Black Marks in the Back-country

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 9

Black Marks in the Back-country

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 10

Island totara is wood-hard, heavy, and almost everlasting, that it is good to have in your fences and the foundations of your house; to some it is a place; to a few it is an economic shrine near Oamaru where history began 75 years ago. To me it is a Jesson in manners Se: most people in the South

and delicacy. Filtynine years ago I was met at Totara

railway siding by the manager of Totara station and taken to the cookhouse for. my first meal as a station hand. I was 15, shy, homesick, and ignorant. In particular I was ignorant of the disgraceful agreement still in force in station cookhouses that gave men meat, bread, tea and sugar out of the owners’ pockets and butter and jam out of their own. I sat at a long table set with pannikins and tin plates and did not know that the butter still in its paper in front of me belonged to the man sitting opposite me and had been paid for out of his very low wages. Even when he rolled it up and took it away at the end of the meal the truth did not dawn on me, since it was a truth, then, as remote from my mind and experience as the Eleusinian mysteries. I helped myself, and for, 1 think, several daysit was certainly several meals-neither the owner of the butter nor anyone else at the table told me what I was doing. In the end I think it was the clerk, whose quarters I shared at night, but who did not often eat with us, by whom my eyes were opened. I have not, to my knowledge, met any of those men since. I remember neither their names nor their faces, and know that most of them must be dead. The owner of the butter, I can hardly think why, is not a physical presence any longer, though something tells me that he was a man of middle age. When I try to recall him he is dark, silent, heavily moustached, and stubbled; but that is probably an illusion-a created image from the composite picture left on my mind at the time and still lingering there somewhere. After all, we have no mental picture of our ancestors two or three generations back. We owe everything to them, but have never seen them or heard their voices or made any recognisable contact with them. So it is with Totara and that station hand. He has been nobody that I can recognise in my world since I ceased eating in that cookhouse a few weeks later, but there is no one to whom I owe more as a teacher of manners, Ed * %

FEBRUARY 14

WAS well on my way to Hanmer last week before I realised that the black patches in the gullies were dead and dying manuka. I had read about manuka blight in the newspapers, and taken about as much notice as we take of a famine report from India or news of an earthquake in Chile. But there it

was in all its ugli-ness-a heavier and dirtier black than

fire leaves, and the mark of a far greater calamity. Yet a farmer to whom I mentioned it called it good news. "What use has manuka now that the big stuff has been cut out?" "The same use as it always hadshelter for stock and protection for the soil. When it goes the soil will go, too."

"We've heard that one before. You don’t believe it, do you? Have you been recently in Hawke’s Bay?" "Not for about ten years." "Were the creeks and rivers very muddy when you saw them?" "They were in the Esk Valley, though it was raining heavily at the time. But I saw what happened during the Esk floods a few years earlier." "Were the big rivers pA ig Ngaruroro and the Tukituki?" "Not that I remember. It was a week earlier when I saw them, and I think they were both low and clear." "As they nearly always are; and far more than half the land they drain was covered in manuka when settlement began." : "Most of it has. been successfully covered with grass. It is good or fairly good soil. How much soil is there on the manuka slopes of the South Island? And where are the sheep in this hot weather? There are paddocks in North Canterbury so bare of shelter that it ought to be a criminal offence to enclose sheep in them without a run-off, A few patches of manuka would save the animals from torture and their owners from gaol." "Have you ever heard of a farmer’s going to gaol for clearing manuka?" "No. I wish I had. But I have heard, and hope, that torturers of animals go to hell." "I’m afraid I’m not interested in your savage hopes. Manuka is economics, not religion. To mé it is a useless pest that it costs much money and labour to eradicate. If a bug will do the job for nothing, I say, God bless the bug." "I say God destroy it. It is not working for nothing. It is working for higher

wages than New Zealand can ever pay. As for those farmers who set it to work deliberately, I wish them nothing worse, being a Christian, than bellyaches all day and nightmares all night while they live, and when they die ten thousand years of tree planting in a continuous north-westerly. But I am ashamed of the moderation my piety forces on me." * % &

FEBRUARY 16

HAVING a little faith in the wisdom of man, I have no real hope that the last rabbit will leave New Zealand before I do. In spite of its spectacular success so far, I can see the killing campaign losing its impetus when rabbits become difficult to find. It is, I think, happening already, if I may trust the

impression iert Dy a 500-mile drive south and west,

While it still excites me to see Central Otago changing from dull yellow to sage green, to see dsnthonia, dancelions and clover where I. have seen nothing for 50 years but scabweed, rocks, and dust, I get an uneasy feeling with the excitement that it is all too good to be true, and to remain true. One reason for this is that dead rabbits are beginning to appear on the roads again; not many, but one or two every 50 miles in country in which I saw none at all two years ago. Since the rabbits that get killed can be only a very small proportion of those that cross the roads every night, and a much smaller proportion of the total number in the surrounding country, it is difficult to resist the suspicion that there has been at least a slight increase in the rabbit

population of several almost cleared areas. It is certain, too, that there are areas in Canterbury, Otago and Southland in which extermination has made little progress. I saw at least. 20 rabbits in half an hour between Lake Ohau and the road to Omarama, several between Wanaka and Cromwell, and far more than it was comfortable to count. on a night drive from Fairlie to Temuka. Compared with the picture a few years ago this is still unbelievably good; but it is not quite good enough to lull all our fears and end all our anxieties. The number seen is never, by day or by night, as many as the number not seen, but even if it were the whole population it would be disturbing. Where there are two rabbits there are potentially two hundred that season and two thousand the next. It is something we all know, and have known for many years. But we know, too, how few of us like paying insurance premiums if we think there is no risk of fire. In short, the destruction of the last rabbit is politics and not economics. We can pay our rates more easily than when the rabbits were here, but we will not, in a year or two, pay them more willingly. The day will come-I think: I can see it -already-when we will not pay them at all without pressure, and the question at that point will be which pressure group wins. To -believe that wisdom in such circumstances will continue to be stronger than folly is to believe a good deal; a little more than we can find in our public history; a great deal more than most individuals will find in their secret history and internal make-up. It is as certain as anything can be that if we are left to ourselves we will falter and fail. But not being left to ourselves involves constant vigilance by our rulers and unceasing diligence by our mentors in keeping wisdom before our eyes dressed in tadiant robes. (To be continued)