CORRESPONDENCE

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 312, 20 December 1884, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE

We do not hold ouchhlvuh rHH|>o'nihle for the opinion expressed by our correspondents.) TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —We have a new County Council, and, I trust may now take a new departure. This Coast has been most shamefully neglected in the past by the Colony, which taxes it as highly as more favored districts. But Gisborne cannot go into any Court of Appeal against this injustice with clean hands. What the Colony has done to the Coast, Gisborne has exaggerated to her out-districts. Last year the County obtained from rates, licenses, etc, ,£2.600 from the district lying north of the Turanganui river. How many hundred pounds were spent there ? and how much did it cost to spend that sum ? It would, however, answer no useful purpose to go back into the past, nor to allude to it except to point a moral. Gisborne and Cook County are so similar in climate and other respects to Napier and its outdistricts that we may fairly use the experience of our neighbor. Enterprise has always been shown by the Hawke’s Bay settlers, and what they have tried and what they have failed to do we may wisely avoid. On the other hand their magnificent success in making their fern hills into the best pasture lands in New’Zealand we may accomplish quite as well and with far less expenditure of time and money by following their example. Practically Hawkes Bay was settled in 1857. I knew it first in 1862. By that time the main arterial road, in spite of great physical engineering difficulties, had been carried to Waipukurau, and thenceforward consistently the Provincial Council policy was directed not to retain expenditure round the town, but to attract trade to Napier by facilitating traffic. When steamers could not be induced to visit Napier on the other hand, the settlers subscribed and bought one, which, though it faik d as a speculation, succeeded in making other companies send regular steamers to the port. When

Wairoa wa« first settled the province, unable, owing to the nature of the country, to give them a road at first, nevertheless kept up the connection by means of sub. staised steamers. Surely we should be wise to follow an example, set us by an adjoining district, which had proved so successful. The little flat round Gisborne is not Cook County, and by no possible mean? can it be made to produce enough to pay the burden of the harbor. It is to the country districts, to the real settlers of the county, that we must look if this is ever to become a self-supporting and prosperous place. I have no doubt that at the poll the country settlers will generously support the harbor loan. Yet it must be borne in mind that out of all the money derived from the General Government, and rates, licenses, etc., no wheel traffic has yet been provided to enable those settlers to send their produce to Gisborne, so that at present all they have to send has to go, under great difficulties, by sea. As the County does not subsidise a steamer, and as the trade is still young, the coast settlers have to look beyond Gisborne for help. At this moment wool is shipped by a Napier steamer from our wool sheds to London at seven-eighth’s of a penny per lb., every charge included. Owing to’ our difficulties, shipping from our sheds to the steamer costs us tfd. A Gisborne craft would bring our wool to Gisborne, if we put it on board, for ss. per bale, (or id. to London) and after paying wharfage and other charges here we might send our wool home for JM. from this roadstead. Practically therefore for I %d. we can use Gisborne, or by a sacrifice of yfd. we can ship from this port, which as yet cannot afford us the same class of vessel, or as early despatch as Napier. What Napier will do for us, Wellington also offers—and I have little doubt Auckland would gladiy do the same. Now it the Council gave a subsidy of say £2s a month out of our own rates to a steamer to ply twice a month from Gisborne along the coast, calling at suitable places, and provided with proper boats for landing and taking oft passengers and goods, there can be no doubt that the rest would follow, and our shippers here conform to the charges current throughout the Colony. For one vessel loaded here now, there would be at least two then, and the passenger trade increase so much that within a few years the steam coasting enterprise would be self-supporting. By that time a road should be made fit for bullock drays, so that this port would be accessible to sheepstations remote from the sea. For, in spite of an immense deal of nonsense talked to the contrary, for many years this must be mainly a sheep-farming district, and the giant task of replacing fem by English grass, must for the next ten years be the chief effort of the sheepfarmers. That with fair play a result better than that reached by Hawke’s Bay may be attained here I do not doubt. Your soil on the whole is better, though the hills are more abrupt, and flat land scarcer. Nothing stands in the way of the Cook County except the shortsighted policy which for 12 years has restricted all useful expenditure to the environs of Gisborne. Even now we hear of roads to cost thousands of pounds to Ormond and Patutahi, which ought long ago to have been weaned and able to do their own work by means of road boards and without further dry-nursing. At all events I hope the Council will give the districts outside the two rivers at least their own rates, &c., to spend even if they do not give them all they should of moneys borrowed from Government or General Government grants. Nothing prevents the Cook County from shearing two or even three million sheep, except -the selfishness which starves the districts which alone can carry them, and the injustice of the Native Land Laws, which subject the true working bees of the hive to an unbearable tribute to the drones.— I am, &c., G. S. Whitmore.