A READER’S MEDLEY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 97, 18 January 1935, Page 7

A READER’S MEDLEY

The Drift of Progress So the old police station is gone. It has been moVed, I read, from Port Awanui to Tikitiki in the general drift inland on the East Coast. That’s always the way of it. You drift inland to avoid the police station, and it drifts inland after you. I have never been to Port Awanui, or Tikitiki either. I’ll probably never go to Tikitiki (there is a police station much nearer home, anyhow), and as for Port Awanui, that once flourishing outlet for the Waiapu district, what attractions can it hold? There is a hotel and a store remaining you tell me. I know, and that is the tragedy of if, for although I have never been to Port Awanui, and may never go to Tikitiki, I have been consumed with an overwhelming desire, ever since I heard that the district had outgrown the need of a police station, to commit some rash infraction of the law in peaceful Awanui. Riding a bicycle without a light from the hotel to the store, past the police station, would probably do the trick. But now there is no police station. Shortly, I suppose, they will move the hotel, and the storekeeper will be left, shaking his head for the two departed glories of Port Awanui. Rabbits may gambol, oblivious of the law, on the garden plot of the departed sergeant in charge. The convolvulus may twine affectionately round the bars of the little cell where once I (or indeed, many of us) might have spent the night. There is always something sad in such a. thought. But constabulary duty must be done. The officers of the law must move with the times, not yielding to vain retrospect. We must all learn to look forward, remembering Lot’s wife. She looked back.—D.G.