The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 7, Issue 4 (August 1, 1932)
The “Father of Taumarunui.”
The “Father of Taumarunui.”
The “Father of Taumarunui,” as Mr. Bell has been called, proudly wore his New Zealand War medal on the day when last I saw him; we had met again to discuss certain passages in the story of the bush-campaigning era. We mutually regretted some of the changes, the inevitable passing of the ages-old charm of seclusion, the forest freedom that once was Taumarunui's. Necessary as was the coming of the rail, a day too long delayed, and the making of a commercial town, there were features of the past that pleased the old-timer best. “Ah,” he said, “I don't like all this hurry and bustle, all this haste to get somewhere, all this noise. I often think of the days when I could go out in the morning, just up the hill yonder, with my double-barrel gun and come back with a kitful of fat pigeons. What shooting we did in those days never seemed to make the pigeons any scarcer. But the coming of all the crowds and the bush-felling and the burning have destroyed the birds that were everywhere in my early days here.” And the veteran lamented, too, the passing of the tui, which used to usher in the morning in all the bush around the valley, and on this Taumarunui flat itself. “I'd far sooner hear the tui sing than those motor cars hoot through the town.”
Was it not the Black Douglas—as we read in the old chronicles—who declared that he would sooner hear the cricket sing than the mouse squeak. The Douglas page 28 meant the prison when he spoke of the mouse's squeak.