Fifty Thousand Deer

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 26

Fifty Thousand Deer

by

SUNDOWNER

OCTOBER 8

¢¢°S T'S ridiculous," Charlie said, "to spend money to tempt tourists here, and then spend more money to chase them away. The Government should make up its mind whether it wants them or doesn’t want them." Charlie had been reading Lady Barker, and asked if I remembered the

pig hunt’ without dogs and Lady Bar-

ker’s luck in knocking a boar over with a boulder. "That’s the kind of thing to tempt tourists," he said; "wild life and free hunting." "The tourists would have to be young." "Well, it’s the young people we want. What’s the use of bringing the decrepit to look at us? We want more from the tourist than he carries in his pocket. We want his interest after he goes home and an inclination to come back. We want some tourists to come back permanently." "But we can’t offer what Lady Barker found here." "I know that. But we can offer some of it, and some things that she didn’t find. It’s just crazy to spend tens of thousands killing pigs and deer when there are so many people eager to do it for nothing." "But what happens in the meantime? If we preserve pigs and deer for visitors, what happens to our lambs and our bush?" "Very little. Far less than the fanatics say. I'am getting a little tired of the forest-savers and erosionists. Burning does more harm every year than pigs and deer have done in 100 years. In any case, I don’t say preserve the deer. I stay stop spending thousands on a job that others are eager to do for nothing." "Do you know how many deer the cullers killed last year in the South Island?" "No, but it would be a big number. Perhaps 100,000. Perhaps 500,000: But

I am not afraid of figures. The South Island is a big block of country." "The number was 54,576. I find it slightly terrifying. If that was the number killed, the number still alive must be three or four times as many. We would need more tourists than New Zealand will ever see to check a host like that." "It is certainly a big number. Perhaps tourists are not the answer. But I don’t want a complete answer. I don’t want pigs and deer to disappear altogether. I am not so young as I was, but fresh Ppig-rooting still excites me." "It does me too. And tourists don’t. Why should we beg them to come here with their money-bags? If we want more income let us call on our sheep and our cows." "Yes, and on our soil and our muscles and our brains. The trouble is that I am well over 80 and you well over 70, and that makes us both old fools." "We are certainly that. But if Lady Barker returned where would you take her for an outing?" "Back to the foothills. Back to the matagouri and the scrub, Back to the flax bushes. Back to the paddocks without fences and gates. Back-" "Old fools, did you say, or young ones?" "Perennials, both of us. How’s yout lumbago?" * ss ~~

OCTOBER 10

F I say that I started this note under the biggest matagouri in the world I don’t know who can contradict me. It may not be true; but there was nobody

there to prove me wrong, and I took

some measurements. The height I judged to be about 25 feet. The circumference of the trunk I proved to be a little over four feet, and a horse could (and did) graze comfortably under the branches. If there is a bigger matagouri still alive not many people have seen it, or ever will, The moas may have seen bigger

specimens, the early Maoris, and possibly the early missionaries; but I have done a good deal of wandering in matagouri country and*I havé neyer before seen so high or so heavy. I have read somewhere, or been told, that our ‘early settlers made furniture out of matagouri, and I can now believe that they did. There were a dozen or more specimens near this big one that would have yielded boards six to eight feet long and six to nine inches wide. But the day must be near when all that big stuff will have vanished. This note is in fact an obituary. But I wish I knew how to spell the name. Though it is 100 years too late to try to recover the Maori word, it is a pity that we don’t use a Maori word, and agree to spell it in one way. Matagouri isa verbal bastard, but. at least gets near to the universal pronunciation. Tumatakuri and tumatakuru could both, I suppose, be’ Maori, but no one will ever Say one or the other. I suspect that tumatoukuri and tumatoukuru are gallicised variations, and it would be hateful to have to fall back on Discaria, I tried for a year or two to say matakauri and abstained from spelling it; but that was an affectation of which, in time, I grew ashamed. In any case, it was as far as matagouri from tumatakuri, There seems to be nothing for it but to perpetuate illegitimacy.

OCTOBER 13

% a Ba HAVE had two verbal shocks this week, one a little disturbing. First, I was astonished to find Sir Richard Bur- | ton saying, in A Pilgrimage to Meccah and Medinah, that a _ disciplinary measure applied to one of his companions' was the Arab equivalent of "spiflication.’’ We were often threatened

with spiflication when we were. children,

and 1 continued, when I had children of my _ own, to threaten them with the same punishment. I may even, when they were very small, have proposed now and again to spiflicate my grandchildren. But I did not suspect in any of these cases that I was perpetuating a threat many years older than New Zealand. Nor did I suspect, until I came on the phrase the other day in an undated letter of W. H. Hudson, that Sir Winston Churchill may not have originated terminological inexactitudes. If he did, it is already more than 50 years since it happened; and that in itself would be a shock. Hudson was born in 1850, Churchill in 1874. Somewhere in his mid-sixties, but I can’t find just when, Hudson complained that the Government of the day had sneaked into power on terminological inexactitudes (no quotes), If Churchill used the phrase earlier than that he must have coined it in his early thirties, and in that case I first heard it in my early twenties, which is more than I can take in. If I was not 40 at least before I heard it from Churchill, and if I did not join then in the newspaper laughter, I wil! submit to immediate spiflication (with of without quotation marks), (To be continued)