Sentimental Journey

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 461, 23 April 1948, Page 13

Sentimental Journey

By

SUNDOWNER

HAVE often wondered what the result would have been if Otago had been settled through the back door and not through the front. Entry by the back door to-day can be depressing; and exit too. The Lindis Pass is not wild enough to fire the imagination, and the approaches to it not green and fertile enough to throw it into relief. I met a Dutchman recently in Wellington who counted an enforced stay of a few hours at Omarama among the unpleasant experiences of his life. It probably is a trying place to those who come to it with their minds set on other places and who stay there against their will. gett AAT OA Naat

But that has never happened to me. My memories of Omarama go back) 42 years, when I crossed the Pass with a swag on my back and lay all night in my blankets half-way across the flat too tired to sleep soundly and waking up at intervals to hear a dottrel calling only a few yards away. I had apparently spread my blankets near eggs or chickens, but could not find either when daylight came. I remember, too, that a shepherd rode past in the moonlight with five dogs, all tired like myself and completely unaware of my presence though I was lying only 10 yards off the track. My setond visit was made on horseback, and I remember that my young son wandered off while I was stabling the horses and came back to ask what "all those roosters were doing in cages." It turned out that the proprietor of the stables was what the groom called "a bit of a sport," and I was not surprised to see him some years later in Christchurch during Grand National Week. I think I was surprised at the time to hear the names of some of his fellowsports, though I would not be to-day. I could even agree up to a point that this is not an especially cruel sport, an average bout lasting a few minutes, and ending in the speedy death of one contestant and a glorious moment for the

other, I have never looked. on myself, but I have taken part in sports for which far less can be said if the test is what happens to the loser. * * a

REQUIESCAT

MARAMA to-day is a meal place for tourists and hardly anything else. But I was pleased to notice that stilts and dottrels still breed in the river-bed and that the "cathedral" was there as I first saw it all those years ago in the evening sun after mv long

hot journey from

Morven Hills, My face was the other way this time, and _my blankets were carried comfortably

in a car, but although I watched all the way to the foot of the Pass I did not. find the terrace with the big matagouris in which, more than 40 years ago, I had been the guest, in his absence, of a rabbiter. He was going up the gorge as I came down, and I have never forgotten his profane insistence that I should leave the road about two miles further on, go down into a dip full of matagouris and help myself to food and drink in his tent, I had never seen him before, and have never seen him since: he was a good deal older than I was then, and is now _ probably dead. But if I were a Catholic I would pray for the repose of his soul, Bo Bd a

TRAVELLERS AND TUSSOCKS

HE matagouris were gone partly be-| cause they are good firewood, partly because the burning madness is still on us. I saw signs of burning all the way up the Ahuriri and all the way down the Lindis, and when I turned up to rere Wanaka smoke ob-|

literated one side of the lake. _I know that it is

offensive when travellers tell farmers what they ought to be doing with their land. It is the piece of earth to which they have committed themselves and all that they possess or will possess, which they water every week with their sweat and sometimes with their blood, for which most of them go through days and nights of torture when markets collapse or fail, storms come at destructive moments, or pests enter by channels that can’t be effectively closed-empty sacks, bales of hay, bird-droppings, infected mouths, skins, or feet. When I criticise farmers I feel that I am criticising my father and my mother, my brothers and my sistersthe universal family. I am resting to-day on a farm, and as I write this note a thunderstorm is soaking some tons of hay which owner and hired helpers have worked overtime (continued on next page)

THROUGH N.Z. TO-DAY .» (continued from previous page) to gather into a stack and have not yet succeeded in covering. An hour ago they thought they were safe. Now they know that the weather has beaten them and that 2,000 bales of first-class fodder are first-class no longer. ~ There would be something seriously wrong with me if it gave me pleasure to criticise such people. But who ever made out a good case for burning tussocks on land watered by 15 inches of rain? It is better to be insolent to the men who do such. things deliberately than to be meekly and respectfully silent in the face of this continuing outrage. * * *

TwO GENERATIONS LATER

NE of the burdens of age is fear-~ not fear of the end or fear of the dark, but fear of change. When I was approaching Ohau I wondered if my old South African sergeant would still be there. I had run into him by accident about 15 years earlier, and found him gteatly aged and a

little melancholy, Now I avoided calling in case he had

| moved or died, & had hero-worshipped him in South Africa as boys worship men who could, if they wished, tell a tale, but who never do. He was the mystery man of our troop, a dark Australian with greying hair who gave no orders, but was always obeyed, and the legend was that he had "family" and a history. After ithe war I lost trace of him for 30 years, and then met him one day holding a small mob of merinos a little up the west shore of Ohau. I wondered if he would still be alive, still temember and welcome me. But I drove past without stopping. When I crossed the Pass and approached Dip Creek I wondered if the old stone hut would still be standing. When I first saw it in 1906 I found a medical student there from Otago University who had developed T.B. while preparing for the mission field, and retreated to that barren spot in the hope that rest, height, and the almost completely dry air would give him a chance of recovery. But he died after a long and lonely battle, and the hut was now a ruin, with the roof gone and half the walls, and thistles two feet high on the floor. So I pushed on to Lowburn, where the ferry used to be and the mulberries ripened in the garden of Mrs. Perriam’s hotel. But the ferry had disappeared, and the river was blocked by a gigantic ‘dredge, perhaps not the biggest jn the world, but the biggest I had ever seen in New Zealand, which was turning the flats into rubbish dumps that would last for centuries. I had thought that one of the conditions imposed on all dredging companies in recent years was the restoration of the torn-up land to something like its original condition, But when I asked about that in Cromwell and Alexandra I was regarded as a political suckling. (To be continued)