Tales of the Pioneers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 502, 4 February 1949, Page 24

Tales of the Pioneers

[N 1915 an Englishwoman, Mrs. James Cassidy, came to New Zealand and spent much of the following five years interviewing surviving early settlers and their immediate descendants. She collected between 70 and 80 stories about the early colonising days, and had them hand-bound into two copies. One was lodged with the British Museum and the other with the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Mrs. Cassidy travelled from Russell to Invercargill, setting down what she was told as nearly as possible in the narrators’ own words. Almost every aspect of early New Zealand life seems to have been covered by Mrs. Cassidy, and there are many firsthand accounts of important events. One description of the Tarawera

Eruption by R. D. Dansey, of Rotorua, was broadcast by 2ZB on a recent Sunday night to discover how listeners would react to such a session, and there were many requests for its repetition. On‘an average of two days a week, for the last few months, a member of the announcing staff of 2ZB (Bill Beavis) and a technician have visited the Turnbull Library with* a _ tape-recording machine to record extracts from Mrs. Cassidy’s book. These have been made into about 30. stories, covering the period from 1823 to 1878, and now 2ZB possesses a series of half-hour programmes about old New Zealand for broadcasting on Sunday evenings. The first of these, with Bill Beavis as narrator, will be heard this Sunday (February 6) from 2ZB at 6.0 p.m. and others at the same time on Sundays thereafter. Listeners who are interested in what their ancestors had to put up with in primitive, undeveloped communities, will be able to hear how and where the plough was put into New Zealand earth for the first time. They will learn something about the difficulties of pioneer housekeeping; they will hear how all sorts of make-shifts had to be. devised-how bustling womenfolk managed to prepare massive meals in open-air ovens to feed massive and bearded menfolk-and learn of life in

tents before raupo huts could be built; of trouble with the Maoris, and of homesickness for England, in the days when it took a year to get a reply to a letter. New Zealanders who are fond of delving into their country’s past and have the time for research, can get this type of information from the records of any of the old colonists’, settlers’ or pioneers’ associations which exist in many of the centres, but those with less time or energy to spare will find the new 2ZB Sunday evening session both interesting and labour-saving. It will be presented undér the title Our Fathers Have Told Us.