I
First Experiences

Hating, as a young man in the eighties, both the hideousness of our towns and the outlook and ideals of commercial life, and loathing alike the enforced confinement and everlasting worrying; detail of my job in a big business house, I was always dreaming of the delights of a free life, of building one's own hut on one's own land far away from the galling restraints of civilisation. That was some fifty years ago. Though I should still be unhappy without my own bit of land, and as uncomfortable in a house I had neither designed nor built, as in another man's coat and trousers, I have nowadays no sort of objection to having civilisation within easy reach.

But as I was then, when month after month came exciting letters from an elder brother, always a rolling stone, who had been learning sheep-farming in New Zealand and had just taken up 1,500 acres of land, I made no page 2struggle to resist the temptation, but went out forthwith to join him.

I will not weary you with the details of the voyage out. Indeed, in my time, it was very bad form, in New Zealand, to discuss the matter at all. Everyone had been through it, and the recitation by the new arrival of the incidents of life aboard ship was usually too boresome to be tolerated.

My ship was the first mail steamer that had ever sailed direct to New Zealand. She was only of 2,000 tons, with very poor accommodation, every inch of which was crawling with cockroaches; and the passengers, being nearly all new to travel, soon started quarrelling, so that before we were half-way they were standing in two cliques, at daggers drawn. There was one Mark Tapley, however, who said: "I like this ship, she's the first boat I've ever been on where they strain all the cockroaches out of the soup before they bring it to table!" At the Cape we heard of the capture of the murderers of Lord Frederick Cavendish, which fixes the year. Though always a bad sailor, with no great love of the sea after I had once been on it, I have never since been half so glad to see the last of a ship as I was at saying goodbye to this one. Later, leaving a comparatively luxurious coasting steamer at Gisborne, page 3we were taken aboard a very miniature tender and then transferred to a row-boat to take us over a sand-bar into the river.

It was in the quiet of very early morning after a rainy night, and 'everything was freshly green, and especially delightful after the weary sea. A high grass bank bounded the still water, crowned with a grove of Ngaio¹ trees, with thatched native wharés² behind, and as we rowed along there appeared above, standing out against the far blue of the bush range, the dignified figure of a stalwart Maori, draped in a scarlet blanket. It was the exact picture for my young mind. It is still before me, as clear as ever.

The fifteen-mile ride up to our section was a delight, along a narrow, winding track among open fern-covered hills, and the arrival at our "really own" land a delirious joy. The chosen homestead site was a twenty-acre bracken covered flat among steep hills of fern and bush, and bounded by a little river of rapids and clear deep pools. But, beyond the delight of ownership and the charming beauty of the place, there was not at first much other comfort. For my brother had had to be away from It for months, recovering from typhoid, and things were all anyway.

The teat was down and all the stores were in a little thatched storehouse of rough poles called a whata. My brother had been careful to make this high off the ground, some eight or nine feet indeed, but had forgotten the necessary rat-insulating tins, so that the flour and sugar had suffered a good deal. After spending some time with a pig-spear jabbing, from under, at the grey bellies of the depredators as they ran across the open pole floor, we climbed up and spent a none too restful night, with nothing but a blanket between us and these very uneven little rafters. Next day we had the tent up and a single sheet or "fly" to cook under, and things generally a little more comfortable. But we were pretty raw with regard to camp life, and did many things all wrong. For one thing, my brother insisted on crockery, until, carrying all the breakfast things out of the tent one morning in a big tin milk pan, he tripped up and broke every single one. After trying tin, which is vile to clean, we finally settled down to enamelled iron, trusting that swallowed chips off it would not hurt us,

Having fixed up a gate on the track to keep our horses from straying back, and done a few other immediately needed things about the camp, we should have at once begun to clear the bush and grass it for stock, Insteád page break

Plate II
The old Homestead, Wai Mat a Valley

page 5of that, we wasted most of the winter in building a quite unnecessarily solid and roomy hut of round timber and clay. The idea was magnificent, but it was not sheep-farming. Later on a younger brother arrived, accompanied by a great strong young fellow, a farmer's son, and with their help we soon finished the clay fort, as our neighbours called it.

There was, however, no thatch handy and no suitable timber for splitting shingles; so we obtained a big tarred tarpaulin, and that, tied securely on, remained our roof for two or three years. When there was a wild sou'-easter raging at night with a continuous torrent of rain, we were often obsessed with the fear that a corner might blow up and the rest follow, leaving us exposed in the dark to the howling downpour, amid the ruin of all our worldly goods; and though it held tight to the end, we had been years living in a well-roofed house before we ceased to take joy in the sound of heavy drops on galvanised iron.

There were great beams of round timber across our big hut, and for sleeping accommodation we laid a strong tarpaulin over them, fastened at the sides. When we went up to bed, the first in took up all the slack as he sank down between his two particular beams.

The next man regained some of this slack, incidentally rolling No. 1 dean over, and so to the end. And when one got up, he let down all the others with an awakening jerk. Then we nailed the tarpaulin along each beam and had peace, until one night the farmer's heavy son split his piece and fell headlong, and would have been hurt had there not been very luckily some bags of chaff beneath. Meanwhile, I myself had swung a hammock down below which was comfortable enough when once you were in, but needed a lot of blankets. The terrier was very disturbed one night, and stepping down to strike a light to see what the trouble was, I found myself over ankle deep in cold water. We had forgotten to put a proper drain round the place. The earth floor was muddy and miserable for some days thereafter, and that little lesson was learnt for good and all. In the end each made himself a rough bedstead of poles and sacking, and went up aloft no more.

Wading the bouldery shallows on a frosty morning to fetch back the strayed horses from across the river was a chilly job. A rough pair of stilts made quite a sporting affair of it, as there was an elusive patch of clay somewhere in the stony ford, and if a stilt went into that, you were done.

As the months went on, we began to work page 7in earnest, bush-felling, splitting posts, fencing, burning off and sowing fern, and what not.

We each took cooking week about. On Sunday the new cook generally spent his spare time cutting firewood and getting things in order. On weekdays he was allowed one hour ahead of the others home from work, and he was expected to have ready, by the time the rest of us were home, fried chops or some other hot meat, potatoes, and perhaps another vegetable, with a big billy of tea and a flap-jack or doughboy or some sort of pudding to follow—a flap-jack being a thick heavy pancake and a doughboy a dumpling. To be up to time, he had to be pretty smart and to have everything very well arranged, and as he often had to spend half his night baking bread, he was generally mighty glad when his week was up. If, however, he fancied himself at the cooking fire, he longed for a wet day. I remember a flaming reputation earned by the help of a timely sou'- easter and an old Soyer cookery-book, the masterpiece thus accomplished having been a real beefsteak pudding. I refused all flattering "encores"; I would not risk my halo. On the eve of another soaker, the carcase of a good wild sow had been brought in, and we had sausages—sausages complete page 8in every way—hot sausages browning and sizzling in the pan! Think of it!

It was about then that I had pointed out to me a striking bit of evidence as to the existence of design in creation. It was a fact, I learnt, that in every pig there is a bit of spatulated bone exactly suited for use as a mustard-spoon.

We had all brought out from home a lot of unnecessary linen, and when this stock had all been used, some of the earlier discarded articles seemed clean enough to go on with for a bit. But the evil day could not be put off indefinitely, and the time came when there had to be proclaimed a general wash.

Firewood was sledged down to the riverside shingle, posts were driven in, all our pots, kettles and boilers were slung by wire hooks to a long pole over a mighty fire, and the work began. My own part of the job was to stand out in the river in a state of nature and rinse. There was a great pile of stuff to do and we were a whole day at it, but work as we would, the linen, though certainly rendered more wholesome, did not seem exactly white, and Reckitt only served to make blue streaks in it. My elder brother sat up most of the night starching his collars and ironing them with a steel splitting wedge.

He got them really stiff and even shiny, though they seemed badly to need another wash when he had done. For my own part I resigned from the Great Laundry Combine right away, and henceforth boiled up a coloured shirt once a week "on my own," and stowed the rest of my linen away.

We all certainly worked pretty hard, but the new life was most exhilarating, and none of us then had the slightest wish to go back to England.

After two or three years of this sort of life we had a fairly good wooden house built for us (Plate II), and my mother joining us with her youngest son, an era of reasonable comfort was begun.

We soon had our first sheep. on the place (Plate III), not many, not so many but that we could get to recognise a few of them individually. There was, for instance, the ewe that would take a standing hop over any fence we had, there was the "Dook" with his abnormal nose, and the old girl who, if she wanted to cross the river, would calmly jump into deep water and swim it, whereas it was often a big business to get a mob across a quite shallow ford. (Distinctive collective words for various live things are not much in use in the colonies. You refer to a drove of cattle or horses, a flock of page 10sheep, a flight of ducks or a bevy of quail, as just a "mob")

My elder brother had a fine sense of humour, but it was intermittent, and sometimes deserted him altogether. We were trying to get back a ewe and lamb from the bottom of a deep gully into which they had strayed. A genial bushman had carried the lamb up the hill and held it there in full sight, while my brother tried to induce the weak mother to climb up after it. Finding this difficult, he, with the utmost seriousness, called out to Goodall in a loud and most earnest voice, "Will you baa, please?" The good man was so tickled that he let go the lamb and rolled on the grass in fits.

A handsome black-bearded kindly man was Goodall, a first-class bushman and an excellent fencer. With little if any formal education, but by no means unread, he had the charm of natural good manners and intelligence. Everyone liked and respected him up country, but he could not keep away from town—the irresistible longing came on him every few months. He ended by drowning himself in our river in a fit of d.t.