Pioneers on Foot

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 146, 10 April 1942, Page 3

Pioneers on Foot

HEY had great powers of endurance. I don’t know what we of this later generation would say if asked to carry a fifty of flour from the city up to Mornington, yet this was an accepted practice in early days. There are records of men who walked from Balclutha to Dunedin to be married and then walked back again, and lest we should put this aside as showing what strange things bridegrooms will do, let me set beside it the case of a worthy resident of Waitati who walked to divine service in Dunedin’ every Sunday morning. A friend of mine told me that his father came ahead of the family and settled in Roxburgh. Later, the rest arrived and the father walked to Dunedin to meet them-a week’s journey over the Old Man Range. Early ministers seem to have had astonishing stamina, covering on foot a charge extending from Waihola to the Bluff, and another a circuit extending from Waikouaiti to Stewart Island..When rivers had to be crossed rafts were made of flax sticks and horses were swum behind boats across the harbour entrance at the Heads. Yes, they had great powers of endurance and also a real genius for inventiveness. They built houses but they did not build them from materials purchased from timber yards and hardware stores, they hacked them out of the virgin bush. They learned how to split totara logs so that they yielded planks which compared well with sawn timber. Where they could not get nails they bored holes

and used dowells. —

¢ Extract from

address delivered by Rev.

D. O.

Wil

liams

at the Otago Early Settlers’ Asso- |

ciation, 4YA, March 23.)