CIVILISATION IN THE BUSH.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 316, 19 March 1875, Page 3

CIVILISATION IN THE BUSH.

There was a tremendous scrub and bush fire here on Friday night—such a one as the Maories say they have not seen in Ohinemuri before. It was originated by the setting alight of scrub to clear the township of Paeroa. lam led to understand that Buch is the case, at least. A still breeze was blowing at the time, and the fire spread with fearful rapidity, running up against the wind and positively curling round the fern and other growth, with hissing and roaring and crackling. The fire travelled up towards the Gorge in one direction, but the greater spread was the Komata, and in this course it found more fuel to feed it. Some distance from the Paeroa towards Komata there is an isolated piece of bush of small extent. In fact it is a row of gaunt tree?, which in the pale moonlight do not look unlike grim sentinels that had been stationed there since the wcrld began and had got old and shaggy in the weary service. Well, the fire came rushing on to these old heroes, lapping up everything in its course, and sending up volumes of smoke, like downy clouds otfire, that lighted up the whole flat, and brought out the surrounding hills, with a vivid clearness that almost shamed the moon ; and then it took them in its fiery embrace, and rushed on again, leaving them a row of burning sticks, with just a few of the outer ones left intact. The sight was a grand one. Like a troubled sea of fire, the vast sheet waved and danced and sparkled ; and at the head of the fire it was most curious to. watch the way in which it spread great moulten arms which seemed to extend themselves and encircle the fern ahead until it was consumed, when the same fiery members would wind themselves gracefully round more vegetation -of whatever kind that happened to be in the line of route which the travelling fire had taken. Some of the Maories I heard express sorrow at this. They were inclined to be melancholy at this huge fire marking the advent of the Pakeha into the country which they have so long held closed in its wild and uncultivated beauty. The Pakeha, they say, brings devastation where he brings civilisation ; misery where he brings wealth • and tryranny where he brings law. If they den't say that exactly, they say something very like it, and abstractedly there may be some truth in it.