COUNTY TOWN

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 9, 8 May 1944, Page 7

COUNTY TOWN

A KORERO REPORT

NEW ZEALAND TO-DAY.

Most people see Fairlie from the windows of a Mount Cook bus. In summer they see it usually as a dusty sun-baked main streetthe near replica of a dozen or more main streets one might pass along in a day’s motoring through Canterbury. The railway-station, the post-office, the pubs, the petrol-pumps, the stores that sell everything from sheep-dip to razor blades —all seem to have been cut from a pattern that has served country townships from Auckland to the Bluff. Fairlie’s main street looked much the same ten years ago as it does to-day, and will probably look much the same ten years hence. Here, you might conclude, is a place whose currents of life are undisturbed by wars, revolutions, or general elections, a place where one might go to forget for a while that there is such a thing as war.

That is how it might seem from the Mount Cook bus. 'The truth is that the war has made much more of a disturbance in the life of Fairlie than it has in the life of Wellington or Auckland, even though most of the school-children have never seen a Marine. To know what the war has done to Fairlie you have got to know the township and its people, and something of their history.

As New Zealand country townships go. Fairlie is old because it depends on

one of the country’s oldest industries the pasturing of sheep on the high tussock country of the South Island. For more than eighty years there has been a regular migration of sheep from the high country of the Mackenzie basin to the coastal lowlands as winter approaches, and back again to the Mackenzie country in late spring. In its beginnings Fairlie was a place where drovers camped and watered and fed their flocks. According to the Jubilee History of South Canterbury it was first called Fairlie Creek, after Fairlie in Scotland. As the district was first settled by Highland shepherds, this sounds probable enough. Nevertheless, one school of thought holds that the name was originally Fairlie’s Creek, after a shepherd of that name who built himself a hut there. There was a regular rail service to Tekapo by way of Fairlie in 1862, and in 1870 Cobb

and Co.’s coaches were taking freight and passengers. Then, in 1883, Fairlie’s predominance in the area between the Mackenzie and the sea was settled by its becoming the railhead of a branch line from Timaru. When the attractions of Lake Tekapo and Mount Cook was known, Fairlie became the half-way house for another sort of traffic. First the coaches, and then, after the last war, the Mount Cook Co.’s buses brought a steady and growing

stream of tourists through the main street. Transport, indeed, has always been Fairlie’s main industry. The greater number of its male adults are employed on the railway or in garages, in keeping roads open and in repair, and in shoeing horses. The Jubilee History of South Canterbury says boldly that Fairlie “ lies in an amphitheatre of hills, snow-clad during the winter, and has a pleasant Old World appearance imparted by the number of trees.” Whatever part of the Old World Fairlie resembles it is not any part of the British Isles, with their soft lighting and restricted perspectives. On a fine day the first thing that impresses you as you top the rise shutting in the Fairlie basin to the east is the brilliant clarity of the air, which makes it possible to pick out every clump of trees on a hillside ten miles away. Apart from that, the Jubilee History’s description is faithful enough. To the west lie the high hills through which Burke’s Pass leads into the Mackenzie country; to the south is the Two Thumb Range ; and to the north is a lower line of hills beyond which lies the valley of the Rangitata. The floor of the Fairlie basin is flat, so flat that you are liable to forget that the road has been rising ever since you left the coast. Fairlie itself is 1,000 ft. above sea-level. Like most country towns, Fairlie has grown like a tapeworm. Its main buildings are not a group round a centre,

but an untidy straggle along the main road. At the east end are the railwaystation, the post-office, the Gladstone Grand Hotel, the Mackenzie County Council’s Offices, the courthouse, a garage, and one or two shops. The railwaystation and the shunting yards take up the north side of the street and are partly screened from the building on the south side by a line of elms. Farther west, about opposite the Presbyterian Church, the road suddenly doubles in width and is divided along the centre by another line of trees. Fairlie’s west end includes the Fairlie Hotel, the offices and stores of the stock and station agents, a billiardsaloon, two pastrycooks, more garages, a branch office of the Public Trust, and, at the extreme west end, the war memorial and the fire station. The oddity of Fairlie’s layout is that a single railway line escapes from the shunting yards and goes unfenced the whole length of the west end. To visiting motorists the sudden encounter with a railway-engine puffing its way unconcernedly down the main street is unnerving. So much for the Fairlie as it looks from the bus. If you turn off the main street you enter the Fairlie known only to the eight hundred people who live there. The side roads are metalled and flanked by waist-high cocksfoot which perilously masks open ditches. Interspersed with empty sections — Fairlie is a town-planner’s nightmare— pleasantly dilapitated houses surrounded by

old orchards. The most important side thoroughfare is School Road, which branches off by the Fair lie Hotel and takes its name from the district high school. On your right is the De Luxe Theatre (pictures three nights a week), an incongrously and deceptively modernlooking building with an open field on one side and a cottage on the other. The wooden erection over the entrance is an observation post for spotting aeroplanes. Over the road and a hundred yards farther on is the school, set well back among trees and with the date 1879 inscribed over the gates. Past the school seven State houses shock the eye even more severely than the De Luxe Theatre. Past the State houses again is Strathcona

Park, the gift of a local landowner. Here are golf-links, tennis-courts, swim-ming-baths, and a bowling-green—a sur-

prising crop of amenities for so small a town.

Now go back to the main street and turn right by the War Memorial. The pleasant and substantial red-brick building is the Fairlie Library, built in 1914 out of Carnegie funds. The library is an even bigger surprise than the amenities of School Road. Here, in addition to the best sellers, are Drucker’s “ Future of Industrial Man,” E. FI. Carr’s “ Conditions of Peace, ” J. M. Keynes on the theory of unemployment, illus-

trated books on modern art, a shelf of plays, and dozens of other books which a few years ago were available only in city libraries.

The chances are that you will find the librarian doing up books in sacking parcels, ready for distribution to remote parts of the Mackenzie country by the butcher, the baker, the grocer, or any one who happens to be taking a vehicle over Burke’s Pass. The librarian’s job is to know what her outlying subscribers have read and what they are likely to read ; she is, in consequence, a sort of cultural dictator for the whole of the Mackenzie. The newspaper-room is well stocked, but little used. The librarian says this is because of the wireless, and recalls that in the last war there used to be queues at the newspaper files. To-day the newspaper-room is used mainly by

school-children, who begin to arrive as soon as school is out. The librarian’s main regret is that the stocking of a special children’s section will have to wait till after the war.

Fairlie needs books, because the winter is formidable. Frosts begin in earnest in May, and for three months or more the weather is sub-Arctic. Last year there were frosts of 34 0 . Fairlie people protest that their cold is invigorating, which may be so. But it is a trial, nevertheless. Prudent housewives empty the pipes about three in the afternoon, running off enough for dish-washing and baths. The motorist who forgets to empty his radiator is certain of a burst water-jacket. One motorist tells this story. Last winter he was called out at night and filled his radiator with warm water. He had driven only a few hundred yards when the water-jacket burst; the heat of the engine was not sufficient to counteract the frost. Shattered water-closets are a familiar sight in Fairlie back gardens—a memento of last winter. The school had to close for eight days because both the heating system and the lavatories went out of action.

For ordinary residents, winter in Fairlie is bad enough ; for the County Council employees, whose job it is to keep the Mackenzie country’s main roads open, it is a nightmare. They are out for days and nights on end with the snow-ploughs, which are equipped with heated shelters in case they do not reach a house by nightfall. Metal becomes so cold that it burns the flesh ; frost-bite is a constant danger ; and often the snow so completely obliterates landmarks that roads are hard to find.

The busiest man in Fairlie is the engineer-clerk to the County Council. Fairlie has no town board and is administered as a riding of the Mackenzie County. It has sewerage, electric light, and a bitumen-surfaced main street, which is about as much as any township of the size could expect. In the absence of a municipal authority the county clerk combines the duties of mayor and town clerk ; he is also secretary of the school committee and the patriotic committee, and was commander of the Mackenzie

battalion of the Home Guard. Apart from ’that, he looks after 640 miles of roads, most of them liable to become snowbound in winter, and 7,350 acres of plantation reserves.

Looking round the main street you would see few signs that Fairlie is a township in a country at war. Both the banks are closed, and all banking business is now done on one day of the week by two bank officers from Timaru. They arrive by the 10.30 a.m. train and leave by the bus soon after midday ; and for two hours financial activity in Fairlie is as brisk as it ever is on Wall Street. In the pastrycook’s shop garishly-coloured bottles of aerated waters imperfectly conceal the emptiness of shelves. A card in the window says : “ No Sweets, No Chocolates, No Chewing Gum.” Wartime bureaucracy is represented by a printed announcement : “ By Order of the Price Tribunal, Cakes is. 3d. a dozen,” and also by a confused bundle of printed matter labelled “ Price Orders.” The cleanness of the price orders show’s that no none in Fairlie bothers about them. - The only shortage that really annoys Fairlie is the tobacco shortage. The general theory is that the Army gets all the cigarettes. There is also grumbling on sale days when farmers and auctioneers

having bought and sold some hundreds of sheep, find they can’t have cold mutton for lunch at the pub. because they’ve forgotten their coupons. If you live in Fairlie, you know that the war has made more differences to the township than are visible in the main street. Notices in the Anglican Church ask you to pray for more than one hundred parishioners who are with the Forces. There are few reserved occupations in the Fairlie district,and the young —and many of the young women — are almost all away. The swimming club, the football club, and the drama circle have suspended operations ; the annual show is being revived after a lapse of three years ; and the tennis and golf clubs just manage to keep going. Some day, it must be hoped, some one will write the story of the Mackenzie Home Guard. Fairlie and the Mackenzie raised 22 platoons and were given priority in equipment. The battalion’s assignment was the defence of a coastal sector just south of Timaru. When the first battalion parade was held in Fairlie, only women and children were left to watch, and of the women most were members of the Women’s Auxiliary. And when orderscame to start an E.P.S. organization, the only possible solution of the problem of personnel was to make E.P.S. duties a Home Guard function. The trial mobilizations presented a problem of transport such as few other Home Guard units faced, some platoons travelling nearly 100 miles from their assembly point. Fairlie has two war industries. One is linen flax, which employs between sixty and seventy workers and has

made the township’s already difficult labour problem more

difficult. The factory is half a mile away on the north side of the town and has near it cottages for married workers. Single women employees live in a hostel. The other war industry, surprisingly, is munitions making. This is a story that might be told round the life of one of the garage-proprietors, a man who has lived in Fairlie all his life and began work in a garage about the time service cars

began to run through to Mount Cook. To begin with, he had the flair for making things, which a man is born with or not born with. In a city he might have been apprenticed to a large engineering firm, gone to night classes, and become in due time a highly competent engineer. Whether that sort of training would have discovered his real genius is questionable. In Fairlie he had a very different sort of training. What he learnt he learnt always in relation to some practical problem. Every second job was a challenge to his wits and imagination. If a service car stripped a crown wheel battling through a snow drift, there was no question of telephoning Timaru to send out another part. There was nothing for it but to make another part. When New Zealand seemed in danger of invasion, and desperately needed military equipment, this man, and others like him in the Fairlie district, went over to war production. They made their own machine tools, they made parts for Bren gun carriers, they made rifle parts, they made mortar bombs, they made trench mortar partsand they are still in production. In its way, the story of Fairlie’s munitions factories is as remarkable as the story of Willow Run. Indeed, when the official historians get down to the task of telling the story of New Zealand at war, they might do worse than start with Fairlie.