Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

CHAPTER XXV

THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND

ON THE map New Zealand looks like a little stepdaughter of Australia, and most of us think of the two countries as near neighbours. We associate them in our minds as belonging together, and imagine that the trip from one to the other is no more than a week-end journey.

This is all wrong. New Zealand is twelve hundred miles from Australia. It is a separate dominion of the British Empire, and entirely independent of the Commonwealth. The voyage from Sydney to Wellington takes four days, or almost the time of the fastest crossing of the Atlantic from New York. The two countries are as unlike in climate as South Carolina and Norway. The northern tip of Australia is nearer the Equator than Florida, while the southernmost island of New Zealand is in the relative position of Portland, Oregon.

New Zealand is a land of lofty mountains, geysers, volcanoes, rivers, fiords, and glaciers. Australia has no geysers, glaciers, or volcanoes; her mountains are not high, she has but few rivers, and the heart of the country is a vast desert. New Zealand has seventeen ports with harbours deep enough to accommodate ocean-going vessels; Australia’s seven largest ports have comparatively shallow harbours, which have required much dredging. Australia has more than three hundred and ninety species of lizards and a hundred different kinds of snakes, most of them poisonous. New Zealand has no snakes of any kind. The aborigines of Australia are among the most primitive peoples of the world, but the Maoris, the natives of New Zealand, are able to take a part in the government of their country.

New Zealand is one of the most remarkable botanical regions of the world and nowhere are there more beautiful forests. The giant fern is so common that it is the emblem of the country.

The southwest coast of the South Island rivals both Norway and Switzerland in its scenic beauty. There the glaciers have made fourteen great sounds, walled with steep cliffs and lofty mountain peaks.

Yet there are also many points of likeness between these two South Sea members of the British Empire, especially in their forms of government. Each country has a Governor-General appointed by the British Crown and each has a Parliament of two houses. In both the executive power is in the hands of a ministry, that is, the leaders of the majority parties in the Parliaments. Each maintains a separate tariff against Great Britain and neither tolerates the least interference of the Crown in its domestic affairs, though both are consulted by Great Britain on matters affecting the British Empire. Furthermore, both Australia and New Zealand are the scenes of all sorts of experiments in government ownership and control and each is noted for its liberal labour laws. The New Zealand government owns the railroads, the telegraphs, and the telephones; it competes with private companies in the insurance business, owns and operates the coal mines on the public lands, and undertakes all water-power developments.

To most of us New Zealand is an empty land in a far-distant part of the globe. I find it filled with a busy people and moving rapidly along on the lightning express of civilization. Neither is it so far away, after all. It is now only eighteen days from San Francisco, only about thirty-five days from London, and good steamship lines connect it with all parts of the globe. From the New Zealand ports there are regular sailings to London by way of the Cape of Good Hope, by the Suez Canal, or the Panama Canal. Still another route to Europe is across the Pacific from Auckland to Vancouver, a voyage of more than six thousand miles; thence by rail to Montreal, Quebec, or New York, and then across the Atlantic. Scores of steamers go from port to port along the wild New Zealand coast, and one can leave here almost any week for the Tongas, the Fijis, and other islands of the South Seas.

The Dominion of New Zealand is made up of three islands. As they lie on the map they form a great boot turned upside down with its toe toward Australia and with the ankle broken by Cook Strait. The foot is the North Island, on which are situated Auckland and Wellington, the two biggest cities. The South Island, which contains the highest mountains and some of the best agricultural areas, forms the leg, and Stewart Island, the little patch of land at the bottom, makes the loop at the end of the boot strap.

The total length of the boot is one thousand miles, or more than the distance from New York to Chicago. At its broadest part it is about as wide as from New York to Boston. The North Island is nearly as big as Pennsylvania, and the South Island is larger than Illinois. Stewart Island is about half the size of Rhode Island. It is mountainous, and although it supports a few sheep, it is chiefly a summer resort. The combined area of these three islands and some smaller ones adjoining is a little more than that of Colorado. In 1901 New Zealand annexed the Cook Islands, and under a mandate from the League of Nations it now administers former German Samoa.

The New Zealand in which we are interested consists of the two large islands. They contain all the cities, almost all the people, and everything that makes the Dominion the live, wide-awake, prosperous country that it is to-day.

The climate here is warmer than that of New England. It is moist and rainy. January and February are the hottest months and July and August the coldest. On the North Island snow falls only on the mountains and high hills and is practically unknown in Wellington and Auckland. On the South Island there is a good deal of snow south of Christchurch.

A large part of the North Island is hilly and some of its plains are covered with pumice sand, which unfits them for tillage or pasturage. One part of it has hot springs and geysers like those of Yellowstone Park. It has several volcanoes, although they are mostly inactive now. Ngauruhoe, the youngest, continually sends up little clouds of steam. The Ruapehu volcano, which is nine thousand feet high, has glaciers on its upper slopes, and ends in a hot crater lake, which is often covered with steam. White Island, in the Bay of Plenty, is a vast bed of piping hot sulphur. On days when the sea is calm a person may land on its rocky shore, but walking about it is not pleasant, for the crusty ground breaks under his feet and the sulphur eats up the soles of his shoes and his clothes if it touches them.

Mount Egmont, near the southwest coast of the North Island, reminds me much of Fuji-yama, Japan. It is a perfect cone, eighty-three hundred feet high, or more than two thousand feet higher than Mount Washington. It is thirty miles in diameter at the base. At its foot lies New Plymouth, a town of about eleven thousand people. Mount Egmont rises out of one of the most fertile districts of New Zealand. The soil is a rich loam, so good for grass that it has sold for four hundred dollars an acre. It is used for dairying, the butter being exported to Great Britain and the United States.

Like the Tasmanians, the New Zealanders call their country the Switzerland of the Pacific, and the mountains of the South Island are named the Southern Alps. They reach a height of more than twelve thousand feet in Mount Cook, which the native Maoris call “Aorangi,” or the “cloud piercer.” The snow line is lower than in Switzerland, and the people here say that the scenery surpasses that of the European Alps. Many of the New Zealand peaks are covered with perpetual snow, and there are great glaciers on both sides of the range, descending in places to within a few feet of sea level. Some of the peaks have never been climbed and many glaciers are still unnamed. Some of the latter are of enormous extent. The Tasman Glacier is eighteen miles long, two thousand feet thick, and in places three miles wide. It covers an area of three thousand acres. Both the Murchison Glacier and the Godley Glacier are ten miles long and each has an area of more than five thousand acres.

The southwest coast of the South Island is bitten into by fourteen deep sounds hollowed out by the glaciers of ages past. The most beautiful of all is Milford Sound. It is surrounded by lofty cliffs and mountains about whose heads float wreaths of mist and down whose sides silvery cascades plunge into the sea. Milford Track, which the New Zealanders call the “most beautiful walk in the world,” leads from the Sound for twenty-six miles through forests, mountains, and valleys to Te Anau, the second largest lake in the Dominion.

The largest lake is Taupo, in the centre of the North Island. It is surrounded by mountains capped with perpetual snow, and in flood times a magnificent waterfall thunders down into it from the sheer cliffs on its western side.

In summer the New Zealand mountains are full of travellers and explorers from all over the world. The tourist agents of Europe send parties and the people of the Old World come to this Switzerland of the South Seas just as we go to the Switzerland of Europe. The New Zealand government, which is the chief excursion bureau, has a department devoted to exploiting the scenery. It prints illustrated guide books, which it gives away or sells at cost. The government builds roads and bridges through the most picturesque parts. It maintains a series of rest houses along Milford Track, and operates the hot-springs district as a tourist resort.

New Zealand is an evergreen land, as the leaves stay on most of the trees all the year round. Here is the same green that one sees in England and Ireland; for, like the mother country, the Dominion has an abundant rainfall. The fences about the houses are often hedges with leaves of a varnished green. There are many varieties of evergreen plants, such as the holly. The New Zealand palm lily is to be seen everywhere. It grows to a height of twenty feet without a branch, and then its top blossoms out in green tassels like a palm. The people call it the cabbage tree.

And then the ferns! New Zealand has enough to establish ferneries for all creation. There are acres of them, miles of them! Some of the deep glens and gorges are walled with ferns. They are of all kinds, some like great trees and others as fine as the maidenhair. There is one plant, half fern and half vine, which is used by the natives for bedding. This is the “supplejack,” which climbs the loftiest trees, coiling its wire-like stems about the branches. The runners are so tough that they can be used for ropes. They maintain their coil after being pulled from a tree, and are said to have been used for making spring mattresses. Think of sleeping on fern beds, upon fern springs, and you have one of the possibilities of New Zealand.

Both the North Island and the South Island have much good land. I visited a farm on the Canterbury Plains in the South Island which a good authority tells me has produced ninety bushels of wheat to the acre, and I have travelled through sections where thirty, forty, and fifty bushels are not uncommon. Some of the land produces a hundred bushels of oats to the acre and much of it yields turnips by the ton. There are millions of acres sown with English grasses. In northern New Zealand, swamp areas once considered worthless have been drained and now form some of the richest land in the Dominion. On the whole, New Zealand comes as near being a rich and beautiful garden as any country with a temperate climate lying south of the Equator.

As for the people, they are enthusiasts about their country. They believe in New Zealand for the New Zealanders. It is estimated that the Dominion could accommodate perhaps four times its present population of a million and a quarter, but I doubt whether away down in their souls the inhabitants really want immigration. Certainly the government has put no premium upon it. Even British subjects wishing to go out to New Zealand must be nominated for admission by a resident of the Dominion before they can get their transportation at the reduced rates sometimes offered. The government is especially anxious to keep out the Chinese, and limits the number admitted, each of whom has to pay a tax of five hundred dollars. The result is that there are now less than three thousand Chinese in the country, and practically no Japanese.

Of the more than a million population only forty thousand are Maoris or aborigines. The remainder are nearly all British-born subjects, more than half of whom were born in New Zealand. The rest have come from England, Scotland, or Ireland. The Dominion is in fact a little Britain. The houses are much like English cottages, the business places are like English shops, and the money is in pounds, shillings, and pence. The language is English and I sometimes hear the cockney accent of London. The people are, I think, far more progressive and less provincial than the inhabitants of Great Britain, and they seem to me much more like the nephews of Uncle Sam than the sons of John Bull.