WHY BOYS LEAVE HOME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 506, 4 March 1949, Page 16

WHY BOYS LEAVE HOME

By

SUNDOWNER

COWS TO COAL

THOUGHT it strange a few months ago when the wife of a farmer in Northern Rhodesia told me that one of their chief difficulties is lack of labour. Cows are milked by hand and it is a problem week by week to find the hands. :

But I didn’t think it so strange after a month in Southland. It is copper that

lures the labour away in Rhodesia, and in Southland it is coal. Ohai and

Nightcaps are doing today what Switzers and the Nokomai were doing 50 years ago. They are robbing farmers of their sons. Just as the natives north of the Zambesi, though some of them have been herdsmen for a thousand years, will not milk cows seven days a week when they can dig copper six days a week and see a pictureshow every night, so the lads of Southland will not work a long week for £5 when the mines offer them a short week for ,£10, with pictureshows, dances, and billiards thrown in, It must be extremely difficult for a farmer within 10 miles of Ohai to keep any of his sons at home once they leave school, and if he is closer than that his only hope would seem to be to make claustrophobes of all of them from the cradle. I would not myself work underground unless starvation left me no choice, and I suspect that those who still milk cows near

Nightcaps, or thin turnips, or plough, or catch rabbits, feel as I do when they approach the mouth of a pit. ade ate ae

FRIENDLY RIVERS

— -, SUPPOSE one reason why so many people think Southland a swamp is that it is not so obviously as Canterbury, a bed of shingle. Its rivers are all friendly, and although they flood sometimes they usually ledve more behind them than they carry away. The Waiau

must carry as much water into the sea as any river in the South Island except

the Clutha, but it does not often overflow its banks, and when it does it comes back again to the old channel. Geographically Southland is a series of parallel river valleys separated by folds high enough to keep the rivers where they are but not high enough to isolate them. So with some variations is Canterbury; but whereas ‘the’rivers of Canterbury can have beds a milé wide,

and are not easily confined to half a mile, frequently jump their banks, and are always capable of doing so, the rivers of Southland do little worse when they flood than drown a careless sheep or two or hide a hungry trout. I suspect too that one reason why Southlanders are so touchy about their territory is because they have:as strange ideas about the North as they think the North has about the South. They forget that there are wider, deeper, and more

intractable bogs nearly all the way along the Thames-Te Aroha highway than anywhere south of Gore, that teeth can chatter as hard in Hamilton as on the Hokonuis, and that if the cows of Taranaki had to go through winter without shelter hedges, as so many cows do in Southland, their butterfat production might be 150lb. They have heard such things, but they don’t take them in, If they do they don’t retain them. They believe that the rest of the Dominion is pitying them, and they get angry when they ask themselves why. But they are careful not to go on asking till they find the answer and lose their grievance. % ES % é

WEEK or two before I reached Invercargill someone asked this question over the ait: "When is a lamb a hogget?" It sounded simple, and I am (continued on next page)

Through N.Z. To-day (continued from previous page)

LAMBS AND HOGGETS

sure it, was quite innocent, but it put | temperatures up for the rest of the | month. Some found motives in it, some obscurities and subtleties, and if it

put to me once in three weeks it was yput. a dozen times.

In the end I counterattacked by asking when a district be-

came a province, The answer of course was when its name was Southland, but I had to go there to find it. I was surprised, disappointed, sometimes annoyed, and sometimes thoroughly ashamed to discover how uneasy life was psychologically in a situation where there need never have been tension at all. It is pardonable (though futile) to be worried if you are uncomfortably poor; if class distinctions press on you from directions where you least expect them; or if religion or politics separate you from those to whom you are most deeply attached. There is an excuse for irritability if your turnips won’t grow, your oats won't ripen, your cows won’t calve, or your bull won’t gender. But Southland has none of these troubles. It has 45 inches of rain, and a mean annual temperature of 50. It averages five hours of sunshine a day, and its crops never fail. It has no very rich people and no very poor; no mansions and no hovels, Everybody knows or can know everybody else, and there are no families with their roots in antiquity. The shearer who gets 50 shillings a hundred knows that the farmer who is paying it got on his feet himself by shearing for 15 shillings a hundred, and he has no reason for jealousy. The schoolboys know that the man in the station homestead usgd to be a butcher, and they grin when* they remember that their Sunday-school teacher owned a draught stallion in pretractor days and was his own groom.

PURITANISM WITH PROSPERITY

* * * HERE is nothing in Heaven above or the earth beneath or six inches or six feet under the earth to justify rivalries, jealousies, strain, or disharmony of any kind in a province so incredibly rich and fortunate, But Southland is not happy. If it had a harbour (you are

, soon told) a gill would be the biggest city in the | South Island. If. they didn’t have to |

grow winter feed, Southland farms would carry more sheep to the acre | than the Waikato. If they were in the | North Island, Manapouri and Te Anau would be so crowded with launches most | of the year that they would require their | own oil stations. If the roads had not. been so good before sealing was thought of, they would now be the best in the Dominion. And so it goes on, Southland’s eyes are green--God knows why! Instead of enjoying life it throws life away. I hesitate to say it, but I came away wondering why the happiest people west and south of Gore seemed to be those who drank whisky and raced horses and resolutely refused to follow football. If contentment with godliness is great pain, puritanism with prosperity can be a creator of conflicts, | and perhaps must always be.

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