Social Geography in Marlborough

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 445, 2 January 1948, Page 10

Social Geography in Marlborough

By

SUNDOWNER

TWO LAKES

HAD intended at Gowan Bridge to turn down to Lake Roto-roa for a night, but discovered in the store that there was a big tree across the road. Cars and light trucks could get past,

but nothing bigger, and I had already had a bump in the Buller Gorge. There

was nothing for it but to by-pass ixotoroa, though I did so sadly, I had been there in 1935 and hoped that I might be lucky enough again to reach the D’Urville and Sabine rivers and see what had happened to the two gold diggers I met on my first visit. But that was not the only disappointment. I rang what used to be the leke

hostel and was toid that it no longer catered for visitors, that the launches had ceased to carry passengers, and that the owners had transferred their attention to cows. I can’t pretend that I think travellers as important as cows; but I think Roto-roa more beautiful than Roto-iti, bigger, more primitive, and better sheltered. The bush when I saw it last ran right into the water all the way round, and. a launch journey from end to end was an experience that lingered in the memory. However, Roto-iti can be beautiful too; in certain lights. almost breathtaking. When the mountains at its southern end ate free from cloud and not quite free of snow the effect is grander than lanvy view TI can remem-

ber from Roto-roa, ‘and far more arresting than the tourist photographs suggest. But there are drawbacks as well as advantages in being only a few minutes from a public highway, and it must be exasperating to the board of control when the time, money, and labour expended on elementary conveniences are treated with contempt by passing vandals. vs * *.

WAIRAU VALLEY

HEN I first saw the Wairau Valley it was the end of April, raining a little, ang very cold. We had driven all the way from. Christchurch, and soon after we crossed to the west bank it was dark. I can’t otherwise explain why

I thought it bleak, hard, and dreary country that I did not wish to see

again. This time I left Rota-iti after an early breakfast and drove all the way to Blenheim in sunshine. All the way, too, I regretted the necessity of having to push on. I felt that I needed as many days as I had hours, and, know that I would even then have wished to loiter longer. It is a beautiful valley- | 60 miles from end to end, and with

just enough creeks, bluffs, terraces and swamps to give the road variety. All the way to the sea you look up at mountains on both sides, one or two of them 6,000 feet high, with short, deep subsidiary valleys ending in bush and blackness. I could not think why I had found it so forbidding a few years earlier until I remembered that’ valleys . and mountains are always what the light makes them. * * *

BLENHEIM AND MARLBOROUGH

T is easy to get into Marlborough and easy to get out, but not easy when you are there to find the people. All roads lead to Blenheim, but Blenheim,

you soon discover, is not Marlborough. If I called it the servants’ quarters of Marlborough I would deserve the hostility of its 6,000

people, and I am not going to ask for that. But I can ‘think of no better way of passing on

the impression some of Mariboroughs oldest inhabitants gave me than by saying that their attitude to Blenheim was something like the attitude of the By 30 people" in Christchurch to Addington saleyards. They did not despise it. They were in fact more than a little proud of it. They had planned it, created it, developed it year by year, and had no thought of living without it. But it was their down-stairs and back-door life, and the visitor who knew only that did not know them. Geography has had something to d with it. The homesteads of Marlborough are often in valleys and pockets away from main roads. Even if there were no social aspects to it you would not see the owners of Marlborough unless you looked for them, You would not see them then unless they invited you into their

houses; and you would not see past their clothes and furniture if you looked t them with the eyes with which you ook at Blenheim. "This is not Blenheim," one of them ee: to:-me up the Wairau. "It is Marlorough." (To my surprise he said Mahl not Mawl). "But Blenheim is the centre of Marlorough." "No, it is Marlborough’s market place, Marlborough has no centre." "Surely Blenheim means Marlborough %o most people." "Only to visitors and strangers." "Then where are the people of Marlborough?" * "Here in the homesteads. We settled ft, and we still own it." "But you can’t live without the others." "We don’t try to. But we don’t lose ourselves among them." "You deliberately hold aloof?" "Not aloof. We are all friends. But Marlborough is a pastoral province and we are the pastoralists." It was not said rudely or with any kind of uppishness, It was just a statement of the facts as he saw them, which were as plain to him as the difference between a Corriedale and a Romney. But it meant, if he was right, that Marlborough is going backwards instead of forwards, since it was a single com- munity once and is that no longer, % * *

FROM A BALCONY

|] WAS sitting on the balcony of a "hotel in Murchison when five boys. topped at a shop window across the street, all of them about the same age and the same size; perhaps six, perhaps g little older. The magnet seemed to be

some _ mechanical toys which each perhaps hoped he wonld find in hie

stocking on Christmas morning. They were, not quarrelling; not even boasting of what they had or would have or hoped to have; just flattening their noses on the window pane and letting their fancies wander. That was the situation one second. The next, a boy who was carrying his shoes in, his hand brought them down with all’ his force on the head of the only boy who had shoes on his feet-a vicious blow delivered without warning and with obvious malice. The victim unfortunately burst into tears, and at. once received a second blow as hard as the first. Then a third boy turned on the aggressor, but not soon enough. Before he could be seized or even hit he had detached himself with considerable skill and was away like a hare for home. That was the first scene. In the second the injured boy, whose sole offence seemed to be that he had better clothes than the others and wore his shoes on his feet, dried his eyes and walked away with his defender’s arm thrown protectively over his shoulder. And that, I thought, was the world. That was balance of power and’ our hope of collective security. It was the distance we still are from united nations. It was envy and an inferiority complex; burning jealousy rising to unbridled hate; softness at the mercy of toughness; wat without warning; help that was too little and too late. If that soft boy ever becomes tough it will be at the expense of what is gentle and kind jn him now. If he ever learns to tolerate his aggressor it will be a one-sided toleration with contempt .on the other side, (To be continued)