Our Pioneers

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2, 12 January 1905, Page 1

Our Pioneers

One by one our pioneers keep dropping off, and their passing reminds us that we are still, so to speak, a nation in its teens— sturdy and self-reliant and proud of our first long breeks, but still in our teens. John Plimmer, who passed last week to the Land of the Hereafter, had reached man's estate, was married, and, had a family when he Handed in Wellington in 1841. He found part of the site of our capital a wild waste of swamp and marsh covered with phormium (flax) and stunted titree scrub ; part was a thick tangle of typical New Zealand jungle ; and the only signs of the future Empire City were sundry raupo (bulrush) huts that gave shelter to a lew disconsolate settlers on the foreslhore. Only two years before— in 1839— the site of the New Zealand capital had been suggested by the noted Dicky Barrett, whaler, lighter, and Pakeha Maori. Barrett (says Reeves in ' The Long White Cloud ') was headman of the Taranaki whaling-station. He ' heJped the Ngatiawa to repulse a noteworthy raid by the Waikato tribe. Afterwards, when the Ngatiawa decided to abandon their much-harried land, Barrett moved with them to Cook's Strait, here, in 1839, the Wakehelds found him looking jovial, round, and ruddy, dressed in a straw hat, white jacket, and blue dungaree trousers, and married to a chiefs daughter— a handsome and stately woman. It was Dicky Barrett who directed Uolonel Wakefield to what is now Wellington, and who, in consequence, may be recorded as the, guide who pointed out to the pioneer of the New Zealand Company the future capital of the Colony.' m They trod a hard rough track, those sturdy, patient pioneers that tamed- the forest and made the field and smoothed the roads tor the generation that flow inherits the ripe fruit of their labor. How aptly Joaquin Miller tells of the grinding foil and the golden hope and the frequent fate of the pioneers when he sings of the Arab Shew who ' Once sorrowed so lor thirsting man, He led belore the caravan And, digging welis, he, thirsting, dictd.' 1 He idied of thirst ! the wells remain ! Oh, hardy, patient, Pioneer, Clod's angels, what a triumph here To know no well is digged, in vain ! ' Here is how the Poet of the Sierras, tells of ttoe hope that buoyed the Pioneers, as it did the Arab Sheik, in their life-long toil :—

' Some far-on day when we are dust And all this vast vale teems with life, Some brave souls, fainting in the strife, M a y rest them here and speak us just. " 4 May say we few, through wilds of time, Blazed out new tracks for worlds to come 1 , And mourned not but, bravely dumb, So died, full trusting God a?id time.' We in New Zealand have not far to look back to the, rocks out of which we were hewn. It is but a short htetime since Uhe vastly greater part of our country was,, lor the white settler, a virgin soil, And vast progress has been made since the arrival of those hardy pioneers who are last slipping from their moorings and putting out to Sea.