New Zealand Now
4 — North Island
4
North Island
Year in and year out Wellington has two thousand hours of sunshine. It has also, intermittently, days without a breath of wind. You fall asleep to the groaning of trees and the rattle of windows and doors. You awake to a stillness that makes you wonder where you are. If you have the imagination for such alarms you think at once of 'earthquake weather'. If you have not forgotten Wordsworth you think of 'Westminster Bridge'. The hills, the houses, the harbour, the dingiest streets are not merely beautiful but touched with a benignity for which you have no words. It was Patagonia yesterday. This morning it is Lemnos or Norfolk Island.
But such miracles are rare. As a rule Wellington is gusty and bleak. Its harbour is choppy. Its hills are bush on clay. When rain comes with the wind, as it does on two days in every five, no other city in the Southern Hemisphere can be quite so dreary. It is difficult a hundred years later, when axe and fire have let in the page 42sun and drainage has conquered the mud, to realise how depressing their first winter must have been to the original white settlers put ashore on Petone beach. It is however on record that many of them would have sailed away again if that had been possible, and when it is possible many people move away from Wellington now. For it is less true of Wellington than of any other city in New Zealand that men come here to live. They come to work, and when their work is done they go somewhere else to live unless age and habit have brought on inertia. There are certainly brave spirits who like Wellington for its own sake: the 'tempest's howl it soothes their soul', as Burns says it does to Scotsmen. They like its moodiness, its wildness, its sudden rages and equally sudden surrenders; they are Wellingtonians. All others are Wellington residents,* and on these at least the climate and site have been fatal to cohesion. Time will of course win in the end. More and more people as the years pass will spread out into suburbs and conquer exposure and bareness and transfer their affections to these precious patches of clay. The proportion of dwellers is increasing, of residents decreasing, and so it must continue as long as there is growth.
* I have however heard one of these 'residents' speak of Wellington with arresting fervour. It was not merely the 'only place in New Zealand in which to work', he insisted, but the only place free of the inferiority complex that demands 'eternal protestation of glory'. And Athletic Park was 'probably the only ground in the world', he added, 'on which the visiting team got louder cheers than the home side'.
And with that thought so big in their minds there is less room for many sordid worries. The house could do with another coat of paint. But whose house is it? The hedge is rushing up instead of out, and is now all draught-holes. But it was tending that way when they first took the place. The garden should be trenched and generously manured. They know that as well as you do; but a real garden—the kind they will give themselves in Havelock or Nelson—is the page 44work of several years. They have only two more to go. And why buy pictures until you know on what walls they will finally hang? Why collect books? Pianos are just impossible things until you come finally to rest. Well made furniture will not go with jerry-built houses.
* I remember, as I write this, that there are in fact more people in Auckland suburbs than in Auckland city—123,880, the latest returns show, out of a total population of 230,680. But they are all emphatically Aucklanders.
But since the land makes the man before the man makes the land, the traveller north by the eastern route finds himself at last among a sheep-raising gentry while the western route keeps him among cows. In both cases he passes through a Scandinavian belt without any sense of strangeness, though he sees signs here page 47and there of an un-British respect for pigs; for in seventy years the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes have suffered the same bush and mud changes as the English, Scots, and Irish, and only their names remain to remind us where they came from.
There is of course a little more in the North Island story than the social rivalry of cows and sheep. The men and women who followed the Main Trunk railway, for example, wove a social fabric of their own that their children have not torn up. You do not feel in Taihape or Taumarunui that it matters much whether they milk 'ceows' or 'caows'. It matters that they have sharp axes and a wholesome fear of fern. They do not lose caste if they eat in the kitchen. They lose everything if they are careless about second growth. For the corpse of their enemy will not stay dead. They have conquered the bush but they still sit in anxious occupation of the stumps. And because they were far too busy when the battle was on to polish their nails every day and scrape their chins, some are now too old and some too proud to change. The day will come when the traveller will pass from, the Rangitikei to the Waikato without knowing where he is socially. But he knows to-day page 52that he is among ruder, stronger, simpler, and for all their cultivation of the ranker sins, essentially cleaner people than inhabit many more sophisticated settlements. Ask one of the older inhabitants to-day what he does in Taihape to amuse himself, and he may give you the answer you deserve: 'Watch fools like you going past in the train.' Ask one of the younger generation, and he will tell you with a tremendous grin that he drinks beer and knows a girl or two. Thirst and lechery are exalted in casual conversation into the high-spots of life, although the signs are everywhere that the chief sin is hard work without time to stand and stare.
And there is of course a reason for all this. The coast was settled by men of all ages and of all conditions, but whether they were young or old, penniless or relatively rich, they came straight from a settled and ordered society. Behind them lay a thousand years of Britain, a thousand years of Church and State with all their social balances and checks. The men who settled the King country had lost their traditions. They were the sons and sometimes the grandsons of men and women who had been half a century uprooted, or Irish immigrants who had strong national and religious reasons for not carrying on the old tradition. With few exceptions they were poor, and it was an accident if they had received a liberal education. They were hearty, as adventurers usually are, but they were also a little defiant, because many page 53of them were the unlucky numbers from the first scramble, settlers who had not succeeded, artisans and labourers who had known soup kitchens, and who now went into the bush with many of the resolutions and resentments with which their parents had left Britain in the first place. The first money many of them ever saved was paid to them for work on the railway. Without that railway they would in fact have been submerged, but they succeeded so quickly with it that they are still in a sense nouveaux riches, confident and contemptuous, slap-dash, by no means a legion of the lost, but a legion, it is difficult not to say, of frontiersmen, who chopped and burnt their way to liberty in twenty years and found fortune in a bag of manure. You must not expect them to have social graces. But you have lost the faculty of distinguishing grain from chaff if you think that they and not you are barbarians.
When you reach Te Kuiti you are in a new drainage area and low country all the way to the end of the Island. If you turn off to Rotorua and Thames you will rise a little and fall a little, but whether you turn right along the Bay of Plenty or left along Auckland Peninsula you remain among cows, with the great flocks of sheep behind you or to one side of you across bush-clad mountains. Auckland worships the cow as devoutly as Wellington, Canterbury, and Otago worship the sheep; nor is its devotion a divided allegiance as geography has made Wellington's. A page 54sheep north of Taupo has about the same place in the hagiarchy as a milking cow has south of Palmerston North: you uncover before both, and may even make sacrifice, but you do it furtively, and only when your other deity has failed you.
And because you are now in the country of the cow, and pass monuments to her every few miles—they stand as thick in the Waikato as in the greenest patch of Taranaki—you soon see the signs of a cheese and butter economy. From Kawhia to Hokianga, and from Opotiki to Keri Keri, though you are aware now and again of the influence of timber, of coal, of gold, and even of gum, you enter no township and follow no road that does not bring you sooner or later to a dairy-factory. You live cows, think cows, talk cows, breathe cows everywhere but on the rocky hump of Coromandel Peninsula; and even there you come on cows as often as you drop to the creek-flats and swamps.
But it is time to get back to the cows, and if you return by rail you will arrive again at Hamilton. You will also pass from one age into another. In that short journey back to the Waikato you say goodbye to everything that was New Zealand once and make acquaintance with nearly everything that is New Zealand now. If Thames is many times older than its age, Hamilton is many times younger. Thames is as old as age can be without being decrepit. Hamilton is as young as youth can be and still sit at table with grown-ups. It will some day be mellow and beautiful, as every town must be that lies long enough on the high banks of a deep clear river. But it is not mellow yet. It is new—clean, vigorous, bustling, alert, but almost indecently young. And just as travellers find it difficult in Bournville to believe that they are in England, and not easy, when they remember where they are, to be sure that such a place should exist—meliorism, they will tell you, can itself be a menace—so the South Islander suddenly entering Hamilton wonders where all those shops and offices came from, who built them, who visits them, and what right the Waikato has to be so flagrantly prosperous. For it clearly makes little difference to Hamilton in normal times whether it hails or rains page 57in Otago, whether frost or the north-west wind sears Canterbury, whether there are floods in Marlborough or drought in Hawke's Bay. As long as its cows calve and its bulls gender money will flow into its pocket and petrol fumes rise like incense from its main street. Canterbury can charge it a little more for wheat, North Auckland or Central Otago extract a little more for their fruit; but there is not much more that the rest of the Dominion can do to it, and the thought is hard to bear.
And as it is in Hamilton, so it has always been, for a hundred different and a thousand identical reasons, in Auckland. Auckland is not what it is just because its citizens are what they are. It is not the Queen City because two hundred thousand people keep on saying so. It has left Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin behind because it lies degrees nearer to the Equator; because it has always had land for its people to build their houses and water in which to swing their ships; because it is in the track of trade to Australia, the first point of call from America, and the nearest point for trade with what we still foolishly call the South Seas and the Far East. Timber has helped it, gold, coal, sugar, and gum. But nothing means so much to it to-day as butter, cheese, and milk. It is a rich garden fertilised from the cow-shed. And because cows are the foundation of its economy, the grocer, the butcher, the draper, and the baker are the guiding stars of its municipal life. Auckland is a city page 58in which you buy and sell things and hope that you will not lose by the exchange. It has the short-circuited economy of the dairy farm itself—grass to-day, cream to-morrow, and your cheque at the end of the month. It has of course many rich men, but most of them have become rich in trade, which means exchange, and keeping things moving, and not having too many poor men. Auckland is a prosperous city—prosperous rather than comfortable. It moves, its pots keep on boiling; however full they are, they are not pushed to one side of the stove. They overflow, they splutter, they rise and fall, they bubble, the contents never settle. So privilege never gets a long grip. There are no entrenched families or parties. The man who serves behind the counter, in the courts of law, or in the doctor's surgery, who fights for his union, or keeps watch on the waterfront, becomes more influential than the man whose prosperity involves no personal contacts. It is not so much service before self—though any prophet could have foretold that Auckland would become the home of Rotary—as service to build up the self; and it is never forgotten in Auckland that they who build up can also take down. He that exalteth himself shall be abased unless he goes on holding himself up by useful work. Cows make you work. They make you remember the source, as well as the secret, of your prosperity. Auckland wears the secret on its brow. It has no false pride; only what the Scots call a good page 59conceit: no superior ways; only a tendency to become self-centred: no superciliousness; only a frank parochialism. It has no need to worry about the south, no desire therefore, and no disposition to pretend.
Nor is it much more interested in its own north. Auckland peninsula means very little more in Queen Street than it does in Lambton Quay—once you have made allowance for its cows. Run a fence from Dargaville to Whangarei, and Queen Street will give you the rest for history. It is pleasant to think that our civilisation began there, pleasant to live there, comforting to know that when Queen Street becomes too noisy there are quiet bays up north and still waters studded with islands. But Auckland does not eat, drink, or grow fat there. It makes holiday. And when it is not there making holiday Auckland leaves the 'winterless north' to retired Empire-builders who do not think her thoughts and to European peasants who do not pursue her ways. When pride of place asserts itself at intervals and insists on a separate identity, Auckland smiles indulgently. If Northland sounds sweeter than North Auckland, Northland it shall be. But the cows still look south at milking-time.