FARMING, FISHING —BUT NO CAMERAS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 203, 14 May 1943, Page 4

FARMING, FISHING —BUT NO CAMERAS

Marlborough Sounds In War-Time

BEGIN absurdly: the Sounds are almost sensationally beautiful. In every mood in which I saw them-in calm sunshine, in roaring wind, in moonlight, in pitch blackness-they astonished me. I don’t think their blindest admirers have said half enough about them, and I hate to think what will happen to them when the truth at last gets out. At present a few thousand visit them every yearfive or six hundred a week from Christmas to Easter, and a thin trickle of townweary people during the rest of the year. If the truth had really entered our minds New Zealand alone would pour a hundred thousand into Picton every year, and Australia perhaps five thousand. Happily for some of us that invasion is still a menace only. The Sounds remain as Cook saw them -if we forget the bush and the birds. It is certainly hard to forget them, and depressing to notice that the destruction still goes on. Bush is still being removed from relatively useless land, and where it has been removed in the past burning is still the standard method of checking the second growth. But the Sounds, like the rest of New Zealand, are at war. Labour is almost unobtainable, and when it can be found it costs more than most farmers can pay. So the majority cut the scrub when they can, burn when they can, and try not to see the signs of erosion. If visitors see it, they see too much. And there are not many of them these days. In a journey of about ninety miles by foot and a hundred by water I met only two or three "picnic" parties (bottles, accordions, and half-naked girls), one party of business men (fugitives from worry in their own luxurious launch), and one solitary "hiker" (no mere tramper would have carried such a pack or pushed on so strenuously to the goal). Easter was, of course, late this year, and when it arrived I had myself come to rest in a sheltered cove where the tables filled at the sound of a gong and the hot water never once failed. *" * * HOSE little groups of holiday-makers were half the population, and isolated homesteads held the other half. Farmers and fishermen are the real inhabitants of the Sounds, and the line between them is not very sharply drawn. Nearly every farmer fishes at times for his table, and | several of the fishermen I saw had small holdings on which sheep were producing the jam while the lines and nets were. brihging in the bread and butter. Even the few "gentlemen" the Sounds still enclose--migrants from Canterbury and the Wairarapa-go fishing more often than they go to their Clubs. And you

don’t remain a gentleman long when a blind eel fouls your lines. * % bo S soon as you can, you go to the bathroom, and every house in the Sounds has one. Fifty years ago, I -feel sure, bathrooms were as rare as 30-pound schnapper are to-day; now they are universal. The gentleman has won after all. Just as the Greeks counter-attacked inside the Roman skulls, the shaving, bathing Sounds sheep-farmer hit back at the son of toil inside the poor fellow’s house. Now he has to shave twice a week at least, and he does not sit down to the last meal of the day in dungarees and boots in which he has been workingunless he is incorrigible. And in that case he begins to be a marked man. Someone makes an innocent remark about him; someone else repeats it; sooner or later the telephone wires on which all conversation with neighbours is conducted, begin to leak, and there is an inter-bay incident. It is then his boots and beard against the world; and if he is a stout fellow, with a loyal wife, he may remain independent. But it is more likely that he will give way as soon as he can do so without loss of face. First the boots will go, and then the dungarees, Then he will comb his hair. And one

night, so casually that no one will be aware of the change, he will put off his working shirt. * * * ‘THAT battle is over in the Sounds. The men shave. The women dress, The children brush their hair. The meals are pleasant ceremonies. But there is one battle still to be won. With few exceptions Sounds families live in isolation. They are frequently large. They almost never have a school. Sooner or later therefore the parents have to. lose their children or somehow or other get instruction brought to them. It is. the problem of isolated communities all over the world, and it is doubtful if any country (unless it happens to be Russia) is doing more to meet it than our own; but the mother whose children are growing up without the "benefits of education" is not much interested in world comparisons. She wants to know what is going to happen to her children if they leave home without the certificates that every other mother’s children get at school, and she spends many sleepless hours worrying about them; unless, of course, she is an unusual woman — too listless to care, or too wise’ and strong to care too’ much. I met two in the second category, and they made me wonder, not how much more the State should do for isolated families, but how much of what is done for other families is wasted effort. One of these women had a lad of twelve who had never seen the inside of a school. But he could milk a cow, row a boat, catch a fish, work a dog, read the weather signs, and give intelligent answers to all the questions I asked him about the farming-fishing world in which he lived. He was a pupil of the Correspondence School, and his wise mother saw to it that he did all the prescribed work as it arrived. But I saw some of his paper answers, and they were not very good. I saw some of the questions, and many of them were about the things he would never require to know and at present did not wish to know. He probably ranks as an average pupil in that school or a little better than average; but he is a hundred per cent. plus boy in his own environment, and it depressed me to think that (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) he might some day lose that environment and all his bright intelligence with it. In the meantime the Correspondence School is doing far more for him than would be done by routine teaching, but its very thoroughness emphasises the gap between a living and a dead curriculum. * * * ANP that brings up another question. I was struck everywhere by the answers I received to questions’on natural history. Everybody knew the names of the trees, most the names of the birds, and nearly all could identify a wide range of fish. The companion who was walking with me-an educated Dutchman with a wide knowledge of west, central, and southern Europe-told me that it was something he had never experienced before anywhere; and it is clearly a tribute to our education system so far as"it goes. But it suggests that education should not stop where it does for the intelligent farmer, that there should be an extension of all the services carrying, knowledge to him, that a closer study should be made of his actual interests and desires, and that the aim should be not so much to pour knowledge into him as to get knowledge out of him. The Correspondence School, because it makes parents teachers in spite of themselves, and because every teacher is his own best pupil, is perhaps doing most -for them. Radio is doing much, and after the war will do more. The newspapers are doing a good deal for those who still get th8m-but I saw fewer newspapers in the Sounds than anywhere I have ever been, and came away with the impression that two farmers in three there now get their news wholly by air. Whatever the position is, there is an opportunity in the Sounds for a newly-devised scheme of adult education in which the Universities and the libraries would combine with the Broadcasting Services to do some of

the things that they are now trying to do for the Army. + * + BUT I am preaching instead of reporting. We went to the Sounds for a holiday, and found it. Four hours after we left Wellington we were in a world so remote that we had continually to remind ourselves where we were. For seven days we wandered round reaches of water so calm and blue that one of us kept thinking he was in Switzerland. For seven hours one day we lay on the roof of a launch without seeing a cloud or feeling a puff of wind or remembering the war or thinking about anything but the sea-

birds and the jelly-fish and the dolphins that never seemed to leave us. On three days we rowed a boat and fished, or fished sometimes, and either ourselves hooked or watched somebody else hook one shark, one conger eel, two barracouta, about 50 sizeable blue cod, and half a dozen eccentricities besides which we were assured no one would eat. We heard tuis and bell-birds (though not nearly enough) and penguins crying all night long. We saw two shag rookeries, one with at least 50 nests containing eggs and young birds at half a dozen different stages and all crying continually for food. We went pig-hunting, and we listened to the roar of a stag. We saw abandoned cars cutting wood, water-wheels lighting houses and bringing in the news from Tunisia. We saw a man of 80 whose hobby is still deer-stalking, a girl of 12 who gave us a demonstration of Braille. We met a woman who had reared eight children, and who since her husband’s death has conducted a sheep run of about 3,000 acres on which she is at present grazing 2,500 sheep. Another woman sang to us in a voice that, if she had chosen in youth to sell it, might easily have brought her a fortune. We stayed with a man who headed off, lassooed and tied up.a whale (the corroborative evidence was too strong to be refused). We were interviewed by the police, in fact temporarily apprehended (as you will be, too, if you wander about the Sounds with a camera round your neck). But they were very nice police, tactful, fair, and not lacking in humour, and we came away convinced that the sounds would be an uneasy retreat for subversion. Of the hospitality extended to us we hesitate to speak. It is possible to thank people for a drink when you are thirsty, for food when you are hungry, for a bath and bed when you are sticky and tired. But how do you catch up on the hospitality that anticipates your wants, sends them along the telephone wires, | and meets vou at unexpected places with

| smiles and your own name? —

O.

D.