No Romance!

In the preface to a lately-published collection of New Zealand short stories, the compiler made the remarkable statement in his preface that this country is lacking in much of the elements of romance and adventure. New Zealand has had no frontiersmen, he declared; it has no epic of struggle against mighty forces, and settlement was a prosaic business. No past, in fact nothing of the kind to stimulate the writer. It was an astonishing statement to come from the pen of a New Zealander, or an Australian for that matter. As a writer in an Auckland paper has truly commented, this Dominion is the very last country to which such a remark could apply.

Our pioneer days, our old bush life, our bush wars, our breaking-in period, surely produced a few frontiersmen! I knew some hundreds of them in my time—and I don't admit that I am yet in “the sere and yellow leaf.”

As for that “epic struggle,” a few thousands had all the epic they wanted in that breaking-period, those years of fighting, that era of golddigging and wild adventuring. No doubt a shopkeeper on Lambton Quay or a bank clerk in Queen Street would have voted life unexciting, but the man who carried a loaded rifle slung across his shoulders as he ploughed his little farm on the danger-line, and the women who nightly carried their babies in to the nearest blockhouse redoubt on the frontier, for fear of Maori raids in the midnight hours—none of those would have considered the times prosaic.

The development of New Zealand has been swift, but it was mighty tough going sometimes. Our pioneer railway route-finders had some hectic days in the outback. And if the page 43 Yankee touch is required, we have even had our frontier renegades, our gun-runners, and our rum-runners, bootleggers too—only they didn't call them that down this way.