THE SMELL OF SMOKE

Forest and Bird, Issue 51, 1 February 1939, Page 4

THE SMELL OF SMOKE

OFTEN A FRAGRANCE, SOMETIMES A TRAGEDY

WHO does not know the smell, or shall we say smells, of burning native woods. They differ in their fragrance. A favourite is manuka. A little of the dead manuka foliage sends up an incense from the winter grate. But keep it in the winter grate. Don’t commit sum-mer-time foolishness that will spread the smell of burning manuka, or burning vegetation of any kind, over square miles of beautiful New Zealand.

“Colliers” tells the story of Mr. George Spelvin, of the United States. George Spelvin is not so much an individual as a type. There are George Spelvins in every country, though they may not be known by that name. But they are known by their acts. Watch a girl throw her cigarette butt out of the window of a moving train. She is Mrs. or Miss Spelvin. Watch a man boiling a billy adjacent to acres of dry grass and trees. He is a male member of the great Spelvin clan.

A Spelvin should be allowed to smoke or to light grass fires nowhere except on the Antarctic icefields or in the great Chinese deserts where the work of deforestation was completed centuries ago, beyond repair.

But as the Spelvins make up probably 30 per cent, of our population, they are too many to be prohibited, and all that can be done is to try to persuade them. Persuasion is preferable to prohibition, but is confronted with an innate difficulty. For persuasion implies that all the Spelvins have an intelligence. Prohibition rests on no such implication.

The George Spelvin who is featured in “Colliers” destroyed by fire many square miles of beautiful America, even though the fire was fought by, firstly, a Forest Service look-out on a tower fifteen miles away, the first man to see the blaze; secondly, by the light fire-truck and its crew, the nearest to the scene; thirdly, by the full force of the Forest Service and rangers, with spotting aeroplanes, radio organised commissariat, and the support of the State Militia. Despite all these, the Black Mountain area, with a million dollars’ worth of virgin timber, vast areas of protection forest, and with settlers’

homes, sawmills, and two townships, was burned out.

And the tragedy is that George Spelvin, the perpetrator, never knew who did it. After taking his fill of the glorious beauty of the Black Mountain country, he had climbed into his motor-car, with his wife and family, and as his car started homeward he had thrown his cigarette butt out through the window. For an hour or more it smouldered among the pine needles, and by then the Spelvins and the car were far away.

Later on, in his home town, George Spelvin read in the newspapers of the Black Mountain burn-out, with loss of property and injuries to fire-fighters. “Lucky thing,” he said to his wife, “that we visited that beautiful country in time. All gone now. Timber destroyed, erosion coming. I wonder how these fires ever get started.”

Will the great family of the New Zealand Spelvins pause a minute in their summer-time behaviour and try to ' learn a little from the story of their cousin George?