“Huskies” on the Glaciers

Birds of Fiordland.

New Zealand is fortunate in possessing so many small off-shore islands, seemingly designed by Nature as places of sanctuary for the too-quickly vanishing native birds. There are page 30 quite forty of these islands set aside by the State as reserves for the preservation of indigenous feathered life. Then there are the mainland sanctuaries, and the largest of these is the huge Fiordland National Park, the south-western corner of the South Island. This is all as wild can be, all forest and gorge and crag and snowy alp—a tremendous tameless region. Even here those foreign pests, the weasel, the stoat, the Norwegian rat, and the wild cat have penetrated, and the comparatively helpless native birds suffer. Nevertheless there is teeming bird life in the more remote parts, as reported by explorers.

New Zealand'S National Sport.
A special train at Cross Creek station (Wairarapa line) conveying football enthusiasts to Carterton for the interprovincial match between Auckland and Wairarapa.

Mr. Kenneth Sutherland, of Te Anau, says that the curious flightless bird, the kakapo—the night-roving ground parrot, extinct in most other parts, is still to be found in all the bush country between Doubtful Sound, on the West Coast, and the north arm of Lake Te Anau. The kiwi, found in its several varieties in many parts of New Zealand, is plentiful on the seaward ranges. It is pleasant to know that all these species of birds, as reported by Mr. Sutherland, are still abundant: bellbird, bush wrens, pied fantail, wood robin, tomtit, kaka parrot, and kea or mountain parrot. Pigeon, too, the beautiful kukupa, is still fairly numerous. Only a few of the sweet-voiced tui were seen, but this bird is accustomed to migrate from one feeding-ground to another, like the kaka.

It is good to hear that the weka has been known to kill its enemy, the stoat and the weasel. It is about the only native bird that can hold its own against those imported curses of the Maori bush.

Bright Maori Banners.

Some day, when Wellington rejoices in the sight of its new Dominion Museum, erected on the commanding site of the present gaol-like military barracks, there should be space to display the numerous Maori war flags that now lie packed away in long cases in a lumber shed. They are wonderfully picturesque some of these relics of the days when Maori nationalism tried in vain to sweep back the pakeha tide. There is one with a quite romantic history, Te Kooti's “fighting whip,” as he called it, a long tapering flag, not unlike a Royal Navy paying-off pennant. It was made by the nuns of a Roman Catholic convent in Hawke's Bay more than sixty years ago for the Government Maoris, the Queenites—as opposed to the adherents of the Maori King—but the rebels captured it, and whenever Te Kooti announced to his wild riflemen a raid on the pakeha, not Blue Peter but “Te Whiu” to the masthead flew.

That gallant colonial soldier, Captain Gilbert Mair, recaptured it for the Government side in 1870, when he shot its bearer in a long running fight near Rotorua. It is “a banner with a page 31 strange device,” a streamer of red silk, with emblems worked on it in white—the crescent moon, a conical mountain, representing Aotea-roa, or New Zealand, a cross, a heart and a star.

Among the historical treasures of this kind in the Auckland municipal buildings is a captured fighting-flag twenty feet in length by six feet in width, bearing a blood-red defiant figure representing Tu-mata-uenga—“Tu of the Angry Face”—the god of war. But a still more remarkable war-colour is one that has gone a-missing; I would like to hear of its recovery for exhibition. It is the flag captured in 1860 by the bluejackets of H.M.S. Niger at the battle of Waireka, on the Taranaki coast. It bore a representation of a peaked mountain—Mt. Egmont—and the Sugarloaf Rock at New Plymouth (these symbolising the land of the Maori), a heart, and a rayed sun, both emblems full of meaning. This token of patriotic sentiment was presented to the Governor of the day, Gore-Brown, at Auckland, and I believe was sent to England. Some of us in New Zealand would like to hear of its whereabouts, if it still exists.

Sleek o' the Whale.

Our artist has given us, in his head-piece to this section a vignette of an old-time whaling station. What an immense deal could be written about New Zealand's whale-hunting history and associations! We had more than a century of it on the coast, and some whaling is still done here and there, at Tory Channel, Kaikoura, and North Auckland.

On The West Coast Of The South Island.
A scene at a wayside station on the Westport-Cape Foulwind Branch Line.

There was a time when one saw many a whaleship, nearly all American, come into the Bay of Islands and Auckland, tranship their takes of oil, and get supplies. It was in 1890, I think, that I went aboard the New Bedford whaling barque Gayhead, lying off famous old Kororareka. A little later I saw that most celebrated of New Bedford blubber-hunters, the Charles W. Morgan; she came in to the Railway Wharf, Auckland. The antique-looking barque has been in the movie business in modern times, with a crowd of beauty actors and strange ruffians aboard.

But what I started out to say was to remark on, for one thing, the picturesque character of the whalers’ technical tongue. Leaving aside the adjectival eloquence of the bucko mates and boat-steerers, the professional language was full of charmingly expressive terms. Just one example. My old acquaintance, big Tom Jackson, of Kaikoura, who had been whaling for nearly sixty years, was telling the story of a wild day off Tory Channel with a killed right whale in tow of his six-oar boat. They were buffeted by the “but-end of a nor'-wester” and they might have been swamped by the breaking seas, but the oil exudations from the harpoon and lance wounds in the whale put a slather on the waves and scarcely a spray came aboard. “The sleek o’ the whale,” he said, “smoothed off the tops o’ the seas.”

The Wonderland of Vestland, New Zealand.
“Both from the point of view of scenery and as a field for mountain sport, the New Zealand Alps can hold their own with those of Switzerland or the Rockies.“—The Rt. Hon. L. G. Amery, formerly Secretary of State for the Dominions.
“The glories of these snowy mountains, piled saw-edged igainst the great broken ranges looming blue and green, and the glistening still billows of the glaciers will never fade.“—Mr. James Cowan, in “See New Zealand First.”
[Photo, Dr. E. Teichelmann.]
On the West Coast of the South Island. Backed by the grandeur of the Southern Alps, with peak of Mt. Cook peeping through the clouds, the terminal face of the Fox Glacier is seen reflected in the still waters of Lake Matheson. Ninety-odd miles south-west of Greymouthly rail and motor, the phenomenon of glaciers reaching down through magnificent forests to within short distance of the sea is found the region of the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers.