume look interesting and attractive. The book carries a definite sales appeal. Inside is a collection of stories and historical incidents bound up with the Arawa people, tales of Tama-te-Kapua, of many other famous Maori people, legendary and otherwise, of the redoubtable old Danish sailor, Captain Tapsell, of the Maori Wars and of other exciting and romantic events wrapped up in the colourful history of Maketu, the first home of the Arawas. This book has a special value in that it has been written by one of Tapsell's descendants. Has not Mr. James Cowan paid his fine tribute to the famous old whaler-trader? “There was not a man or a well-grown youth of ‘Tapihana’ who failed to answer Britain's war call in 1914–1918.” Mr. Cowan also states that “to-day the ‘Whanau-a-Tapihana’ (Tapsell's children), are more than a hundred in number.”
Here, then, is a book rich in associations. The illustrations by H. Dansey, junior, are good, but are worthy of reproduction on a larger scale. Much of the detail is lost, however, because of the thumb-nail blocks.
Rly. Publicity photos.)
ByC. H. Gordon
In the far south of New Zealand lies a very lovely bay—not a simple curve in the coast line, to be seen at a glance; but a wide, intricate sound, holding many islands and islets, deep coves, and long arms stretching away into the mainland.
On a squally afternoon, one hundred and seventy years ago, Captain Cook—sailing up the south-west coast of the South Island—sighted this bay and as it appeared to be a good place wherein to anchor, the Endeavour hauled in toward the shore. But after standing for an hour, Cook decided that the distance was too great to run before dark, and the wind blew too hard to attempt it in the night, so in the gathering twilight he bore away up the coast, and named this bay he had wished to enter—Dusky Bay.
Thus, quietly, on 14th March, 1770, Dusky Bay entered New Zealand history.
Three years later, in the same month, Dusky Bay suddenly rose to greatness; for about noon on Friday, 26th March, 1773, Captain Cook, on board the Resolution, sailed into the bay and anchored under Anchor Island—the first place he touched in New Zealand on this, his second voyage round the world.
The Resolution had just come from Antarctic regions, where, with her consort the Adventure, she had been sailing among thick fogs, sleet, snow, and icebergs. During a furious gale a great part of the live-stock brought from
Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Sound.
Adventure disappeared from view in a dense fog; everything possible was done to gain contact with her again, but without avail. On 17th March Cook decided to proceed to New Zealand, to look for the Adventure, and to get greatly needed refreshment for his people. By the time he reached Dusky Bay, Cook had been over four months without even sighting land.
It was with feelings approaching ecstasy that the ship's company looked on Dusky. George Forster—one of the naturalists with the expedition—describes their sensations on entering the bay:
“Flocks of aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores,” he says, “and the whole country resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribes.” “The view of the rude sceneries … of antediluvian forests which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired to complete our joy. And so apt is mankind, after a long absence from land, to be prejudiced in favour of the wildest shore, that we looked upon the country at that time as one of the most beautiful which nature, unassisted by art, could produce.”
At three o'clock in the afternoon the Resolution was anchored, and immediately Cook sent “a boat and people afishing”; meanwhile, some of the gentlemen killed a seal—out of many that were upon a rock—and thus a fresh meal was procured for the whole ship's company, which numbered 112.
Not liking the place where they had anchored, Cook sent Lieutenant Pickersgill over to the south-east side of the bay to search for a better anchorage, while for the same purpose he himself went to the other side. After hearing Pickersgill's report, Cook considered his finding to be the better; therefore, the following morning they got under sail, and working over to Pickersgill Harbour, entered it by a channel scarcely twice the width of the ship. Mooring head and stern in a small creek, they were so near the shore that it could be reached by a stage. Certainly, it was a most convenient spot—wood for fuel and for other purposes was right at hand, and a fine stream of fresh water ran about 100 yards from the ship's stern.
Dusky Bay woke up—disturbed in its sleep by the shouting of voices, the moving of gear, sawing, hammering, and chopping of wood. In the woods places were cleared in which to set up the astronomer's observatory, a forge to repair the ship's iron work, tents where the coopers and sailmakers could work while mending the sails and watercasks. Out in the bay, men were fishing with great success; getting, in a few hours, enough to serve the whole company for dinner.
(Continued on p. 52
).
At the Head of Dusky Sound.
The second large catch of fish, and the fact that there appeared to be plenty of wild fowl in the bush, showed that Dusky was well able to provide good food for his people; therefore, Cook determined to stay there for some time. He wished to make a thorough examination of the bay, as no one before him had landed there or on any other part of southern New Zealand. Dr. McNab considers that Cook's decision in this matter, “played a very important part in the history of southern New Zealand, as it gave an accurately surveyed harbour to the merchant service of the world.”
Among the tasks which were begun immediately, was the brewing of spruce beer; Cook's recipe for making this is most interesting:—
First make a strong decoction of the small branches of the spruce and tea plants, by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from off the branches, then take them out of the copper and put in the proper quantity of mollasses; ten gallons of which is sufficient to make a ton, or two hundred and forty gallons of beer. Let this mixture just boil, then put it into the casks, and, to it, add an equal quantity of cold water, more or less according to the strength of the decoction, or to your taste. When the whole is milk warm, put in a little grounds of beer, or yeast, if you have it, or anything else that will cause fermentation, and after a few days it will be fit to drink.”
This beer was intended to supply the want of vegetables, which it did. The spruce tree to which Cook refers, is rimu or red pine, and the tea plant is manuka.
On the second day after entering Dusky Sound, some of the ship's officers reported having seen some natives. No sooner had the officers got on board, when from round a point about a mile from the ship, appeared a canoe with about seven or eight people in it. After a while the canoe came within a musket shot of the ship, and for some time the natives remained, looking at the strange sight. Signs of friendship were made to them, but they would come no nearer.
After dinner, Cook went in search of the natives, and found their canoe hauled up on the shore, near two small huts, where there were several fireplaces, some fishing nets, and a few fish lying about. No natives were to be seen. After a short stay, Cook left some medals, looking glasses, beads, etc., in the canoe, and then rowed to the head of the bay.
On returning, he put ashore again at the spot where the canoe was lying, but still saw no natives, though the smell of fire smoke showed they were near. Cook wisely comments: “I did not care to search farther, or to force an interview which they seemed to avoid; well knowing that the way to obtain this was to leave time and place to themselves.”
For the next few days, wet and stormy weather confined everyone to the ship. On 1st April, Cook went to see if any of the articles left for the “Indians” had been touched; but everything in the canoe remained as before.
Various members of the company engaged in botanising and shooting excursions, while Cook himself continued his survey of the bay. While so doing he discovered a “capacious cove” where fourteen ducks, besides other birds, were shot; for this reason it is named—Duck Cove.
As they returned in the evening, Cook and his companions had a short interview with three of the natives—a man and two women—who appeared on an island which thereupon was named, “Indian Island.”
The man stood—his club in his hand—on the point of a rock, while behind him, at the edge of the wood, were the women, each holding a spear.
As the boat with Cook and his party drew near, the man showed signs of fear, but he stood his ground. At length Cook landed, and embracing the man presented him with such articles as he had about him. This treatment dispelled the man's fears, and for about half an hour they chatted together, though with little understanding on either side.
The following morning, Cook went back to Indian Island, and meeting the natives he gave them various presents, including hatchets and spike-nails, which were the only things they appeared to value.
At this interview the whole family appeared—the man, three women, a boy about fourteen, and three young children. They brought the ship's party to their dwelling—two mean huts made of the bark of trees—a little way within the skirts of the wood. Mr. Hodges—the artist of the expedition—made a drawing of most of these natives, who for this reason gave him the name—Toe-toe. On this occasion, the chief presented Cook with a piece of cloth or garment of their own manufacture, and made it clear that he would like a boat cloak. Subsequently, Cook ordered one to be made for him, of red baize.
When next the natives were paid a visit, they were found at their huts, “all dressed and dressing, in their very best, with their hair, combed and oiled, tied up upon the crowns of their heads, and stuck with white feathers. Some wore a fillet of feathers round their heads, and
A few days later the natives were seen coming towards the ship. Cook met them, and leaving his boat, got into their canoe; but he could not persuade them to come alongside the ship. At last, however, they put the canoe in a little creek, and sat down on the shore abreast of the ship, but would not come aboard. Cook “caused the bagpipe and fife to play and the drums to beat.” They paid no attention to the music, but showed some interest in the beating of the drum—another instance of the universal appeal of rhythm.
On the afternoon of this day, Cook took Mr. Hodges to a large cascade which fell from a high mountain on the south side of the bay; Mr. Hodges made a drawing of it which he afterwards painted in oils. Cook named the place—Cascade Cove.
In the course of his survey of the rocks and isles at the mouth of the bay, Cook found—on the south-east side of Anchor Isle—“a very sunny cove, sheltered from all winds. Here by the side of a pleasant brook, shaded by trees from both wind and sun,” Cook and his party dined on crayfish. Hence the name—Luncheon Cove. To Cook, what a delightful pause in his unending toil—to rest by the side of a pleasant brook, shaded by trees from both wind and sun!
The next day, while continuing his survey of the bay, Cook came upon the sportsmen's boat adrift and seized her at the moment when she was about to be dashed on the rocks.
Dusky Sound from Captain Cook's Look-out, Pickersgill Harbour.
One evening the natives paid another visit to the vicinity of the ship, and the following morning the chief and his daughter were induced to come on board. But first, the chief presented Cook with a piece of cloth and “a green talk hatchet”; Mr. Forster and Mr. Hodges also received a present of cloth. Then the chief, taking in his hand a small green branch struck the ship's side several times with it, meanwhile repeating a speech or prayer. This over, he threw the branch into the main chains and came on board.
The natives were taken down to the cabin, where breakfast was in progress; they consented to sit at the table, but would not eat anything. At noon, after having been shown all over the ship, they left.
Cook remarks that as far as riches might be counted in New Zealand, this chief exceeded every man there; having received from one and another not less than nine or ten hatchets, three or four times that number of large spike nails, besides many other articles. A few other natives were seen, but the total number in Dusky Bay did not seem to exceed three families. Possibly, these Maoris were a remnant of the Ngatimamoe tribe, whose famous Chief Te-Uira (The Lightning) made a last stand at Jackson's Bay, South Westland, about the year 1760; and then fled with his people to the wild, mountainous country between Lake Wanaka and Milford Sound.
Whenever the weather permitted, the work of surveying, botanizing, and sealing was carried on. The seals served three purposes—the skins were made use of for the ship's rigging, the fat gave oil for the lamps, and the flesh was food—“little inferior to beef steaks”—which the company enjoyed.
On the morning of 23rd April Pickersgill, Gilbert, and two others went to Cascade Cove in order to ascend one of the mountains. Returning, they reported that on reaching the summit, nothing was to be seen inland but “barren mountains with huge, craggy precipices disjoined by valleys, or rather chasms, frightful to behold.”
The following day, Cook took five geese—brought from the Cape of Good Hope—and released them in a cove which now bears the name—Goose Cove. It was hoped that the geese would multiply and spread over the country. A succession of eight or nine fine days facilitated the work of getting a supply of wood and water, and making the ship ready for sea.
On 27th April Cook discovered an arm or inlet which communicated with the sea, and which afforded a better outlet for ships bound north, than the one by which he had entered Dusky Bay. The following day—the tents and every other article being safely on board—Cook set fire to the top wood, in order to dry the ground they had been occupying. “Next morning the ground was dug up and sowed with several sorts of garden seeds. The soil did not promise much success to the planter, but was the best that could be found.” (con. on p. 54
).
“Kb” class locomotive in use in the South Island.
At two o'clock in the afternoon they set sail, but after getting through between Indian and Long Islands it “fell calm,” and they were obliged to anchor near Long Island. In the morning, 30th April, they tried again to get away, but after struggling till five o'clock in the evening, were compelled to anchor again under the north side of Long Island. After another effort to leave the bay, calms kept them in a cove—aptly named “Detention Cove”—until the afternoon of 4th May, when they got the length of the passage leading to the sea. The breeze then left them.
The night brought heavy squalls of wind, attended with rain, hail, snow and thunder, and in the morning all the hills and mountains in sight were covered with snow. With the help of a light breeze and their boat, the next day saw them down the passage to the place where Cook had intended to anchor. To the east ran a second arm which Cook wished to explore, but being confined on board with a cold, he sent Lieutenant Pickersgill, accompanied by the two Forsters, to do the work. Apparently they experienced some rough weather, as the arm is called “Wet Jacket Arm.”
Finally, at noon on 11th May, the Resolution got clear of the land, and sailed away up the coast, leaving Dusky Bay to settle down once more to sleep.
Captain Cook devotes a chapter of his journal to describing Dusky Bay, and to detailed instructions concerning the best way of entering and leaving it.
“There are few places where I have been in New Zealand,” he says, “that afford the necessary refreshments in such plenty as Dusky Bay, a short description of it and of the adjacent country may prove of use to some future navigators, as well as acceptable to the curious reader. For although the country be remote from the present trading part of the world, we can, by no means, tell what use future ages may make of the discoveries made in the present.” Particular note is made of the birds and other animals found in the bay. Cook speaks of five different kinds of ducks, the largest being as big as a muscovy duck, and having such very beautiful, variegated plumage, that they called it the painted duck. Amongst the small birds, he mentions particularly the wattle bird, the poy bird, and the fantails. The most remarkable fantail was one—so small, that Cook in describing it, said: “the body is scarcely bigger than a good filbert, yet it spreads a tail of most beautiful plumage, full three-quarters of a semi-circle, of at least four or five inches radius.”
Unfortunately for the birds in Dusky,
(Photo., E. J. McClare). “Ab” class locomotive being turned in the station yard at Auckland.
Resplution's cat, discovering how unsuspecting they were, used to wander off daily and procure for itself a full and tasty meal.
During the first few days of their stay in the Sound, a four-footed animal was seen by three or four of the Resolution's company; but as “no two gave the same description of it,” Cook could not say what it was. However, all the witnesses agreed that it was “about the size of a cat, with short legs, and of a mouse colour.” One of the seamen who had the best view of it, said that it had a bushy tail, and was more like a jackall of any animal he knew.
More than once, Cook refers with gratitude to the fish in Dusky; not only were they in abundance, but in great variety. A species of cod—which the sailors called the coal-fish, on account of its colour—was considered the best and most savoury of all.
Almost the only annoying thing was the host of sandflies. They were tormenting; and “exceeded everything of the kind ever met with.” The other evil was the nearly continuous rain, though in fairness to Dusky, Cook adds: “This may only happen at this season of the year.” Yet the people felt no ill-effects from the rain; on the contrary, “the sick and ailing recovered daily,” due to the healthiness of the place and to the fresh provisions—seal-meat, fish, and spruce beer.
The great work done during Cook's stay in Dusky, says Dr. McNab, was, of course, the accurate survey and charting of the sound. Cook must have worked very hard to have accomplished what he did in the time; “distance, length of coast line, and weather, were all against him.” The chart is, without exception, the finest made during his second voyage.
(ByW. G. Mcclymont )Written for the “New Zealand Railways Magazine” by H.B.
In this, the most recent addition to the New Zealand Centennial Surveys, we are presented with a continuation of the story commenced by Dr. J. C. Beaglehole in “The Discovery of New Zealand.” Whereas Dr. Beaglehole, however, was concerned mainly with discoveries relating to our coastline, Mr. McClymont's task was to reveal the stages by which the interior became known and to relate the parts played by all those who had a share in the great work. That the assignment has involved any amount of research is obvious from the most casual perusal of any chapter in the book but especially so in regard to those concerning the exploration of the southern half of the South Island. This conclusion is amply confirmed on reading the appended “Notes on the Sources” where we see how old newspaper files and the letters and notebooks of missionaries and others have been drawn upon for facts relating to the survey, besides the published works accessible to the general reader.
The part played by the missionaries in exploring the interior of the North Island in the course of their long and arduous journeys from one mission station to another provides an absorbing topic for much of the first few chapters, the treatment here given adequately disposing of the earlier criticism that there was a gap in the planning of the Centennial series. Many of these early journeys were carried out, it must be remembered, at times when inter-tribal warfare was at its bitterest and most ruthless and when to the hazards incidental to difficult and little-known terrain there was added the risk of sudden death at the whim of some bloodthirsty cannibal. Bidwill's life hangine in the balance after his ascent of Ngauruhoe, and hazardously redeemed by a gift of tobacco to old Te Heu Heu, is an excellent example and provides, moreover, a reminder that traders, sealers, whalers and an occasional scientist worked the same field as the missionaries and contributed each his quota of knowledge.
One of the most interesting aspects of “Exploration in New Zealand” is, in fact, the revelation of the widely different motives which prompted some of the great feats of exploration during the past 120 years—the dissemination of Christianity among the natives, the pursuit of trade, the desire to add to scientific knowledge, the lure of gold, and always, but especially so in the South Island, the quest of suitable land for settlement and hence of routes by which such land could be readily approached. In the index, for example, there are listed nearly thirty mountain passes, and in reading of how they were first discovered one is speechless at the tenacity of purpose which sustained the efforts of their discoverers. Brunner, Heaphy, Barrington and the Dobsons are only a few of the names from what would make an inspiring roll-call.
Such, indeed, is the amount of material relating to Mr. McClymont's subject that there is a certain danger of the later chapters losing in interest owing to the deliberate choice of a bold style of narration; the facts are to speak for themselves. Seldom does he relax the formality of his account to voice sympathy or appreciation and even when he does it is for only a few lines.
(Photo., E. J. McClare).
An excursion train hauled by a “K” class locomotive leaving Auckland for Hamilton.
In spite of this, however, an intensely moving story develops. In reading and marvelling at the hard-ships endured and obstacles overcome, at death braved not once but many times, and, when at last narrowly evaded, challenged yet again, even if we are prompted to reflect that these men were of a tougher, sturdier breed than most of us who have come into the Promised Land they discovered, we shall not fail to agree that no more opportune time than this critical period of our nationhood could have been chosen for the appearance of a book designed in treatment and scope to afford us inspiration and example for the difficult days that lie ahead.
How did briar pipes originate? The story goes that a manufacturer of meerschaums who visited Corsica in 1844 chanced to drop—and break—the meerschaum he was smoking. By way of a temporary substitute he carved himself a pipe from Corsican brpyere (briar) root. That was the first briar! And the experiment proved so successful that the manufacture of these pipes soon developed into a flourishing industry. To-day briars are produced by the million! The finest briar-root, by the way, still comes from Corsica, and the best briars cost money. But your “dyed-in-the-wool” smoker cares little for the expensive pipes. With him it's the tobacco that counts! Some folks can smoke anything; the tolacco-lover wants the best. Tastes differ but the constantly growing demand for the toasted tobacco, so pure, fragrant and free from nicotine, is proof positive that New Zealanders are not slow to appreciate a really good thing. All five brands: Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendisch, Riverhead Gold, Desert Gold, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead). are an everyday request all over the Dominion.
The New Zealand League for the Hard of Hearing was founded eight years ago, and to-day the movement has been definitely established as one of the main institutions of its kind in the Dominion.
The headquarters of the League are in Auckland and there are branches in the four centres (including one recently formed in New Plymouth) and indications are that further branches will be opened at an early date.
That the league is deserving of encouragement and strong support was emphasised during a recent intensive publicity campaign conducted and organised by the Wellington Branch, at the rooms of the League, Beehive Chambers, Courtenay Place.
The objective of the League is to make known the means whereby some forms of deafness may be prevented or minimised.
During the publicity campaign referred to, which was a Centennial gesture of lectures and demonstrations, a special day was arranged by the Wellington Branch, for parents and teachers, interesting talks on the following subjects being given:—“How the Home Can Help in the Prevention of Deafness”; “Helping the Hard of Hearing Child”; and “Preventive Work of the London County Council.”
Mrs. Nicholson, the Hon. Secretary of the Branch, spoke enthusiastically of a demonstration and follow-up of a more thorough test of the hearing of pupils attending a school for normal hearing children. The test, by means of a multiple audiometer, which was given during Centennial Hearing Week before educational authorities revealed unsuspected loss of hearing among some of the pupils.
The multiple audiometer is a scientific apparatus for testing the degree of loss of hearing. In appearance it resembles a gramophone to which an operator attaches a number of headphones with suitable leads. As many as forty earphone can be attached at one time, and a class of children can be tested in about twenty minutes or half an hour.
When the operator starts the machine the children hear a voice giving numbers. As the voice of the gramphone record speaks to the class the pupils write on a chart the numbers heard. An examination of the chart shows the children with defective hearing.
The Wellington Branch of the New Zealand League for the Hard of Hearing seeks to assist the parents by advice as to where and how they may receive the help which they may desire.
Briefly the aims of the New Zealand League for the Hard of Hearing are:—
Early detection and prevention of deafness; encouragement of lip-reading by the hard of hearing; investigation and recommendation of reliable hearing aids for those who will benefit by their use; provision of social intercourse; provision of facilities and equipment (at the rooms of the League) for lessening the ill-effects of deafness, and restoration of the ear-handicapped in the business and social world.
The League disseminates practical suggestions for overcoming in the home the ill-effects of deafness, e.g., the replacing of door-bells with door-lights, and the installation of buzzers in addition to telephone bells, and the training of a dog to attract the attention of the ear-handicapped person when some one knocks at the door, and also when the telephone-bell rings.
ByHelen
Box Craft.
What I may call “box craft” is the art of using wooden boxes in the making of simple furniture. A grocer can usually supply suitable boxes for such articles as those illustrated.
The curtained “pedestal” is for shoes. It is made from two square boxes, each box holding two rows of shoes, held in position, under toe and instep, by an expanding curtain rod stretched tightly. The front curtain is held on the same type of rod. The top and sides may be painted after sandpapering the wood, or plain or matching material may be stretched over and lacked in position.
A slightly more ambitious effort is the low box ottoman. Two or three boxes are placed side by side and the top lightly padded with kapoc.
If you have a dainty petticoat dressing-table, use a box as foundation for a matching stool. Just pad the top and make a gathered skirt.
The attractivess of this type of furniture depends on the cover material. If possible make it match something clse in the room, e.g., cushions or curtains. Don't do a rough job, or you will miss the dainty effect, no matter how charming the chintz you have chosen.
Box furniture can help to solve the furnishing problems in the family house, where the children's belongings always seem to overflow the available cupboard and drawer space. Make them (or, better still, let them help to make) box furniture for bedroom and playroom. Children are always pleased to have cupboards “of their very own,” and will be more tidy when these are provided. For the play-room, materials must be serviceable, but they should nevertheless be pleasant to the eye.
Too Tall, Too Thin.
You've met her, haven't you, the lean and lanky woman with the scraggy neck, the stooping shoulders (as if she's afraid doors won't take her 5ft. 8ins.) and the bony hands which hardly seem to belong at the ends of her thin arms.? She has an “ugly duckling” attitude towards life, and a permanently apologetic air.
Tell her to snap out of it! Her problem isn't nearly so difficult as that of her plump firned, for it's easier tto disguise lack of curves than to get rid of accentuated ones. Also, with fashions what they are at present, the thin woman should be smartest of the smart.
But before she starts on an orgy of clothes planning, tell her to take stock of herself, to study herself dispassionately in a mirror from every angle, trying to catch herself off guard. Does she notice the chin poke and the shoulder stoop? If she throws out her chest (what there is of it), holds up her head, and steps out with a swing, she'll lose that awkward unco-ordinated look, and, when she has the right clothes, she'll have line. A course of drill, or curythmics, or dancing, or even country walking, will help her tremendously—and probably improve her appetite!
How nice to be able to eat what she likes and as much as she likes, and to know that she won't get fat, But she may be able to fill out a few of the
Now for clothes. For out-of-doors she should be chunky. The box coat, with padded shoulders and a comfortable high neck, is made for her, especially if it is carried out in a rough tweed. (Hairy, knobby and tufty effects should be her choice in woollens, blistered and matt surfaces in silks). All her jackets, for day or evening, should be of the same style. A slim skirt under such a jacket is very smart. So is a full flare, or pleats. Shoes, too, are chunky. So are hats—particularly must she avoid the upward line.
A rough tweed suit, with boxy jacket featuring high-neck closing, or wide lapels and a gay scarf, is made for her. An overblouse is better than a tuck-in one, for thin people so often haven't sufficient hips to manage a neat waist. Have shoulder interest on blouses and sweaters.
Because a woman is thin, she must not say, “Oh, anything fits me.” “Anything” doesn't! It hangs floppily, as on a scare-crow. The thin woman must have well-cut clothes.
For day frocks she will choose a high neckline, a full bodice and shoulder emphasis. If her hands are well-shaped, a long sleeve, fitting the fore-arm closely, is flattering.
For evening wear she is lucky again. There is no need to expose salt cellars and shoulder blades. If she is self-consious about her thin arms, she can wear long sleeves—definitely smart! Boleros, jackets, fur capes, are just right for the thin one.
Chunky accessories that the plump one covets, but avoids, are gladly collected by the thin one. Outsizes in hand-bags, she loves.
She varies her hair style to suit the occasion, but always there is a discreet bunching of hair at the sides in order to widen her face.
She's a very smart person, this thin girl of ours.
Frayed Cuffs.
Men hate frayed edges, but it is a pity to discard a good skirt because of worn cuffs. When a double cuff has started to fray, make a new buttonhole half an inch below each of the upper buttonholes. The fold will then come in a different place, and the worn part, neatly darned, will be on the inside of the cuff. Don't forget to sew up the old buttonholes, or the man of the house will get in a real muddle when inserting cuff links and won't quite appreciate what a clever wife he has.
Health Notes.
The Medicine Cupboard.
A well-planned medicine cupboard should contain reasonable quantities of the things that can normally be used for the greatest number of purposes. For instance, bicarbonate of soda can be given for vomiting, biliousness, heartburn, indigestion, etc. It also makes a good lotion—a teaspoonful dissolved in a pint of warm water—for chafed and sore conditions, and for applying to irritating rashes. If made up in a strong solution—as much as will dissolve in the quantity of water—it makes an excellent application for insect bites.
Friar's balsam should also be given a place in the medicine cupboard. It makes a good first-aid dressing for cuts and grazes. A teaspoonful added to a pint of boiling water makes a good vapour for inhaling in cases of bronchitis, feeling of rawness in the windpipe, or even for a cold in the head.
Permanganate of potash is a good third. One or two crystals dissolved in a tumblerful of warm water makes a very good antiseptic gargle or mouth-wash.
Glycerine makes an excellent dressing for cuts and grazes in children, because it does not sting as some antiseptics do. Several drops warmed (but not hot), and dropped into the ear, make an excellent remedy for earache provided that there is no discharge. It is also of value for sore throats, added to equal parts of lemon juice and honey.
Peroxide of hydrogen, tincture of iodine, and bandages, should all have a place in our ideal medicine cupboard. Add to these a bottle of aspirins and also a bottle of magnesia.
Dietetic Tips.
Onions bring sleep and are especially valuable in war-time when nerve tension is apt to disturb the habit of sound sleep. The following is a simple supper dish:—
Thickly slice a pound of onions. Put them in a saucepan with a pint of water, a pinch of salt and a little butter. Let boil gently for rather more than half an hour. Serve with toasted wholemeal bread.
Fried onions on toast, besprinkled with grated cheese, is an appetising dish.
Mix four tablespoonsful of onions with a pound of mashed potatoes, stir in one egg and a cup of wholemeal breadcrumbs, add seasoning, shape the mixture into oval cakes, roll in crumbs and fry in hot fat.
Slice three large onions and fry them slowly until delicately browned. Turn the fried onions into a saucepan and add a quart of water, salt and pepper. Let simmer for half an hour. Take a little of the cooled soup liquor and beat up the yolk of an egg in it. Off the fire, stir this into the soup. Reheat without letting the soup boil. Have crisply toasted bread with this soup, input a few cubes of very dry toast in the soup. The addition of grated cheese makes a nutritious dish.
Onions added to potatoes which are being fried, boiled or baked will please “onion-lovers.”
One large onion; 1½ tablespoons ordinary bran; I pint milk; pinch of salt.
Simmer for fifteen hours, and take as hot as possible just before bedtime.
Miscellaneous.
Whip an egg in a glass of milk, add I tablespoon ground almonds, and the juice of an orange.
Beat up a teaspoon of olive oil with two tablespoons of lemon juice to a froth, then pour in half a cup of hot milk.
Roast peanuts in the oven to a nice brown, skin and put through mincer until completely soft. Melt sufficent butter, stir in I teaspoonful of salt, and stir in Ilb, of the ground peanuts. Put in jars to cool.
Recipes.
Six ozs. flour; ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg; 6 ozs. castor sugar; 4 eggs; pinch salt; 1½ teaspoons baking powder; 6 ozs. butter; grated rind; ½ lemon; brandy—I tablespoon—if desired.
Line a greased cake tin with greaseproof paper. Mix the flour with the baking powder, nutmeg and salt, and sift thrice. Beat the butter until soft, then beat in the sugar by degrees. Beat till fluffy. Stir in the lemon rind. Beat in the egg, adding each one separately, then gradually stir in the flour. Add the brandy. Turn into the prepared tin. Bake in a moderate oven for about 1¾ to 2 hours.
One lb. sifted flour; 3 well-beaten eggs; ½ pint warm milk; I oz. yeast; 3 ozs. sugar; 3 ozs. butter; I oz. currants; I oz. chopped peel.
Cream the yeast and I teaspoon of sugar and leave 15 minutes. Sift the flour into a warm basin. Make a well in the middle and add the yeast and sugar mixture. Mix to a soft dough with beaten eggs and warm milk. Leave in warm place to rise for ¾ hour. Then turn out on to floured board and knead. Roll out and flake the butter over and sprinkle with the sugar. Fold up and then roll out again and sprinkle with currants and chopped peel. Roll this time as for a jam roll. Cut with a sharp knife. Place on a hot greased tin and put to rise for 15 minutes. Bake in a hot oven. Brush with sugar and water and wrap in a tea towel.
I lb. minced gravy beef; I large onion; I carrot; 2 eggs; I sprig of mint and parsley; pepper and salt to taste; 2 cupsful cold mashed potatoes.
Chop onion, carrot, mint and parsley. Mix into beef, then mix in mashed potatoes, pepper and salt, then add beaten egg. Tie into cloth like a sausage, tying at both ends and boil in pot for 2 hours.
Cream together ½ cup butter and I cup sugar; then rub in 2 cups of flour sifted with I teaspoon cream of tartar and ½ teaspoon of carbonate of soda. Drop in 2 eggs unbeaten and add ½ cup of hot honey. Mix well and roll out thin, cut into rounds and bake until golden brown in not too hot an oven, as the honey burns easily.
Two cups flour; ½ teaspoon salt; 7/8 cup milk; 3 teasponons baking powder.
Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Add milk, mix throughly, drop into stew and cook for 15 minutes.
Roll out foundation cream to a strip. Cover the centre with preserved ginger. Form into a long thin roll. Cut into small rounds. Leave till set.
Wash 2 lbs, of firm green gooseberries and put them in a pan with a gill of water and ½ lb. sugar. Bring to the boil, let the fruit simmer until it is soft, then rub through a fine sieve and let it cool. Then stir in ½ pint thick cream.
Strawberries and raspberries make delicious foods, and there is no need to cook them. Simply prepare the fruit, sprinkle with sugar, let stand for a few hours, then proceed with the sieving.
National Centennial One-Act Play Competition.
The attention of our readers is drawn to an advertisement appearing in this issues announcing the organisation which has been arranged by the Centennial Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs in collaboration with the British Drama League and the Auckland Drama Council to give effect to the decision of the Government to include in its programme of National Centennial Celebrations a festival of community drama. The festival will take the form of a competition in which play-acting groups in all parts of the Dominion should be interested.
Specially Written for “N.Z. Railways Magazine”
ByW. F. Ingram
New nights ago I sat and yarned with one of New Zealand's most famous old pugilists, “Gentleman Jim” Griffin. The years have been kind to this old-timer and he had many interesting things to talk about.
There were four brothers in the Griffin fighting family—Jim, Charlie, Jack and Frank. Jim was middle-weight and heavyweight professional champion of New Zealand after first winning the amateur middleweight and heavyweight titles of Australia and New Zealand. As an amateur he had 14 contests and won them all by knockouts. His professional career was also studded by knock-out victories although he invariably conceded weight to his opponents.
In 1908 the great Tommy Burns visited Australia and Hugh D. McIntosh, who made fame by staging the Burns-Johnson world title contest at Rush-cutters’ Bay, Sydney, matched Griffin against the Australian heavyweight champion, Bill Lang, with the winner to meet Burns for the world title. In the third round Griffin, weighing 11st. 6lb., knocked out Lang, who weighed 14st. 8lb., but in the excitement the referee missed the count and Lang was saved by the bell. It was agreed that Lang had received the biggest hiding of his life, but his superior weight told in the end and Griffin threw in the towel after six rounds. So popular did he prove with the Sydneysiders that they carried him shoulder-high down Castlereagh Street. After the fight the newspapers were unanimous that Griffin had morally won by a knock-out and it is on record that McIntosh contemplated giving Griffin the title bout against Burns instead of carrying on with Lang, but an injury kept Griffin out of the picture. Another memorable contest engaged in by Jim Griffin was against Billy McCall, former Australian heavyweight Champion. Griffin broke the big bone in his right arm in the second round, but continued with the fight and so punished McCall that a halt was called in the fifth round. Against Joe Grimm, who had many bouts against Jack Johnson, Griffin had to be content with a draw, the agreement being that if a knock-out did not come there would not be a points’ decision. Once again Griffin gave away a couple of stone and gave his opponent a boxing lesson.
His brother Frank died under tragic circumstances. After knocking Curly Parkes in 16 rounds he retired to his room. In the morning his throat started to bleed and he died as the result of a ruptured blood-vessel. For that contest Frank Griffin was trained by Pat Connors, well-known in New Zealand for his association with Lachie McDonald, Charlie Purdy and Ted Morgan.
Another brother, Charlie, fought in New Zealand, Australia, England and America. His most important win was against Joe Bowker, lightweight champion of England, who was knocked-out in 8 rounds at Albert Hall, London. He met Jem Driscoll, the “Welsh Wizard,” three times for the world title and after a bitter struggle in America faced Leach Cross, the “Fighting Dentist,” in a title bout. Although a New Zealander, Charlie Griffin was dubbed “the Fighting Kangaroo” in America.
In Jim Griffin's opinion the boxers of to-day do not take sufficient pains with
A quiet scene in sunny Gisborne.
One of New Zealand's smallest soldiers is Leo Nolan, former New Zealand amateur bantamweight and featherweight wrestling champion. Leo was turned down on his first attempt to enlist as he was under the regulation height … and looked it. On his next visit he wore thick-soled shoes and somehow or another managed to make the grade and join his pals in khaki. In the last war the “Bantams” proved great soldiers and as Nolan can handle men two and three stone heavier than himself he should prove a worthy successor to the other great little men who have worn the khaki uniform.
Who is the oldest active sports official in New Zealand? My vote goes out to Jack Cusack, who carries out the duties of starter at the annual Labour Day sports gatherings in Wellington. Jack recently celebrated his 80th birthday! Sixty-three years ago Jack Cusack linked up with the St. Albans Cricket Club, Christchurch, and has never allowed his interest in the game to slacken. He has long been a stalwart of the Wellington Mercantile League Cricket Association, the organisation that has made great strides in one-day matches in recent years.
Elected president of the New Zealand Women's Hockey Association a few days after its eightieth birthday, Mr. Cusack has had a long association with that branch of sport, having been selector, manager and coach for many touring teams in addition to carrying out the onerous duties of referee until he had passed his 75th birthday. Five years ago he was appointed one of the selectors to choose the New Zealand team to tour Australia.
In track and field sport Jack Cusack played a prominent part as administrator after ending his competitive days. He was Secretary of the New Zealand Cycling Alliance, the controlling body in the closing days of last century, and in that capacity was associated with the first Australasian cycling and athletic championships staged in New Zealand.
His association with sport did not end with those mentioned above, for he was a member of the Christchurch Fire Brigade, the Wellington Volunteer Fire Police, and for many years was handicapper and starter at Fire Brigade competitions.
By trade a hairdresser, Jack is unique among men of his profession … he is a good listener! Instead of doing the talking—and he can really tell you something interesting—this veteran prefers to do the listening, and few realise what a fund of anecdotes is possessed by this wonderful “young” old-timer.
News of the success of New Zealand's Army footballers has been trickling through week by week and it is obvious, from the names of the players, that a large number of our best players have donned the khaki and are no longer available for play in New Zealand. Just as the boys of the Echelon in Egypt have the tradition of the original Anzacs to urge them on to greater efforts, so have our soldier footballers a great tradition set them. The Army team of 1919 included some of the greatest players ever to wear the All Black jersey, and had the men from Mesopotamia been included, New Zealand might have fielded its “best ever.” But the lads of 1940 have a bigger handicap to overcome, on the football field, than was the lot of the 1919 brigade. Our Rugby mana stood on a pedestal in the years prior to 1919, but in recent years we have had our Rugby pride trampled into the dust by England, Wales, and South Africa. The time has arrived for the new generation to win its spurs on the field of battle and, also, to regain our Rugby prestige. The Army team of 1940 bids well to place New Zealand where she rightly belongs … at the top of the ladder.
A great champion is not necessarily a great sportsman … it is when you get a combination of both that you get the Real Champion. Such a champion is Pat Boot, British Empire half-mile champion who is now Second Lieutenant V. P. Boot. Pat, in thanking the New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association for its expressions of goodwill on his marriage, sent this letter:
A view from the Mount, Tauranga, showing the inner and outer beaches.
“Would you please convey to the members of the Council my sincere thanks for their very kind expression of good wishes to myself and wife on the occasion of our marriage and also their congratulations on my appointment to commissioned rank. I would also like to take this opportunity of thanking you all for the generous consideration you have shown me during my athletic career and for affording me the opportunity of competing overseas. Without these opportunities I feel sure I would not have been able to improve, and I can assure you that when time permits I will do my bit to pass on the knowledge which it has been my good fortune to gain. I intend to keep up my athletics in the Army, and, if the opportunity arises while I am overseas I do hope I will be able to put my best foot forward.”
To appreciate the true value of Boot's gesture of thanks it must be realised that he nearly missed selection for the 1936 Olympic team because the Council of the New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association did not consider him up to the required standard. This is not a “knock” at the N.Z.A.A.A.—I was one of the members who voted against his original inclusion—but merely a desire to put in the proper perspective the sporting gesture of Boot's letter of thanks.
R. B. Farquhar
Storied Coromandel! The Maruiwi peopled it subsequent to the coming of Kupe, round about 950 A.D. A proportion of “Toi's myriads” of the 1150 A.D. migration, poured in, conquered, and in the course of 400 years, lost it to the Tainui tribes, from among whom the Ngati Tamatera, and their related tribe, Ngati-Paoa, gradually emerged as the dominant people of the Coromandel Peninsula, and the Hauraki Gulf.
In 1769, Captain Cook noted the mighty forests of the high mountain ranges; so did the early day commanders of warships and keen-eyed traders, to whom “the grand spreading tops of the kauri, surmounting every other tree, and proclaiming itself king of the forest” meant kauri spars, for which they could get £200 apiece in London. In 1820, H.M.S. Coromandel, calling in for a load of spars, gave its name to the beautiful, land-locked circular harbour, on the shores of which nestled a native village.
Lying across the harbour exactly opposite the existing wharf, is a long, narrow island with lovely little sheltered bays, shelly white, and pohutukawa-fringed. Its name is Whanganui, though formerly it was Waiou. About 1835, a trading-station was established here by an American trader, William Webster, who was to cause almost a century of litigation between the United States and British governments. Webster worked up a considerable trade with the Maoris of the mainland in spars; pigs; and maize, which they grew in the valley occupied by the rambling township of to-day. A big genial man, Webster was yet a forceful character, who came to wield much power over the natives, though this was partly because of his well-stocked store, which he would make “tapu” to the tribe of any native who offended him. Such warm blankets, gay prints, and other articles of adornment; such sharp-edged tomahawks and adzes, and much-to-be-desired guns; such wonderful pipes of clay and cherrywood, and even more wonderful tobacco, had not hitherto come within their ken. The Maoris, therefore, walked warily where Webster was concerned, and bartered away their lands to the shrewd Yankee.
Webster, or “Waipeha,” as the Maoris named him had taken a chief's daughter to wife, native fashion. The Maoris called him “King of Waiou,” and here he reigned for several years till departing trade and rumours of Californian gold lured him across the sea. Had he but known, golden opportunity lay at his very front door, for just beside the mainland wharf are the deserted battery, fern-grown prospect tunnels, and mullock dumps of the once famous Hauraki gold-mine which drew thousands of miners to Coromandel, and proved to be a remarkable fortune-bringer.
It was in 1841 that Webster first put forward a claim for 500,000 acres of land, which included practically the whole coastline from Hauraki to Whangarei. This, he said, he purchased from the native owners between 1836 and 1839. Various commissions assigned him 42,000 acres of the land, although it does not appear that he actually got possession of it.
In 1845 Webster left New Zealand, but it was 1858 before he turned up in the United States to present his New Zealand land claim to the Washington government. The claims came before the Senate and were the subject of correspondencé over some years. In 1873, Webster went to London and put his claim before the Secretary of State for the Colonies, but nothing came of it. In 1876, 1880, and 1884 the claim came up again,
Coromandel's most modern building—The Rest Room.
Webster died at Baltimore, in 1897, and left his entire estate to his widow, Augusta J. Webster (his Maori wife he abandoned). The widow immediately prosecuted the claim with vigour, and a claim for Arbitration was made by the United States to Great Britain and included in the Schedule for Claims for 1910. The late Sir Robert Stout made an exhaustive report on the subject, and the case was set down for hearing in 1914, but was postponed because of the war. It was eventually heard at Washington, in December, 1925, when arbitrators were appointed by both governments. The claim was finally rejected, and so after 85 years the case was settled against Webster's heirs.
The first part of this story was told to me in Coromandel by Mr. P. Beveridge, retired manager of the Bank of New Zealand, who is a mine of such stories, all of which he verifies. The latter part of the story was taken from government files which are very vague as to Webster's doings in New Zealand. An American journalist writing for details of Webster's life remarks that nothing is forthcoming in America, but that Webster is quoted as saying that he knew well the East Indies, China, New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and New Zealand where he owned a lot of the country. He also claimed to know Queen Pomare well, and to speak her language. A colourful character was Webster!
He comes into another story. In 1840, Sir John Logan Campbell, Auckland's first merchant and well-known philanthropist, landed at Waiou from Sydney. Then a former ship's surgeon looking for adventure, he stayed on as Webster's paying-guest, and was often
The year, 1883, saw Church of England missionaries settled at Mana, near Coromandel, and in 1850 the Rev. T. S. Grace, crossing from Auckland, noted in his diary: “The bays here are very beautiful. The village of Coromandel is well situated and the surrounding land is suitable for cultivation. Here there is a large new chapel.” Of the chapel no trace remains, nor has the oldest inhabitant any recollection of it. Coromandel has seen another Anglican church come and go, for two years ago a gale of wind damaged the existing church so much that it had to be pulled down. A few grass-grown graves in a field above the entrance street mark its former site.
From 1840, bushmen arrived in earnest, and a sawmill town came into being. The kauri industry reached tremendous proportions. The ranges being steep, and streams numerous, use was made of driving-dams. The trees were felled, cut into suitable lengths by a cross-cut saw, and the lops shot down to creek water. Here they would lie until a “fresh” drove them down to the creek mouth, or harbour, where the “boom” was waiting. The boom was formed of a circle of logs chained together, often enclosing acres of water. The logs entered the boom, were fastened together, and towed to their destination. If the felled trees were far from deep water, a skidded road was formed of greased logs. This made a rough sort of wooden tramway onto which the logs were jacked. Sometimes bullock-teams, making their own track through the undergrowth, hauled out the logs.
In Coromandel many tales are told of the bush gangs who would toil for a year, to have a fat cheque and a week's “spree” at Christmas, after which, the cheque “blown,” they would go back to the bush. They lived on pork and potatoes for three meals a day, and thrived on it, for Coromandel is full of lone-lived, “hard-case” old bushmen, who delight to tell a tall story without even a twinkle.
There is still activity in the bush. We were interested in the growing pile of logs deposited by lorry at the tidal creek near our hotel. Arthur Hamilton, in charge of a cutting and log-hauling outfit on the Tokotea Range, said that the logs were from a patch of big timber left over from early days. Inaccessible then, the timber was now workable by “modern methods.” He invited us to see for ourselves. Next morning saw us on top of the range, where we had an unforgettable panoramic view of the township, beyond which stretched the smiling blue waters of the island-studded Hauraki Gulf on one side; and on the other, an equally unforgettable view of the road winding and twisting far below to lovely hill-encircled Kennedy Bay.
Here we waited till the lorry came out with its first log of the day. The road into the bush was on the east of the range just below the summit, and had been formed by Mr. Hamilton with his “bulldozer.” It was just of sufficient width for the lorry, and not always that, for we were pointed out the spot where it went over after dusk—a kauri log being the only casualty. Arriving at two huts, perched above road level, we were given a cup of tea before going on a few yards to the slipway. By invitation of Mr. Hamilton we took turns at riding on the bulldozer as it ploughed down the mountain side, and tore a trail through the forest to a felled log. Nikau palms, fern trees, and young saplings were bowled down like ninepins; broken logs, stumps, and other obstacles hurled themselves aside at the monster's coming. “Modern methods” would destroy the chances of any fugitive in a forest to-day.
The log, always felled some time before, was attached to the tractor by
A view of Coromandel Harbour showing the wharf.
Fir logs lying beside the wharf were part of a contract taken up by two expert Maori bushmen from Hokianga, and being light would be floated across the harbour.
Knowing that an army of kauri gumdiggers had once invaded Coromandel, I asked if the Hamilton enterprise ever found any gum.
“Plenty of it,” I was told, “but after digging it up, the bulldozer hurls it to the side of the track with other spoil, and so it usually gets buried again.”
Every Coromandel home has its collection of unusual gum specimens, but I was always advised to keep my admiration for “Mrs. Johnson's gum,” said to be unique and the result of 50 years’ collecting. Unfortunately something always turned up to prevent me from going along, as I was invited to do.
As official records have it. “The first authentic discovery of gold in New Zealand was made in Coromandel, in 1852. In October of that year, before the Provincial Councils had taken over, a body of representative Aucklanders offered a reward of £500 to the man who should first discover a valuable gold-field in the northern district of New Zealand. Within a week this was claimed by Charles Ring, officially
According to the story told me by a prominent resident of Coromandel, who knew Ring well, “Charlie Ring, and his brother, Fred, had a sawmill in the bush, to which the logs came down from Kapanga Creek, known locally as Driving Creek. One day while down at the creek, Charlie picked up a piece of rock showing colours of gold. His Californian experience led him to think it would assay well, so in his spare time he did a bit of prospecting. He got hold of some quartz nuggets, and washed a quantity of fine gold from the creek.”
Commissioners were sent to report on the proposed field, and discovered that the reef was on Maori ground, and that the natives, though friendly, were strongly against any more miners prospecting over their lands till some agreement had been reached. The commissioners, too, seemed to think it doubtful that the goldfield was extensive enough to pay for working, and so Charles Ring was never paid the promised reward. However, the government eventually made an agreement to pay the native owners £2 for each square mile of territory prospected; £1/10/- if the miners’ licenses issued exceeded 500; £2 if the licenses issued exceeded 1,000. Meanwhile, about 3,000 diggers flocked to discover that the getting of the gold meant hard work. The general opinion was that the field was poor, and it was abandoned within six months. Yet the Kapanga mine was to prove its worth.
After the gold discoveries of Otago, interest in Coromandel was revived. The Kapanga mine, worked at great profit, was the first to attract English capital to New Zealand. More than once the run of gold was lost to be re-discovered—a feature of all Coromandel mines where
In 1870, gold was discovered on the Tokotea, and for a number of years this mine yielded good dividends. A very beautiful formation of quartz crystals was found in the Tokotea reef—we picked up some good specimens which now glitter in our rockery. An old miner told us that he had often seen gold in quantity trapped between the crystals—but that was once. The Union beach mine gave good returns, as did the well-named Success Claim. It was, however, left for the famous Hauraki mine to create the boom of 1895, when a miner named Legge, working on tribute with his mates, took out some thousands of ounces of gold in a few weeks. To the field flocked 7,000 miners, and overnight Coromandel became a city.
The golden period is gone, but even to-day individual prospectors and miners have luck. On our recent stay mild excitement was caused by Herbie Anderson and his mate taking £300 worth of gold in three weeks from their claim near Castle Rock. Everyone in Coromandel will tell you there's as good gold in the hills as was ever taken out, and that the surface only has been tapped. Not enough development work was done at the time the mines were in full swing, but “modern methods,” and capital, would produce another bonanza.
In 1887 a School of Mines was established in Coromandel, and flourished for forty years. The course of instruction was comprehensive, and students from this school occupy prominent and responsible positions overseas. Sir Colin Fraser, Australia's leading engineer, was the son of a Coromandel sawmill proprietor. Before going to London to specialise further, he did much valuable work for the New Zealand Government, and afterwards Australia was quick to recognise his worth.
The Coromandel of to-day has other industries. Sheepfarming and dairying are now the real backbone of its existence. Coromandel granite, worked at the Moehau quarries on the Cape Colville road, is becoming well-known as a building stone. Off the wharf lies the oyster-boat, for oysters are everywhere about the peninsula. A mussel-dredger is also at work, and canning mussels is a Coromandel winter industry. The output is about 2,500 cases, and the whole of it goes to the Mann settlements of the north.
Coromandel is in no sense a tourist town, but in that lies its charm. Something of the old-time glamour persists. Perhaps this is because of its long isolation, for it is literally on the road to nowhere. At one time its communication with the outside world was entirely by sea; even to-day its cargo is sea-borne. Though Thames is only 35 miles away by road that road was, until lately, merely the old coaching road, and one that presented a problem to the motorist. It is still a road to travel with caution, but this is compensated for by the beauty of the rock-girt, pohutukawa-fringed coastline. To give a tropical twist to the scenery there are the acres of curiously distorted mangrove trees of its mud-flats, and the giant aloes that grow about lovely Te Kurneu Bay.
Coromandel abounds in good stories, and in friendly folk who have never learned to be “stand-offish” with strangers.
One could fill a book about the place, and about its past, and the half would never be told. We're all “characters” here, you know. “I can't make out why the newspapers have let us alone for so long,” declared a leading citizen. And he meant it!