SUN IN THE ATTIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 391, 20 December 1946, Page 14

SUN IN THE ATTIC

By

Sundowner

TWO WORLDS

yr OST New Zealanders know M what it is to live in two worlds in one day. South Islanders do it as often as they pass through the Otira tunnel. It happens to North Islanders, though hot quite sé dramatically, when they traverse the Manawatu gorge. Whereever there is a high range running north and south you get one set of conditions On the wést side and another on the east sidé. It was never more than a question of hours, and to-day,

when we fly, the transition is often a matter of minutes. When I was a boy a

journey of five miles took me from Scotland to Palestine. It lasted about two hours, but the change never ceased to astonish me: gréy skies, rain, fertility, bleakness; then blue skies, rocks, heat and drought. It had always been like that, and I can think of nothing in posterity’s power that will alter it. But with all those experiences to prepare me I was not ready for the change when I reached North Auckland. It was not dramatic at the time, or for some days after. I had spent over a week on the jouttiey from erd to end of the North Island and could easily have believed, the day I reached Whangaroa, that I had come on a cold day to Picton or Havelock. The sea was rough, the water on the mudflats was dirty, there was nowhere éither beauty or warmth or rest. But when I had lingered a little longer there, and beén across to the other coast, and séen thé . mangrove swamps in hot sunshine, and slept under the kauris in Trounson Park, I knew that the New Zealand to which I thought

I belonged ended at Auckland and that I had lived all my life in a house with an attic and had never ventured to climb the stairs. Northland is no more New Zealand, the New Zealand that most of us know, than the Channel Islands are England or the Orkneys Scotland. The people are New Zealanders so far, but the day will come when they too will be different and will make entries in the ledger that Southerners will find it hard to understand. They are beginning to change already, chiefly because it is néver cold, but partly

because they are never far from a Maori pa. For we deceive ourselves if we think (1) that the Maori will remain a Maori, (2) that he will die, (3) that he-will disappear and leave no trace. He will remain in New Zealand throughout all imaginable time, not only blackening our eyés and browning our skins, but putting courage and poetry and patience into our minds for generations after the pakeha thinks he has absorbed him. He is at work already in Northland teaching us the folly of go-getting. I don’t know where laziness

begins and philosophy ends, but it is elementary that the man who has no time to stand and stare is not a grown man at all. He is a mental child or a social or economic robot, trained to pursuits that bring him no joy, accumulating litter that he can neither absorb nor carry away. Job called him what he is -a fool-and every Maorj agrees with Job. Every Maori in Northland is at work on every Pakeha-despiséd and rebuffed just now, but aided by the climate, the pests, the generally poor soil, and the physical indolence that Puritanism can never quite kill, in slowing the white man down, humbling and humanising him and making him more accessible to wisdom. If the Northlander of 2046 laughs at the Northlander of 1946 it will be partly because there are brown genes in his cells and some brown sense developing in whatever he then calls his mind. a ~~

NO HISTORY

BUT I am in 1946, looking for summer in a November that every Northlarider tells me he has never "seén the like of?" before. I havé no difficulty at all in bélieving him, though I have had rain or gales or both two days in three since I left Hamilton, and have slept

every night under three heavy blankets. -Only twice have I found it

warm enough to lie half-naked in the sun, and only once have I had to bother about mosquitoes. In any case the evidence of years makes nonsense of the evidence of days, and even if there were men living who could remembér 20 Novetnbers as cold and wet as this

one, the evidence of centuries would silence them. One substantial piece of that evidence confronts me as I write this note, a big tree in Waipoua forest whose bole is 43 feet round. A mile or two away theré is a ttée whose bolé is nearly half as big again, atid there is evidénce in the possession of the Lands Department that there was a tréé once in the Tutamoe forest whose circumference was 66 feét and whoé’e first branch was more than 100 feet from the ground. I under, stand that this means nearly a quarteg

of a million superficial feet of sawn timber (planks 12in. wide by lin. thick) and something approaching 200,000 board feet (good usable timber with the sap-wood removed). If those figures are correct the biggest tree I had seen in my life before I came to Waipoua was not much bigger than a branch of some of the trees seen by Percy Smith and referred to by Kirk, since one of those had limbs 22 feet round. I don’t know how long a tree must stand to attain dimensions like those, -but I find it no harder to accept the 2,000 years suggested by some authorities than I did a moment. ago to believe my own eyes when I forgot where I was as I wrote and then looked suddenly up. I can believ at this tree was standing at the Crucifi I think the stars were looking down on it when Caesar crossed the Channel. I think it was a pa tree when William the Conqueror And I feel quite sure that when Sula. bus blundered on America it was what I would have called a forest giant three or four weeks ago. But every schoolboy is told, and at last believes, that New Zealand has no history.

THINK it was Mark Twain who said that he went to Italy determined not to butcher anyone to make a Roman holiday. I came to Northland as firmly resolved not to ask anyone to die after seeing Waipoua. But I ask every New Zealander to see Waipoua somehow before he: dies. Meanwhile it gives me pleasure to think that two starlings I see carrying food into a hole 50 feet from the ground have nothing to fear for a week or two from weasel, hawk, or ferret. Pa se st

NORTHLAND PROSPECTS

A LITTLE north of Whangarei there is a swamp that, if drained, would support a hundred families, On the way to Whangaroa there are three or four more that would support ten or twenty families. West of Keri Keri there are several square miles of down country

now in scrub and fern that, if the soil, _ is not barren or sick, could be converted

into a little Waikato. Between Dargaville and Opononi there are half-cleared, half-drained timber areas crying out for tractors and bulldozers, So it all appears to the visitor who goes through at from 15 to 30 miles an

hour. Northland at first astonishes him, and then bewilders him and leaves him confused. He comes expecting low scrub hills with little patches of fertility at the mouths of streams. He finds scrub, and low hills too; but he also finds high hills, great patches of -heavy bush, waterfalls, gorges, and the most difficult roads he has driven on in New Zealand. Then when he is wondering where the sea is, and feeling as isolated as if he were in the Lindis Pass or on the Gentle Annie Road between Taihape and Napier, he climbs round a spur and runs into mangroves. It is easy to understand why Northlanders do not wish to be North Aucklanders or even ordinary North ‘Islanders and why half of them are go-getters and half victims of taihoa, I have talked to men and women here who are furious that they have not better roads and more dairy factories and freer supplies of lime and fertiliser and electricity; who can’t understand why the Government should go on testing and testing and watching and waiting before opening up the land it holds near Keri Keri; who point to the results already achieved there, 30 dairy cows on a little more than 30 acres of land, and ask angrily why the returned soldier who wants to settle in the North must do so without help from the rehabilitation fund. I have talked to others who are glad that things are as they are; glad passively if not actively; relieved; happy to be living in conditions where day-long moiling and toiling would be futile; where they are always warm and always have enough to eat, where they can grow enough to, eat, where they can grow vegetables without too much trouble, catch fish, run a few fowls, gather enough firewood for cooking, cut their clothes bills in halves, and go on doing these things year in and year out. I was not there to find out who is right and who wrong or if right and wrong at all. I was a visitor and determined to be nothing else. But I could ‘almost have believed I had discovered in Northland what a Wisconsin professor persuaded himself he had discovered throughout Christendom — men and women drafting themselves like sheep into two groups according to the shape of their heads and the multiplication rate of their corpuscles. I would not suggest that all those kind people I met are aggressive if their heads are short (as anthropologists measure them) or passive if their heads are long. I say merely that some have their eyes on the horizon and some on the earth round about them, and that whether it is cerebral or not the two groups are not. likely to coalesce. * * *

GOOD WEATHER

HEN I crossed from Whangarei to Dargaville it was still raining and blowing in spasms and the roads were still’ showing signs of recent flooding. | Here as on the other side of the peninsula everybody assured me that the weather was abnormal-that it was

usually still and hot at this time of the year, with long stretches of un-

broken sunshine. Again I was almost persuaded that this was true, but I met one man who assured me that it wasn’t -farmer, curio collector, and in his spare time keeper of the Kaihu hotel. It was all nonsense, he said, that the weather was getting worse. It was get-

ting better. He could remember two or three floods a month. Now it was two or three a year. But what was wrong with that? Where would they be if they had nothing but sun? A man ought to be reasonable, He’d been there 31 years, and the worst season they ever had was last summer, when it didn’t rain for three months. Sun and rain was what they wanted, and that’s what they got. (To be continued)