AT WAR WITH NATURE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4854, 17 July 1925, Page 1

AT WAR WITH NATURE.

LIFE IN THE BACK-BLOCKS. MORTGAGES AND CARS. How settlers in the back country of the North Island are called upon to struggle on in the face of a multitude of cares and anxieties is told by a woman in the King Country in a letter to a friend in Christchurch, says the Lyttelton Times. "Somehow it gefis me down,’’ she writes. "(Once it used to be such a cheerful, go-ahead, optimistic place, everyone coming in full of hope. Now it is otherwise. There are abandoned farms everywhere. It’s the curse 01 spreading fern and arrears of rent to the Government that’s knocking the hearts out of so many, though most make a brave show of fighting. The fern might be fought with money in the form -of much fencing and regrassing and stocking, but there is no hope of it with a Government that thinks of nothing but rent. Even in the worst yearjs of the slump, when most private mortgagees had the decency to keep quiet and’ wait patiently for their interest, this Government department was everlastingly sending out final notices, blue papers, black papers, and green papers to people at their wits’ end to know where to turn for money, and who couldn’t possibly pay. All the while the newspapers were babbling about how the Government was standing by the farmers.. COSTLY BREAKING-IN. “These places are proving very costly to break in—that is the trouble. They ought to be rent free for years and years, not a petty four or five. The money saved that way could be put back in the land. There will come a day when they’ll be jolly glad to let anyone have the land rent free as long as it brings in some revenue to the country. I suppose they’ll wake up to that fact some day, when the present men are out and broken after putting in all their money and years of work. They are everlastingly sending in commissions about this and that which never seem to arrive at any helpful conclusions. The most helpful one, of course, would be to wipe but those arrears to everyone. The poor farmers didn’t make the slump, after all, so why shuld they have to shoulder all the loss ? “ FEELING BOLSHIE:” “Oh, dear I It makes me feel a bit Bolshie, but I hate this feeling, which oppresses one now. I used to love this country—and still do —all the little pretty things, delicate ferns and mosses, and berries along the banks of the road, little rushing creeks, the greenness of everything, and the smoky blue distances, and bellbirds’ songs at dawn, as well as the savage wildness of it all, and work and toil thot has gone into, the semi-civil-ising of it by the first settlers. At best, man has a titanic struggle against nature in such places, and one hates to see nature slowly winning—especially when it is ably assisted by a penny-wise-pound-foolish Government. Oh, dear! I could say a lot more, but will abstain.”