NORTH BY EAST TO THE BAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 6

NORTH BY EAST TO THE BAY

INTO HAWKE'S BAY

ECAUSE it is easier in a ‘high wind to go through mountains than over the top I entered Hawke’s Bay through the Manawatu Gorge and in an hour

began to wonder what the stock were living on. In _ fact they were living very

well, partly because stock which have enough shade and water do well in summer if they have been well fed in winter, and partly because droughts are seldom as dry as they appear. There was a certain amount of rough growth that would keep cattle going if they had troughs and ponds; but it was tinder and not grass. There was probably on southern slopes some grass that still had moisture in it, and substance. But none of that could be seen from the road.

From Dannevirke all the way to. Bay View, where the road north enters hills @gain, it looked like a second drought on top of a first, weeks without rain in 1947 following months without rain in 1946; but no farmer seemed wortied. It was a normal Hawke’s Bay summer, I was told, a little drier than stock-owners liked, but not at all disturbing. Rain would come in a week or two, and when it did the whole countryside would be green again and the situation safe

for the rest of the year. And the rain did come. It came in inches and not in points, with wind lashing the trees, and every creek running bank high. But among the adventurers we commonly call farmers I think some of the most cool-headed live in Hawke’s Bay, facing droughts and floods if they are sheep-farmers, and gales and frosts if their hope is in fruit, and never quite sure which one to guard against. Pa Ba *

WHEN EAST IS NOT EAST

VERY schoolboy knows why the east coast of New Zealand is drier and hotter than the west coast, but no ene knows when the east is going to

refuse to be east and behave like the west. I spent three weeks in

,the Walrarapa in September and remember only three good days. In October I circled Ruapehu in sunshine and dust and had rain all the way back to Wellington. No-: vember and December brought me winter in the winterless north-four hot days in Hokianga County, rain and blustering gales nearly everywhere else. January was spent in Wellington, and when I left at the end of the month for the East Coast it was so cold in Palmerston North that I regretted having to spend a night there. Then I drove through the gorge and was sure when JI was crossing the Takapau plain that heat and dust would follow me all the way to East Cape. In fact the heat lasted just long enough to make a fool of me for the nth time-put me intu drills at Hastings, and shorts and sandals at, Gisborne, and at Tolaga Bay’ left me so suddenly that I had gooseflesh for nearly a week. It was the end ef my lust North Island iflusion, and I

am ashamed to think I had clung to it for 50 years. It can of course be dry in Poverty Bay and hot along the East Coast. It can be nearly as dry at Clyde and as hot as Alexandra. But it is neither one nor the other normally. It is as hot as Nelson and as dry as Marlborough, with a sea breeze two days in three and a land breeze three nights in four. It made my Wellington mouth water to see grapes growing and ripening in the open, passion fruit hanging on fences and verandahs, oranges, lemons, mandarines, and limes sharing orchards with persimmons and Chinese gooseberries. I had never before seen such crops of maize or eaten so much sweet corn, known how good rock melons can be, or eaten water melons in New Zealand

straight off New Zealand ground. It is hardly New Zealand at all between Gisborne and Hick’s Bay once you get your shelter belts established and your garden hedges. But it is New Zealand before you do that, and when I saw the Waiapu river playing the same tricks as the Ashley, shingle fans in the gullies, and trees blown down in old plantations, I felt that I had not wandered very far from Canterbury. Then when I reached Cape Runaway I discovered that the water pipes freeze in winter.

TUTIRA

* * * SHOULD like to know that the day will come when Tutira will be a sacred lake; not merely a picnic place but a place of pilgrimage. Already in

my reckless moments I think that it will be such a place.

but I don’t know. I know that it had hundreds of visitors this summer, some of whom knew its history vaguely. On the last Saturday in January it was visited by nearly every farmer living within 20 miles of it, with his wife and family and hired hands. Some of them some day will realise where they went. Others will come through all the summers ahead, and in 2040 perhaps, or a little later, when Guthrie-Smith has been a century dead, the blood of one traveller in a hundred thousand will flow a little fdster the first time he sees that peaceful sheet of water. But it is still only 1947, and Tutira is just a pleasant stretch of water edged with willows that Napier and Hastings motorists can reach in an easy hour. It is far more beautiful than I thought it would be, in itself and in its setting, and I always find it exciting to see a

notice proclaiming a sanctuary for birds. Sanctuary is of course a moving word anywhere, a place where life is sacred and safe, but as birds are almost the only game I have never hunted, their sanctuaries are the only refuges I can welcome without humbug. I knew that Tutira was safe for birds before I went there, but I was not prepared in advance for the extreme wariness of the birds and their insignificant numbers. I hope I am wrong about the numbersthat for every swan I saw there were ten others, and for every grey duck and teal a hundred others; but if I am right the situation is a little depressing. It means either that sanctuaries are only relatively safe from man or that they are specially easy marks for hawks, weasels, stoats, and cats. It is, I think, natural justice that a sanctuary for one bird should be a sanctuary for all birds, even if some are native and some imported. In any case I could not justify my annoyance when I watched two hawks working a patch of raupo all morning and swooping at intervals at something I could not see but could easily enough guess at. Nothing was taken while I was actually looking: I would hear a splash, angry squawks, and a flurry of wings, then see the hawks soaring up again emptyfooted. But their persistence was not mere stupidity. Sooner or later it would have its reward, and the turn of the weasels would come a few hours later. I could not doubt that some of the sudden cries I heard in the middle of the night, confused and agitated and solitary, meant death to one bird and silent terror to the others. But in this matter, too, I may have been wrong. I suppose birds can ‘behave in bed very much as we ourselves do-crowd one another, call out angrily for more room, dig one another in the ribs, and emerge unhurt and innocent-looking the next morning. If I could accept that explanation I very cheerfully would. One odd feature about the concentration of the hawks on the raupo patches was the fact that it was quite unnecessary. Rabbits seemed to be extremely numerous all round the lake and to have relatively little cover. I counted a dozen once within 50 or 60 yards, not all old and wary, but from half-growns down to innocents of three or four weeks. Why should hawks spend their time trying to snatch ducklings out of ~protected water (in addition to the cover there were the beaks and wings of the old birds) when there was so much easy meat on the hillsides? But the point I set out to make was that ‘hawks are birds, too. Whatever was the case once, they are to-day a factor in the balance of nature that will not be removed. I think sanctuaries must remain as safe as we can make them against men, but never safer than that except for special and passing reasons. Tutira has far fewer birds of all kinds than I expected to see there; but I hope we shall never see it black with ducks and swans (except in the shooting season) artificially protected against all rivals. Let our sanctuaries "become places where life goes on very much as it would if we were not here at all: life and death and change and perpetual adaptation. (continued on next page)

LAKES FOR WHOM?

(continued from previous page) ADMIT an unreasoning irritation over the present popularity of Tutira. I thought I would be at peace there, and in a negative way I was. No one called

on me or camped 0eside me or deliberately interfered with

me. But it was not the peace of silence or of solitude. Cars rushed past at intervals all day, quite frequent intervals, so that the whole lakeside was buried in dust. It was strange to find myself longing in the presence of so much water for a deluge to wash everything clean. But even darkness brought no relief. I heard at least a dozen cars pass before I went to sleep, and when a particularly noisy motor-cycle woke me after midnight 1 lay wondering how long it would be before another car came. It was not more than five or ten minutes, and four more passed before I went to sleep again. Well, they had as much right to the road as I had, and as much to the day and the night. The milk lorries and transport trucks had a better right. I hope we shall never see aesthetes and self-conscious romantics claiming privilege in our beauty spots, and if they do I hope they will be laughed at. But multitudes are a problem too. Not many of us are fine enough to visit such places for the best reasons or crude enough to go there for the worst. We don’t, like D’Arcy Cresswell in Panama, climb our Dariens for poetic inspiration and get arrested by unimaginative policemen. But we don’t go there to open gambling dens either, or sly-grog shops, or camouflaged brothels. All the people I saw camped round Tutira, with the boat-loads of picnickers on it, were good average New Zealanders: the men and women and children who fill our streets and shops and tramcars, talk to us over the back fence, go to the races with us or to church, work with us, work for us, keep our railways going, our factories, our farms. To object to them as heighbours would be to object to one’s self, to be a donkey that said no to thistles or a sheep that refused to eat grass: in short, a pretender and a fake and a fool. But whoever surrenders a lake to birds surrenders it to thousands of human beings who have no special interest in birds, who would say if you made them think about it, that human beings come before birds, but who are in general too happy and healthy to do much thinking at all. No solitude will ever be secure against them, and no solitude ever should be. But I don’t think it is a sin against the Holy Ghost to wish sometimes that they would be happy and healthy somewhere else.