Incredible Country

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 16

Incredible Country

By

SUNDOWNER

KNOW that there are people who see nothing in the Upper Molyneux Valley but rocks and desolation, and nothing in the Cromwell Gorge but the place where the gold used to be. Some of us, no doubt, see too much therehistory where there never was any, and romance 50 years after the breath of life has gone. Well some are always too smart to be sensible and some too dull to be alive, but he is surely only

half alive who feeis nothing between Cromwell and Bald Hill Flat, say, but a desire to escape into greener country. I am not myself greatly moved by goldrush stories now that the goldfields are so completely dead, But it,ismoving to see where the | miners carried water and to think what. that water is. doing to-day. Eighty-seven years have passed since the rush to the Dunstan and the Arrow, but 187 years will not obliterate | old water-races or the good and evil that they wrought. But when time does remove the marks man has made in this country so far it will be the evil that will disappear first. Twenty vears ago I would have

put ‘it the other way round; but after seeing apricots and peaches, and the biggest walnut tree I have ever met in my life, growing above tailings in Conroy’s Gully, and pine’ trees planting themselves in bare shingle near Roxburgh, I can’t doubt that it will be harder in 500 years to think what water has carried away than to see what it has brought. Meanwhile, the two pictures stand side by side-incredible desolation where there was once fertility and growth, incredible fertility where everything, only a few years ago, was desolation. I have mentioned the orchard in Conroy’s Gully with its walnut tree covering more than 600 square yards. That tree is growing on a bank, and the, bank for some reason or /otherprivate ownership perhaps and the presence of the tree-was left standing when the miners worked the rest of the gully. But the rest of the orchard is in the bed of the gully, and I can remember when much of what is now cherries, apricots, and pears was tailings, with Chinese at work a little higher up patiently turning the soil they had washed or carried down from the hillsides and once at least lost in a cloudburst. ; % * 7% MANY stories have been told about the first fruit tree grown in Central Otago and many claims made to the first box of fruit sent away. I am old

enough to mistrust the first of anything, including the first man, but am prepared to believe that GOLD TO commercial fruit. FRUIT growing did have a formal __ beginning. Somebody somewhere did send off a case of fruit, and then a few cases, and then a load, But the first fruit-grower was not a commercial man. He was a home-sick man, perhaps a farmer, perhaps a labourer, but hardly, I think, a

miner. He wanted what he had lost, the apple or pear or plum or peach tree he had left on the other side of the world, and he somehow or other got a chance to pyt one in. There would, of course, be many home-sick men, and many experimental plantings, and it is profitless to try to find the first; but all would precede the commercial grower. If we allow the commercial’ grower 70 years we shall, I think, have done him more than justice. Not many orchards, if any, are as old as that, and not wety many 60 years old. The best are probably about 40 years old, but there certainly are some half as old again. What Otago owes its fruit-growers is not so much the development. of undeveloped land as the better development of land already used in other ways. ‘They had the wisdom to see the possibilities and the patience and hardihood to wait five, six, seven, or eight years for their first harvest. I don’t know how some of them came through those years, as I don’t know how some of the miners lived while they were carrying water eight or ten and sometimes twice ten miles to the spot at which they decided the gold could be found. I suppose they hired themselves out while the trees were growing, helped to make roads and bridges and railways (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) when they were not helping the trees to fight against wind, and drought, and weeds, and pests. Whatever they did they survived, and if some of them are now reaping rich rewards they have earned every penny many times over. They are also giving New Zealand the best stone fruit it is possible to grow in the Southern Hemisphere, and taking it out of land that before them produced very little. That, I think, is their monument. fe % * UT if I were a young man I would pause before I started off in their tracks. I would ask myself if I had the patience to wait while the seedling became a tree, the courage to fight wind, pests, hail, and frost, and the toughness to live without any AT A COST income at all if the thermometer went crazy one night when.I was asleep or caught me without oil for my fire-pots. One man I spoke to told me that his average harvest would be about 4,000 cases, and that a single frost one year reduced him to two peaches-one under a bird’s nest and the other under a branch against a wall. "If it had happened a few years earlier I would have been out." "It could have happened then?" "Just as easily as when it did happen." "Your alarm failed, I suppose." "I had no alarm. I thought I was in a safe area." "Do such places exist in Central Otago?" "None that I would take a chance on now. But it costs a lot of money td buy fire-pots, and a lot more to burn. them. I thought I couldn’t afford them." "What does a lot of money mean?" "It depends on the size of the orchard and the number and severity of the frosts, but equipment can cost two or three hundred pounds to begin with, and using it up to a hundred pounds a night." "Frost-fighting could cost you five or six hundred pounds a year?" "Quite easily. The average is less than that, but a man not far from here spent seven hundred pounds last year." "Was it worth it?" "Yes, if he had the money to spend. But beginners can’t always afford as much as that, and can be ruined in a week." "Do you get frosts every year?" "No. But we have to be ready for them every year. Last year some of -. us couldn’t get oil. I lost half a crop that way, but the other half brought a \big price." "You are satisfied with the life year in and year out?" "Yes. It’s an adventurous life, but so is every kind of farming." "Do your sons stay with you?" "Some do and some don’t, but we are better off in that. way than dairyfarmers. The majority in this district have their sons still with them." "If a man has_ several sons can the younger ones get started too?" "Yes, so far. But the day will come when it will not be easy. Fruit farming depends on soil, sun, and water, and not many districts provide those in the right combination at the right time. But it is not a problem yet." » "Perhaps families will give out first." "It is quite possible. And then Orientals will take our places.’ (To be Continued.>