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The New Zealand Railways Magazine is on sale through the principal booksellers, or may be obtained post-free for 6/- per annum.
Employees of the Railway Department are invited to forward news items or articles bearing on railway affairs. The aim of contributors should be to supply interesting topical material tending generally towards the betterment of the service.
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I hereby certify that the publisher's lists and other records disclose that the circulation of the “New Zealand Railways Magasine” has not been less than 20,000 copies each issue since July, 1930.
Deputy-Controller and Auditor-General 27/9/33.
Although Shakespeare had never seen the Venice of his Merchant, and Mark Twain wrote “Innocents Abroad” without moving from his native heath, these strangely dissimilar tales, with their European setting, have, in their different ways, added much to human enjoyment, but nothing in the way of dependable knowledge, regarding the customs of the people or the geographic features of the places described. For there is only one fully satisfactory way to get to know about a place, and that is to go there.
In recent years an increasing desire to travel has been aided by greatly improved facilities for transport, and the economic value of travellers to the places visited is so great that a huge business of travel promotion has developed. This business is, in general, rather unorganised, depending on individual efforts for personal or private company interests, and seldom does it occur that a complete service is given. For, properly understood, travel promotion includes dependable advice as to the places worth visiting for specific purposes, the creation amongst travellers of a desire to visit such places, complete arrangements for their transport, adequate provision for their accommodation, and personal assistance for their guidance and pleasure. When all these elements of service are properly co-ordinated then the place to be visited has a fair chance to gain a just proportionate reward in tourist traffic according to its worth.
The Governor-General of this Dominion, whose remarkable powers of observation have been applied during a long period of travel over most parts of the world to gauging the attractions of various places, declares in a special article published in this issue, that no place has scenic attractions to equal New Zealand's. With this sound judgment, supplementing as it does that of other experienced travellers, this Dominion is in a strong position to organise its travel promotion for sight-seers along the most modern lines. What has already been done in the promotion of internal travel by the Railway Department acting in association with local bodies, travel agencies and associations, and resort interests, is proof of the efficacy of this kind of service in developing travel.
Much remains to be done to make the business of travel promotion within New Zealand achieve maximum results. In the matter of travel promotion from overseas countries to New Zealand some thought has recently been concentrated on the idea of joint action by countries in or bordering upon the Pacific'to draw travellers from Atlantic countries. It is generally recognised that no one country could do this effectively, and that efforts by individual countries acting without co-ordination of any kind might well prove an actual disservice to visitors anxious to see the best that the Pacific has to offer. Where identity of interest is obvious there is every economic inducement for the promotion of travel by the united efforts of the countries concerned. Parallels in ordinary business are easily found where, identity of interest being proved, united campaigns to sell some commercial product, without specific reference to the individual manufacturers of it, have given a definite impetus to its general use or consumption. It is along these lines that the most hopeful possibility of largely increasing the influx of visitors to New Zealand lies. This country can certainly entertain and accommodate more visitors. The hotels at the principal resorts are now maintained at a high standard and the facilities for travel have never been better. Any development which may result in a steadily increasing stream of tourists to and through New Zealand will give a valuable help to trade throughout the Dominion and add to the world's knowledge of its own fairest country.
Now and again, but with a rather sad infrequency, one hears a New Zealand song to New Zealand music. New Zealand writers sometimes think their lot a hard one, but it is easy compared with that of New Zealand composers. They deserve every honour for they are of the company that work for love. In most instances, their very names are unknown to their countrymen. A few who are interested may search them out, but they have neither the market nor the publicity of artist or writer. Their fame will come perhaps, when all pioneer fame comes, in a renascence. One hears beautiful little songs by New Zealanders, but they, being difficult, will never be whistled at street corners. It is good to record that the Maori tunes are, through fine and disinterested effort, being saved from oblivion, but these others, too, should be preserved. Alfred Hill's, period will be worth study in the years to come.
Poems by New Zealand writers, living and dead, have been set and set well by other New Zealanders. A good song is brief with an emotional appeal. Chesterton, I think, stresses that that appeal is better personal and direct, quoting Goldsmith's “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly” as inferior to “Ye Banks and Braes” where the sinner sings her own sorrow.
Of this direct, personal appeal there is little in our literature. The Maori songs have that primal simplicity, but they are known to us only by translation and something of their fervour, their poignancy, is lost. Domett has a little of that directness in Miroa's Song, but the words are somehow a little sickly and un-Maori. Here are the most natural stanzas of it: —
Several of Jessie Mackay's songs have been set, but there is one that cries out for setting and that is: —
“The Nixie's Prayer” would make a wonderful, wistful song.
There is in the first anthology by Alexander and Currie a little rhyme called, Te Raupo, by M. A. Sinclair. It sings to itself from its very beginning.
Its appeal, however, would be to the ear more than to the heart.
Johannes Andersen, if the birds had a city, would be given the freedom of it. Music is heard behind the lines, as it were, in these stanzas of his on the bellbird:
And this of Bracken's would make a magnificent song. It has an exultant ruthlessness that only deep chords could mate: —
That has the Maori fierceness. I think that our literature of the future will be less Maori in incidents and personalities than in verve and form. The legendary influence will be there, but our art will have to spring from something nearer to our own experience, pride, and desires.
There is a little lullaby of Mary Poynter's that drowses into music: —
That weakens in the last line, but one can hear a running accompaniment to it like the ripple behind “The Sally Gardens.”
An un-sombre little tune rises somewhere surely to Alan Mulgan's: —
There are few songs to old women yet somehow an air can be imagined to Fairburn's: —
One of Alison Grant's calls for music too: —
There is a very desolation of sound in J. C. Beaglchole's “Despondency” that begs a minor setting: —
And there is a smooth, soft music in this fragment from one of Robin Hyde's:—
Helen Glen Turner achieves true sorrow in “The Return”: —
There is a sough in Una Currie's “Pines” that should haunt some musician:—
These are but a few of the many that might be set. The examples have been chosen solely for their singing sense. Some poems are sufficient of themselves and the poetic gift does not presuppose the lyric gift; others court music, and from the marriage of two arts a song is born.
One hardly associates castles with New Zealand, yet there are at least two in the country, and both are in Dunedin. The most important is Larnach's Castle, which is situated on a commanding position on Otago Peninsula. It is just like a real English castle, complete with battlements and towers, and the sturdy entrance doors are guarded by two massive stone lions. Mr. J. M. Larnach conceived the idea of building a castle on the lines of one situated at Dalkeith, in Scotland. He intended to have a number of small farms dependent on the castle and worked by yeomen. His dream commenced to take shape in 1871, but it was not until nearly eighteen years later that the castle was completed. It cost in the vicinity of £150,000 to build. Of this sum a large amount was spent in haulage, for the distance from Dunedin to the castle is several miles. Large sums, too, were paid out for decorative work: the intricate and delicate carvings, one of the castle's most absorbing attractions, took years to complete. Apart from building expenses it cost £50,000 to furnish the place. When Mr. Larnach died the Government took over the castle, and it was used in conjunction with Seacliff Mental Hospital, but later on it was found unnecessary and was abandoned, though a caretaker was left in charge. Later still the castle was offered for sale and was bought by Mr. Jackson Purdie, a prominent Dunedin business man, for £3000. Mr. Purdie restored the castle, and to-day it is a veritable show-place. The magnificent ballroom is full of rare china, period furniture, etc., and the grounds are splendidly laid out.
The other castle is Cargill's Castle, and this occupies a bold position on the cliffs above St. Clair. It was built by Captain Cargill, and though far less pretentious than Larnach's Castle, it yet has a definite castle-like appearance. The march of progress (?) has converted this castle into a cabaret and tearooms.
Arising out of an editorial which appeared in one of the staff journals recently, it has occurred to me that some thoughts upon the subject of mutual confidence as affecting the internal relations of the Department might be helpful at the present time to both the staff and the management.
It is clear that confidence and integrity as between man and man is a prime necessity in all classes of work where more than one person is involved in production, and that all successful trade is carried through on the principle of good faith as between buyers and sellers. Particularly in railway transport, where so many factors affecting the safety and well-being of human life and limb are involved, is it a dominant consideration that there should be complete confidence as between man and man. This applies whether it be in laying a rail, placing a girder, shunting a train, giving or receiving a signal, building a car, erecting a station, or in performing any other of the thousand and one actions involved in the efficient performance of the Department's work. The scale of this work is summarised in the statement that last year we carried twenty million passengers, as well as six million tons of goods, the equivalent of 2,000 million gross ton miles, over our three thousand miles of rail.
Anyone can see that not even the most ordinary shunting operation can be successful without complete confidence and understanding between the driver, the fireman, and the shunter. It is equally true, although Perhaps not so readily understood, that a spirit of confidence and understanding of an exactly similar nature is necesary between the management and the men throughout the service for the success of the whole undertaking and the peace of mind of those associated with it. To realise this fully it must be clear that there does not exist any hard and fast line of distinction between the men and the management. Every individual employee forms an essential part in the complete structure of railway management; each has to manage something or somebody, to receive and give instructions to plan and account for work, to accept and place responsibility—and this applies in every branch of the service, from the latest joined apprentice, cadet or porter, through the whole structure to the General Manager. This being so, any attempt to break down faith in each other throughout the organisation must be harmful to the whole.
It is only by maintaining our faith in one another that the Department can continue to hold public confidence, and any action which tends to undermine this, if it receives any support, must have serious consequences upon the morale of the service, and through that, upon the stability of employment within it.
Those who occupy controlling positions in the higher ranks of the service have worked through from lower positions, and they are just as anxious as any other members of the Department that the rewards of service may be equitably distributed and as ample as the circumstances of the Department warrant. It is only right that, for the common weal, their good faith in this respect should be fully realised.
Lord Bledisloe, Governor-General of New Zealand, in his inspiring address before the Auckland Travel Club on the 7th June, did a great service for New Zealand by the impressive and authoritative declaration he made regarding this country's claim to world supremacy in the diversity of her scenic attractions. The following verbatim report of the address is published by the courtesy of His Excellency.
Before becoming relatively immobile as Governor-General of this Dominion, I was for many years an unwearying globe-trotter. I believe that no living Englishman has travelled more extensively in different parts of the world on tours of agricultural investigation than myself, and in course of them I have met many interesting people and seen much entrancing scenery. Before coming to New Zealand, I was able to say with sincerity and conviction that I knew of no country with a greater variety of scenic loveliness than Great Britain, no County in it that excelled Gloucestershire in this respect, and no district in that County more beautiful than that which contains my own ancestral home. But my views are now entirely altered. New Zealand can claim, without fear of contradiction, to possess a greater diversity of outstanding scenic attractiveness than any territory of similar area to be found anywhere in the world. What is a little disconcerting is to find that most New Zealanders—even those of means who can afford to travel—know relatively little of their own country. They have yet to discover it—to assume the cloak of Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook —and put personally to the test the inexpressible joy of gazing with rapture upon the numerous aesthetic gems of their national heritage, with proud consciousness that it is their own Fatherland and trebly blessed by its having, moreover, an incomparable climate and flying over it the Union Jack, with its message of freedom, justice and noble ideals of character and service.
If your Auckland Travel Club is out, not merely to extend hospitality to visitors from other lands, but also to promote knowledge of your own land, it will fulfil most opportunely a muchneeded want. In order to instruct and guide others we must have knowledge ourselves. Your Tourist Industry could, by organisation and advertisement, be made the most lucrative of all industries in the Dominion and possess the advantage of being dependent for its profits upon Nature's bounteous gifts rather than upon human toil and the unsettling vicissitudes of commodity prices. In spite of her immense wheat industry, Canada derives greater wealth from her tourist traffic than she does from her wheat, and New Zealand has immeasurably more to show her guests in varied scenic beauty and natural phenomena than has the premier Dominion. The average visitor to your shores has never heard of any tourist objective in this country other than Rotorua. There is no more fascinating health resort in the world than Rotorua. But what does he know of New Zealand who only Rotorua knows? Have you not in this Dominion the Empire's loveliest mountain in Mt. Egmont, the world's most beautiful glacier in Franz Josef, its most impressive Fjords in Milford, Dusky, and Queen Charlotte Sounds, its most inspiring group of snow-clad mountain peaks in your Mt. Cook range, lakes lovelier than those of Switzerland in Otago and Westland (not to mention South Auckland), glow-worm caves which rival those of Slovakia, thermal wonders comparable with those in Yellowstone Park in America, and vistas of incomparable charm such as those which feed the eye from the heights of Mt. Tongariro, from the hills on the Waitangi Estate, looking out over your lovely Bay of Islands, or from the top of Paekakariki Hill overlooking Kapiti Island and the curving foreshore of the historic coast which faces it? Where, too, in the world can finer native bush be found than that which you possess, where grander giants of choice timber (so far as the ruthless woodman's axe has spared them) than those in Waipoua Forest, orr where birds with more melodious song than your tui, and your bell-bird, or with more splendid plumage than your kaka, your pukeko or your kiwi? What country outside Britain can show better high-roads for motor travel, or a greater choice of exceptionally good sport, obtainable at small expense? What other country has such alluring sun-bathed, flower-decked, winter resorts (comparable with the French Riviera, Madeira or Teneriffe) as Nelson, in the South Island, Tauranga on the East Coast, or Paihia or Russell in the Far North of this Dominion? Is there any country where the clear atmosphere and actinic light are more favourable to successful photography?
This newly established Travel Club has my warm sympathy and cordial hopes for its success in fulfilling its three main objects, namely:
I referred just now to the inadequate acquaintance of New Zealanders with their own domiciliary environment. They are not peculiar in this respect. Out of the seven million people who inhabit Greater London not one in a hundred has ever seen the Tower of London, the National Gallery, or the British Museum. The bulk of those that have have been taken there by their country cousins, when on a jaunt to the Metropolis. It is the same in America. When I was touring there in 1926, besides visiting numerous farms, Universities and research stations, I managed, within six weeks, to travel about 15,000 miles and to visit places as far apart as Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minnesota, North Dakato, Washington City, Salt Lake City, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park (with its geysers and hot springs), the Yosemite Valley, and the Rocky Mountains, and to enjoy the hospitality of (amongst other notable individuals) Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Calvin Coolidge, the American President. Before sailing from New York for England I was invited by my host, a leading Presbyterian in the real estate business, to meet at lunch ten of the leading citizens of New York, all elderly men and all millionaires, in a restaurant on the 40th floor of the tall sky-scraping Equitable Building. After lunch I was asked, quite unexpectedly, in reply to the toast of my health, to describe shortly the area of my six weeks' itinerary. As I did so the faces of my hearers grew longer and longer with astonishment, until one of them exclaimed “I guess there's not one of us New Yorkers present who in sixty years has seen as much of America as Lord Bledisloe has in six weeks.” To which they all assented. Lack of means was not the reason in their case, but the dangerous habit of human immobility.
There is no doubt that travelling about our own country and, if we can afford it, about the world, not only conduces to human harmony, confidence and co-operation, but is mentally stimulating and highly educative. Sometimes it enables one to carry valuable information resulting from research or experience from one person or country to another. This has often happened to me in visiting farmers in different parts of the world. The most notable instance occurred to me when, in 1927, as Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Land Drainage of England, I went with my Commission to Holland to examine there the oldest and most efficient schemes of land drainage in the world, and incidentally to view the conversion of the bulk of the great Zuyder Zee into dry land—an engineering feat second only to that of the Panama Canal—which was then in progress. In the course of a speech of welcome from the President of the Dutch province of Over-Yssel, adjoining Holland's mighty marine lake, he stated that they were about to expend a sum of several hundred thousand gilders on research work, in order to discover how to eliminate from the drained land the various sodium salts (particularly sodium carbonate) contained in the sea water and thus enable economic plants to grow successfully on it. I was able to tell him, as the result of my visit the previous year to the twelve apostles of the Mormon community at Salt Lake City, in the State of Utah, in America, that this problem had been solved several years previously by Mormon research workers in Utah, and that if the Zuyder Zee scientists chose to apply to them for information, expenditure
Of all the men whom the War made famous, perhaps the greatest is President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. The son of a poor coachman, and himself a farrier, his ambition from birth was to emancipate the peasants of Northern Austria-Hungary and Moravia from the racial thraldom which had prevailed there for four hundred year. Having educated himself as a child and gained entrance to Prague University, where he won high distinction, he found in the Great War his opportunity, and made the most of it, with the result that Czechoslovakia is now a separate self-governing State and one of the largest in Europe. Apart from our own Monarch, he is probably the most loved man in Europe. When in Bratislava, in 1926, I visited Masaryk in his beautiful palace at Tapolcany—a palace which belonged formerly to the late Emperor of Austria and is still full of his priceless furniture and works of art, just as he left it. I found Masaryk the most dignified, well-educated, statesmanlike, and best-dressed man in a position of supreme authority whom I have met anywhere outside the British Empire. His simplicity of life, human sympathy and consuming love of his fellow-men explain the reverence in which he is universally held by his compatriots. Although over eighty, he is remarkably active; he rides regularly every day, and there is no better horseman in Central Europe than he.
What more can I say in this short half-hour regarding incidents, places and people whose varied attractions and peculiarities have enriched my life and developed an insatiable appetite for greater knowledge of the world, and travel as the surest means of appeasing it? Time fails me to tell of such things as the world's loveliest natural harbour at Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil; El Capitan, its most magnificent cliff composed of white granite and rising perpendicularly 3,000 feet from a pine-clothed plateau of similar altitude in the Yosemite Valley; the dazzling natural colours of the stratified rocks of the canyon of the Yellowstone River; the intriguing beauty of the great curtain of the American Falls at Niagara when ingeniously illuminated at night with coloured electric lamps; the inimitable taste of the multi-coloured frocks of the Slovak peasants as they proceed to church on a Sunday morning from their picturesque long-eaved cottages beneath the glorious Carpathian Mountains; the calm serenity of Lakes Como and Maggiore amid their vine-clad hills, broken only by the soft melodious serenade of some romantic Italian boatman; the perfect natural setting of the placid Bay of Spezia, the Italian Naval Station in the Riveria, immortally associated with the memories of Byron and Shelley; the sublime craftsmanship of the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the dignity and symbolism of the King's Kava ceremony in your own Mandated Territory of Western Samoa; the vast ensilage crop of brilliant sunflowers (twenty tons to the acre) on the Prince of Wales's Ranch
In conclusion, I would beg of those who have enjoyed the immense privelege of world travel to grasp opportunities of sharing their knowledge and impressions with some of the thousands who have not had the same good fortune. Six years ago I was asked by a friend if I would give a lecture on America, illustrated by my own photographic lantern slides, to a mass meeting of work-people at a People's Institute in North Kensington—one of the slummiest districts in London. I have never addressed a more crowded, a more ragged, or a more enthusiastic audience. They kept on crying out for more, and my agreed hour spun out to two and a half hours. At the end of it, as I was leaving the overpoweringly stuffy hall, the gangway was blocked by the outstretched arms of an elderly, shock-headed man of immense stature and gleaming eyes, dressed in an old flannel shirt, and a brilliant red tie, who accosted me as follows: —“You don't leave this hall, guv'nor, until I've given you a bit of my mind. For forty years I've been a revolutionary—a Bolshevist —because the likes of you can see God's beautiful and wonderful world and we poor devils can't. But now it's all changed guv'nor. I'm discontented no longer. For you and I have been fellow travellers this evening in the great outside world—mates, so to speak, on a long and lovely journey in a far-off land. You've made one old man happy for the rest of his life.” No experience in my life has touched me more deeply or given me more food for thought. I suggest that you may deem it worth while to include within the activities of your Travel Club the turning into happy “Fellow Travellers” of the many around you whose mental outlook is spacious, although their lot in life be cramped, who have, like, ourselves, the “wanderlust,” but, owing to straitened circumstances, have to keep it eternally suppressed. The cinema is doing good in this respect. But the personal contact of the traveller can do much more.
One of the most difficult problems facing railways all over the world to-day is that which concerns ways and means of meeting the ever-growing passenger business handled at city termini. In the past, city passenger stations were often planned and constructed with little thought of future expansion, so that the enlargement and remodelling of the average city terminus is both a costly and perplexing proposition.
In London the situation is especially harassing, and attention has recently been focussed on the possibilities associated with approach track widening as a means of facilitating terminal operations. It is recognised that terminal congestion may often be completely removed by the provision of better facilities on the approach tracks some miles outside the city, and noteworthy widenings accomplished beyond the big London stations have been the means of securing high operating efficiency at relatively modest cost.
Liverpool Street is a typical London terminus, handling by steam power an exceedingly dense suburban business as well as a heavy main-line traffic, train arrivals and departures totalling 1,230 daily. Here, track widenings outside the station have revolutionised conditions within the terminus and rendered unnecessary costly station alterations. Commencing on 1st January, the L. & N.E. Railway operated a four-track mainline from Liverpool Street as far as Shenfield, 20 1/2 miles from the metropolis. Hitherto the four-track mainline extended only 14 miles from Liverpool Street, and the provision of the two new tracks for a distance of 6 1/2 miles has come as an immense boon. The 20 1/2 mile stretch of four lines of way out of the terminus has enabled the management to entirely separate local from express services; while new power-operated signalling equipment has rendered practicable a three-minute headway, which will also meet any future requirements associated with possible electrification works.
Until the building of the new Waterloo terminus of the Southern Railway, Liverpool Street was the most commodious main-line terminal in London. Opened exactly sixty years ago, and at one time the London headquarters of the old Great Eastern Railway, Liverpool Street is to-day the largest of the three London termini owned by the L. & N.E. line. King's Cross and Marylebone are the other London stations on the system, both handling traffic to and from the north and midlands.
All the big London main-line stations are placed some distance from the actual centre of the city, being arranged in a circle with inter-connecting tube and bus services of a unique character. Liverpool Street lies on the eastern side of the city; on the north there are the King's Cross and Marylebone termini of the L. & N.E. line, and the Euston and St. Pancras stations of the L.M. & S. system; westwards lies the G.W. Company's Paddington terminal; while to the south are the Southern stations of Waterloo and Victoria. The London termini lay no claim to being the finest in the world, but, taken all in all, they probably represent the most striking and most efficient collection of passenger stations to be found in any one centre.
Although little is heard of the railways of Ireland, steady progress continues to be made by the transportation undertakings both of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. In the Free State, it will be remembered, one big railway—the Great Southern —was some years ago formed out of the individual lines serving the area, just as the ambitious grouping scheme was carried out in Britain. The Great Southern, with headquarters in Dublin, has proved itself a truly goahead concern, and this line has recently embarked upon big improvement works.
In all, some #200,000 are to be spent by the Great Southern upon improvements of various kinds. Track betterments will give improved services with Waterford, Kerry, Limerick and Galway, while new trains will also be introduced on the Dublin-Cork main-line. Ten new main-line locomotives are to be constructed in the railway shops, and new rollingstock will include 500 goods wagons designed for the movement of sugarbeet. In association with the Dublin tramways, the Great Southern has been given a virtual monopoly of road transport, and in this connection the railway is constructing a huge central omnibus station in Dublin, with workshops, washing-sheds, and other modern amenities. There is also being developed a comprehensive plan for co-ordinated rail-road transport employing railway-owned vehicles throughout, and this will give quick door-to-door service for merchandise of every kind throughout the country.
Now that trade is steadily improving in Britain, the railways are adding to their stocks of freight locomotives. The L.M. & S. line has under construction in the Crewe Works a batch of forty new tender locomotives of the 2–6 wheel arrangement, designed especially for fast freight haulage. The new engines are on similar lines to the existing “13,000” class of standard 2–6 superheated locomotives, of which there are some 245 already in service on the line. The
The cab equipment of the new engines is especially interesting. The width over cab plates is 8 ft. 6 in. and the drive is on the left-hand side, tipup seats being fitted on each side of the cab. There are two sliding windows on each side, and a wellplaced hinged window on the front cab plate.
Greenwich time is the basis upon which all the British railways operate. Across the Channel various timing systems are in force, all based upon Greenwich. These include West European Time, the same as Greenwich; Amsterdam Time, 20 minutes ahead of Greenwich; Central European Time, one hour ahead of Greenwich; and Eastern European Time, two hours ahead of Greenwich. These standard railway times are especially interesting, because it is just fifty years since the world of railways put its time in order. Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway manager, was the pioneer of standardised timing. He planned to divide the earth up into twenty-four zones, with a standard meridian as the centre of each, in which time would always be uniform. To-day, as one journeys round the world, the clock is conveniently advanced or retarded one hour as the passage is made from zone to zone.
Practically all the countries of the European mainland work to the 24-hour clock. In Britain, the old a.m. and p.m. arrangement persists, but there is a movement on foot to adopt the 24-hour clock, and this would undoubtedly simplify time-table arrangement and prove a convenience to the travelling public.
Post-war government legislation in many lands definitely extends a helping hand to the railways, and frees them from nineteenth century enactments which tended to restrict their useful activities as common carriers. In Britain there has recently come into operation the Road and Rail Traffic Act, 1933, which affords relief from former legislation, under which the railways were compelled to weigh meticulously the quoting of a rate for a particular commodity, lest they should be called, before the courts upon a charge of conferring undue preference towards one trader as against another engaged in the same business anywhere in the land. This relief has rendered possible a new scheme of rating known as the “agreed charge,” to be determined by the railway and the trader in consultation, and providing for the movement of traffic at a fixed figure per unit, generally per ton.
The new plan, now being taken up enthusiastically by most large consignors, does away with the old system of charging by distance, and dispenses with the time-honoured railway “classification” of merchandise. The trader, on his part, undertakes to forward all his goods by rail service—which, of course, includes railoperated road service—and altogether the new plan promises to prove both simple and efficient.
In the handling of goods traffic, it is remarkable how extensively mechanical appliances are now employed in Britain. Freight is no longer laboriously moved to the loading crane in warehouses and yards; instead, mobile cranes are speedily moved into position alongside the goods, and the transfer to or from wagon made in a few minutes. Handbarrowing in goods stations has been replaced to a large extent by the employment of petrol-driven trucks, and experiments are now being made with moving platforms. In city collection and delivery services, horses and carts still have their use, but by degrees motor trucks and tractors are replacing horses.
Anyone travelling through N.Z. at present and seeing the large number of pine plantations now being milled cannot fail to appreciate the potential value of the large pine forests established by N.Z. Perpetual Forests Ltd.
Sawmillers are finding that it costs less, and is much more profitable to mill plantations instead of natural forests, which are now mostly inaccessible.
The importation of foreign boxing timber has dropped considerably and the milling of Insignis Plantations has been responsible for this.
Very satisfactory returns are being received for trees planted without any thought of profit.*
Mr. W. P. Reeves, who died in London in 1932 at the age of seventy-five years, was the first native-born New Zealander to rise to eminence in the fields of literature and statesmanship. He was a pioneer in advanced industrial legislation, and was the first Minister of Labour in the New Zealand Cabinet. He has been described as the foremost writer this country has produced; his reputation rests chiefly on his book “The Long White Cloud.” Nearly half of his life was spent in England, many years of it as High Commissioner for New Zealand.
To be born clever, though poor; that is a good thing. To be born clever and with the proverbial silver spoon in mouth; that is better. For the spoon, or what it symbolises, permits to natural ability the educational advantages and varnish of the schools. If a young man is not only clever but possesses what, in the vernacular, is called 'the gift of gab'; if he possesses a tongue not only voluble but quick to answer back, and waspish in the answering, added to a disposition with more aloes than honey in it, who shall say where, nowadays, that young man is going to stop?”
That rather tart prologue to a character sketch is from “Political Portraits,” by “Quiz,” a pamphlet in which many New Zealand Parliamentary figures of over forty years ago were described, often in unflattering and sarcastic fashion. “Quiz” was Joseph Eyison, a journalist of the day in Wellington, who plied a skilful and mordant pen. The young man was the Hon. William Pember Reeves, Minister for Justice, and soon to be first Minister of the Department of Labour. He had been five years in Parliament when “Political Portraits” appeared, and had given his fellow-members such a taste of his quality that “Quiz” had adequate warrant for his wonder where so clever a young man was likely to stop. Indeed, Mr. Reeves, who was then thirty-five, went far since his early years in Parliament, and achieved even greater fame than the writer of 1892 was destined to hear. Politics absorbed all his energies then; it was later that he took pains to develop a literary style and an historical sense that brought him a wider celebrity than a lifetime of Parliamentary warfare would have won.
William Pember Reeves was born at Lyttelton in 1857. His father was the Hon. W. Reeves, who was Minister of Public Works in the Fox-Vogel Government of 1873, so it may be considered natural that he should develop a bent for argument and the arena of party contention. He was a clever lad at Christ's College, where he gained five scholarships, but he did not follow this up with a University course. He did, indeed, go to England with the intention of graduating at Oxford, but ill-health compelled a return to New Zealand. He studied law and qualified as a barrister, but the attractions of newspaper writing, where he had the opportunity of expressing himself on all manner of topics from day to day, far outweighed those of a law office. He became a contributor to the “Lyttelton Times”—now the “Christchurch Times”—and after editing the weekly “Canterbury Times” for a time he became, in 1889, editor of the daily. There he had the fullest scope for his pen, which was now beginning to be described with truth as brilliant. He was a young editor of ideas and ideals; he had his own conceptions of the duties and rights of democracy, and he was ambitious to lead the way in the establishment of a reformed social order which should replace the old conservative methods of government and life that were becoming intolerable. Inevitably all this led on to an entry into politics; in fact two years before he became editor of the “Lyttelton Times” he had found his way into Parliament as M.H.R. for St. Albans, Christchurch.
Mr. Reeves was only three years in Parliament before he became a Minister. His vigorous opposition to the old order of things clearly marked him out for Cabinet rank when the Liberal Party, of which Ballance and Seddon and John Mackenzie were the chief stalwarts, secured victory over the diehards of the Conservative army. Reeves' first portfolio was that of Education. In this capacity he initiated a number of improvements in the school syllabus and the general management of the education system. A little later he was Minister of Justice. Then, when the Department of Labour was established, with Mr. Edward Tregear as its first Secretary, he was the first Minister, and he threw all his talent and his enthusiasm into the legislation that focussed on New Zealand the attention of industrial and social reformers all over the world. Here was something new, an unknown little country at the back of beyond putting into practice new and quite daring methods of securing better terms for the working classes and means for
Here it is appropriate to continue the sketch—one would not call it altogether an appreciation—of the young Liberal crusader in Joseph Evison's “Political Portraits,” the little book of 1892. “Mr. Reeves” (says “Quiz”) “was born clever and under such a lucky star that his natural cleverness has been polished, or at least sharpened, in the schools. Moreover, he is the possessor of that great political pearl beyond price—the power of facile expression. In his disposition and conversation are no undue proportions of the saccharine that cloys. So equipped, to what political height may he not rise? He has alrèady risen—in political life—with a certain startling rapidity. It seems but yesterday since he was a profoundly nervous, blushing and distressing selfconscious parliamentary neophyte, who coyly disburdened himself of shrinking little sarcasms in the House and blushed to find them heard. So may the briefless but ambitious barrister, whose down is not all come upon him, practice small, meek jocosities in presence of an unoccupied woolsack. But we have changed all that, and now when the Hon. W. P. Reeves bursts eloquence upon the House it is with a sarcasm meteor-like in its brilliance and the self-confidence of a hoary leader of men. We tremble, we reiterate, to think to what altitudes—political altitudes—he may soar before he stops.
“Had England agreed with Mr. Reeves, or had Mr. Reeves agreed with England, he might have stayed there. Staying there, it is more likely that his peculiar bent of mind would have drawn him into the vortex of politics, and that the associations and circumstances among which he then dwelt would have made him a Conservative—a fine old crusted Tory of Tories. In time, for with his talents he must have made his mark, he might have even assumed the mantle which Benjamin Disraeli, the erstwhile red-hot Radical, left behind him when he went to—to somewhere where mantles are not needed. Who knows but, had Mr. Reeves remained in England, that fifty years hence the English people might have been decorating his statue with flowers—buttercups and daisies and other floral emblems of innocence. It was not to be, however, and so, instead of the good old English gentleman, one of the olden time, drinking port and swearing fealty to Church and State, we have the fiery Radical, the red-hot Socialist, the perspiring dreamer of very magnificent but perfectly Utopian dreams! Of course we ask the pardon of Mr. Reeves for presuming to draw any comparison between him and Earl Beaconsfield. We were, however, pressed for an analogy.”
The keenly critical “Quiz” went on to say that “as far as fluency and quickness of repartee went there was probably no one in the House, except Mr. R. W. J. Reeves, who can touch W. P. But their methods, if not their names, are utterly different. The repartee of 'Dick' Reeves redounds with fun and geniality, while that of his Ministerial namesake is redolent of sulphur and vinegar. Mr. W. P. Reeves does not shine so brilliantly in his longer essays, being too anxious to sacrifice solidity to effect. So anxious—some might say—to maintain the reputation of an infant phenomenon. Of his genuine cleverness, his capacity for hard and sustained intellectual toil none can have the slightest doubt. In all that regards education he is head and shoulders above his fellow Ministers. He has the brain to conceive, the energy and knowledge necessary to carry out difficult affairs, and he has some pluck. But he has no tact, and he does not inspire affection or even personal enthusiasm. Those most closely associated with him in politics admire his head, but do not praise his heart. It may be that the knowledge of this fact has had a malign influence upon him and has—as in the case of many another able man—made him bitter. His sole idea of politics seems to be that they are a war of tongues, and that he who can say the nastiest thing in the nastiest manner must inevitably win. Time, however, working on material so plastic, cannot fail to mellow and round the clever young man. As he mellows, as he gets more real experience of men and affairs, he will inevitably see the folly of many of the wild political doctrines he now appears to believe in.”
That Mr. Reeves mellowed in time we know, though he did not repent of the “wild political doctrines” that Mr. Evison scarified. The things that seemed so wild and revolutionary to some people in 1892 are mild and commonplace indeed in 1934.
Although Reeves delighted in the fray of party politics and in the opportunity which gave full play to his Socialistic ideals, it must have been in the nature of a relief to him to turn his steps into a new and wonderful path, the way to London. He left the Cabinet to become Agent-General (later High Commissioner) for the colony in England. That position, in which he did much to advance the credit and renown of his country in London, he held for twelve years. When he left it, it was not to return to New Zealand but to become Director of the London School of Economics. He remained Director until 1919, and he was also for many years a member of the Senate of the University of London. Meanwhile his interests had carried him into the world of finance, and he became Chairman of Directors of the National Bank of New Zealand, a position he retained up to a little while before his death. When he revisited New Zealand in 1925 it was chiefly for the purpose of surveying the affairs of the Dominion in the interests of the Bank and of making a careful economic study of the development and prospects of the country which he had not seen for very nearly thirty years.
Opinions may differ as to the quality of statesmanship displayed by W. P. Reeves, but when we turn to his literary side there can be one view of his work by which he is chiefly remembered. In his poems he shows us the best of his nature; they reveal a sympathy and a depth and tenderness of feeling which seem strangely at variance with the often acidulated utterances of his political life. In his great book, “The Long White Cloud,” his descriptive history of New Zealand, his literary quality is at his highest. In “New Zealand,” a book beautifully illustrated in colour with many paintings by Frank and Walter Wright, of Auckland, he reveals himself as a landscape artist in words and as a wholehearted lover of all that makes the New Zealand scene, the noble mountains, the cool and fragrant forest, the glories of fiord and canyon and lake. He described colonial political progress in his “State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand,” published in 1902. But it is on two or three of his poems that his name and fame most securely rest.
“The Passing of the Forest” is a poem that has done more than any other work of pen or tongue to turn the people's attention to the need for saving the remnants of the New Zealand bush from destruction. It is a tangi for the vanished glory of the most lovely forest in the world, a glory that can still in part be saved by the joint efforts of State and people. With the forests there perish, too, the birds:
The ruined beauty “wasted in a night,” the blackened hills—the places where the waterfalls sprayed “dense plumes of fragile ferns, now scorched away”—these seemed to the poet a bitter price to pay for what the colonist calls progress.
The other most notable poem from the pen of a man who greatly loved the land from which, by a curious run of circumstances, he absented himself for nearly half his life, has long become a New Zealand school anthem:
The last two verses of “New Zealand” express the poet legislator's faith that this country's lawmaking will be a beacon to the less enlightened nations—
Perhaps we are not all so confident as Mr. Reeves was that we are a bright and shining light to illumine the darkness of less progressive peoples. We are disposed to be more restrained in our opinion of ourselves. Nevertheless, Reeves' “New Zealand” remains as a noble poem, an anthem of the free. If he had written nothing more than “The Passing of the Forest” and “New Zealand” he would still have earned a very high place in the country's literature, for these poems breathe the truly national spirit.
In an interview at Greymouth, Mr. W. J. Lowe, who is connected with the administration of the Queensland railway system, spoke of his impressions of the Dominion, with particular reference to the railways. First of all, Mr. Lowe said he would like to pay a tribute to the modern equipment used in the New Zealand railways. The system provided excellent service, both for passengers and goods, and at rates and fares which compared favourably with those of any country he had visited. The passenger carriages and sleeping carriages were exceptionally modern, and in type were most comfortable to ride in. The trip by the Limited Express from Auckland to Wellington had been most impressive. The complete absence of noise and the exceedingly good riding surface of the permanent way had made the trip more comfortable still. The railways of New Zealand compared more than favourably with those of many countries possessing much larger populations. He did not think any country with a similar population could claim to be so well served. Mr. Lowe added that he had been equally impressed with the feeling of goodwill that existed between the officers and employees of the Department throughout the country.
The broad gauge engines in Canterbury “ploughed a lone furrow” for nearly ten years; then companions came “not in spies, but in battalions.”
The second gallant gesture in New Zealand railway history was made in 1870, when Julius Vogel enunciated his bold development policy. Vogel was a sound and cautious financier, and his policy was not one of reckless borrowing, as is so generally thought to-day. He proposed that the loans should be hedged in with many restrictions, and repaid through ample sinking fund provisions. He also suggested that the proceeds of the land sales and of the increased revenue that would follow his development policy, should be allocated to the reduction or repayment of loans. The people, however, although they accepted his borrowing policy with acclamation, rejected his repayment provisions with silent enthusiasm. Vogel created, in fact, a Frankenstein monster that overwhelmed its creator, and when he emerged, breathless, amazed and shaken from the riot, he retired philosophically to the bath chair that his gout necessitated, and suggested nothing more ever after. The unkindest cut of all was surely the beautiful jeu d'esprit of Mantell, a political opponent. When Vogel, on his return from London with the first instalment of the #10,000,000 was greeted in Wellington with a torchlight procession, Mantell scornfully discounted the enthusiasm with the double-barrelled pun Le jeu ne vant pas la chandelle.
It was indeed a gallant gesture of Vogel. In 1870 the population had certainly increased, and had reached 250,000; but the communities were still sparsely scattered through the fertile lowlands, separated by great distances (reckoned in journey time), by racial characteristics, and, more disruptive still, by provincial jealousies. Vogel (for the first time) visioned the colonists as a united people, and discerned the truth that a debt of #40 per head of population would, if wisely spent and sternly redeemed, prove not a wild speculation, but a wise movement. His vision was only in part fulfilled. His policy did make for unity—for the first time in our history, every province, town and hamlet was united—everybody was firmly linked by three ideas, the first to borrow all the money possible, the second to spend as much of this as possible on railways in his own district, the third to have nothing to do with sinking funds or repayment schemes.
I have already hinted at the riot of railway construction that followed. In retrospect it seems more fantastic than a nightmare, and only a diligent historian could disentangle the maze. In every province lines were projected, and their construction feverishly pushed on. Brogden's babies (so the burly navvy immigrants were called, after one of the leading contractors) scarred the plains, bridged the rivers, and blasted the hills in every direction. In three years (1873–1875) over 450 miles of railways were constructed, and out of the welter emerged virtually the New Zealand Railways system as functioning to-day. Railways were built by the Central Government, by the Provincial Governments, by private companies and even by volunteers, and were put into operation as quickly as built. The Public Works Department did exercise a general but limited supervision over the various projects, whether national, provincial or private. In some càses, however, the sectionally built lines did not meet exactly, and a vexatious reverse curve spanned the gap; in others, the hasty survey ended in the final joining section being needlessly difficult and expensive to construct and operate. When the lines did join up and the disabilities of divided control were overcome or smoothed out, the various owners were coalesced and their interests merged, and after 1st July, 1875, the working railways were operated by the New Zealand Government Railways Department.
As I have said, the Public Works Department did exercise certain supervision over the various projects.
The engines later and still known as the “F” class are, however, in a different category. Sometime in 1872, Mr. John Carruthers, Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department, had to decide what type of engine was to be ordered for the many lines under construction. Various types, all very similar to the small “A” or “C” class already mentioned, had been suggested by various English firms of locomotive builders. In lucid and definite notes on the different files, Mr. Carruthers expressed disagreement with their views, and on the back of a foolscap service envelope made a hasty but accurate little sketch of the engine he suggested. The sketch, as I saw it some years ago, still leaps to the eye as the “F” class engine we know. Mr. Carruthers was a civil engineer with no previous experience in locomotive design, but I am speaking dispassionately and advisedly when I put on record my belief that this was one of the finest examples of locomotive design the world has ever seen.
The design was so admirably adapted to the conditions that even to-day it is difficult to suggest any improvements. The locomotive was intended for a pioneer railway track with light traffic, the sections were short and the coal poor. The design provided for an engine that could run at 30–4–5, and fulfilled their functions admirably. Even to-day about 30 are still in service as shunting engines in yards where the service is light, and are wonderfully reliable, smart and economical. The history of the “F” class engines is the history of the New Zealand Railways.
The first of the class in service was known as the “Ada” (called after the daughter of the contractor who built the line) and hauled the first passenger train out of the old Auckland station in December, 1873. Years later an illjudged experiment was tried of coupling together two “F” engines to give one unit of greater service. The “Ada” was one of the engines chosen to suffer this indignity. Later still, another ill-judged experiment was made of adding a rear bogie to the “F” engine, and the poor “Ada” was one of those converted to the “Fa” class, as the new design was classed. As “Fa” 243, the engine was still running in 1931, and was actually shunting in Auckland yard when the new station was opened. The pictures show these episodes in the engine's life, and illustrate the statement that the history of the “F” engines is the history of the New Zealand Railways.
The line illustration shows the original “F” engine as built with outside cylinders and saddle tanks. The proportions of the engine are well brought out in this picture. If a locomotive has any claims to be considered beautiful, they must be based upon simplicity of outline, symmetry and proportion of dimensions, adherence throughout to forms suitable for the service the locomotive is intended to perform, sensible utilisation of weight and mass, and general dignity of design. From all these standpoints the “F” engine has every claim to be considered a most beautiful engine. Its absolute suitability for the service for which it was intended, its reliability in service, its beauty of outline, its outstanding simplicity, and its wonderful utilisation of weight and mass to develop power, make its design one to command the respect and envy of all capable of appreciating these features.
From the time of Edward III. the English law has recognised high treason as one of the gravest of crimes. In those days, and in our own time, the crime consisted of doing, or designing anything which would lead to the death, bodily harm, or restraint of the King, levying war against His Majesty within the Realm, or adhering to his enemies within or without the Realm.
In the early days of the colonisation of New Zealand the peace of the country was much disturbed by certain Maori chiefs leading the tribes upon warlike expeditions, or kokiri, against the pakeha and friendly natives. In these expeditions there was no more skilful or daring chief than Te Kooti. He made his presence felt when, with a large band of braves, he escaped from the Chatham Islands and landed at Whareongaonga. His ravages and cruelty struck terror into the hearts not only of the peaceful European but also of the friendly natives who desired to live at peace with their new pakeha friends.
Out of Te Kooti's guerilla warfare arose a large number of criminal trials for high treason. Natives either voluntarily or when captured by him joined his band of roving warriors and assisted in his wholesale slaughtering. As a result of several battles a large number of these natives were put on their trial by virtue of a statute that had been passed called “The Summary Trials in Disturbed Districts Act.” Under a special Commission, Mr. Justice Johnston, in the year 1869, tried eighty of these natives, one of whom was Hamiora Pere.
He was tried in September, 1869, for high treason, in waging war against Her Majesty the Queen. In order to hold these natives safe during the trial they were placed on board the barque “City of Newcastle,” which lay in Wellington harbour.
At the trial of Hamiora Pere the Attorney-General and Mr. Izard appeared for the Crown, the prisoner being represented by Mr. Allan.
After the jury had been empanelled, Mr. Izard opened the proceedings, the Attorney-General following with a statement to the jury, in which he explained the crime of treason and what facts he was going to lay before them to substantiate the charge. The case was unravelled as the witnesses told their stories from the witness box.
The first witness must have created some excitement. She was Maata Te Owai, and she declared that she was a married woman, the wife of Te Kooti. She said that the great Maori had deceived her and then married her in the Chatham Islands, during the time he was a Government prisoner. She escaped with her husband from the islands and landed at Whareongaonga. Hamiora Pere, she said, joined the force while Te Kooti and the rest of the tribe that had escaped with him were in the Poverty Bay district. She knew the prisoner personally he having joined the tribe at the village of Puketapu. He had a gun. Te Kooti, she said, fortified the pahs at Puketapu. The witness stated that she heard her husband tell his soldiers there was to be a kokiri, or war expedition, to Wairoa for the purpose of attacking the Government people there and to bring back powder and other ammunition. She remembered that the prisoner was present when Te Kooti said this. In that kokiri two Government or friendly natives were killed. The witness also remembered seeing the prisoner return with that kokiri from Wairoa. Later, Te Kooti ordered another expedition to go to Turanganui. He told them to go there and attack the Europeans and the friendly natives.
The witness said that Te Kooti gave his orders after prayers had been said. He commanded them to be strong in fight and to pray to God. If they prayed to God strongly and faithfully, God would listen to them and give all the Government people into their hands; but if they were not strong, and did not pray to God, then they themselves would be given into the hands of their enemies, the Government people. He told his soldiers that all the Government people were to be killed, including the pakehas and the friendly natives, and that Jehovah had told him this. Te Kooti then added that when they had done this God would give them possession of all the other towns, namely Wellington, Auckland and Napier, and all the people who lived in them; that
The expedition then went to Pukepuke (where the sick men and women were dropped) and proceeded on the march again. The order of march consisted in half of the warriors in the lead, followed by the women and children, and then the balance of the soldiers. They all went to Turanganui. The women and old men halted, but the warriors went on to Patutahi, where the residents were captured and brought back as prisoners. The captured people were previously Hauhaus and Te Kooti forced them to turn round and fight with him against the pakeha. Having ascertained where the Government people were Te Kooti formed another kokiri to go to Matawhero. This kokiri, the witness said, consisted of Nama's people and some of the Urewera tribe. Te Kooti himself took charge. The whole expedition was armed, and the prisoner at the bar was one of them. When they returned they had as prisoners Maria Morris, Ema Katipa and her husband, Himiona. The prisoner returned with the expedition. They said when they returned that they had killed 100 whites and friendly natives. Maata Te Owai then said that another kokiri proceeded to Oweta, and the prisoner went with that party too. He returned with them. Then the whole tribe moved to Makaretu. There was a fight there, and many of the Maoris were killed by the Government troops. The rest fled to Ngatapu, where there was another fight. The prisoner was still with Te Kooti. The Government troops went away and Te Kooti fortified the pahs.
In cross-examination the witness added nothing useful to her story. She said she had escaped with Te Kooti and had landed at Whareongaonga. In answer to the Judge, Maata Te Owai said that Te Kooti had been an inferior chief of his tribe, but later he became a great leader through his prayers to his God. He belonged to the Ngatimaru tribe, who were not Hauhaus at first, but they nearly all joined Te Kooti on his escape and adopted his religion and became Hauhaus. She added that the Ngatimaru's were a numerous and strong tribe. She said that she herself had been christened by the Bishop at Waerengahika.
Then came another native witness, who gave his name as Riria Kaimare. He remembered when the prisoner joined the forces of Te Kooti at Puketapu. Generally he bore out the evidence of Maata Te Owai. This witness swore that the prisoner had been behind the parapets at Ngatapu with his gun in his hand.
The story was continued by Thomas William Porter, who said that he was with Major Westrup's party in Poverty Bay. He was there when the fighting took place against Te Kooti at Makaretu in November of the previous year. The fighting there was due to Mr. McLean, the Government agent for the East Coast district, ordering Major Westrup to attack Te Kooti. He estimated that about 200 Hauhaus took part in that particular fight.
Colonel Stoddart Whitmore, of the Militia, said he was Officer Commanding the East Coast forces. In July and August, 1868, he also commanded the militia and volunteers as well as the Constabulary. It was in the month of July, the Colonel related, that Te Kooti had landed at Whareongaonga after he and his band had seized the ship lying in the harbour at Chatham Islands. Towards the end of July his forces came into grips with the Hauhaus. Then he returned to Wellington and left Major Biggs in command. The Colonel later returned to the East Coast and led the troops into action again at Makaretu. The enemy were routed. He pursued them to Ngatapu with a force of seven hundred men. He reviewed the situation there and came to the conclusion that his force was not strong enough to attack the strongly fortified pahs. Accordingly, he returned to Turanganui. There he augmented his troops and returned to attack the stronghold. In order to save bloodshed, if possible, he called on Te Kooti, in the name of the Queen, to surrender.
Te Kooti refused to reply to the demand, and the fighting began. Then the witness requested Te Kooti to allow the women and children to come out, and so spare their lives. Te Kooti, however, refused to accept this offer. The pahs were then fired on with shells and rockets, and rifle fire, for several days. The losses among the Hauhaus must have been considerable. About the fourth day a breach was effected in the battlements, but under the cover of the night that followed the enemy made their escape. They had made supplejack ladders and with their aid had escaped down the precipices at the rear and sides of the pahs.
The Maori chief who was in command of the friendly natives then pursued Te Kooti and his followers into the bush, and catching them up, killed and captured many of them. No doubt the prisoner was amongst these though the record is not very clear how Hamiora Pere fell into the hands of the pakeha. That concluded the evidence upon which the Crown relied for a conviction.
The Attorney-General then addressed the jury on the facts, and claimed that the evidence clearly identified the prisoner with the band under Te Kooti, and that the crime was duly proved against him. His speech was a very brief one.
Mr. Allan, who did not call any fresh evidence, addressed the jury for thirtyfive minutes. One can easily imagine that much could have been said to the effect that the natives concerned were not really British subjects and that, therefore, they were not guilty of treason. They were still savages, fierce and resentful, and unable to understand English, hence they would not have known they were doing anything more than fighting a foreign enemy who had stolen their lands.
No doubt these thoughts crossed the mind of the Judge for he took infinite pains to explain the law and the facts to the jury. However, after only fifteen minutes deliberation the jury brought in a verdict of guilty. When it became known that the prisoner had been convicted there was a rush of people into the Court building to hear the death sentence pronounced. The Judge disappointed them for he refused to sentence the prisoner until all the other cases were disposed of. It was not until the 11th October that Hamiora Pere was called on to say why
Hamiora Pere said that he had been taken prisoner by Te Kooti, and in order to save his own life he had been compelled to join the Hauhaus.
The Judge's exhortation to the native was an extraordinary one. He took great care to congratulate him on the fact that the practice of drawing and quartering after hanging had been abolished. These are his actual words: —
“The sentence I am about to pass on you is one which I regret I am bound to pronounce, even though I am certain it will not be fully enforced against you, for it is a sentence which no Christian man would desire should be inflicted, and which never has been fully inflicted in modern times. But the Judges do not make the law; they only declare it and apply it in particular cases. For some crimes the law permits the Judge to pronounce sentences differing in severity, according to his judgment, but in the case of the great crimes, like treason and murder, he has not this discretion. All the Judges of the Colony, if now present, could not alter the sentence in these cases; but fortunately the Queen's representative has power to mitigate it, or practically to substitute another punishment for that which the law pronounces. The crime of which you stand convicted is considered in well governed and peaceable communities to be the greatest of all crimes, because its tendency is to destroy the foundations of the peace, well-being and happiness of a whole, people, and it was therefore deemed right in old times to mark the horror and detestation in which it was held, and to endeavour to excite fear and terror likely to prevent its commission by adding to the punishment of death, circumstances of a degrading and terrible kind, to which the perpetrators of other crimes, however great, were not made liable. I believe it is to be attributed to the rarity of this crime in modern times, and to the certainty that public opinion as well as individual feeling, would always induce the Sovereign to deprive this sentence of its horrors, that it has not long since been removed from our Statute Book.”
After this quite unnecessary speech by the Judge he formally passed sentence of death upon the prisoner, and told him he should have no expectation that the sentence would not be carried out.
On Tuesday, the 16th November, the luckless native paid the penalty for his folly. He was the third prisoner to be hanged behind the walls of the prison. When the prisoner began to realise how quickly his life was ebbing he became terribly distressed, but became more calm under the spiritual advice of the Rev. Mr. Stock and the Venerable Archdeacon Hadfield. He was helped to the gallows, sobbing bitterly. The Rev. Mr. Stock preceded the solemn procession, reading the burial service in the Maori language. The prisoner spoke a few words huskily and almost inaudibly as he stood on the platform. Just before the final scene was enacted he lost all his nervousness. He stood erect, and in a voice that rang clear and loud he repeated the last words of the prayers before he was launched into eternity.
In these days of peace it is hard to imagine how the execution of Hamiora Pere can be entirely justified.
“When a total stranger accosts me in the street and tells me he objects to my smoking (as a man did yesterday) I consider he is guilty of gross impertinence,” wrote an indignant correspondent of a London daily, adding “I might just as justifiably tell him I object to the cut of the suit he is wearing. If people had always minded their own business and refrained from meddling with other people's the pages of the historian would make pleasanter reading.” Hear, hear! Although tobacco cranks are growing scarcer every day there are still those who would gladly see smoking made a criminal offence. Yet tobacco can be as harmless as fresh air, provided it's good. If you find smoking is affecting heart or nerves your tobacco is at fault, and contains too much nicotine. The toasted New Zealand is the best. Almost free from nicotine—eliminated by the toasting—all four brands, Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), are not only delightful smoking but absolutely innocuous.
“I was crippled with pains stabbing me like a dagger in the lower part of my back. From there they would go from joint to joint, almost fixing my shoulders so that I could not move my arms up and down for pain. At times I thought I would never rid myself of this terrible agony. I walked the room night after night with no sleep for week after week. I tried lotions of all kinds, but got no relief whatever. Then I tried Kruschen Salts, and started straight away with the wonderful results which I am obtaining at this present moment.
“No fear of going to bed, not afraid to eat a meal. My food used to nearly choke me. It must have been all acid in my body, which I am very thankful to say is not the case now, I am reaping great benefit from Kruschen, which I take regularly every morning. To me it is worth its weight in gold. It has put new life in me.” —(Mrs.) E. P.
The pains and stiffness of rheumatism are caused by deposits of needle-pointed uric acid crystals in the muscles and joints. The six salts in Kruschen stimulate your liver and kidneys to healthy, regular action; assist them to get rid of the excess uric acid which is the cause of all your suffering. When poisonous uric acid—with its deposits of needle-pointed crystals—goes, there's no doubt about those aches and pains going too! Nor is that all. Kruschen keeps your inside so regular, so free from stagnating waste matter, that no such body poisons as uric acid ever get the chance to accumulate again.
Kruschen Salts is obtainable at all Chemists and Stores at 2/6 per bottle.
The matter of New Zealand placenames ending with the apostrophe “s” has been discussed recently. The endeavour to eliminate the possessive from such a name as Arthur's Pass has not received popular support. That name, in particular, is well established in its present form, and should continue to have the official sanction given to it by the Canterbury Survey Office in the Sixties. Young Nick's Head is another historic name which it would be absurd to lop of its “s.”
Another example of a good old Coast name is Riley's Look-out, a familiar object on the Coast route south of Kaikoura, on the way to Canterbury. It is a round crag of an islet close to the beach and near an old-time whaling station. It was used as a watch-place by the whalers on the look-out for “a spout” seaward, hence the name. But dock it of its “s” and its meaning would be altered; it could be taken then as a cautionary admonition to Mr. Riley to keep his weather eye lifting.
New Zealand is not the only country in which the return of the horse for farm work, and to some extent for general purposes, including pleasure, has been noted with pleasure by horselovers. In the United States the number of horses, especially for riding, has increased greatly during the last few years, in spite of the huge motor car traffic and the increase in roads which horses cannot use. There is a companionship value in a horse. An eminent American, moreover, wrote recently that children who are brought up in the saddle develop an unusual degree of self-confidence, courage and selfcontrol. This is as true of New Zealand as of America. We cannot go back to the horse altogether, but those of us who were reared to the saddle, in the healthy old country way, know that the motor car, however easy and convenient it may be, can never be a satisfying substitute for the company and the pleasure of a good horse, anywhere off those bitumen highways.
A friend who motored through the Urewera Country not long since, from the Waikaremoana side to Rotorua, told me that he really did not see much of the bush, or as much as he would like to have seen, because the whole of his attention was taken up with his steering. He had, naturally, to keep his eye continually on the road of many twists and turns and get but a casual passing impression of the glories of the forest and the ranges. Also, he was pressed for time. (All motorists seem to be pressed for time, I have observed. There is only one traveller more pressed, or oppressed by the demon time and that is the motor-cyclist.)
This is, of course, the one inevitable drawback of the tour on flying wheels. You cannot possibly gather an adequate understanding of such a region as the Urewera from behind the wheel of a motor car, or even as a passenger.
Perhaps the ideal way of travelling through and learning to know a wonderful and beautiful and rugged bit of country is to traverse it first on foot or on horseback, camping out and fending for yourself. A summer tour of that character, living awhile in the bush, listening to the bird-song of morning and evening, climbing the ranges, clambering along the banks of the mountain streams, inhaling night and day the fragrance of the bush—that is the only way to enter into the spirit of the wild places. There is, too, the Maori life, and those human associations, the old, old tribal story, the tales and songs of the mountain folk, form at least half the attractions of travel in the Urewera Country or a backblocks tour through some other native district.
Then, if you like, return to the old place, when the new roads permit, and travel it as luxuriously as you like, in your car that takes only an hour to cover the ground that once you measured with your feet in a long day's tramp. There is satisfaction of a kind in contemplating the contrast, as I have done in more districts than one. Inevitably you think with a certain degree of longing of the old camp days. But would you leave your comfortable car and take to the swag and the old black billy and the long foot-slog again? Hardly! You haven't the time, the muscles, or the wind.
An old Maori acquaintance whose home is at Peterehema (Bethlehem), in the Tauranga district, who now and again sends me a scrap of local news or legend, discourses this time on the shrubs and flowers of the land, and in particular those which are more or less poisonous at certain times. The honey made by bees which feed on the waoriki and the wharangi is often poisonous, and those who eat it are in great danger. The waoriki is chiefly a swamp plant, the wharangi rangiora and wharangi-piro are familiar shrubs or small trees which many people grow in their gardens.
“The tupakihi or tutu is also poisonous,” says my correspondent; “it is strongest in the month of January. The other flowers are dangerous at all times. People poisoned by the honey made from these flowers become dazed and stagger about as if demented. I have seen many made seriously ill by the waoriki and wharangi honey, and I have frequently cured sufferers. I have treated them with salt. I gave them salt water to drink, and they recovered.”
A useful hint if ever you should chance to sample “wild” honey containing an undue proportion of sweets from the bush blossoms mentioned. The waoriki's botanical classification is Ranunculus rivularis and
As for the tutu, its poisonous properties are well-known; cattle, horses and sheep have often died from eating its leaves.
If there is a living creature in all the animal kingdom which merits the appellation “aristocrat,” it is the tuatara, a remarkable reptile found only in New Zealand. This extraordinary reptile, which formerly possessed three active eyes (the third being still visible in a rudimentary form) is one of the most ancient types whose nearest relative, the Homaeosaurus, became extinct in Europe by the middle of the Mesozoic era, variously estimated at between 100 and 150 million years ago. This is a lineage of which any living land animal could be proud. And the tuatara has no living near-relative.
The full-grown tuatara is about twenty inches in length, and weighs approximately two pounds. Its colour is of a yellowish or greenish olive, the female, which is slightly larger than the male, being generally darker in shade.
The tuatara belongs to the genus sphenodon (or hatteria punctata). The scales on the upper surface are small and granular, intermixed with small tubercules. Those of the lower surface are large and transverse. It has no ear openings. The tail is compressed on the sides like an alligator's. The toes are webbed at the base. There is a low crest of white spines which extends from the back of the head, with a small interruption at the nape, along the back and tail. It has parallel rows of teeth in the upper part of the jaw, and a single row in the lower. When the tail is broken off it will grow again as in all true lizards. The eyes, adapted for nocturnal vision, have in daylight vertical pupils.
But it is the fact that it possesses a rudimentary third eye which singles out the tuatara for special distinction. This cyclopeaan eye is situated on the top of the head, and on removal of the skin it is found embedded in the tissues of the brain. There still remains a small opening in the top of the skull from which the third eye formerly protruded. This optic is believed by a number of scientists to have been developed for the set and only purpose of preserving the tuatara from overhead enemies in the dim ages of the past.
The greatest enemy of the prehistoric tuatara was probably the pterodactyl, a voracious Bat-like flying reptile of various sizes, some being as small as a sparrow while others had a wing-spread of twenty feet from tip to tip.
The pterodactyls were the “destroyers” of the air, ready to pounce down on the undefensive smaller reptiles. The tuatara, therefore, could only survive by a constant watchfulness against overhead attack, and thereupon Nature in her benignity furnished the tuatara with a third eye (like a periscope) on the top of its head so that when the pterodactyl came winging through the air it was able to escape by diving quickly into its burrow or by seeking safety from attack in the bottom of the marshes.
The tuatara formerly inhabited both the main islands of New Zealand, but is now restricted to a few small islands off the coast of this country. The reptile is most plentiful, now, on Stephen's Island, in Cook Strait. The New Zealand Government protects the tuatara by an Order-in-Council, and anyone killing or capturing one of these reptiles is liable to a heavy penalty.
In 1843, Dr. Dieffenbach, naturalist to the New Zealand Company, wrote that he heard of the existence of a large lizard which the Maoris called the tuatara, or ngarara, as a general name, and of which they were afraid. Eventually he procured a live specimen.
The tuataras live in holes in the ground, generally with a petrel, sharing lodgings with that bird, like the rattlesnake and the prairie dog and can be got out only by digging. They hollow out a chamber about three feet in length and one foot in width. The entrance, however, is so narrow that there is barely space for the tuatara to squeeze in. The petrel builds its nest separately in these chambers, the tuatara occupying the opposite side. The petrel digs the holes in solid earth, while the tuatara only burrows where the earth is soft and loose, and sleeps in these burrows during the greater part of the day.
The diet of the tuatara consists mainly of beetles, grasshoppers and spiders, but it will eat any small animal so long as it is alive. These reptiles are rather peculiar in their feeding, sometimes fasting for months, and then suddenly eating heartily every day. In captivity the tuatara will eat live earthworms or thin shreds of raw beef if these foods are hung up in the cage, and they are partial to live snails.
The tuatara lays its eggs in holes which are specially dug for the purpose. The eggs are white and soft, with a semi-calcareous shell, and are about one inch in length. Eight to ten eggs are laid at a time and do not hatch till about twelve or thirteen months afterwards.
It is belièved that the tuatara was killed in large numbers for food by the early Polynesian natives. Portions of the skeletons of tuataras are found even nowadays in the ancient middens of the Maoris, sometimes in the sand near Lyall Bay, Wellington. Seeing that the total area of the North and South islands of New Zealand is 103,000 square miles, the early native inhabitants must have done some extensive ranging to have practically exterminated the tuatara from these islands. However, the tuatara, thanks to the legislation of a wise Government, still holds sway on the islands off the coast. May our little prehistoric survivor long continue to thrive there in peace!
The inhabitant of Christchurch is vaguely aware that the name of his city was the pious choice of the Church of England founders of it, and his guess is probably a very near approximation to the truth; but there have been several conflicting explanations of the name's origin, which have occasionally given rise to fierce controversy.
A coincidence that the town of Christchurch in Hampshire, England, also possesses a River Avon, has been the chief stumbling-block. Hampshireborn people naturally have always supported the theory that the new Christchurch was named after their Christchurch, but as long ago as 1856, Archdeacon Harper, a new arrival, confidently wrote: “Through the site of the town, the River Avon, so called from the river at Christchurch, in Hampshire, winds its picturesque course.”
This argument is exploded, however, when it is recollected that the Avon was named by the brothers Deans, the first settlers in the district, long before “Christchurch” was thought of, and after a stream that bounded their grandfather's property in Lanarkshire, Scotland. For instance, John Deans wrote in 1849: “The river up which we now bring our supplies is to be called the Avon at our request, and our place Riccarton.”
Moreover, it may be remembered that when Captain Thomas came to prepare a site for the new settlement, in 1849, he decided first of all that the capital of it, Christchurch, should be established at the head of Lyttelton harbour, beyond Governor's Bay, and that on the plains over the hill should be a smaller town, “Stratford,” named, no doubt, in deference to the Warwickshire and Shakespearian Avon.
So the Hampshire argument is assailed on all sides. How then did Christchurch get its name? Well, there is the theory that the city was called after a patron saint of Canterbury Cathedral, England, which was consecrated by St. Augustine in A.D. 597 under the name of Christ Church. This is plausible, because the Archbishop of Canterbury was the first President of the Canterbury Association, and the Church of England authorities at the time were prime movers of the settlement scheme.
But there is yet another explanation, the widely-accepted one, and actually the most satisfactory. Many of the founders of the Canterbury Association, including John Robert Godley, came from Christ Church College, Oxford. It is quite probable that the name of their famous old Alma Mater appealed to them as the most suitable for the virgin City of the Plains, which had been planned to include a Cathedral, a College, and a Cathedral Square, in exactly the same way as the Oxford College possessed its unique Cathedral —the smallest in England—within its gates.
Of course it possibly happened that the name “Christchurch” was chosen out of deference to both Canterbury Cathedral and the Oxford College. In any case the Canterbury Association consisted almost entirely of old Oxford men and clergy who were familiar with both the Oxford and the Canterbury Christ Churches. It is interesting to reflect that the name Canterbury itself was chosen unanimously when the Association scheme was mooted in 1847.
The first prospectus of the settlement scheme, issued in 1848, commenced: “The Plan of the Association for Forming the Settlement of Canterbury, in New Zealand.” And it is worthy of note that the chairman of the general committee of the Association was a Lord Lyttelton, who became an ardent worker, and whose name was later substituted for that of Port Cooper, the original anchorage in the harbour. Nowadays Canterbury folk give the names of Christchurch and Lyttelton different connotations from those they originally possessed—meanings varying with experience, sentiment, and knowledge. But the rest of New Zealand still recognises Christchurch as “the Cathedral City,” and it may be hoped that the distinction will long remain.
Old Omar's observations prove that he knew his Persian catechism when he penned this panacea for life's fitful fevers; for “Khyyam” and “I Am” battle the breakers in the same boat; the heart-aches and head-aches of yesterday are the head-aches and heartaches of to-day and the age-old aid to health, wealth and snappiness of getting the grippers on the gold-dust that flies in the eyes while keeping the ear a'cock for the music of the distant drum, is still the pick of the pharmacopoeia. But 'tis vain to meditate on the music of the distant drum at the expense of the cash in hand, or to allow the clash of the cash to drown the insistent “dum” of the distant drum.
But old Omar's oblative obsecrations on “thrum-dobs” and drum throbs are only an oblique allusion to, first, the gifts of the gods which are left each morn with the milk on the mat, and, second, the felicitations of Fortune which always await us round the corner of to-morrow and to-morrow.
In words less whirley, the cash in hand represents the presents of the Present, and the distant drum denotes Hope's hey-day and pay-day. But the telescopic optic oft' overlooks the things which are nearest and dearest, and the hope-hopper, whilst hiking hastily towards the ever retreating horizon, denies himself the delight in sight. For to-day is real, but to-morrow is a dream which may come true and may come blue.
To some the distant drum is a call to arms—and feats. To others, it is mainly a tom-tom calling to the tumtum. To Youth, it is a jazz drum beating out a blither of cranky cacophonies and juggled jocundities. To the middleaged it represents the tempo of Tempus or a quickstep to hearten the heart and quicken the tread when the pack grows heavy and the feet are lead. To the aged it is nearer and clearer, for Age has caught up with the band, has shaken hands with the drummer, and has realised that the farther away you are from the drum the better it sounds.
But long may the distant drum urge on the panting populace to their divers destinies. Joan of Arc heard it across the fields of Flanders, Hannibal heard it, Alexander answered it, and when man fails to tune in to the “tum tum tum” of the big bass drum, it is a sign and a symbol that his soul is goldencrusted, lead-lined, pickled in acid of assets, and sunk in the mulloch of Mammon; his aspirations will be no higher than his hip pocket, and his only ambition will have a milled edge.
Of course there are many who have mis-coded the message of the distant drum, and many who have waded through wars and worse to get a closeup of the drum-rumbler. But mistakes will happen, and it is better to count in the scum of density than to count out the drum of Destiny.
So, as Gracie Fields advises, “Fall in and follow the band,” the band of Hope, the call of the weald.
Who is there so dumb and dubious that he can resist the blare of the band —the blustering blast of the Big Blow? That Kruschen crash of brass and breath, that zipp and zoom of accelerated air. Why, even well-bred babies still kick the stuffing out of their perambulators, swaddlings swallow their chewing gum, and adults become adulterated and trickle along behind the big bassoon, when the band goes by. And why? Because of all the variegated velocitated vibrations that masquerade as music, give us the big bold brasses. The wild wail of the bagpipes may stir the Scot to the very knots of his purse strings, the oboe may minister to the meth-elated spirits of the dismal Desmonds, the saxophone may sag and moan, jazz may cater, from hip to heel, to the cataleptic callisthenics of the rhythm-ridden; crooners may give depressed-air expression to the curse of Adam, and violins may whip the welkin from neck to knee with every knack of neoteric necromancy from the sob of a punctured pie-crust to the scream of a stepped-on corn; but the “brasses” have the wood on the “wood-winds,” they have the “reeds” rattled, the “strings” unstrung, and the oscillated orchestrations of synchronised syncopation jazzed to a “frazz.”
When the brass band hits the air pockets with Barnum and Bailey's Best, Colonel Bogey, Barney Google, Hearts and Flowers, Beer and Onions, Men of Garlic, and Hearts of Okum, the soul must be dead indeed which is not stirred to a state where it craves to joust a joist or fling down a gauntlet or gimlet or a giblet to prove that men are men in spite of wives and sweethearts—and everything else to the contrary. Who has not felt, when the big drum bangs, that Rob Roy was right and Tarzan was top of his class? Who has not forgotten for the nonce that he is a J.P., a C.T., an M.C., a T.T., and the father of a large and disrespectful family—when the brasses enter his soul?
No wonder grandpa fought in the Crimea with his whiskers frozen to his chest, just because the throaty throb of the old “oompah” had caught him off his guard.
Stirring! Well, siree, if it's not it is time mankind was inoculated with a serum of leopard's spots and Chicago gin.
But where are the bands of our wildwood days, the bands we used to hear throbbing in the distance like the heart of a boiler-factory wrapped in wadding? The bands we pursued for miles and miles, until their muffled palpitations grew to the fascinating frenzy of plumbers at play or Saturday night in the tin mines? The rattle of the kettle drums, the high-hullabaloo of the horns, the blistering blasts of the cornets, the guttural “gumph” of the old Oompah, the “oof oof” of the ougah, the thud of the big drum—like an elephant being beaten with a motor tyre—and the whole harmonious hicockolorum of brass, breath and biff, blended by Bash and spiced with a moiety of military motley.
If Civilisation crumbles and Cash crashes, and Progress passes of a palsy, it will be because Man's soul has been snookered through lack of lilt and a paucity of passionate pandemonium. If the iron enters his soul it will be because the brass has failed to enter his ear.
But we of the old brigade must content ourselves with a repetition of that Latin warning, “nec mora,” which, translated transatlantically, means “give it the air.”
Writing to me recently from Sydney, a well-known literary and art critic observed that “a miracle had happened in Australia,” people were not only talking Australian books but were buying them. Certainly there have been remarkable developments in the publishing world. The number of books published is surprising. The standard, too, is high. A small indication is in my review section. Here I refer to four new Australian volumes, at least three of which are really outstanding. It is great comfort for Australian writers, and for New Zealand writers also, for the publishing houses over the Tasman are keen to have anything that is marketable. One of the greatest successes has been “Pageant,” by G. B. Lancaster. Although only published last year the Australian and New Zealand sales have run into thousands.
Quentin Pope has the honour of having inspired the title of one of the latest of these Australian books, “Blue North,” by H. Drake-Brockman (Endeavour Press, Sydney). The thought is in these lines, written by Pope some years ago:
“Blue North” is a striking romance of the West Australian pearling grounds. The sort of novel that you feel you want to finish in one sitting.
Some of the most artistic printing I have seen, either in Australia or New Zealand, has come from a recently established printing company in Auckland, The Griffin Press. The presiding genius is a young University student named Ronald Holloway. He is a real craftsman. A sample of his work reached me recently in a chastely printed booklet entitled “Modern Poetry and the Ideal.” This is the last of a series of eight broadcast lectures on the subject given by Mr. W. D'A. Cresswell from 1Ya, Auckland. Mr. Cresswell laments what he describes as the downward trend of English poetry. He claims that when the boy Tennyson carved on a tree the words “Byron is dead” he might as well have gone on to say “so is man, so is the ideal; long live the machine.”
Under the auspices of the Council Against War, Margaret Macpherson, the well known New Zealand writer and lecturer, is acting as honorary editor and producer of “A Golden Book of Peace,” which is to be compiled and issued on a national scale. One thousand well known New Zealanders are being approached to give their favourite quotation bearing on the question of peace and war. George Bernard Shaw will be among the contributors.
An interesting literary find was made by Newbold's, the big Dunedin second-hand bookshop, recently. It is a book published about 1782 under the title of “The Trial of Lord George Gordon for High Treason at the Bar of the Court of King's Bench” (Monday, Feb. 5th, 1781). Who has not read Barnaby Rudge? Here is the sequel to the Gordon Riots, in which the prisoner at the bar was acquitted, thanks to Erskine's brilliant defence, by a jury consisting chiefly, to judge by the appended panel list in the book, of vintners and brewers. For some reason the prisoner or the Crown appear to have challenged any other trades. This book is a find because, after Lord George's second arrest, the Government of the day banned the book, and hunted up such copies as they could find and destroyed them. Poor Gordon—to finish in the madhouse—and the record of his misfortune to lie on the shelf of a New Zealand bookseller!
Several pleasant surprises have come the way of writers represented in Dent's anthology of New Zealand short stories. Republication rights have been sought by papers in England, America and the Continent, and in due course payment has come to the writers concerned through the compiler of the anthology, Mr. O. N. Gillespie. I do not know of any New Zealand anthology that has attracted so much interest as the one under notice.
I always look forward to the annual Capping Book or Sketcher of the Otago University. The 1934 issue just to hand is one of the best on record. The clever coloured cover design is by Russell Clark, who is also represented in the book with black and white work of high standard. Another Dunedin artist, Gordon McIntyre, who is usually the mainstay of the “Sketcher,” contributes only two or three drawings to the latest issue, but it is the best and most finished work I have seen from his pen. The letterpress is immensely clever. Most of the advertisements are written in humorous vein, giving the whole publication a hundred per cent. reading value.
It was certainly a brilliant idea to publish in booklet form the newspaper utterances of George Bernard Shaw, following on his New Zealand visit. I understand that the book has already run into a second edition. No Shavian enthusiast at home or abroad would be without this interesting record.
Miss Mary Blair, of Gisborne, reports brisk sales for her waltz song “Lilac, the Night and You.” The song has been presented by the Southern Song Service.
When I wrote a paragraph in last months issue announcing the fact that the “New Zealand Artists' Annual” would be published this year, there were definite indications in this respect. However, subsequent developments have postponed the reappearance of this journal until next year. It is not an unusual thing for an annual such as this to discontinue publication for a year or two. I might instance the case of “Printers Pie,” which has suspended publication for many years and is to reappear again shortly.
I was not aware until the other day that Anthony Trollope wrote, in 1873, a book entitled “Australia and New Zealand.” I have not seen it quoted in any catalogue or included in any of our book auction sales.
Further indication of the rapid development in the art of the book plate in New Zealand was furnished at the annual meeting of the New Zealand Ex Libris Society recently. The president, Mr. Johannes C. Andersen, stated that the year had shewn marked activity in book plate production, quite a number of new and striking designs being completed. Outstanding artists in this respect are Russell Clark, of Dunedin, Miss Hilda Wiseman, of Auckland, Leo Bensemann, of Christchurch, and M. Matthews, of Wellington. The total number of New Zealand plates designed to date is nearly 300.
“Priestly, who wrote 'The Good Companions,' can enthuse about his latika, and J. M. Barrie rave about his wonderful 'mixture,”' said an old smoker at a little social gathering (men only) at Auckland the other night, “but give me Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog)! Yes, it's New Zealand, and toasted New Zealand at that! Been smoking it for a dozen years, and never smoke anything else. It's unique! The flavour fascinates, the aroma captivates! It's as soothing as the recovery of a bad debt! Joking apart, when you start a pipe of Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog) (a blend of extra choice leaf, and of medium strength), you don't want to put your pipe down! There's pleasure in every whiff!” This enthusiast didn't mention the other toasted brands: Riverhead Gold, Cavendish, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead) but they are equally good. They are all toasted, and all comparatively free of nicotine. That makes them safe to smoke, even if you smoke them to excess. You can't buy any other toasted tobaccos, because none is manufactured.*
I was anxious to secure biographical details of a well known Australian, so repaired to the Wellington Public Library. The only Australian “Who's Who” they had was dated 1929! The name I sought was not in it. I only hope that this lack of interest is not reciprocal on the other side of the Tasman.
There is talk of a new woman's weekly in Wellington.
The possibility of bringing out small limited editions of the work of leading New Zealand poets was discussed recently in Auckland. Granting the financial backing the work should go ahead.
During his stay in Auckland, Hector Bolitho had some thirty manuscripts of potential novels sent to him for his opinion.
The New Zealand centre of the P.E.N. has agreed to the cabled request of London Headquarters that Miss Nelle Scanlan represent it at the Scottish Congress.
One of the most successful first novels published in Australia for a decade is “The Doughman,” by the New Zealander, Robert Desmond Tate.
“Blood in the Mists,” by J. Halpin (Macquarie Head Press, Sydney), is one of the most remarkable war books I have read. The author is a man who thinks and writes with almost disturbing intensity of feeling. His swift staccato sentences flash round the horrible theatre of war with almost bewildering rapidity. At times the precipitous transition from a scene of horror to a deeply religious thought is as merciful to the reader as it must have been to the author in the writing. A wonderful book. (Price 6/-.)
“Her City of Refuge, by Ralf Rodd (Cassell), has for the basis of its plot the problem, sentiment versus law and order. John Hamough, very English, with all the English ingrained respect for the demands of justice as set down in our moral code, has to decide whether he is to become a “city of refuge” for the lawless Dinah. In a swiftly moving story, crowded with romance and excitement, the author brings his unusual story to a gripping finale. “Rodd for Romance” is a slogan often applied to this writer, and certainly he lives up to it in this book. (Price 7/-.)
“Tooth and Talon,” by Henry G. Lamond (Angus and Robertson, Sydney), is another of those thrilling books dealing with the Australian wilds. The striking coloured jacket by Dorothy Wall gives a fair indication of the character of the book—the mighty battles of the wilds between bird and beast, the “romance” of the mating season, the desperate fights of animal motherhood. The author is a patient and close observer of the fauna of Australia, and has given us a series of word pictures almost as vital and as intimate as an actual animal movie. (Price 6/-.)
“Three Goats and a Bender,” by Winifred Birkett (Angus and Robertson, Sydney), is certainly an intriguing title. The suggestion is borne out by the book, which is unusual and interesting. For a first novel it is surprisingly good. Incidentally at least two first novels by Australian writers are putting up big sales, and this should be another. An enjoyable blending of comedy and romance makes the yarn thoroughly readable.
Despite the popularity of aviation films railway romances can more than hold their own. In addition to such wellknown successes as “The Shanghai Express” and “The Ghost Train,” New Zealand audiences are now being treated to two other exceptionally fine railroad features, “Rome Express,” described as Britain's greatest screen achievement, and “Orient Express,” a story connected with the train that runs from Ostend to Constantinople.— O. W. Waireki.
I was interested to read
Have you ever stood on a lonely country road and watched the night express rattle by? One night I stood on a road in the Taieri Plains (where night is night), and heard from afar the faint shrill from the whistle of the ghost train. Whistle after whistle rent the stillness of the air, and presently a faint rumbling sound could be heard miles away. I stood close to the railway track, positively thrilled. Then, far down, like a faint glimmer of a rising sun I could just discern the gleaming headlight—approaching, approaching, approaching: until the gloom was shattered, apparently for all time, by the long, bright, silver beam that thundered on. Overhead, a ruddy, whirling column of smoke was lit up by the inferno of the firebox when the door was momentarily opened, a streaking flash of sparks. Then the light of carriages, an increasing deafening roar (how those trains do roar in the night hours), a fleeting glimpse of travellers essaying sleep, or seated reading, heeding not the lone watcher outside—and the night train was past. Only a dying rumble and a little red light fast disappearing to convince me that the incident had been real as I turned and continued my way. But how incomparably dark and cold and lonely the night seemed now. —C.H.F.
What interesting folk travel by the Limited Express! One night recently we went down to Frankton Junction station to see a 'Varsity friend off south. As usual the train made its ten minutes' halt to allow the travellers time for refreshment.
My friend whispered to me, “There he is, in the flesh—the young chap standing by the window.”
“Who?” I asked, eagerly scanning the faces around.
“Your favourite New Zealand poet.”
“Not R.G.P.?”
“The same.” And by a strange coincidence he was exactly as I had pictured him! It is so seldom we have the opportunity of seeing our own favourite writers. Didn't I feel thankful I had gone to the station!
That night, by the way, Dad would insist upon donning his best suit. “Don't bother changing,” said I, but he took no notice.
“You never know who pops up with the Limited, I've been caught before.” We laughed; but when a real live Cabinet Minister came up to shake hands with him, we felt glad he had made himself presentable.
We often slip along to see who is on the Limited. Isn't it thrilling to say “Hello” to an old friend you haven't seen for years? —“Artful Dodger.”
Not the least of the troubles which beset the redcoats who fought New Zealand's battles in the middle of last century, was the Maori's way of treating even war in an apparently off-hand manner. The Maori thought nothing of running away if that seemed to be the best thing to do at the moment—it was better to run and fight another day than to die uselessly. Time and time again the redcoats laboriously sapped their way up to a pa and then storming it with inimitable dash, found that the wily enemy had slipped off into the bush. The Maori knew the plodding methods of the pakeha, and was quick to take advantage of them. One European commanding officer, a devotee of the sap and assault system, set his men to dig a trench nearly a mile in length, so that they might approach safely to within striking distance of a pa. As the work progressed a considerable quantity of manuka was required for fascines, and the “friendly” Maoris were paid to supply it. This arrangement was doubly agreeable to the beleaguered garrison of the pa, who now by day relieved the monotony by shooting at the pakehas in the trench, and by night cut scrub for their friends among the “friendlies,” who paid them in tobacco and clothes. Assuredly, the pakeha way of fighting was a wonderful one! Of course, the spoil-sport white officer objected to having his men fired upon; there was always a danger that someone might get hit, so he made a great sap-roller of manuka and turf which was pushed along in front of the workmen. In time this happy state came to an end; the head of the sap crept dangerously near to the stockade. The Maori description of subsequent events was a marvel of coolness and brevity; it ended, “and so we left that pa and built another one.” —E.S.A.
You instinctively remove your hat as you enter this historical and sacred area, approximately a quarter of an acre in extent, neatly encircled with a live hedge. In the centre, a stone monument records a story of true British heroism of the adventurous era of the Maori wars. It is a scene of real life drama during the troublesome time of the 'sixties and embodies the true spirit and traditions of New Zealand's past. A small blockhouse was erected on this spot, which was then one of the farthest outposts of the 18th Royal Irish. Occupied by but a very few soldiers, vigilant guard had to be maintained against a wary enemy.
Just prior to dawn on the 10th of July, 1868, the Maoris launched, as they thought, a surprise attack, and endeavoured to obtain possession of the blockhouse; but they had not reckoned with the defenders putting up such a determined resistance, or on their being prepared at such an early hour. Every enemy attack was heroically repulsed, until at last a small body of British troops located some miles away, attracted by the firing, hastened to the scene, upon which the enemy fled. Of the small force in the redoubt. Captain Ross, who was in command, and nine of his gallant men lay dead, while six were severely wounded. In spite of this loss the fort had been held! Right down through the years, and for all time it is a hallowed spot. Not a quarter of a mile distant is the site of an ancient Maori fortification of prepakeha days. Fully ten acres in extent.
Even the most fickle woman could hardly play more pranks than has the weather this year. Summer months have been sadly misplaced, and winter ailments have found many victims. Naturally a busy time for Baxter's Lung Preserver. This grand old remedy makes quick work of those coughs and colds.
“Baxter's” is quick and sure, pure and pleasant. It has excellent tonic properties, too. Order “Baxter's,” 1/6, 2/6 and 4/6 at any chemist or store.* the trenches have recently been cleaned out and repaired, to represent as closely as possible the appearance the scene presented over a century ago.
The lines upon lines of deep trenches, escarpments and embankments, intersected at intervals with caves and tunnels, make visitors realise that the savage in his native state possessed considerable architectural skill and engineering genius, for the whole scheme is vast and complete. The plateau on top is probably the most interesting and instructive, for here may be seen countless numbers of sunken pits, exactly as left by the Maoris. It is considered these were used principally for the storage of food, and also as a refuge for the women and children when the place was attacked by hostile tribes.
The Maori of old had a simple and effective way of dealing with his enemies, for he killed, cooked and ate them. Numerous “hangis,” or stone ovens, in an excellent state of preservation still exist, and could they but speak would unfold many an interesting tale of the past. Human bones in plenty, relics of many a cannibal feast, were discovered during the repairs and excavations.
There is no gainsaying that these cold days are drab. Friend sun, cheery no longer, greets us less warmly and less frequently. Day by day we crawl into our cosiest outfits, hoping that soon a faint warming of the atmosphere will allow us to don something slightly thinner and less obviously utilitarian. No; I'm not forgetting the gay jumpers. But don't you agree with me that they are so necessary that even the gaudiest reminds us of the cheerless days?
A pessimist, am I? But wait till one of our sparkling days—glittering frost spangling the grasses, fences, roofs, at early morning; the sun, faintly warm, casting a net of silver sequins over the cold blue of the sea—then enquire for my pessimism, and you'll find not a trace. On the evening of such a day, when stars icily be-diamond the black velvet of the night, oh! it is good to be alive.
And on these evenings, when frost brings an extra tinge of colour to the cheeks and feet jig as much for joy of life as in the cause of warmth, all the young, many of the middle-aged, and those of the old who believe in being as young as they feel, join in winter revelries.
Now, being feminine, let us consider what we will wear for the forthcoming festivities.
Materials are so fascinating. Velvets range from rich, thick-piled chiffons to lustrous “wind-swept” in marvellous patternings. A great advantage of the latter is that they do not crush or mark. Remember that velvet, though one of the more expensive materials, outlasts all others, and retains its smartness, especially if the style chosen is that that will not date. For velvet, of course, have velvet shoes and bag to tone.
Silks and crepes come in new weaves. Note specially the varieties of crinkle crepe, matelasse and wind-swept satin. Lace is showing in new cobweb designs, which make up most becomingly for dance or dinner frocks. Gold and silver tissues are marvellous, and are used in combination with other materials, such as velvets, for evening gowns or wraps. Sequib nets, also, are adding to the glitter of the dancing season.
Colours. —Black and white (the combination in which a Parisienne feels smartest) are sweeping the world of evening fashions. Or if not white, combine silver with your black. The off-black shades are ravishing, and for those who prefer warmer tonings, reds of all descriptions are rampant. If your forte is a charming daintiness, you will be pleased to know that pastel tints are very popular. For debutante, of course, nothing looks better than white; for the girl who does not look her best in dead white, or even in white and silver, the faintest of corals or a very delicate maize can be charming.
Style and Cut. —Aeroplanes are stream-lined, cars are becoming more so month by month, experiments are being made with stream-lined trains, and women, not to be outdone, are stream-lining their frocks. That effect of well-made slimness is obtained by even the more robust in a “streamlined” model. To achieve this effect, the cut must be rather intricate. Frocks fit closely to the knees and then flare (but less than last season). Necks are high in front and low at the back, the most popular shape being a deep V. Frocks may be sleeveless, have cape sleeves, or a small cape. A touch of fur on the latter is smart. Some models have ruching at neck, sleeves and hem; but with a ruched neck-line beware of necklaces or long ear-rings, as these give a top-heavy look. Wear bangles for ornaments, and perhaps a hairband.
Let me describe a charming trio of velvet frocks.
(1) Evening. —Sleeveless, slim fitting, round neck in front. Flat velvet roses round skirt where flare begins.
(2) Dinner or Bridge. —Slim fitting, fairly high neck, round in front, chromium ornament for neck finish, sequin net sleeves.
(3) Afternoon. —Velvet sleeves, stream-lined skirt, little oyster vestie. All charming, all slim-fitting, and all beltless.
Now for a deb. frock. I saw one carried out in white, intricately cut, but with an effect of simplicity. It was finished with a bow and sash ends at the side of the back, and an ostrich feather posy (very new, this!) on the left shoulder.
Small evening coats are short and loose. A white fur coat or cape graces the smartest occasions, but great care must be taken to keep the fur absolutely white. Nothing looks worse than grubby white fur. I saw a beautiful evening wrap of chiffon velvet knee length, lined with white satin and with a white fox fur collar.
Accessories. —This winter the “extras” are specially interesting.
Necklaces are evolved—daringly, beautifully, intricately, plainly—from rock crystal, metal, diamente, brilliants, beads, semi-precious stones. Those in metal are reminiscent of the old Victorian silver necklaces. (Will the locket be revived?) Gowns are ornamented with clips in chromium or brilliants. To stress the neck-line also are diamente shoulder straps, sequin capes (glorious over velvet), capes of accordeon pleated georgette frills, ruchings.
Gloves. —For evenings these mostly match frocks. Velvet is a popular fabric.
Shoes. These also match frocks, and may be made of velvet, satin or glace. Styles are plainly cut court, or elaborate sandal.
Bags. —Again the accessory matches the outfit. An envelope shape is the most popular. Materials are satin, corded silk or velvet. Some bags are beaded, others have ornaments to match those on frocks. White, beaded with crystal, is lovely for the debutante.
All plain knitting throughout. Cast on fifty stitches.
Second Row. —Knit into the back of the cast on stitches to make a neat, firm edge.
Third Row. —Increase one stitch at the beginning by knitting into the front and back of the first stitch. Continue in plain knitting until the last two stitches are reached. Knit these two together.
Fourth Row. Knit plain.
Repeat these two rows for the entire length of scarf, knitting stripes of various colours as required.
When the knitting is finished, there will be numerous stray ends of wool where the different colours have been joined into the work. These should be neatly joined into the work on the wrong side and firmly fastened off.
This is the season of the dreaded “flu,” common colds and coughs. One must keep fit and build resistance to withstand the germ infection of these dreaded enemies.
Give attention to your diet. Included in the dietary should be a proportion of milk, fruit and vegetables. Drink plenty of water. The wearing of suitable clothing (which should be warm without being stuffy), having as much exercise as possible, maintaining proper personal hygiene, avoiding hot ill-ventilated rooms and crowded buildings, keeping your distance from infected persons, and keeping out in the fresh air and sunshine as much as possible, are all important factors towards keeping fit.
If you have that heavy head, dry throat and cold, shivery feeling, it is advisable to take precautions. Have a hot bath and get right to bed with a hot water bottle. Take a few doses of baking soda (half a teaspoon to a tumbler of water) at intervals of about two hours. Copious hot fruit drinks are also efficacious. This treatment should break up the “cold” if the infection is not severe, and you should be well in the morning; otherwise you should keep to your bed for a day or two, and take precautions not to spread the infection.
If you have a temperature it is well to stay in bed for at least twenty-four hours after the temperature has become normal. Keep to a fluid diet for a few days.
Inhalations of medicated vapour are often ordered for head or chest colds. The usual medium is a jug of hot water with inhalant and a bath towel over the head. This is an uncomfortable method as it parboils the eyes and opens the pores of the skin to admit a chill. The best way to give an inhalation is to pour a pint of boiling water into a receptacle, with the inhalant ordered, and leave for a minute or two to cool. Cover the receptacle with a brown paper-bag with a small hole cut in the corner. If the inhalation is given in this way, the steam goes directly into the nose, passages and lungs, without the discomfort of steaming the face. After use, the paper-bag should be burnt.
Olive oil has a wide field of usefulness. It may be used medicinally for both external and internal application.
Thin and sickly children improve in condition if given a teaspoon of olive oil daily. It may be given in orange juice.
For children's coughs and colds olive oil may be given both externally and internally. For external application rubbing the back and chest with warm olive oil will be found very efficacious.
Dry and brittle hair is improved by frequent massage of the scalp with warm olive oil. Just before shampooing rub in an extra generous application.
To Warm Olive Oil. —Remove the cork from the oil bottle, and stand the latter in a saucepan of water; it may be brought to boiling point if necessary. To warm oil for rubbing or massage, pour a small quantity into a saucer and stand over a basin of hot water.
Barley Water. —Pearl barley, 4 tablespoons; cold water, 1 quart.
Method. —Wash the barley and scald with boiling water. Strain the water away, then add to the barley one quart of cold water. Simmer for two hours, Strain. Add sugar and lemon juice if liked. May be taken hot or cold.
Black Currant Tea. —Black currant jam, 1 tablespoon; boiling water, 1/2 pint.
Method. —Put the jam into a hot jug and pour boiling water over it. Cover for a few minutes. Strain into a hot tumbler and serve at once. A teaspoonful of lemon juice improves the flavour.
Lemonade. —Lemon, 1; sugar, 1 1/2ozs.; cold water, 1/2 pint.
Method. —Scrub the lemon and peel very thinly. Place the rind and juice a bowl. Add the water and sugar. Stand for several hours. Strain. Add cold water to make one quart. If it is to be served hot, heat slowly but do not boil. A pinch of bi-carbonate of soda may be added if an effervescing drink is desired.
Albumin Water. —Beat up white of an egg until frothy. Add 1 pint of cold water and beat. This drink will often arrest vomiting.
Albuminised Milk. —Boat up white of an egg with a cup of milk till it is frothy. A little salt may be added if desired.
Imperial Drink. —Boiling water, 1 pint; cream of tartar, 1 dessertspoon; sugar, 1 tablespoon; lemon, 1.
Method. —Scrub the lemon and slice into a jug. Add the cream of tartar, sugar and boiling water. Leave until cool, then strain. Allow about one tablespoon to a tumbler, add water (hot or cold). This is a refreshing drink for cases of feverishness, and has an excellent effect upon sluggish kidneys.
Sherry Whey. —One teacup of new milk, place over fire in an enamel saucepan; when milk reaches boiling point put in a large glass of sherry, and stir until it curdles; strain through muslin or gauze and the whey is ready for use. This is a nourishing drink for invalids when stimulants are required.
Good fresh butter beaten to a cream is the foundation for savoury butters.
Watercress Butter. —Chop the leaves of watercress very finely. Add a teaspoonful to every ounce of creamed butter; season with pepper, salt and about twelve drops of lemon juice.
Pickle Butter. —To a tablespoon of creamed butter add a pinch of chillies or a few drops of onion juice, a small pickled gherkin chopped very finely, and a seasoning of salt and pepper.
Marmite Butter. —To a tablespoon of creamed butter add marmite to tasteAdd grated cheese if liked.
Fried Sandwiches. —Required: Left over sandwiches. These are delicious and most intriguing. Try them at your next bridge or supper party. Be sure to have plenty of them. The nicestones for the purpose are those made of anchovy paste or a cheese filling, but any left overs may be used. To fry: Dip the sandwich into beaten egg or batter, and fry in hot shallow fat. Be sure the fat is very hot or the sandwich will not be crisp. Drain, and serve piping hot.
Fudge. —Two cups sugar, one tablespoon cocoa, half-cup milk, two ounces butter (no more), essence vanilla, chopped walnuts.
Method —Put sugar, cocoa, butter and milk in saucepan, gradually melting the sugar, but refrain from stirring until the mixture is at boiling point. Boil for about 10 to 12 minutes. Take off fire and add essence vanilla and walnuts to suit taste. Then beat until mixture thickens and turn out on to buttered dish. Be careful not to let mixture get sugary by beating too long. Cut into small squares when nearly cold.
For some months past the Railways have been trying out a new form of matting in several of the Main Trunk Express cars. These mats are a New Zealand product of a link design, and any dirt is caught in the interstices of the mat, making it almost impossible for it to be tramped or blown through the carriages.
The matting is soft and silent to walk upon, and in those cars where it has been tried it has been favourably commented upon by people walking through the carriages.
The Victorian Railways have used these mats for a number of years, with complete satisfaction, and it will be interesting to hear the further comments of New Zealand railwaymen and railway passengers on the greater cleanliness of travelling which it is considered this matting now makes possible.*
There is a touching reference to an orphaned family of children in an old North New Zealand lament, in which a woman voices her grief at the death of her friend Ngahuia, a young chieftainess, renowned for her beauty and her virtues of industry and hospitality. Ngahuia had several small children, and when she was dying she wept as she thought how young and helpless they were whom she was leaving motherless.
On her death her friend composed and chanted a song in which she tried to reassure the spirit of Ngahuia that all would be right with the little ones left behind her. This, translated, is a part of the lament:
The lonely birds—in the Maori “kahui tara,” literally a flock of terns—were the orphaned children. They would never want so long as there was a tribe to sustain them with the fruits of Maui, that is the kumara and other products of the gardens. No Maori community allowed any of its members to suffer for lack of food.
Bits of history are wrapped up even in horse names, among pakeha and Maori alike. Many a page could be written about the lore of racehorsenaming. There were whimsical names such as that given by a Wanganui sporting settler to his steeplechaser long ago, “Johnny-come-through-theraupo.”
A Maori war veteran, the ancient Te Huia Raureti, who is still living on what was once the frontier of the Upper Waikato, told me this incident of the war of 1863, when a Maori force unsuccessfully attacked the Pukekohe East stockade, a fortified church.
“On the retreat from Pukekohe to the Waikato River, we spent a night in the bush. Our party kindled a small fire. Early in the morning there was an alarm that the soldiers were upon us, and the quick command was given —“Haha te paoa! meaning to extinguish the blaze and cover up the embers lest the smoke [paoa] should be seen rising through the trees. We captured a settler's horse that day, a piebald. We took it with us right up the Waikato, in fact we brought it to Te Kopua, on the Waipa, and we named it 'Haha-te-Paoa,' in memory of that incident.
I Knew all about Rotorua. 1 had, never been there, but a ohidish imagination had, years ago, filled in the gaps among the technical details to be found in the school geography books. Rotorua, these stated dispassionately, was one of the main thermal regions of the world. The earth's crust was very thin there, a fact which invited the deduction that the sulphurous terrors of the earth's centre must be alarmingly near. By some mysterious means—the geographers did not explain just how—boiling water and mud containing valuable medicinal properties, bubbled from the earth; geysers shot continuously or intermittently into the air without suggesting any reason for their action.
However coldly these facts might have been presented, they stimulated the imagination. Then I read the brochures of the Tourist Department which were more prodigal of their epithets. Descriptions of “diabolical manifestations” and of “internal creatures making wild play with oozy plasticine” made me blink. I wrestled with “bubbling cauldrons,” porridge pots,” “champagne bowls” and “sodasyphons,” which overawed and attracted me in turn by their uncanniness. Nothing was said about the smell, but friends had given warning.
I would go and see these things, and it was with pleasant anticipation that I stepped on to the Rotorua Express, and into one of the most sensible and comfortable carriages I had yet travelled in. There was no sign of Nature in wrathful mood as the Express sped through the plain land, and less to suggest it as we began to wind through the fern-clad hills, relieved here and there by knots of native bush. The journey was pleasant enough, but surely nothing enchanting could lie at the end of it! The lake, which soon spread out before us, was not surpassingly beautiful, and when the station signs showed that we had arrived I was frankly disappointed. Surely the publicity writers had been deceiving me these several years! No geysers belched their steaming burdens on to the platform; the panting of the engine, as if it had done the journey in a hurry, seemed more realistic than anything this place had to offer. Photographs and scenic “shorts” had conveyed the impression that the town teemed with graceful Maori maidens dancing the “poi-poi.” None of them greeted me on the platform, but, instead, a squad of smart, gold-braided hotel porters. I took refuge in the thought about anticipation always being better than realisation and then began to argue with myself. Was it likely that a seasoned tourist resort would display all its attractions along the railway platform like new season's goods in a shop window? Surely that was not business. It was during the next few weeks, as I wandered alone and in company on and off the beaten track, that Rotorua gradually revealed herself, and my faith in the publicity writers returned. I had not known nearly all.
Rotorua, is, by its own confession, a resort for tourists, and it is doing no more than justice to the inhabitants to say that they keep this constantly in mind. They have something good to show and don't mind saying so. They also cultivate another art without which the local glamour would not long endure: story-telling. The street names themselves are constant reminders of the past glory of the Arawas and of their entrancing tribal legends. The incantations offered up by experienced guides as they approach a spot of unusual thermal activity are part of the stock-in-trade, calculated to heighten the effect rather than to deceive any
Rotorua has personality, and its people are most careful—probably unconsciously so—to preserve it. Its natural advantages have received generous treatment from the State. For example, many local bodies must be envious of the Borough Council, which, alone in New Zealand, is empowered by law to strike a rate for the development of the borough as a tourist centre. The other controlling body is the Government Tourist Department. One can only hazard a guess as to what it values its assets at, in terms of money, but in terms of health and aesthetics, it is beyond valuation. Most of the places of interest have been preserved in time by the State for the people, and the borough must rank as a place where State Socialism has achieved some of its most desirable results. The splendidly appointed baths, and the squaremiles of exotic conifers, standing like a massed army along the southern boundary, testify to that.
Rotorua without the Maoris would be like peaches without cream. And the Maori during the carnival season is something to be experienced. I witnessed the genuine excitement of the primitive mind when rival teams pitted themselves against each other in the tug-of-war. I listened, with thousands of others, to the haunting melodies sung by the “girls of the village,” and to the ferocious hakas given by “the boys of the village.” They were not new, but they were still tremendously effective. Dusky warriors imitated the skill of their ancestors as they dipped their paddles in unison during the canoe races of the regatta. At night, the hangi which was being prepared in the town square smoked like a sulphur pool. I paid my shilling and received a conglomeration of meat, kumaras and potatoes, cooked to a turn by mass production methods and handed out in wicker baskets, locally made for the purpose.
The low-pitched, resonant voice of the Maori is pleasing to the ear, and more than once I provoked conversation just to gain the satisfaction of hearing it. One young man, basking at full length on the lake shore, told me he had a dairy farm across the water. “By Jove, I dry the cows off quick this year, so's I get here,” he confided in me mirthfully.
Sitting in a meeting-house at Ohinemutu, an old Maori woman, her lower lip blue with the real tattoo, proudly displayed specimens of her carving, lamenting the while that carving was a dying art. On a Sunday afternoon, at Whakarewarewa, I saw in the flesh the creature of my juvenile fancy, a chubby Maori lad, who dived for pennies and got them. But commercialism had gained a premature hold upon him, because he constantly demanded “thrupences.”
It does not seem difficult for Rotorua to make merry, for there is no suspicion of artificiality in its Christmas and New Year jollity. Once King Carnival is enthroned he reigns. No irksome restrictions spoil the revelry. Lines of motor cars seem to park themselves naturally without the metropolitan bark of traffic inspectors. The only grudge that the townspeople bear against cars is that they treat them like dogs. On at least two establishments will be found, in bold lettering: “Beware of the motor!”
By degrees I came to know Rotorua, and to believe the guide books. Most of the attractions so rightly advertised will be found there. In addition, the visitor who takes the trouble can find many more for himself and reap the satisfaction of his own discoveries. The thermal wonders, except where they have been harnessed for balneological purposes, lie in their primeval state. They excite admiration and command respect, while the healthgiving qualities of the waters which man has turned to that purpose are known the world over. The picturesqueness of the Maori life, a natural concomitant of the thermal regions, remains.
Man has aided Nature. There are good trips, secluded walks, spacious and well-kept playing grounds for young and old. The summer sun is kind, and the breeze temperate. Most important of all, perhaps, the people of Rotorua seemed to have discovered a secret formula for making spontaneous ous fun at the proper time
“Tobacco absolutely free from nicotine?” writes Mr. Eugene analytical chemist of note. “No I'm afraid it's as hopeless to look for that as it is to discover the philosoper'name stone or the elixir of life. The nearest approach to tobacco of such purity—and is a near approach—is made in Zealand. I know, becaus when i was there there for the big game fishing a year two ago I found that 'the tobacco of the country, as the Maorilanders call it, contains surprisingly little nicotine. The manufacturers toast it (having installed special machinery for the purpose), with the result that so much of the nicotine is eliminated that what remains is negligible. Both flavour and bouquet are delightful. No wonder this tobacco finds so much favour with smokers in 'the Britain of the South.' Thus the testimony in favour of New Zealand toasted tobacco is always growing! The four brands are: Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Riverhead-Gold, Cavendish, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead). Smoke them as freely as you will they are harmless—because they're toasted.*