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Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 442, 28 November 1908, Page 3

Mr John Stevens, patron of the local Horticultural Society, will open the inaugural Show on Wednesday next.

A Sydney medical man just back from his first tour through the far-out country gasps with horror when poison is mentioned (narrates a Sydney exchange). “It’s marvellous there’s a man alive out there,” he exclaims. He tells of the careless way in which bushmen handle arsenic, strychnine, and other deadily drugs. “.I've seen rabbit skins, painted with arsenic, suspended over a shearers’ dining-table. I’ve seen the stuff dripping on to the table within half a foot of a round of salt beef. On the table in the cook’s galley I’ve counted three strychnine bottles, two half-full, jumbled up with sauce and pickle bottles in constant use. Men treat skins with poison, handle them, pack them up, and, without washing their hands, grasp their food and help themselves with their fingers. ‘ Don’t eat that,’ said a cook to me. It was a bit of damper I picked up,; I didn’t mean to eat it: I was merely smelling it and wondering what it was composed of, ‘ A bit of poison slipped into the dough,” remarked the cook.”