NEW FOREST FRONTIERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 810, 4 February 1955, Page 15

NEW FOREST FRONTIERS

"HERE are 600,000 acres of them up there, extending from, say, the top of Lake Taupo to past Rotorua; so many pine trees that if pushed down, and laid end to end in one long row, they would easily go 150 times around the globe. And the residents claim they form the biggest artificial forests in the world. These trees, many of them planted in areas which had been abandoned by farmers as hopeless, have to be chopped down, transported’ over specially-con-structed roads, and then milled. To do this, factories are needed, and men ,to work the factories, men with their wives and their children, who need schools and community centres and post offices and shops to buy their food and clothing. In short, towns are needed; they are being built. These forests, and the towns springing up in them, are described by Jim

Henderson in a series of seven talks, Frontier Towns, which will be broadcast on the YA and YZ stations, the first three at 9.15 p.m. on Thursdays, February 10, 17 and 24, and the remainder in April. The first talk describes the forests themselves, and especially the precautions taken against the forests’ worst enemy-the man with the match. Stan Mark, for instance, spends his working day from sunrise to sunset at the top of a 60-foot steel tower, but unlike the Lady of Shalott, he must constantly watch over a vast blue, green and brown circle of forest, hills and river. Over thirty miles he can judge the distance of a fire to within half a mile. With his telescope and French binoculars he has watched a cricket match six and a half miles away-*"the ball was a bit hard to follow, though." At first sign of a fire, he radio-telephones headquarters, and if necessary, a thousand fire-fighters can be mustered. . . In 1948 there were 140 people in the township of Tokoroa. Now there are well over 5000. But what stresses are imposed on the people in towns undergoing such forced growth? For one thing, they had to build three great institutions vital to any community-a maternity hospital, a gaol and a cemetery. The hospital now contains 10 maternity beds-they will be needed; at the time of writing the population was due to increase by about 50 known; they finally got a gaol, brick, with two cells, and a sergeant; and as for the cemetery, they've got a site set aside, but nobody has yet taken enough time off from building Tokoroa to get butied there. But Mr. Henderson is not content with describing merely the shell of the —

towns, the buildings "and.environs, He takes a real person, Judith, and her family, and shows how they came to Tokoroa fresh from a big city, with no knowledge of small-town community life and, indeed, no community life- to come to in Tokoroa; he tells how they were lonely for months till they began helping to build the community spirit of Tokoroa. Other talks in the series describe the mills at Kinleith, the loggers’ camp at Murupara and the town of Kawerau. They are an interesting mixture of facts, descriptions and stories about peoplelike the logger who half swallowed the large black weta, and the patrolman who is hoping to catch a lurking traffic officer trespassing on a private road,