Poverty Bay Standard. Published, Every Evening. GISBORNE: THURSDAY. OCTOBER 5, 1882.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1167, 5 October 1882, Page 2

Poverty Bay Standard. Published Every Evening. GISBORNE: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1882.

Poverty Bay has always been a place singularly disregardful of what is going on in its own immediate neighborhood. Isolated, as we are, in only weekly communications with civilized, or to put it mildly, further advanced, districts we have been content to a culpable extent with the goods the gods have been pleased to give us, or the evils they have thought necessary to inflict upon us. When we use the word culpable, we use it advisedly, recognizing the melancholy and self-reproachful fact that nobody but ourselves can be blamed for our own apathy and negligence. If we do not choose to look after our own business, and improve our position in a due ratio with other places, in other words “march with the times,” who is going to do it for us? Echo answers, Who? We want water; we are frightened to pay for it. We want a breakwater; we are too lazy or too careless to go to work in earnest to try and get one constructed; notwithstanding that we recognize the fact that such a work would benefit Poverty Bay to an extent that cannot be named. We have lands for sale; instead of utilising those lands to the benefit of the district we are affording facilities, and even assistance, to landsharks and impecunious speculators while we are shutting out foreign capital, ready money, to the extent of hundreds of thousands of pounds. There is no better grazing district than Poverty Bay. Sheep and cattle are being exported every week, and yet not a soul among us has had the forethought to suggest the value of the exportation of frozen meat; an undertaking which is acknowledged to be a paying one in the Australian Colonies generally, and in which New Zealand takes a marked and enviable supremacy. Surely our sheep and cattle breeders and dealers must be able to read? Be able to see and acknowledge the immense profit that would accrue to an undertaking of this description if properly manipulated, and directed by men of standing and recognized integrity. Standing idly by will never advantage us; we want work; hard and energetic work, to pull us out of the miserable slough of despond into which we have, by our own apathy, been dragged We commend these reflections to the minds of those thinking persons who have at heart the welfare and prosperity of Poverty Bay.