An Aurora Incident

Hokitika Guardian, 24 May 1921, Page 3

An Aurora Incident

People are still discussing the Aurora Australis, and among the reminiscences it has awakened is an incident that marked the display which occurred in Auckland about 38 years ago. It was not so high in the heavens as the one /last Sunday week, and so its natiue was not quite so easy to determine. Anyhow it quite fooled the Auckland Fj,. e Brigade. The swift, smart, glittering turnout of to-da\« is a very different affair from that of thirty or forty years back. In those primitive days the band-reel was hauled painfully and laboriously to the scene of the fire by enthusiastic firefighters on foot, and as Auckland is not one of the most level places in the Dominion, they deserved all the kudos and long-service medals they got. Seeing a brilliant glare in the sky that night thirty odd years ago, the brigade (which was then housed in a shanty in Albert Street, long since pulled down) set out with the reel, and made good time to the. top’ of the rising ground to the south. Ihe glare still lured them on. and they toiled on heroically to the city boundary (then not quite so far-flung as to-day) and as the light on the horizon, in the words of the bard, still “mocked them,” they baited, took a breather and made their disappointed way back to the station, for those were the days when it was neither etiquette nor polite to go beyond the boundaries, and moreover the reel was hauled by hand and even the e'nthusasim of the fireman has its limits.’ The cream of the joke Jay in the fact that in the brigade report for the month appeared the item that there Tiad been only one fire during that period “but it was outside the city boundaries.” And it was a long time before the brigade lived down the story of that conflagration.“Star.”