Grey-Green Southland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 20

Grey-Green Southland

by

SUNDOWNER

MARCH 21

WOULD like to know a little more about Topsy, the performing pony the Queen was shown in Brisbane. According to the newspapers Topsy added and subtracted accurately, not only when given questions by her owner, but when tested by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. By pawing the

ground she told how many buttons there

were on the front of Lady Pamela Mountbatten’s dress, how many were above. the belt and low many below. For a pony that was a good performance, even though the answers wou'd not be astronomical figures. But to be a real wonder-horse Topsy would have to multiply and divide, and then, to hold her place in history, proceed to square and cubic root. It has been done before by horses, and will be done again when the world has forgotten everything that happened at earlier performances, and the cloud of suspicion in which such miracles faded out. I have forgotten some of the details in the Elberfeld story, but I remember that there were horses in it which could make complicated mathematical calculations and master new processes in arithmetic faster than the brightest boys at school and. university — until a psychological

Senator McCarthy investigated them. I don’t recall that he actually exposed them: his method, I think, was to show how far we would have to wander from common sense to believe in them. He may never have discovered the point at which trickery took charge. But he removed the horses from the psychological map. The brightest horse is a clod by comparison with a smart dog, and I have not met the shepherd whose dog could count sheep. Topsy’s counting was just obeying a set of signals hammered into her with infinite patience. * x *

MARCH 23

T is surprising how easy dipping is without sheep; in other words, when it lasts only half an hour or so. I was not able to be present when Jim dipped his own flock, and when I arrived next day with my own little handful, dipping them (with Jim’s help) was just a pleasant diversion. It is the long day

that kills — dragging heavy sheep hour after

hour when they know all the corners and footholds. My 22 survivors of the drought were all innocents except the three rams; 12 ewes that were too poor to sell and seven (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) pets that we are not sensible enough to send away. So when the sheep were all through I sent Tip after them to keep up the old tradition, and not for any good. or ill that dipping does dogs. If they are verminous, their kennels and stamping grounds are verminous, too, and will reinfest them before morning if re-infest-ing is necessary. But that, I think, is not often the case. It takes a prclonged and very thorough wash with insecticidal soap to kill the last flea on a house dog, and I am sure. that half a minute in a dip once a year does little or nothing to a sheep dog. It, however, does something to us-gives our noses a change for a day or two and our consciences another blanket. ® oor Pa

MARCH 27

F I were young and sensible I would settle in Southland, where land, in spite of a recent jump, is still cheaper than. anywhere else. But I would not settle there if I were sensitive to wet feet, raw winds, grey skies, and halfway English. Southland is for the tough; for the early riser and the late worker; for the man who gets annoyed when his chimney smokes, because that is wasting

wood, but who does not notice it when his boots sink an inch into

the ground. I think some farmers in Southland like the heavy walking because it saves them from the sin of indolence. If you are a lazy lump of dough don’t settle west of Gore. But I found myself yesterday at a farm near Forest Hill, where every member of the household was romantic. The mother wrote poetry and bred fancy rabbits, ground her own wheat and added soya beans to scones, experimented with rare vegetables, and spiced her cooking with pious curses on the makers of atomic bombs. The father’s world is Romney sheep, but he kept disappearing from the family circle and returning with two-gallon buckets of peas, carrots, or piebald potatoes. The daughter bred cats and collected golt trophies. The son worked three farms,

amused himself on week days by playing hide-and-seek with missing tools in a 60 x 10 engineering workshop, but wandered off at intervals to talk to his stud of white and golden palominos, who are his first thought in the morring and the only disturbers of his sleep by night. It was a strange household in that sober Southland setting; but exceptions, if they don’t always prove the rule, throw a lot of light on it. P x x

MARCH 30

~ C.A-W., when he came to visit me "one day, deplored the absence of geese from Canterbury and the almost universal lack of interest in them among Canterbury farmers. If he had been with me’ on my run through Southland he might have felt some encouragement. On a hill overlooking the Pomahaka River I saw a group of 72

-more geese.in one gagele than I had ever seen before. I stopped

and watched them at a distance of about a chain, but they were finding the grass too interesting after the rain to return. my curiosity. A few miles from Gore I saw 34, and on the way to Winton from Mataura a third group that I was too far away to count, but estimated at 40 to 50. I don’t know what these numbers indicated, l¥jt I can hardly suppose that they wef without significance. Geese cost little to buy, and almost nothing to feed. They foul pastures, if their range is restricted, but that is not a serious nuisance if they have a whole farm to explore. They make weight quickly, and are cheap to eat when they are not easy to sell. At present they are very easy to sell, and I find myself wondering if what looks like a sudden increase in numbers is designed or accident. Have Southland’s farmers who in general don’t like geese, been unable to resist the lure of easy money, or did the mild and favourable weather in‘ Spring reduce the mortality among the goslings? The three or four farmers I. consulted had either not noticed the increase or thought that "some one »hoped: to make a haul at Easter." (To be continued)