XXI NORTH AGAIN
I am glad to have seen Gore and met its genial, hospitable citizens, but I am not sorry to get away, since during my stay a blizzard of great virulence has been raging. A tantalising kind of weather indeed. For occasionally there would be a burst of brilliant sunshine and the sky would look serene. Then with amazing celerity a black mass of cloud would arise from behind the ranges, overspread the sky, and burst upon us in a perfect hurricane of biting blast and blinding snow. But upon entering the train and starting for the north it was wonderful to see how rapidly we ran out of it into balmy, summer weather, until when we reached Dunedin we seemed to have entered another season altogether than winter, as fine a day indeed as heart could desire.
I might just remark here that the New Zealand Government Railway rolling stock is all American, but the cars are of mixed type, some being like our corridor cars at home, only with the corridor wired at the side instead of being perfectly closed in like ours, and others of the open American type, seats on each side with a middle aisle. They are fairly comfortable, but the speed is slow, even on the express trains the pace is only about twenty-five miles an hour. The line is usually single and laid American fashion, that is, the rails are spiked down to the sleepers with hold-fast nails in a fashion that to us at home seems quite casual and temporary. The officials are genial, but being Government servants, which always seems to mean something different to public servants, they do not waste any time in superfluous civility, and they come down upon any hapless passenger who unwittingly infringes a bye-law with draconian severity. But with all that they are courtesy and gentleness personified when compared with the autocrats on the American railways, who actually resent savagely being spoken to civilly, and proceed to insult a passenger who is accustomed to speak to those whom he pays to serve him as he would like to be spoken to himself. Our Colonial brethren do not make that grim mistake, though quick to resent any needless assumption of superiority.
It has been a great pleasure to renew my acquaintance with Dunedin, and to note the development of its shipping facilities, as well as the way in which the high character of the city architecturally and structurally has been maintained and developed, although the latter phase is much less important than I was prepared to find it. But principally I was interested in Port Chalmers, that idyllic spot for beauty of situation which has been left stranded, as it were, in its little nook by the passing of the traffic up the tortuous estuary to Dunedin. It is almost as it was when I last saw it, thirty-one years ago, in a state of arrested development. With the exception of three of the Union Company's steamers, which were lying there coaling, the port was deserted, instead of having quite a fleet of fine sailing ships such as used to lie at its wharves in my day. Such traffic as it has now is confined to the large steamers of Messrs. Shaw Savill, the New Zealand Shipping Company, and others which do manage to get up as far as this, but seldom venture up to Dunedin, as being too risky and involving besides too much loss of time. I really experienced all that sense of everything being dwarfed and mean, such as so often strikes a boy upon revisiting the scenes of his youth in some sleepy village or some small town after being away in the great world for years.
The only change of any importance noticeable was that a fine new dry dock was being dug, which, I have no doubt, will be a very great boon to the big ships which call here, but I should think will be mainly used by the fine vessels of the Union Company. So I bade farewell to the pretty little old-fashioned place, with its lovely views over land and sea, and sped on over the railway towards Christchurch (it was being commenced when I was here thirty-two years ago) past the picturesque place where I once essayed farming—Purakanui—and catching occasional glimpses of beautiful bays, all silted up and worthless for navigation or shelter except by the smallest craft, to the thriving towns of Waitati, Oamaru, and Timaru. This is the unsheltered coast-line known as the ninety-mile beach, where the communication with the land depends upon the weather, but the richness and fertility of the great plain extending inland assures the prosperity of the towns studded along the harbourless shore.
It is pleasant travelling, especially on a day like this, for the train although slow is very comfortable, and there is an excellent dining-car with good and plentiful food at a low rate compared with what is to be found in any other country in the Old World or America. And here I think it only just to say that wherever I have travelled out here I have found the same thing—the very best of food, plainly but excellently cooked and nicely served at a very low cost. I know that my ideas in the matter of food are considered to be old-fashioned and heterodox, but I cannot help that; my deliberate opinion is that in the matter of food which is honest and good without being ambitiously messy and ostentatiously disguised, the Antipodes can challenge the world. As far as food is concerned, it is like travelling from one home to another.
The extent and fertility of this great plain, bounded on one side by the sea and on the other, far inland, by snow-capped ranges of mountains, is very impressive, and when occasionally the train pulls up at a thriving, bright town like Ashburton, and the traveller notes the neatness of the roads and comfortable appearance of the buildings, and the utter absence of squalor and grinding poverty, such as are, alas! too noticeable at way stations in America and in our own country, he feels a glow of satisfaction at being permitted to pass through such a land of plenty and of peace. And so we roll on into the thriving city of Christchurch, which is built entirely on the flat and is consequently not so picturesque or imposing as Auckland, Wellington, or Dunedin, but gives an impression of solid prosperity as well as of great extent, remembering always the number of its population.
But I am en route for Wellington, and my train is timed to catch the ferry-boat Mararoa, a 3,000-ton steamship of fifteen knots an hour, that, leaving Lyttleton (the port of Christchurch) at 5.30 p.m., is timed to be in Wellington at daylight, or, say, about 6.30 a.m., having in the meantime covered a distance of over 170 miles. She is a beautiful vessel, fit for any service in the world, but with the modesty generally attendant upon all such undertakings out here, the voyages which she and her sister ship, the Rotomahana, make on alternate days, are called the Wellington-Lyttleton ferry service. The only similar service that I can think of at present for distance and speed is the Fall River Line from Fall River to New York. But there is really no comparison possible. Those great top-heavy, gorgeously decorated vessels are obviously designed for service in sheltered waters, and are entirely unfit for a sea-voyage, while, for all their gingerbread decorations, I think meanly of the comfort they give for the money that is paid. However, as one is almost a lake service and the other must needs be prepared to encounter some of the worst weather in the world, it is, as I said, impossible to compare them.
The train, halting a very brief space at Christchurch, speeds on through smiling suburbs until it enters the great tunnel under the mountain which shuts off Christchurch from the fine harbour of Port Cooper. It stops for a few minutes at Lyttleton town nestling on the foreshore, then runs right down alongside of the ship so that the passengers have merely to step from the railway car to the gangway of the fine steamer, which will presently slip out to sea, and, in the face of any weather, land them at the wharf at Wellington as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and got ready for business.
And so with the rest I find myself at the capital city again, which, in strong contrast to the stormy South which I left the day before yesterday, lies bathed in golden sunshine, the air balmy as our summer, and the green, encircling hills with their cosy homes peeping out from the rich verdure, giving no hint that this is the winter-time. Truly a goodly land, well-favoured by nature, and in the hands of a people determined to keep its blessings as far as may be under their own control, unable to see any sense in following the example so persistently set them by the purblind people at home, of handing over its choicest benefits to the unthankful alien or the sneering inimical foreigner. It is of no use looking here for any specimens of that great and influential class at home who are the friends of every country but their own, and who, while professing to labour for the good of the people, persistently encourage the efforts of those without, who hate Britain and all her works, leaving no stone unturned to undermine her position in the world and reduce her to a dependency of their own.
The work of the Wellingtonians in developing their city has been astounding. On my previous visit I noted the extension of the residential quarters of the city to the slopes of the encircling hills, but I did not dream of the extent to which this has been carried. It came as a positive shock to me to learn that land in this rugged country, which is really as picturesquely uneven as Switzerland, without, of course, the enormously high mountains closely guarding it, has increased in value within the last generation from almost nothing to a thousand pounds an acre! Of course, engineering science in getting cable and electric cars running up the precipitous slopes of these hills is largely responsible for this inflation of land values, but comparing these values with those obtaining at home within easy reach of our great business centres, I am filled with astonishment at the price of land in New Zealand. I am strongly inclined to think that there is something artificial and temporary in such prices, especially when you remember that upon such enormously expensive land buildings are erected that, although beautiful to look at and entirely in accordance with their romantic environment, are practically all of wood. Still wooden house building has reached a high level of excellence in Wellington. If you can shut your eyes to the material, you will find nothing to gird at in the quality of the houses or their interior finish. In a word, they are beautiful and comfortable as well.
It is not often given to the citizens of an important city to be able to get from their offices in a few minutes to homes that occupy exquisitely beautiful points of advantage as regards scenery, and at the same time commanding an outlook of immense area over the sea and the harbour of their city. This is essentially the case in Wellington, and it is an advantage that is fully appreciated, judging from the extraordinary development that has taken place within the last few years. The amount of land available for the erection of business premises near the wharves was very little, but that has been rectified by reclamation, more evident here than anywhere else in New Zealand, where the extension of foreshores and their conversion into busy business thoroughfares is carried to a greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Here are to be seen splendid avenues of traffic, bounded on both sides by grand buildings, where a generation ago the sullen sea beat incessantly upon long, barren, shallow beaches. The aggregate cost of these great works has been enormous—phenomenal, when it is remembered how small are the numbers of the population that have achieved so great a result; but the returns from this enterprise have undoubtedly justified the keen foresight and business aptitude which has energised them as well as prompted the outlay. It is with no ordinary feeling of satisfaction that I here bear my tribute to the go-ahead qualities and the enduring work of these makers of the Britain of the South.