Notes by the Way

Mt Benger Mail, 2 November 1938, Page 2

Notes by the Way

(Contributed). Gold in the Hills of Thames One of the secrets of the life of the old mining town of Thames is that its people keep its money in the town just as long as possible. The glory of Thames has departed from its hills, and its streets are quieter to-day. But Thames on ;i Christmas Eve, —crowds throng and jostle Pollen Street, Old Thames Boys and Old Thames Girls, and the boat comes down the Firth of Thames and through the islands of the gulf, and old romances live again—gold—yellow metal —showing in the quartz, Thames has fine folk—English miners many of them, happy sociable, proud of the old town. Its gold has gone, though men will say there is more gold in the Thames hills than ever was taken from them. Does not George Eliot picture the miser, Silas Marner, counting, loving, his gold, with a fierce and hungry love, losing it and finding in his despair ; the golden-haired darling who made a new man of Silas Marner —Silas Marner, Scrooge—Eliot and Dickens sketched with a deft pencil. The Thames coast road is known to many a lover of beauty— a road of valleys running back into the hills, road fringed by many a pretty bay, and the waters of the Firth where ugly scows and fussy little steamers of the Northern line still make regular appearances Under the old regime of traffic inspection, the Thames Coast road, unsafe for speeding, was known as a trap—the limit was 15 miles an hour—very, very rural. The traffic inspector had a simple device. He tootled down and up the road at the bare limit (15 m.p.h.) and took the numbers of those who passed him. Some inspectors have had a more hectic existence. • • • • Once in a Blue Mpon. Actually it wasn’t a blue moon, but it looked blue. The time was a quarter to eight on January 31,1936, and the place was Thames, behind the town in the shelter of the hills. The moon, just risen showed through a pink cloud a definite duck-egg blue, a bluish green. Others present, good sober citizens remarked on it too, and at Grafton Road, Auckland, 60 miles away the same phenomenon appeared. “Blue Moons” do happen, under certain atmospheric conditions, but it seems they are rarely noticed. Mayor Island, .Matauri Bay, Whangaroa, Cape Brett, Mercury Bay—they all crept into prominence with the post war expansion of big game fishing in New Zealand coastal waters. It has helped to lift Mercury Bay on the eastern side of- the Coromandel Beninsula out of its isolation. Even so it partakes of the kind of civilization typified by the East Coast settlement of Tokomaru Bay. Mercury Bay with its inevitable Maoris and their inquiet worship of wild west manners, its hills, its beauty, its crudities, with its suburb of, so they say “Fenookit” —yes, Fenookit. Books and records spell the Bay’s suburb “Whenuakite.” Perhaps we do have local dialects . . . Men have been hanged for less. It is a strange weakness that causes staid suburbia to appropriate Maori names for garden gates and name-plates—“mon repos” and “dew-drop inn” having only a limited appeal. There is a rugged North Island mountain and a quiet little village at its foot —“Pirongia.”—In the long ago, one Maori chief to another wishing to highly insult the other, referred to his neighbour’s pah as “that .” Well “piro” gives the clue' to what might euphemistically be translated ‘ ‘ rubbish heap. ” Yet somewhere in Auckland’s suburbs someonewith a fancy for the Maori has, named their home after the Mountain and village of Pirongia • • • ‘ ‘ King of the Cannibal Islands. ’ ’ Here on the Waipa tributary of the Waikato, and in the heart of a district historically rich, was the court of the old Maori Kings, ancestors of the present mildmannered and Europeanised ‘ ‘ King ’ ’ Koroki. For years after the war their unsettled demeanour made life a trifie dubious and guarded by armed constabulary in the other little town of Alexandra the aforesaid Pirongia, which lost its English name in a ballot by one vote in favour of the Southern Alexandra. Somewhere about 1882 Potatau or Mahuta, whoever was the “reigning monarch” of the day—returned from a goodwill trip to England, The band in the market town of Te Awamutu turned out under a roguish old soldier to play him welcome. The bandmaster winked at his men and out rolled the rollicking strain “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” The monarch beamed “Kapai the tune—what you call it?” The answer was given, hesitatingly. Native dignity—of the people as of the King—was highly offended. It is said that preparations for armed attack were only quelled by bringing out the constabulary. Those days were only twelve years removed from the end of the Maori War and in the area where it had raged most fiercely with what is known still as “the Frontier Kpadj” oiiiy a mile away.