Memories of the Pioneers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 8

Memories of the Pioneers

ro HE great muddy roadstead was at that time, and for many years afterwards, crowded with shipping. There was the tri-weekly passenger service to Helensville by such vessels, among many others, as ‘the Gosford, Aotea, and Awaroa. Then great ocean-going ships put in, carrying away cargoes of timber and gum and flax fibre. Launches chugged and grunted day and night, and the yellow waters were alive with fowing boats of every size and colour . . . How empty it is now, that turbid stretch of water, flowing sluggishly beneath ° the bridge that robbed it of its glory of transportation. Old timers still maintain that its importance will return: a younger generation pokes a saucy tongue -and runs for a bus, or fills up with petrol. And a _ still younger gazes arrogantly down from the skies. . ." This picture of two ages in the history of the Wairoa River (once concidered New Zealand’s finest navigable waterway) comes from Jean Boswell’s Dim Horizons, a book to which listeners will be introduced by the author herself in readings starting in the Commercial stations’ Women’s Hour during the coming weeks. Jean Boswell (left), wife of the late C.. W. Boswell, New Zealand’s first Ambassador to Moscow, was born Jean Smith, in Mangawhare a suburb of Dargaville on the Northern Wairoa tiver. She was her sgother’s ninth child -the third by a second marriage-in a family that was to grow to ten. Considering woman’s lot from this aspect of large families little Jean once asked her mother why she didn’t "tell Dad to keep a couple of concubines." Tracking down her daughter’s unexpected knowledge of concubines to the Bible Mrs Smith replaced it with a New Testament on the kerosene box that served as the girls’ bedside table. Mr Smith was an ironfounder by trade, but like many of the early pioneers

was able to work well at whatever was available. Roadmaking one day on the Kaihu-Dargaville road, a chance encounter with a government official led him to take up a bush section in.a settlement later known as Katui. At first the dwellings of the Katui settlers were Maori whares made with fronds of the nikau palm and saplings. ‘There were no windows, what light there was came through the thatch roof and the sacking door, and down the punga chimney. Such a whare was home for the Smiths until at last their house was finished, a house laboriously built of pitsawn timber felled in the bush nearby. "There it stood, the dream of years! Just a little butterbox of a cottage, creamy-yellow as only new kauri palings can be, looking strangely alien amid its wild surroundings, the half-burnt blackened logs seeming to crowd it resentfully, while the gaunt scarred standing trunks -those that had denied the flames their full savour-appeared to point their naked arms menacingly at the foreign invader. And, beyond all, glowered the dense sombre forest, . ." This remained their home ‘for ten years, then came another house that had French windows to every room and a veranda round three sides. And though she lived in that home, too, says Mrs Boswell, "My real home was that little box of a cottage on the hillside . . ." It is to the memories of those days in the first home that the author of Dim Horizons returns, to the hardships of the first years spent in the bush; a way of life that, though seeming remote today, is still real in memory to many New Zealanders. ‘The eight extracts from Dim Horizons tread by the author started from 4ZA and 2XA on May 13; and ,will begin from 2XP on May 27, 4ZB, May 29, 2ZA, June 17, and from other Commercial stations later in the year. >