AUCKLAND LETTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 939, 9 August 1957, Page 11

AUCKLAND LETTER

Sir-My Auckland Letter about country slums has evidently blistered the Achilles heel of "Ex Farmer" (Dunedin). This seems less my fault than his, since he has plainly read it in mounting indignation and thereby wholly missed its point. My "disparaging account" was not of "the shortcomings of a home-built Northland house" so much as of the life within it, a life which all too often squanders in carelessness and_triviality the efforts of the pioneers, and the amenities they won for us. They built this land and built it well: not only by working a great deal harder than we now do, and to more purpose, but also by making intelligent use of materials they ‘found around them. The women’s ingenious sewing of sugar or flour bags, for instance, or the way in which, as shown by Helen Simpson’s Women of New Zealand, they concocted such necessary things as soap and candles out of

whatever substances that came handy, should be a lesson to us. But what would those early women have thought of the modern farmer’s wife who allows expensive electrical gadgets to be wasted through bad installation or sheer neglect? Or of the farmer who equips his cowshed with all conveniences, and leaves his wife to do her weekly wash in the open, fetching the water herself in kerosene cans from some distance away? "How I wish I were a cow!" as one of these pour souls said: this is qa true story, which perhaps "Ex-Farmer" hasn’t yet heard. (I am assuming, by the way, that he is a New Zealander, and therefore knows even better than I, an Englishwoman, such books as Helen Wilson’s My First Eighty Years, and Land of My Children, or Jean Boswell’s life of her pioneer mother in the Waipoua forest, Dim Horizons.) As to "snobbery and ignorance," I can only answer thus: That snobbery all too often dwells in the eyes of the beholder, especially when a New Zealander wants to refute a critical Pommy: and that my "ignorance" of rural slums comes from observations in Canterbury, the King Country, Auckland, Northland, and North Queensland. Lest "Ex-Far-mer" thinks I am criticising only the New Zealand variety, I'll briefly describe a farmer’s hovel on what used to be an Australian goldfield. Floor of hard-packed earth (as in a Kaffir kraal); no hot water system; no lavatory except the usual hessian curtain in the bush; no bathroom save a square of concrete under the house on which the bather can stand, while tipping over himself the contents of a watering-can slung from the hoists by a piece of whipcord; two pet kangaroos (who cannot be house-trained) roaming freely through the place and expressing their natural joie de vivre from time to time by sweeping all the crocks off the kitchen table; a front gate which has long ago abandoned all effort to stay up, and combines, with a latchless front door, to admit ducks and hens who roost under the kitchen table; and, at the gap where the gate should be, a flash new car which has cost the owner nearly a thousand pounds. It is this kind of attitude to country living, this frivolous frittering away of cash on showy luxury, that I criticised, not the efforts of the pioneers to make life easier for those who come after

them,

SARAH

CAMPION

(Auckland).