Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

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.