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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 4 (August 1, 1929)

[section]

Leaving the Grey River again at the beginning of March, 1848—during the whole of 1847 not a white man was seen—Thomas Brunner and his companions, Piki and Kehu and their wives, tramped through the bush to the Buller again, and struck the great river somewhere below where Murchison is to-day. Sometimes the party had a square meal; sometimes all hands were on starvation rations.

A Great Explorer. Thomas Brunner.

A Great Explorer.
Thomas Brunner.

They cooked the roots of the ti (cabbage-tree) and enjoyed the sweetness thereof; ti is New Zealand's sugar-tree. They made nets of ti leaves and caught the upokororo and grayling in the streams; they got eels, too; they shot and snared birds—the weka, paradise duck, dabchicks, even sparrow-hawks—all went into the pot. Then in the mountain-beech country they had to tighten their belts. On the South bank of the Buller Brunner tried “a new species of fruit”—the berries of the mako tree. They were palatable enough, he wrote, if you were careful about it, “so that your teeth will only slightly crush the berry without breaking the seed, which has a most nauseous bitter taste.”

“The beastly drip of the bush” got on the explorer's nerves sometimes—no wonder, after a solid year of the West Coast. Rivers were a nightmare; they used to ford some of the rapid streams by “sparring” them, an art which the gold-diggers found necessary along the coast twenty years later—all hands holding a pole horizontally and pressing against it up-stream as they crossed. Other rivers they had to swim, or cross by making rafts.