Passing
Pageant
by
Trevor
Lane
* WON'T pretend that | I’m getting much enjoyment out of writing _ PASSING PAGEANT this week. I’m trying to put this down in those disturbing days between Christmas and New Year when the whole world seems to be holidaying and there’s an air of irresponsibility abroad. (And, what’s more, I’d much rather be indulging in fun and games, too.) Anyway, rather than foist any old nonsense on you-and because it saves me-a lot of trouble-I’m going to give you a talk that I broadcast from the BBC when I was in London. The hero of this little story I’ve called Nathan Westwood for reasons best known to myself, Anyway, here goesand remember it was written for an English audience.... * gx the voyage from New Zealand I’ve been reading again Rupert Brooke’s comment on my country and its people. Twenty-five years
ago he found New Zealand ‘fa, sort of Fabian England, very upper-middle-class ‘and gentle and happy. All the women smoke and dress very badly and nobody drinks. ... They’ve got all the things in the Liberal or mild Fabian programme-eight-hour day (and less), bigger old-age pensions, access to thé land, minimum wage and insurance, and yet it’s not paradise. Cost of living is rising quicker than wages.’’ " T was strange to read that, for, on this same journey, I read a book written nearly a quarter of a century after and expressing almost the identical words about the New Zealand of to-day. England’s well-known Tom Clarke was the writer. Everywhere on the route... Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Malta ... 1 found a vivid interest in the bold Socialist experiment that is being played out in our little Dominion ‘‘down under.’’
I found. myself involved in arguments for and against the methods of New Zealand’s Government. * UT whatever the colour or creed of her politics, New Sealand is home to me as it was to my father and to his father before him. Té was in the ’forties that the spirit of Empire-building spread from a few explorers and statesmen to the rank and file of Great Britain. The Dutch had had a look at Ao-tea-Roa-the Land of the Long White Cloud, as the native Maoris called t--in the seventeenth century. To them New Zealand owes its name. Captain Cook had come along in the next century and left names that remain to-day... Poverty Bay, in the north, where the Natives would give him nothing to eat, the Bay of Plenty where he was regaled by friendly Maoris on kumeras-Maort potatoesand wild birds, Cape Kidnappers, where some of his men were kidnapped, and many more. ¥ OR the most part Crown and Parliament weren’t enthusiastic about New Zealand. Think of the trouble America had been! Think of the lives laid down in India! Convicts had turned bushrangers in Australia and were no end of a nuisance to her Majesty’s Government there! But there were men who believed that great good could come from the proper colonising of hills and plains of New Zealand, men who were ready to back their beliefs with their fortunes. There were John Robert Godley and Bishop Selwyn and Lord Lyttelton and Sir George: Grey and Hobson, fine figures, all of them. We jt was the prospectus of the newly-formed Canterbury Association that attracted Nathan Westwood, who was an eighteen-vear-old medical student at Edinburgh University at the time. His father had died @ year before, his mother six months later and the young Yorkshire orphan decided to put the few hundred pounds he had into this colonial adventure. There were stormy interviews with the trustees of the estate, hard-headed Halifax men who thought of the colonies as places of robbery, hardship and sudden death. But Westwood was a Yorkshireman, too, and when his mind was made up, well-it stayed made up. He took a long farewell of his friends
at Edinburgh-their admiration for his decision was probably tempered by the private thought that he was just a little mad. " XN 1850-I can’t remember the month-he set out, with several hundred other English men and women, in a little vessel called the Charlotte dane. Five months the journey took. There were storms when the unfortunate passengers were battened down in the smeliy darkness below the decks. There was sickness, when the little medicine Westwood had acquired at Edinburgh stood him in, good stead as the doctor’s assistant. Eventually they reached the harbour of Lyttelton in the South Island. So this was the promised land! On the beach were a few tents belonging to whalers and to the few soldiers who had preceded the colonists. On three sides were tall, gaunt hills. ve HE women cried a little, the men found this socalled Utopia a little disconcerting. It must be remembered that these Canterbury colonists were no tough-as-leather immigrants. Godley and Lyttelton, the men behind the Canterbury Association, had chosen their flock carefully. There were’ men
from Oxford and Cambridge, women whose lives had been lived in sheltered vicarages with carriages to drive in and servants to look after them. One man had even brought his carriage... @ handsome affair with silver mountings that fell into Lyttelton Harbour when tt was being unloaded and was never seen again! ~ HICH way lies Canterbury?’’ asked one of the new arrivals of the soldiers on the beach. ‘‘Over that track there,’’ they said, with a laconic jerk of the thumb. And so the men in their handsome trousers and tall hats and
the women in their billowing skirts and early Victorian bonnets set out to climb the mowfamous Bridle Track. After nearly two hours walking they reached the summit... and there was Canterbury! Mile upon mile of plain, uimarked by house or fence except where the blue smoke eurled upward from the cottage belonging to the Deans brothers, the first settlers in Canterbury, who had arrived a year or two before. Immediately below was a big swamp where wild birds chattered among the huge clumps of native raupo. « NATHAN WESTWOOD, who was really little more than a youngster, had fallen in with a widow and her two daughters. He climbed the Bridle Track with them, helping the elderly woman over the stonier parts. But as the Canterbury Plains burst upon them with the majestic fringe of the snowy Southern Alps in the far distance, the widow fell back on the rough grass and died, poor soul, before anything could be done for her. There’s a stone and an inscription there to-day to mark the spot. . we JOHN ROBERT GODLEY had sent a (Captain Thomas with the pilgrims to act as
surveyor. And so it was Cap-; tain Thomas who, beside thy sluggish little stream that wandered across the swamp, said, ‘‘Here will we build a town." And a pretty depressing pros: pect it was. There was swamp and desolation and the lonely eries of a few birds as they wheeled about the incongruous little company gathered on the newly-named Canterbury Plains, Bur there was work te be done... plenty of work. The men laid aside their tall hais and their grend coats, the women tied eprons over dresses that had , probably graced some garden party in old England. Soon there was the buzz of the saw and the crash of the axe, as homes were hewn from native
timber, They were rough and ready, but they were home to this little bend of pilgrims. And keeping strange company with these little colonial shacks were pieces of Crown Derby, paintings by Romney and Rembrandt, delicate giniatures of brothers and sisters left behind, plate from London's most famous silrersmiths. AN I) so was born the city of Christchurch, largest in the South Island of New Zealand, and world-famous to-day as the most English city outside England. Westwood had no hankering after life in a town. His mind was young enough to be filled with tales of derring-do, and he had yisions of rolling sheep country with the fresh wind blowing in from the Pacific and the smell of the open tussock country in his nostrils. So he struck a bargain with the Canterbury Association and became the owner of a good stretch of land bordering the banks of the Ashley River. Sheep had been brought from England, and he purchased some of them. He bought a couple of cows from the Deans brothers. He built a eottage and a stable. He cleared land and put up fences. He was happier than he had ever been in his life. * AN? then something happened to complete this picture of colonial contentment.
When he had first gone to Edinburgh as «@ student, young Westwood had carried a letter of introduction to a manufacturer there. This man had several daughters, bonniest of all being Nellic, a bright-eyed Scots lass of seventecn. She looked shyly at the tall and .gawky — Yorkshireman-and romance was born. Then he went away... and the girl’s family considered the litile romance at an end. But not Nellic. She had a few pounds, she bought a ticket for New Zealand, and travelled all that long and dangerous journey for the sake of the man she loved. They were married in the tiny Anglican Church in Christchurch... the beginning of 60 ycurs "of happy married life. wv BOUT this time there was another young Englishman in Canterbury who had felt the call of the eolonies. But he was less interested in sheep-
farming than in writing-for which the world ean be thankful. He was Samuel Butler and T have stood on the doorstep of his lonely little cottage in the foothills of the Southern Alps and tried to turn my mind back to the days when he had sat far into the night writing the words that went forth as the famous ‘‘rewhon.’’ You can’t imagine a more peaceful, lonely spot. From the door of the little one-roomed shack-it’s falling into ruin to-day-there is a magnificent view of mountain peak and green hill and turbulent river. To-day, Samuel Butler’s sheep station is a part of the huge run owned by Sir William Nosworthy, a ‘former Post-master-General. * AS T have said, Nathan Westwoods little sheep station was prospering. The cottage had grown into quite a house, the stables and sheep pens and stock had grown, too. There was a homely woman’s touch about the neat curtains, the little chicken run, the healthy well-cooked dinners, And
so into the ’sixties when Westwood took his little store of capital to buy more land. _ But the gods who had smiled on his every enterprise now turned away their heads. . Late one winter’s afternoon, 2@ terrific rain storm broke... the rain lashed down all night, and
all the next day, and all the next night, too. The Ashley River rose alarmingly. It flowed across the garden, scouring’ out the sturdy little oaks and the willows. It flowed through the stables soaking the hay and scaring the horses.
T ran across the paddocks where the sheep stood in desolate little groups up to their bellies in water. On the third morning the water was flowing through the house and the young couple decided they would have to leave. They went out into the paddocks, opened gates, turned the cattle and the horses loose, chased the chickens out of their pens. And with no more than a few clothes and a canary in a cage which the young wife insisted on taking with her, they turned their horses’ noses into the grey, mounting waters and
rode down toward Christehureh. . That flood of the eighteensixties is still talked about in Canterbury. The rivers became mad, swirling seas spreading out over the plain, desolation and destruction in their race to the ocean. The Waimakariri | River flowed down into Christehurech, washing houses away and terrifying the people. * NA THAN WESTWOOD went back to his farm as soon as the waters had subsided. The house was gone, the stables and fences and stock were no more. Where his most fertile paddocks had been the Ashley River now flowed in a stony bed nearly two miles wide. There was no such thing as appealing to the Government in those days. If you chose a colonist’s life you chose hardship and hazard. There was no use cursing the folly that had caused him to spend nearly all his capital adding new acres to his sheep run. A tiny cottage in Christchurch became the young couple’s new home,
and young Nathan went to. work for an engineer, * He showed surprising aptitude at his work, was entrusted with some of the plans for the Lyttleton Tunnel, the big tunnel that was driven through the hills under the very Bridle Track over which the pilgrims had travelled not so many years before. Orders flowed in for all sorts of work. The Provincial Government was building bridges and buildings, roads and tunnels.
Q/ITHIN ten years Westwood had become a partner in the firm, was taking an interest in the politics of the thriving
little colony, had become a respected citizen of the growing town of Christchurch. He died twenty years ago, but he lived long enough to see Christchurch grow into a proud city, a city where the culture and scholarship of the old world was allied to the vigorous spirit of the new.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/RADREC19390106.2.44
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 30, 6 January 1939, Page 10
Word count
Tapeke kupu
2,207Passing Pageant Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 30, 6 January 1939, Page 10
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
See our copyright guide for information on how you may use this title.