WINDS IN THE TUSSOCK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 9

WINDS IN THE TUSSOCK

by

SUNDOWNER

JUNE 9

VERY reader of Carlyle knows how irritable he was about noises; but when he went for peace to Craigenputtock Mrs. Carlyle complained that she could hear the shéep nibbling a quarter of a mile away. I have never been quite so fortunate as that-partly because my ears are not as good as

Mrs. Carlyles apparently were, and partly because

few places in New Zealand are as still as a Scottish moor on a calm day. There is always the "little noiseless noise" that our tussocks never lose. , But I find it most pleasant to sit on a tussock in the sunshine. and listen to the sheep approaching from, say, 50 or 60 yards. How soon you hear them depends on the nature of their grazing and on your own concentration, but even in this frosty weather I can’t hear their nibbling a hundred yards away. I have heard Elsie grazing 70 yards away, but a cow is a noisy grabber and not a nibbler. If the pasture is tough-old cocksfoot, for example-cows give it a tug and a twist that break the silence violently. It is still a pleasant sound, but not comparable with the multitudinous nibbling that comes from sheep and precedes them if they are working your way. Mrs. Carlyle did not like it because it accentuated the loneliness of the moors. She went to Craigenputtock because. Carlyle insisted on going there to read, write and think; but she hated solitude, and blamed the sheep for something that lay nearer to her own door. a * *

JUNE 10

HERE was, I think, something for which Mrs. Carlyle could have blamed the nibbling sheep, though not those grazing on the moors of Dumfries. When Lord Lovat came here a month or two ago to try to interest us in the high-country cattle of Scotland-or to disinterest us in the Angus and Galloway studs of Canada and the United

States-I wondered if his high-country cattle farming

was a move away from the high-country sheep farming that had finished so many of Scotland’s forests and just about ruined the cattle economy on which the Highlands had lived for hundreds of years. I used to think

that it was deer which had depopulated the Highlands, but it was sheep, For every crofter who was moved to make room for a stag three were eaten out by sheep, and forced to emigrate or retreat to the coast. A doctor who died some time ago in Otago, without chick or child, told me a few years before his death that he would not leave his money in New Zealand where he had made it, but send it to Scotland to chase some of the sheep out of the West Highlands and put back the cattle. Nobody talked about erosion then, but the picture he gave me of the glen in which he had been born would have been worth a further penny in the pound to some of our Catchment Boards. It was the finished state of a picture which New Zea_land so far has only roughed in-hill-sides burnt out for military reasons, then eaten out for economic reasons, until no-one realises any longer that the country was originally wooded, There, as here, men still burn the countryside to give their sheep fresh grass (less and less of it each year); and they also do things there that we have no temptation to do here-burn the heather to provide young shoots for grouse. But sheep can destroy country without the aid of fire, and keep it destroyed if fire has ruined it to begin with. That is what has happened in the Scottish Highlands, and I begin to be afraid that it could happen here. k * ke

JUNE 12

ALMOST persuaded myself today, after dipping into The Journal of Edward Ward, that Elsie has a pedigree, at least a hundred years long. Edward Ward was an Anglo-Irishman who left Plymouth on the Charlotte Jane and would probably have ranked with Fitzgerald and Bowen if he had lived here as long as they did. Unfortunately, he

was drowned six months after he reached New Zealand, and only his diary-

published last week after lying for years in the Canterbury Museum-remains as a measure of Canterbury’s loss. But I was talking about Elsie. This is from Ward’s entry for November 18, 1850: A curious accident occurred to me this afternoon, One does not imagine themselves liable on board ship to be tossed by a cow, but nevertheless such was the nature of my accident. I had gone into the cow's

house and remained coaxing and petting her on the most affectionate terms-she licking me and pretending to be the best friend possible. But when I climbed upon the partition to get in front of her, while kneeling thereupon with my rear exposed to her face, she, as if sensible of the extreme indignity, ripped up ‘my fright leg with everything upon it, including the skin, for about a foot in fength. I came down in rags and extreme terror, for I thought that my thigh must have been cruelly laid open. But when I got down to my cabin, behold it was only a scratch, and a torn trouser and shirt was the only injury done. If that was not Elsie’s ancestor, Adam was not my ancestor. Further proof is the fact that both cows had Lilies for calves.

JUNE 14

* * * }OW that I have finished Ward’s Journal, I realise how well equipped he was mentally and morally, and how soon he would have adapted himself, physically, for the kind of life Canterbury offered a hundred years ago. But I realise alsc how blind he was to the social situation which so many of his companions had left England to escape.

Though he was only a boy when his journal was writ-ten-he had hie twentv.

fifth birthday two days after he reached Lyttelton-this is an obtuse entry for a graduate in law from ‘Trinity College, Dublin:- : Heard today rumours from the steerage of a combination among the emigrants for high wages. A married woman (name not mentioned) has resolved not to hire for -less . (keep included) than £40 a year! They seem to be a "bad lot" (with few exceptions) on bosrd this ship-chiefly the offscourings of the small mechanics of large towns-up to all sorts of meanness and petty pride-knowing too well the arts of Separating the interests of employer and employed. They meanly fear a combination of the land-owners to reduce wages, instead of trusting to the right feeling of gentlemen end the favour of fortune. The "right feeling of gentlemen" was then, as now, like the love of God-a reality, but not a clearly seen reality in the steerage of a crowded emigrant ship. It had not fed most of those "bad lots" before they left England, or clothed them, or kept them warm, for five or six hundred years. Neither had "the favour of fortune." Ward should have known that the gentleman was on the way out, the plain man on the way in, and that fortune has always been kindest to those who take her by the scruff of the neck. (Tc be continued)