The Whakatane Valley and Rangitaiki Plain.

Once upon a time, and that only a few years ago, the Whakatane district was to a large extent isolated, not an easy place to reach. We used to go down by small coastal steamer or by road, and both had their drawbacks. Not until the recent completion of the railway to the Whakatane Valley at Taneatua did this rapidly growing producing region come into its own, and the beneficial results were apparent to the commercial touring party. There was a time when the staple commercial product of most of this Bay of Plenty country was maize. A great deal of maize is still grown by both pakeha and Maori, but much of the land is now diverted to dairy farming, the most profitable of all branches of land work. To this industry, as well as to the raising of fat stock for the market, the coming of the railway means a great deal. There is, moreover, to be noted the immensely enhanced value of these seaward lands as the result of the great swamp drainage operations carried out by the Government.

The Rangitaiki Swamp is now the “Rangitaiki Plain.” The change in title represents a transformation which has brought a far-spreading area of marsh and lagoon and creek under cultivation and habitation, a region of industry and wealth, the home of scores of prosperous settler-families. Where once we saw nothing but a flax and raupo wilderness, threaded by slow muddy water courses and shining with lagoons, the haunt of wild ducks, there is now a wide expanse of rich grass land, with its grazing dairy herds, its plantations, orchards and homesteads. The eel-swamps have been unwatered with scientific skill, by canals and a network of deep drains; river courses have been straightened, and motor launches buzz along where once Maori canoes crept silently along the narrow crooked creeks. Across this redeemed fern country between the Awa-a-te-Atua estuary and Matata and the lower Whakatane, the railway goes to-day to its terminus under the hills at Taneatua, the business centre of a wealthy countryside where the Maori vies with the pakeha in agriculture and the production of butter-fat.