AND THE GREEN GRASS GROWS ALL AROUND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 407, 11 April 1947, Page 8

AND THE GREEN GRASS GROWS ALL AROUND

SUN, RAIN, AND GRASS

NE of our troubles in New & Zealand is that for every acre of first-class land we have ten acres that are second, third, fourth, or fifth-class. It is our climate and not our soil that is our fortune, but we find difficulty in accepting that fact. It hurts us to think that so much of our land is hungry,

so we don’t think it, We turn clay into soil, and occasionally rocks and water too,

but we contrive somehow not to see the landscape as it is. But so far as the East Coast is concérned. I had never seen it at all. The

triangle whose apex is East Cape and base the line joining Gisborne and QOpotiki was entirely new country to me. I had never been nearer than 50 miles as a bird flies from any of it, and I entered it with great expectations. Three weeks there ‘made me wish to stay longer, and I still think of it as, all in all, the most fortunate corner of New Zealand: beautiful to look at, delightful to live in, warm, sheltered facing the sun, never monotonous if you are a land-lubber, exciting if you love the sea, sheep country, cattle country, fruit country, with mountains. real rivers.

bush, and almost African nights. But it is not rich country except to the spirit. It has made men rich, whole families of them for three ‘generations, but their pockets have been kept full by grass, sheep and cattle feed, not by wheat or oats or butter or cheese or maize or potatoes or fruit, which men themselves eat and require good soil to grow. They do of course produce most of these crops in small quantities, some of them in fairly big quantities, but'grass is the steady crop, the well that fluctuates but never fails, the builder of the beautiful homes, nine of the ten reasons for the confident, hospitable, cheerful, exceedingly friendly people. And grass will grow on poor soil. If it'grows better where the soil is sweet and rich, it does not refuse to grow on clay or shingle or sand: if regular showers fall and the thermometer rises above 60 ten times as often as it falls below 50. That is what has been happening to the East Coast since Maui hooked it out of the sea. It has had fires and droughts and hurricanes and frosts now and again; but nine years in ten, and 19 centuries in 20, it has not only been first into the sun, but often enough in the warm and soaking rain to keep the bush growing or the scrub or the grass, whether man has helped or hindered. And man has. of course done both. He has murdered the bush, but he has made ten thousand blades of grass

grow where one grew before, and they have been growing steadily for a hundred years. But now, after all that beneficence, the farmers are beginning to be worried. The grass does not grow so fast or so recklessly as it did. Acres that once fed two sheep now feed one, and every second man I spoke to asked me if it was fair that the rest of the Dominion could get lime and fertiliser at a little more than their cost at the works while East Coast farmers either could not get them at all or had to pay so much for transport that the land could not carry the burden. When I asked if they had not had some compensating advantages, ¢heap land and the world’s best climate,

they countered by asking how I would like loading wool through the breakers — for 50 years, spending as much as a week on the short journey to Gisborne whether I went by water or by land, seeing my children once a year when they came home from school, often half dead with the journey, still cooking with wood and reading by oil, and having to travel 30

miles to see a doctor. It would have been humbug to reply that 1 thought I would count civilisation well lost for other delights; so I said nothing. But I felt like saying something as foolish as that, and it is difficult not to be foolish on a March morning anywhere between Gisborne and Opotiki, to re- ; member the drawbacks of isolation when the mist is rolling up out of a valley lined with poplars and dotted with , weeping-willows, when there are still dew-drops and long shadows on the grass, and you can hear a tui in a puriri tree not many yards away,

GOOD LAND AND BAD

HE best land I saw on the East Cape was the half-moon of fertility surrounding Gisborne. I don’t know what that land is worth to-day, but I understood the attitude of the owner who told me that no price would tempt him but that the Poverty Bay Flats would be

cheaper at £100 an acre than any other land in New Zealand at £50. I don’t think

he had been anywhere else for more than a day or two, but his confidence was more than mere parochialism. He had a paddock of maize about eight feet high and as level at the top as at the bottom: one of the finest sights of its kind I had ever seen. But even on those flats I saw relatively poor land, not so much cold and wet as sour, and likely to remain sour for a long time. I saw grass. that would feed more than a cow to the acre; but I saw some paddocks whe-e a cow on three acres would be hungry unless she filled herself with straw. And it was the same all round the Coast. I saw rich flats here and there that it would be nonsense to value in money. Only fools would sell them, and only the men who own them know how much better they are than they look to the covetous eyes of strangers. But much of the Coast is second-rate land or worse. It may be true that it could be "made" first-class artificially, forced into feeding three or four sheep where it now feeds one. But it is £8 to £10 land to-day until you get right round to Opotiki, and even there the area of first-class land is limited. I talked to a,man about half-way between Ruatoria and Hicks Bay who told me that the market value of his property today, with his fences, buildings, and modern home thrown in, was a little more than half the price he gave for it barely 25 years ago. On the other hand it was pleasant to see a soldier settlement on downland behind Opotiki which had been bought for £12 an acre 20 years ago and was now worth twice as much. When I remembered some of the soldier settlements I had seen, and others I had heard about, I could not

help feeling grateful to the rich man who had made this land available at a price based honestly on its productiveness and not cynically on the hopefulness of landhungry soldiers. It was a tonic to see well-painted houses, flower gardens, orchards, and neat out-buildings, and to be told that not one farm in the settlement was for sale.

SOCIAL LIFE.

at ]F comparisons were not so offensive I would be tempted to say that I found the people of the East Coast the most interesting I have met anywhere in the North Island. I resist that temptation, but take the risk of saying that I have nowhere found people more interesting. '

‘ Nor am I trying to be pleasant when I say that. I found

them interesting partly at least for their limitations, and am _ therefore saying something that many of them will think exceedingly unpleasant, ungracious -and ungrateful after all the hospitality I had among them, the ready welcomes and warm and continuing friendliness, But it would be a poor return for all that-to offer them a little cheap flattery.’ They deserve the truth as far as I can see it and as honestly as I can ‘report it. They interested me " because they are kinder than New Zealanders elsewhere, or richer, or wiser, or pleasanter, or more sincere. They are on the average richer, the Pakehas among them richer than the majority of Pakehas elsewhere, the Maoris richer than most Maoris elsewhere. I found them also exceedingly pleasant, Pakeha and Maori without any distinction at all. But what makes them unusual is the fact that they have lived by themselves for three’ generations, not in complete isolation of course, but always isolated to some extent, sometimes very rich but not often very poor, more poised and polished than the average run of farmers because so many of them have been to boarding schools, free of snobbery partly because the richest people among them have never been merely rich, partly because not many of them are poor enough to be bitter, partly because there were never egough of them altogether, rich, comfortable, or poor, to hive off into classes, partly because isolation has made and kept them one family. I have not had 'so strong a feeling anywhere else that all the residents for a hundred miles and more are acquaintances, and most of them friends. No one forgets to offer hospitality to a traveller from another valley or bay, and no one hesitates to accept it. They call

in tor meals as naturally as I would call in on my, brother or my son if I were 50 miles from home and passing his house at a meal hour. They carry one another in their cars, give one another gifts from orchards and vegetable plots, and were surprised that I seemed surprised at such continual giving and taking. It was remarkable, too, to note the interest they seemed to take, the interest of friends and not of rivals, in one another’s gardens; men and women alike. "How are your onions?" was the first remark of one of my hosts after he had introduced me to a neighbour 18 miles away; and the neighbour at once led the way to the onion bed and pointed out his successes and failures, Women exchange plants and bulbs, and when they visit one another ask how a particular dahlia is thriving or some exotic thing obtained by post and locally famous. The flower gardens and lawns serve both as art galleries and as moralebuilders, keeping alive a love of the beautiful and giving their owners the kind of feeling a woman in the city

develops if she has rare pictures or choice furniture. One husband expressed it like this to me when I asked who. cut the lovely but enormous. lawn. "I do, and my God I curse it sometimes. But it keeps my wife contented. When her neighbours call she has something to show them that she is not ashamed of." "You’re a wise man." "No, I’m a grateful man. My wife came here out of the city. She is better educated than I am, but cooks, dusts, mends, and polishes, and interests herself in my work too. I’m not much interested in flowers myself, but I’m interested in keeping her happy." * 2% O it goes on between Pakeha man and Pakeha wife, Pakeha farmer and Pakeha neighbour. There is a good deal of dancing in the winter, a steady run of parties and picnics in the summer, which nearly everybody attends. The occasional church services’ seem to be well attended, too, partly because faith is still a reality in most households, and partly because the others hesitate to abandon a practice that brings neighbours together once a month in friendliness. I met a travelling Sunday School in one centre whose two young teachers, husband and wife, seemed very happy about the welcomes they were receiving. But I saw the signs, too, of a move in the other direction, the wife driving to church alone while the husband and sons drafted sheep or rode away up a valley to shift cattle and shake their heads sadly over the latest advance of erosion. ’ And I could shut neither my eyes nor my ears to the evidences of isolation in ‘their redding and thinking. It is strange, with radio voices carrying right round the world, books and newspapers flowing freely, and planes annihilating physical distance, that a gap of a hundred miles on a New Zealand coast can still make a difference of something like a genefation in ideas. But it is so. The people of the East Coast are what we all were before social conflicts separated us*30 to 50 years ago, and what we must all become again to be saved. But they are certainly not in the van of thought politically or socially. They talk earnestly about things that no longer exist, feel sad about tendencies that the rest of the Dominion has ceased to notice. The good old days af@ not just a phrase to them, or a joke, but a reality that they now think they ,will see again if we come well out of the peace conferences.