WESTWARD HO!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 12

WESTWARD HO!

By

SUNDOWNER

TOWNS CAN RISE AGAIN

N I first saw Reefton \X) many years ago it was everything that a dead mining town is supposed to beuntidy, listless, and buried in rust. When I returned a few days ago I

was. almost. disappointed to see it alive again. There were still rusty

roofs, and untidy corners when you looked for them, but there were many new houses, and I thought more paint

in every street than in the whole town as it used to be. There were, in fact, plain signs of a boom-houses going up, streets being cleared and repaved, transport trucks on the move, service stations overloaded with work. The gold town was 10 years dead: The cdal town had, come back to life. But no one could tell me why. With the ex- | ception of the open-cast mines, one of which I visited and heard that it was returning its working owners ten pounds each a day, the pits were neither new nor. reorganised. They were ‘simply busy now and idle when I saw them. before. Miners then were working about a half or a third of their time,

and if you asked them why the answer was always the same. The pits had no orders. Now there are more orders than any mine can meet, and I could not get the explanation. There is a reason; but the miners themselves professed not to know what it is; ar.d it certainly seemed strange to me that in 1947, when oil and water .are providing more power than ever in our history, there should be a simultaneous and insatiable demand for coal. But it was pleasant to see Reefton on its feet again and laughing at the idea that when towns die they stay dead for ever,

ARCHITECT'S PARADISE

URCHISON to most of us is a name on the map; a township we pass through on ‘the Nelson-West Coast road, and at once forget. It was no more than that to me till I came to rest there three weeks ago. I had passed through

twice without stopping, and- also, I now realise, without taking in any more

of its beauty than comes to us through the window of a speeding car. But Americans would build mountain houses there, make a noise about it on the air, and in the meantime, of course, lift its face a little and put on some paint. I don’t know how high the surround‘ing mountains are, and I get hot when

I think what has happened to their bush; I mean what human hands have done to it since the earthquake tore holes through it in 1929. But a great deal of the bush still remains, softening without obliterating the rugged outlines and intensifying the boldness of the modelling. At each point of the compass there are a gorge and a river, and the settled area, about two square miles of open country, almost but not quite flat, on which the sun, if it shines

at all, beats all day, 1s far enough away from the mountains not to seem hemmed in. Any house in such a setting is a home with a view, and although there is no sign yet that artists have worked there, the whole area is an architect’s paradise in which the master plan was drawn a million years ago. It neither surprises nor troubles me that some desperate attempts have already been made to defy that plan. We creep aesthetically before we walk, and most of us never walk at all. But Murchison’s day is coming. Sooner or later a boy will be born there whose eyes art will open. There is not much risk in the meantime that settlement will move fast enough to spoil his chances, * * %

SCRUB TO GORSE

DON’T know how many acres of gorse there are in Nelson or whether it is still gaining ground. I thought it had got away a good deal since I was last there, but Ismay have been wrong. In a journey of 700 miles I saw nothing.as

bad as on the hills round Wellington or on the approaches to Wanganui. But

I still saw a lot of gorse. I saw hillsides wholly covered by gorse, and carrying no stock at all, and I saw extensive stretches where the sheep, if they were (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) fot actually living on gorse, were getting more than half their sustenance from it. I even met a farmer who said that he liked it that way. "If I had no gorse I would have no heep, and that goes for most of my eighbours, too." "What would happen if the gorse got Bway?" "The same thing. We would have no sheep that way either. But it doesn’t get eway." "Do you grub it?" "No, the sheep keep it down." "What about the thickets that sheep can’t penetrate?" "We lose those," "Do you burn?" .- "Only where the sheep have given up. " "You'd sooner have gorse than danthonia?" "No, but I’d sooner have it than scrub," "Don’t you lose a lot of wool on the bushes?" "Yes, but we have a lot left. Far more than we would get from manuka and tawhine," (He called it tawhine, not tauhinu, and I’ve never heard a farmer call it anything else.) "If you could clear it, would you?" "Clearing this country would cost more than it’s worth," "It pays you as it is?" "Most years it does. We have bad years when we get nothing. But so do ail farmers." It was a strange conversation in a country settled for only a hundred years. I could not help wondering as I talked to him if our second century would not put his whole farm back into trees. * Ba *

COUNTRY STORE

HEN I crossed the Lewis Pass and reached Springs Junction I found the store front bright with’ flowers; and not only the store front. The whole area for a couple of chains each way was terraced and planted with shrubs, ,

with a tenced-in triangle where the three roads meet converted into a

garden of memories, i was too iate for the daffodils: though the tulips were still blooming, but a glance was sufficient to show what the scene must have been a few weeks earlier. In each plot there was a sign commemorating a desert battle-El Alamein, Bel Hamed, and’ so on-and although the total area was no bigger than a small sheep pen, the general effect was most moving. Part of it was the surprise of finding such a touch in such a place; but there was much more than that. There was imagination, a feeling for beauty, and the instinct .to combine the two in a tribute to the men (and perhaps women, too) who had left that remote clearing in the bush to die in the African desert. ‘ Nor could I help thinking of the difference between buying and selling in the city and doing it in the country. A city storekeeper is a necessary and useful member of society; but the more useful he becomes the further he withdraws from: the men and women he serves until he is little more than a calculating machine locked away in an inner room. A country storekeeper is the friend or enemy of every customer; in nine cases out of 10 the first. He

never has so many customers that he] does not know them all when he meets them, and he can never withdraw far enough from the least acceptable of them to keep right out of their lives. He speaks to everybody and everybody speaks to him-buys from him, borrows from him, confides in him, asks big and little favours of him, until so many strings tie him to each one of them that he can’t hold aloof if he wants to. This is, of course, the last thing he wants, partly because the more hie knows the safer he feels in his business dealings, but partly also, and in the end chiefly, because there is no longer any line between business and friendship. (To be continued)