Mushroom Warfare

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 349, 9 May 1928, Page 8

Mushroom Warfare

REPRISALS BY FARMERS Week-End Exodus of Townsmen MUSHROOM gathering has taken its place as one of Auckland’s leading seasonal sports. This year, with mushrooms abundant, it has been conducted on an unexampled scale. , , . Mobility is now a cardinal secret of success, and the army of week-end mushroom gatherers relies on modern methods ot transport.

TT seems as If a beneficent and thoughtful Providence has designed the mushroom to fulfil a definite place in civilised life. In its natural condition the fungus grows most abundantly between seasons. It is plentiful at a time when large numbers of active people are marking time between the exit of one sport and the advent of another. Two months ago the mushroom had no chance of competing with tennis and surf-bathing. In another four weeks golf will have the field. But recently, during the sporting doldrums, the mushroom has held sway. The result? Out into the chilly gloom of early morn moves a large proportion of Auckland's motor-ware. There was once a day when mushroom gathering entailed a certain amount of hardship—a long trudge by lane and lea, and a glorious uncertainty about the outcome of the venture.

But now the only walks undertaken by the well-equipped mushroom gatherer are a short preliminary from his bedroom to his garage and a series

of skirmishes into roadside paddocks, with his car as a conveniently mobile base of operations. EARLY-MORNING THRILLS But the game is not devoid of thrills. Indeed, it Is acquiring the flavour of guerrilla warfare. First there are rival mushroom gatherers to be outwitted and outpaced, and then there are hostile farmers, whose lines the intrepid mushroomer must pene-

trate, whose gorse hedges and barbed wire the advancing prospector must courageously Ignore. The first of these conflicts crystallises Into trials of skill between the motor-drivers of the mushroom fleet. On highway and byway the peace that dwells beneath pearly skies is broken by the whine of gears, the crescendo of accelerating motors, and the blare of klaxons as cars pass and pass again, racing to the mushroom fields. A perverted maxim is that the early bird gets the succulent mushroom. Many an ambitious party, touring in a silk-lined limousine, with monogrammed billycans dangling by its running boards, has found a bunch of “flivvers” parked by its favourite pastures, has sighed, and moved on. Howlck, Fapatoetoe, Whitford, Mangere, Hunua, Waiuku —these and other districts have this year witnessed an amazing invasion of mushroom gatherers. It has not been uncommon to see nearly a dozen cars parked near a likely spot. The outing is often turned into a picnic as the day advances, so that discarded tins, and even bottles, remain to aggravate the already inflamed farmer. Field-glasses have been introduced to supplement the devices of the modern mushroom seeker, and the scout with the glasses, poised on the running board of the c-ar, resembles the look-out in the crow’s-nest of a whaling ship. POLICEMAN ON PATROL It is this cold and calculating manner, the suggestion of wholesale earnestness, that has roused many farmers against mushroomers this season. Disputes and hostility have been inevitable. One farmer, who claims that his turnips were stolen, and his firewood stacks ravaged by predatory mushroom gatherers, had a mounted policeman patrolling his property all one Sunday. Others have descended, like harpies out of the sky, on the spoils gathered from their pastures, and forbidding notices, dogs tied to sliprails on phenomenal lengths of chain —these and other manifestations have proclaimed the ploughshare, in temper, to he no less warlike than the sword.

As to the rights and wrongs of this mounting dispute, perhaps even a royal commissions could not decide them. Generations of townsmen have regarded the right to gather mushrooms as a Heaven-sent prerogative, but it was bestowed before cars and field-glasses were joined as allies in the quest. In the alternative, there are the shops. Mushrooms sell in Queen Street for from 8d to Is a lb. Earlier in the season, and in other years, the price has been as high as 3s a lb, for the price is regulated by the supply. The demand is always constant. Aucklanders relish their mushrooms, and it is therefore probable that artificial cultivation, which at present supplies only the early-season fungus, will ultimately supplant the popular enterprlse of to-day.