OUR DISTRICT

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43323, 9 May 1908, Page 2

OUR DISTRICT

PAST, PRESEN| V & FUTURE.

(Written specially for the Te Aroha News.)

[By A.B. — Copyright.] FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS | W hex man approaches the years of his decline his mind turns back fondly to the days of his youth ; whilst youth has but little thought but of the present and the future. Yet we will not apologise for turning the attention of our readers backwards toward the old days of this district, for those were days wherein a simple and grand history, a history of great enterprise and often painfully small achievement was enacted. One , cannot fully realize it now, what it was in those days, when, as one of our oldest residents, Mr Turnbull, of Morrinsville, says, “ there was not even a track from Hamilton to Morrinsville, and it was years before I got through to Te Aroha.” When Mr Turnbull first came to Morrinsville the only way thither was from the Thames. That was in the year 1870. It was about four or five years after that that a track began to be made through the scrub from Hamilton. Before that, as Mr Turnbull says, the Maoris used to slush through, and he made a track so that he could just get in, but that was all, but there was not a road for years. For about two years Mr Turnbull was without a neighbouring home nearer than Hamilton and Cambridge, whilst Mrs Turnbull did not see a white woman for nearly a year after her coming to her country home. But the Maoris were very kind, and never killed a bullock without bringing a present of some of the beef to their white neighbours. In those days Te Aroha was an obscure native settlement with one accommodation house, of a Maori sort, kept by a native named Morgan. Imagine if you can reader, huge reaches of country unfenced and most sparsely inhabited, over which the cattle would stray for miles. If we saw anyones cattle straying we never attempted to prevent, it. We had no fences, we simply told their owners where we had last seen them that was all we could do, said an old settler. The children used to go off for the cows, at milking time, through fern so high that you couldn’t see the children for it. But somehow they managed to find their way home alright. The young fern was'' grand feed for the cattle and splendid for the colour of the butter. But catching one’s horse might easily be, and indeed sometimes was, a day’s work, and left one too exhausted to use the horse when caught. v Dairying was extremely difficult, and the result of it, that is the butter, golden from the young fern feed, found no market. The milk came in for feeding pigs, and -the dairy-fed bacon and ham was gladly bought up by the great swamp camps. So good was the feed for pigs that one settler, having by a course of diet, transformed a rough looking herd of swine into a very creditable lot of pigs, could not satisfy’ her neighbours that they were one and the same half-Maori lot that she had brought over from Cambridge By most prosaic patience, the settlers held on their way. If we had to sleep on fern and be satisfied with a three-roomed house one would presently be able to import a mattress. If one had to churn without a churn, and make butter with one’s market out of “ cooee ”at the Antipodes, or with nothing worth naming as one’s reward, if one did manage to market it nearer home, better times were afoot.

But it does require the sense of humour (and one catches the gleam of it in the grey eyes of the pioneer) to be able to see the joke sometimes. If you have milk, butter, and bacon well and good- But suppose two out of the four cows you have brought to your back-block home stray away; suppose that after searching a whole fortnight through scrub and swamp, expecting to find them bogged you come one day out on a hill to find them both lying dead, having eaten tutu. Or supposing that yon with your two and only families of neighbours are within three weeks of the exhaustion of your combined food stores, and the Maoris who have gone down the Waihou to Thames for fresh supplies are away seven weeks. You come to the end of your luxuries (tea and sugar) and fall back upon the flour. You live on flour for three week's without a cup of tea. Every day and every night the Maoris are expected. _ At last there comes one day of terrible rain. One of the three settlers arrives at a conclusion fl we can do without luxuries, but flour we must have ” He sets off for Cambridge with a pack horse to procure it. That very day the Maoris return. The settlers take charge of the stores and place them in a tent to protect them from the downpour. But, alas, they have left them too near the river’s devouring flood. By morning there is nothing but the ; tent top to be seen. The river has taken the salt and sugar in a fine whimsicality, leaving you the bags. He has set about washing your drapery goods and turning your flour into dough.. But, nothing daunted, you secure your provisions, dry what you can, and by a mammoth baking convert

the river gift of dough into a batch of bread large enough to last three weeks !

These are but some of the outstanding facts connected with the memories of the old days, days that were good as one's young days always are in that the verdict of age concerning their hardships is, “ I thought nothing of it, 1 couldn’t do it now, but I thought nothing of it then.” Among the things which were thought “ nothing of then,” I am taking the liberty of quoting-Mr Turnbull, of Morrinsville, with regard to this was having the drays bogged on their way to the site of the Piako Bridge, with the piles for its erection.

Portage was dear, for the Maoris used to exact a charge of £3 lOs per ton for bringing goods up the river. Even after the road was through to Hamilton from Morrinsville cartage used to cost £3 per ton. But Mr Morrin, who owned the Kuranui and Lockerbie Estates, and after whom Morrinsville is named, used to send a launch up the river with goods from his store at the Thames when there was a fresh.

It was the cutting-up of the land at Te Aroha West, on the deferred payment system that brought us neighbours said Mr Turnbull. Neighbours must have been a luxury, that is to say such near ones. For there is a touch of tragedy in the narrative bf one lady, who tells of a sixty-mpe horseback ride with a baby in her arms, to visit a dying friend.