The Babies on the Brink.

There was a once greatly popular song on entertainment programmes, “The Babies on Our Block,” of New York origin:

On a hot day in the summer, when the wind blows off the sea,
A hundred thousand children lie on the Battery;
They came from Murphy's Buildings, and their noise would stop a clock,
There's no perambulators for the Babies on our Block.”

A recent news item from Rotorua seems to suggest to me that a ditty with a similar lilt could be written about a sight that travellers cannot duplicate outside New Zealand, and that is the Maori infantry which kicks up its heels and sucks its toes on the edge of the hot cooking springs and young and old geysers in the Rotorua country. Considering the familiar terms on which the Arawa population lives with boiling water, it is amazing that so few accidents occur.

The Coroner, holding an inquest on a three-year-old which had tumbled into a hot pool at Ngapuna, near Rotorua, commented strongly on the danger of unfenced springs of boiling water. Certainly such places should be made less perilous. There are several ways. In one furiously boiling ngawha at Ohinemutu some Maori humorist, a few years ago, set up a post bearing the notice: “Keep Out!”

In such a place as Tarewa village, a kind of native suburb of Rotorua, the large boiling springs, originally geysers, are filled nearly to the brink; the water is all but level with the grassy lawn around. They go down to unknown depths; the quietly boiling water, perfectly clear, has a blueish tint. The mothers of the village tend their cooking there, and gossip while the infants—there are always a lot at Tarewa, happily—lie on shawls or mats or crawl about in the manner of all the world's children, but with this difference, that there is sudden and fearful death within a few feet of them. The babies on the Tarewa block have the “keep out” instinct. The sight doesn't disturb the lovely calm of the kainga Maori. It would send a pakeha mother into fits with fright.