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XXXII
New Zealanders

People at Home are often very hazy about Australasian geography. I remember finding in my evil youth perfectly receptive ground in the minds of two young ladies, school teachers, too, for an account of the frequent visibility of the Australian coast from Wellington, and the departure thence of a Sidney ferry boat, every half-hour. The actual distance is something towards 2,000 miles.

And you must never make the mistake of calling a New Zealander an Australian. He has the pride of his small and entirely different country, a country differing widely not only in flora, fauna, climate and aborigines, but also in its present inhabitants.

The early settlers in New Zealand were, taking them all together, of an exceptionally high class, and among them were many men of culture and great intelligence, who have left their mark on its social life. And for years the difficulty of reaching so distant a spot discouraged the emigration thither of all but the more earnest and determined settlers. Moreover, those who have come page 233have mostly been absorbed by the wholesome country life, and had not, In my time, at any rate, formed pools of poverty and degradation In great towns.

In the country there was singularly little difference In the actual style of living between the big run-holder and the man of only a few acres; the one, from whatever class he had originally come, had either himself begun in a small way, or had been actually employed on a sheep station; so he had much in common with the other, and there was really no very distinct class line of any kind. If a man was by nature a gentleman, it was not very long before he took his place with his natural equals, and if a cad, his inclinations, in the absence of definite class restraint, soon led him to consort, for the most part, with his kind.

The fact that nearly all children attended the Government public schools also helped to form a fairly homogeneous society.

In Australia there was, on the other hand, as I am informed, a social gulf between the big sheep men and the small settlers with opposed interests and much resultant bitterness. Then the life of an up-country Australian, owing to the vast distances and the more extreme climate, must often be far more arduous, adventurous, and full of hard-page 234shipsthan that of an average New Zealander, and in very great contrast, too, with the life of the numbers who are crowded in their own great towns.

Therefore it is not to be wondered at that, while in Australia character seems rather to run to extremes, in New Zealand it keeps more to the happy mean.

An Australian may be a splendid type of adventurous Englishman, a man whom no odds and no hardships can daunt or even distress, brave even to a fault, insistently independent, and submissive only to such discipline as he and his equals have approved. Or he may be a man of very different sort, one who perchance has hardly ever been out of the town, and who, though his merits may mainly consist of being Australian born, is sometimes not conspicuously modest in proclaiming them.

Of course, there are bad and good in New Zealand, too, but perhaps not quite so bad, and it may even be, though here I hesitate, not quite so good. The classes are more welded together with a pretty high average of education, manners, and character.

During the war I was always on the look out here, among folk who did not know that I had any interest in the matter, to get independent opinions on the New Zealand page 235contingent, and I heard from people In civil and military life, and from individuals of all classes who had come in contact with them, nothing but a chorus of praise without one jarring note So unanimous was this praise that I felt quite uncomfortable on their behalf, remembering the words, "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!" Are they perhaps even too mild and good? I said to myself. But my personal knowledge of some of these young men nipped that thought in the bud.

New Zealanders, as a rule, speak very good English. So also does the average Australian. But there are among the latter those who do not. For there are Australians and Austrylians. And there is the Sydney lingo, which is debased Whitechapel with a sort of twang super-added. I have heard it well characterised as "Cockney off a tin plate."

A story goes about that at a Sydney garden party, a daughter of the house, handing round cake and fruit, addressed thus a young man who had chosen the latter. "Naow, you'd better have some kyke. Oi myde it myself, yeaow can have the gripes afterwards" The thing is catching, especially by children, and creeps about horribly; the victim, when grown up, being quite incurable, though usually entirely unaware of his lamentable page 236state. It is even noticeable to some small extent In New Zealand, but does not there meet with much encouragement.

In the matter of drinking the young Colonial is much more sensible than were many of his emigrant forbears. Thirty or forty years ago you had, In order to survive, either to be teetotal or to have the constitution of a hippopotamus in a whisky river to stand without damage the fast recurring glasses that it was socially imperative to drink, when meeting friends in town, and on all sorts of other occasions. But there has been a vast improvement since them.

This Britain of the Southern Sea is a beautiful country, with a delightful climate or climates; it is an eminently healthful new dwelling-place for our race, and its inhabitants, who are almost entirely from the British Isles, do their mother's land the highestcre dit. The Government is quite reasonably good as governments go, and roads and railways are fast rendering all parts fairly accessible. The country has to my mind only two serious drawbacks. In the first place, it is so far off, that you feel when there, too entirely "out of the movement " of things at Home. (If it could only be towed round to somewhere near the page 237Canaries, now, what a paradise it would then be!) Secondly, however fair the landscape may be, there is but seldom any human interest in it, save now and then the sight of a Maori or pre-Maori fort; and, barring a little highly conventionalised Maori carving, there is no human work of any constructive beauty to be found.

But modern science is every day shortening the estranging distance, and it is to be hoped that in the course of time some sort of art will appear.

Meanwhile it is a community of kindly hospitable folk, not yet enslaved by the tyranny of modern industrialism; a people inclined, perhaps a little overmuch, to idealise the Old Country, with whom, as an Island Nation, they have so much in common, but otherwise, from the general mix-up of classes and of emigrants from all parts of the United Kingdom, very open-minded to new ideas, and able and ready to look boldly forward, facing the future with the utmost confidence.