ANOTHER LOOK RACK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 467, 4 June 1948, Page 18

ANOTHER LOOK RACK

By

SUNDOWNER

OTAGO IN MARCH

Y returning to Otago in March I saw something of the centennial celebrations and caught something of the centennial spirit. If I had seen everything I might have modified my opinion

of the smoothness with which. everything went, and de-

tecteq points oF friction that participation in two functions only did not reveal; but = I don’t think that would have happened. And I am sure I should not have become aware of anything mechanical or cold in the spirit of the people I have never felt so strongly before that from the Waitaki south there is only one community -one faith, one language, one general plan. There are English and Irish as well as Scots, arid on the goldfields especially there are still enduring foreign elements; Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, and Poles. It is noticeable still that on the goldfields Otago was never Scots in origin. Strangers came too fast there, itl

and poured in from too many directions, for the Scottish planners and directors ef the settlement to retain control. From Roxburgh to Alexandra, and from St. Bathans to Naseby, you can forget Captain Cargill and Dr. Burns, ang tell yourself that Scotland is twelve thousand miles away. But you can’t do that anywhere else. I stayed for a night in Lumsden with a man whose father came from Nottingham at least 70 years ago; who was himself in his fifties, and martied to a wife whose father was English too. They had a daughter of 18. and

all three noticeably burred their r’s. I found too that my own nephews and __ grandnephews said they-er for there, Go-er for Gore, rhymed dance with stance, and without a single exception made Kerr into Kair. If there was any softening of the Scottish influence. it was in the second generation rather than in the third, but when an old schoolmate whose mother was Trish and father German asked me where I’d been all these yee-ers I knew: that Scotland had won.

GOLD AND GOD

AM not able to agree with those Otago historians who believe that God ruled the goldfields and that men of God set the standard and tone of life there. Whatever the

goldheids were like they

were not’ centres of piety, and I have very little doubt myself that the

godly found all of them uncomfortable places to live in. God was of course higher in His heaven 80 years ago than He is to-day,.and I don’t want to suggest that Gabriel's Gully and the Dunstan were worked by agnostics who moved on later to Naseby and the Arrow. There was faith enough in all those places to build churches, and no evidence that I know of that unbelievers obstructed or scoffed. When I look back to my own childhood on the goldfields I can see a church there and a Sunday school, but I can’t remember Presbyterian Sundays or any thickly religious atmosphere at all. I don’t think any of the Commandments meant «much but the sixth and the eighth, and whea I recall what a change there was when the gold gave out and we moved away and became farmers, I must suppose that religion was accepted on the goldfields rather than pursued, that its influence was indirect rather than direct, the ruling force in a few families and at best a vaguely refining influence on the others.

THROUGH A CHURCH WINDOW

UT I am bound to say that I wondered if this view was right when I returned to Waitahuna Gully to witness the unveiling of a monument to

the miners who had followed Gabriel Read there 87 years earlier. There were

perhaps 800 people present from all parts of the Dominion, most of them

connected in some way with the vanished miners, and at least 600 of them spent some part of the third and last day of the celebrations in church. I did so myself, and could not doubt that a maioritv of those

who filled the pews and aisles and porches were making some kind of acknowledgment of God. There was the fact, too, that the houses of God (two Protestant and one Catholic) were still there to receive them. . I agree, too, that to get Otago as a whole in focus it is necessary to look through a church window. The goldfields were relatively godless because they were usually occupied in haste by men from the ends of the earth. But settlement in general preceded and outlived the goldfields. Nor is it possible to understand Otago to-day unless we remember that it was settled in the first place by men of strong religious faith, and that even the goldfields would have had a different history if those religious pioneers had not established themselves before gold was discovered. Gold disturbed it, enriched it, forever changed it, but to know what the change means we must remember that Otago to-day is the result of the discovery of gold by a community founded in the fear of God. If I may repeat something I said myself in another connection, everything that happened in the sixties, and everything that has happened since, would have happened differently if the pursuit of gold had not cut across the pursuit defined as man’s chief end in the Shorter Catechism. * * T was a strange experience to meet. men and women who had been boys and girls at school with me 57 years earlier and never crossed my path since,

ACROSS THE YEARS

It must have been as difficult for them as it was for me to talk across so wide

a gulf, and some refused to try. I approached a woman whose name I had

somehow remembered, pointed to my identity card, and held out my hand. "I don’t know you," she said, and held back. "But I know you," I answered, "I have carried your name round for 50 years," This plainly terrified her. "I don’t know you," she repeated, and turned her back on me. Most did their best to remember, but not all succeeded. Some recalled incidents that I had myself completely for-gotten-one of them an incident in my own child life that had made me a laughing stock at schodl for some weeks. As it was recalled by two men who had not themselves been in contact since, I must suppose that it happened and that I suffered the humiliation it brought me. I mention it as an indication that memory can be kind as well as cruel. Even yet I can recail only what they told me. It was disturbing to think that so many had died, that so few had reached old age without physical failures in hearing, sight, or locomotion, that most of us were not even passably attractive to look at, and that a painfully small proportion still had their own teeth. A woman a little older than myself whom I remembered as a very pretty girl, and who was still comely, looked at me for a long time and then gave me this: "I’ve been looking for some trace of the boy I remember, but the only clue is your shape." =~ ~~. |

SOMEHOW GOOD

a DON’T suppose we should look for beauty after 57 years, especially in New Zealand where we are not, I think, very beautiful to begin with. But I hope others felt as strongly as I did that if we were not much to look at we were|

a rather encouraging lot to think about. Not many of us had achieved

what the world calls distinction, and few, I think, had gained wealth. We were a little better off, on the average, than our parents had been, and some of us had a little more polish. Life had been easier for most of-us than it had been for them, and education had been cheaper. But our real claim to such crumbs of complacency as all may now and again allow themselves was, I feel tempted to say, this-that we had come through 60 or 70 years without much pretence or humbug. Appearances I know are deceptive, but they are not meaningless. You can’t assemble 800 people for a celebration, hold them together for three days, and keep all the rogues and spongers hidden. If there was no sign of them, I think the reason was that they were not there. I am sure that there were few snobs among us, few who despised their origins or had forgotten the way they had come. So far as it is possible to gauge such

things, I gained the impression that most of us had paid our way as men and women and neighbours. Wherever we had started, we had somehow or other ended upright and on our own feet. I felt that there were not many among us who were merely vain and foolish and useless, few who were crooked or corrupt, and perhaps not one who had deliberately chosen to be. Whatever it means in a more exacting analysis, I find it a comforting thought that vulgar boys and giggling girls can make fools of the prophets of woe, * % r TAKE leave of Otago with a curious question» It was sent to me by a reader in Christchurch, and I have no (continued on next page)

THROUGH N.Z. TO-DAY

A LOST SADDLE

(continued from previous page) idea of the answer. Perhaps some.other reader can help me. "H. M. Stanley in his book How I Found Livingstone (1871) says that he

furnished the donkeys of his expedition with. packsaddles made wholly

out of canvas, rope, and cotton, plus woollen pads to prevent galling. He goes on to say that his model was ‘the Otago saddle, in use among the transport trains of the English army in Abyssinia.’ Stanley was a correspondent with Napier’s army which burned Magdala in 1868. How did the Otago saddle get to Magdala, and later to Tanganyika? How was the Otago saddle made, and what were its advantages (apart from the possible absence of leather)? I think it is probable that the Otago saddle (a packsaddle if correctly named) derived from the gold-rush days and that an English officer (perhaps. with Cameron’s Maori war. army) took the idea back via India and Bombay, and so on to Abyssinia. Perhaps. it was that Ajax, Captain Speedy, who had been out in New Zealand during the Maori war; or perhaps the idea spread in more formal waysI mean via the official military organisations. Stanley of course did not visit New Zealand till he was famous &nd a knight." If there are any research students among the readers of these notes, I give them this pleasant problem. eS TE OE