WELLINGTON ROUNDABOUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 33, 9 February 1940, Page 16

WELLINGTON ROUNDABOUT

By

Thid

DIRT LL prospective anonymous A correspondents should be warned immediately that I am about to utter some complaints about Wellington. The first complaint is addressed to the general public on behalf of housewives who do for husbands, housekeepers who do for bachelors, bachelors who do for themselves, and all other poor creatures whose tummies depend on the gas ring or the stove. Although they do not know it, their problem is partly geographical, mainly geological, and somewhat sociological.

Wellington, you understand, is a sort of geological afterthought. Elsewhere in New Zealand, God found room for rivers and river flats where soil could hold and souls and bodies could be kept together. But at Wellington He was in such a hurry to get to work on the South Island (for which He had much better and more exciting ideas), that He stopped short on the hills and left His chosen to gaze, not upon a garden, but blankly at the sea. All very well that Wellington should be able to feed its aestheticism upon such a fine blue panorama, but there is not much fun

in life for the homemaker in looking out of his front door at the scenery while from his back step he can see only chipped rock. Wakefield and his friends of the Company should have foreseen this possibility before they shifted the site for the city from Petone. No doubt they thought of more intransigent things than black earth and juicy onions, fat carrots and bursting lettuce, but they did leave us a problem for the kitchen, no matter what amenities they provided for the front porch. I mean by all this preamble that it is impossible without great difficulty to make anything grow in Wellington, Shrubs — _ yes; shallots, no. So Wellington has to look elsewhere for vegetables. Hutt Close by is the Hutt Valley, where the soil rivals the oniony acres of Marshlands for all the good things gardeners dream about. They tell me you can plant a pot of paint in the Hutt and it will grow spots for Old Bill’s rocking horse, or, with judicious grafting, tartan stripes for plaids. Perhaps this is not quite accurate. At all events, the soil is there, nine to twelve miles away from the central stomach. That’s no distance, if Homo Sapiens 1940 is going to a dance or looking for a pub that’s open after hours. He can do it in half an hour, in spite of Mr. Semple and the overseas debt. But when it comes to transferring to the city a ton or two of vegetables, there is a different story. I wish I were a slug, as some small boy might say, that I could buy a rug, some day, and ask a leek, so round and sleek, to take me for a ride, not just for pride, but so that I could see, just how long it might be, before a man, with a mind, and a car, could take me from the ground, with all the other kind, and shift me not so far, from Hutt, upon the car, to Wellington. But I could go on forever in that strain, but James objects to rhyme as antiquarian, so I'd better break

into prose and say outright that the system used for getting food from the producer to the consumer in Wellington, and I expect in all other cities, is as much of a disgrace to this civilisation as international politics. In short, sweet readers, I have to inform you that you are charged double for vegetables of 50 per cent food value, because you can’t grow your own and have to put up with a distributing system that separates you from your food by a week or more of man-made hazards and delays. Suckers! The second complaint, if there is time to make it, concerns those multitude of mutts who pay for their meals to save themselves the bother of cooking, and so maintain Wellington’s hundreds of eating houses. "Mutts" is definitely the word. Rats Some day a little rat, grey, brown, or black, with narrow head cocked and bright eye spying, will run ashore from some _ easterntrading ship. In Wellington it will find everything to delight a properly ambitious rat. Millions of other rats, for one thing; millions of new smells, millions of new places in which to find the filth in which all good rats revel, millions of new breeding spots in which to nurture the little microbe it carries as a passenger, And when that happens, gentle readers, Thid will leave you ignominiously to your fate. You build fine new buildings. Rats infest them. You establish a bureau of social science, health services, inspection services, All these things are good things, if they are ever used. But with them you establish a legal code which includes the law of libel. So I can only hint to you that all your airy suburbs, your blue sky, your sea, and the other wonders of your wonderful Wellington, nourish in their midst a mess that some day will fester and disgust you, and dispense disease among you. And serve you right,