NEW ZEALAND'S CAPITOL

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 393, 6 September 1911, Page 7

NEW ZEALAND'S CAPITOL

THE CITY OF TAUPO: A PROPHECY. (By James Cowan.) Mr Laurenson's prediction that some day our political capital will be removed from Wellington and set up anew in some inland district was laughed at by several unbelieving members of Parliament in the the other night. But Mr Laurenson has the gift of prescience in far greater degree than the average member of Parliament, whose range of vision is too often bounded by the requirements of his own little constituency. Mr Laurenson's idea is by no means a new one, but it is a good thing to din it into the ears of members every now and then. Half a century hence, perhaps, it may make some impression. Wellington's central geographical position is its only real claim to the privilege of being New Zealand s capital. That advantage, however, is not so all-important as it was once., when all New Zealand journeys of any length had to be done by sea. When the capital was shifted from Auckland to Wellington in the sixties the annual trip to Parliament was <» serious undertaking for members. Now, however, most parts of the two islands are easily accessible by rail, and a few hundred miles either way makes little difference.

The city of Wellington, moreover, as Mr Laurenson pointed out, is very badly planned —if it was planned at all. Its area is circumscribed by the steep hills that hem it in, and it 3 very advantage of geographical situation, in the funnel of Cook Strait, will have the disadvantage of making it an overcrowded and congested city. The removal of the seat of government from Wellington would therefore come as a great relief, considered quite dispassionately and apart altogether from questions of "vested interests. The removal of several thousands of civil servants would possibly be bad for trade at the outset, but it would give Wellington a breathing while, and would enable it to reconstruct itself on lines that in the end would make it a far more attractive city than before and a no less busy one, and there are the strategic and military considerations which make it undesirable that the capital of a country should be in such an exposed position, open to raids from any piratical ship of war, which could lie out in Cook Strait and shell the city with perfect ease and safety to itself. Of course it is no use suggesting anything of the sort to Wellington .members of Parliament. But in a big national question of this sort Wellington members of Parliament and members of the Legislative Council and their purely local interests need not be given exaggerated importance. Then where shall we place our future capital, or Capitol, which you please? Mr Laurenson, with some enthusiasm, drew a picture of a model city on a ten-thousand acre block, up in the Wairarapa or the Manawatu, or the back of Blenheim—why the back of Blenheim?—with a lake in the centre and Parliament House on the waters edge. But Mr Laurenson, in my opinion, doesn't go far enough. Why not go to Taupo? Lake Taupo is the natural and geographical heart of the North Island. Indeed the great lake is roughly heartshaped; Nature evidently had an eye i to the fitness of thing when she i shaped these land and filled these lakes. There is no one part of the | South Island so admirably designed | 83 a central ; equal distance from either coast and i equal-distance from Auckland and ; Wellington. A colossal reservoir of ! blue, it drains the greatest mountains I of the island and it supplies our greatest river. Long ago its shores were the meeting place of Maori tribes from all quarters of the Ika-a-Maui, and there was a spirit in the place and in the grand, life-giving tonic air of the plains that made the Taupo Maoris the most free and independent in New Zealand. Te j Heuheu, the great chief whose home was on the southern shore of TauDO, was about the only Maori of any importance who refused to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, when it was brought to him to affix his tatoo-mark. "Hu!" he said, "ami going to place my head beneath the thighs of a woman? Take your pukapuka away ! Perhaps a similar spirit of pride and independence may be developed in our | white legislators when they make their laws at Taupo! Look at a map of the island and observe how Taupo M.ieana lies fair in the middle. Remember also that its surface is 1300 ft above sea level, that it has an area of more than two hundred square miles, and that its climate is probably the best in New Zealand, better even than the much praised Hamner Spring. It is already becoming a health resort; doctors say that residence there is a certain cure for consumption except in the worst cases This germ-free air is new life to the sick. Here too are healing springs of wonderful efficacy, health-giv : ng mineral waters that cure pretty well any disease with which you can fit yourself from a medical book. And the scenery is the grandest in the North Island, and more interesting in its combination of snow and ice and volcanic activity, than any part of New Zealand. Timid people who shudder at the mention of a volcano, and who live in apprehenison of earthquakes, need have no fears. The volcanos are perfectly harmless; you may climb to the top and picnic in the craters with perfect safety, if you j keep well to windward—and as for earthquakes, Wellington has more in I the course of the year. j j Here, somewhere on Taupo Muana s 1 shores, is the site of our Dream City, * our Garden City of the future, our Washington, our Berlin. Picture it as it mav be in 1961 A.D. The Capitol, with its white stone Parliament i House and its departmental buildings and its churches and theatres and

dwellings, lies on a gentle slope of the easternside of Taupo Moana, overlooking the blue inland sea. (No need for Mr Laurenson's circular artificial lake here!) The town is a real garden city, for it has been laid out in accordance with a rational town-planning scheme, based on the infant measure *\hieh the Hon. Geo. Fowlds introduced in the far back days of 1911 (See "The Life and Times of the Hon. Geo, Fowlds,'' in the Taupo Parliamentary Library.) There are great plantation! of trees to shelter the white city from the cold breezes off the Kaimanawa Ranges and the snows of Ruapehu. There are parks and fountains and beautiful gardens; each residence has its shade trees and its orchards and its flowers. These pumiceous shores of Taupo may not grow wheat, but they will grow trees and fruit and flowers equally a3 well as the once condemned lands around Rotorua. Pure sparkling cold streams run down through the town into the lake. Away to the north, looking for the Capitol Park, you see the lofty wooded extinct cone of Tauhara, and far away beyond the wide Kaingaroa Plains and southwards is the most wonderful view in the island -the lake and its woody shore hills, and then the great trinity of high places, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, all three snowcapped in winter, and Ruapehu al the year round. It was under the shadow of that inspiring mountain Ruapehu that Sir George Grey camped when he made his first draft of New Zealand's Constitution. In front of you the lake stretches away, twenty-five miles long and sixteen miles wide. It is lively with steamers and electric motorboats and white sailed schooners, and small sailing craft, for villas have grown up all around its shores, and it is a famous yachting ground. _ And you are not isolated from the big trading cities on the coast for trains run in here from Wellington in the south and from Auckland via Rotorua, in the North. The honourable member for Lyttelton —I am afraid it won't be Mr Laurenson in 19(51 —can reach Taupo in ten or twelve hours from the time he leaves home. (Flying machines do it in leas, but so many members of Parliament have been lost in Cook Strait or carried out into the Tasman Sea that the air route :s not popular amongst the more conservative members, for Wellington and its vicinty is as wide as ever). The Garden City is selfcontained and seltsufficing; it does not need to go beyond its own lakes and its own forests and mountains and trout streams for its recreations; and it has its newspapers and its national museum and art gallery and is own circle of art and culture.

Well, all this is but a dream of the present. But dreams have a way of coming true. And, anyway, you capital planning legislators, why not go up and see Taupo and see its huge open spaces and breathe its grand free air of mountain and desert, and sail on its fresh water sea; and mark out your ten thousand acre site before the syndicates grab all the choice blocks of the Maori's unused land. You won't talk about Palinerston North or the back of Blenheim if you only come to know the Taupo country, from Tauhara to Tongariro, and the banks of blue Rotoaira.