Looking southward across the Puniu in the Seventies and early Eighties we who were bred up on the Frontier saw a mysterious-appearing land, fascinating to the imagination because unknown—a land, too, of dread in the years of unrest, for there in the hinterland only a few miles from the border river lived Te Kooti and his band and the hundreds of Waikato dispossessed of their good lands on which we pakeha families now dwelt. As far as the eye could range it was a land altogether given up to the Kingites and the Hauhaus—an untamed country painted in the dark purple of broken mountain ranges, merging into the vague, misty blues of great distance, the sombre green of ferny hills and plains, and the yellow and white of deep flax and raupo swamps. Clear, dashing hill-streams and lazy, swamp-born watercourses, alive with eels and wild duck, all carrying down their quota to feed the silently-gliding Waipa. And over all, from Maunga-tautari’s shapelessly rugged mass along the curving sector to Pirongia’s fairy-haunted peaks, an aspect and air of solitude; a suggestion of mystery and waiting for the touch of man which was to transform that far-stretching waste.
The contrast! On our side the green farms of the pioneer settlers, roads, villages—each with its redoubt as a rallying-place in alarm—churches, schools—primitive schools, maybe, in the early stages—the flag of British authority flying.
So the border remained, the line of demarcation sharply defined by the confiscation boundary, the southern side inimical, sullen, waiting, for well-nigh twenty years after the final shots of the Waikato War.
Life on the old frontier, on one of the farthest-out farms, seems a kind of dream, a fabric of remembrance tinged with a faerie [[85]]haze, viewed through the vista of years from these times of new interests, new manners, changed modes of thought. Memories! One strives to marshal them into some order, but the most that can be done is to recall the things that chiefly fixed themselves on the youthful mind. There was the home on the hill, on the famous battlefield, the garden with its sweet old flowers, the cherry orchard, the huge almond trees (with flat stones at their feet upon which Maori children long before us cracked those almonds)—trees grown in the old days from the Rev. John Morgan’s orchard—the wild mint that grew in the tiny creek that went rippling down a swampy gully near the big acacia grove; the dam and the lake-like pond in the Tautoro swamp; and, above all, the peaches. The peaches of those happy dream-days on the old Orakau farm!—peaches vanished, a kind never to be tasted by the present generation. Orakau, Kihikihi, Te Awamutu, and Rangiaowhia were then the favoured land of the most delicious fruit that ever this countryside has known. Peach-groves everywhere, the good Maori groves, trees laden with the big honey peaches that the natives called korako because of their whiteness. Tons of peaches grew in those groves, and those wanted were gathered by the simple process of driving a cart underneath and sending one of us youngsters up to shake the branches until the cart was filled with fruit. Some of the best peaches were preserved by the housewives of the frontier in a way never seen now; they were sliced and sun-dried on corrugated iron, in the strong heat of the long days, and then strung in lines and hung in the high-ceilinged kitchen, criss-crossed in fragrant festoons, until required for pies.
As for the surplus fruit the pigs got it; many a cart-load of peaches from the groves was given to them, or they were turned out to feed on the heaps of fruit lying under the trees. Porkers fattened on peaches!
And it was curious, too, to explore some of those old groves of trees, on the crown of the farm near the road, for there the lead flew most thickly in the three days’ siege of Orakau, and nearly every tree bore the curious weals and knotty growths that indicated a bullet-wound, and a search with a knife sometimes revealed a half-flattened ball or fragment of one.
There was the bush on the north, covering the greater part of the swamp between the farm slopes and the high country of Rangiaowhia; even there, in little islanded oases in the woods and the [[86]]raupo marsh, were Maori peach-groves. On the south, a few hundred yards from the homestead, was the Blockhouse, with its little garrison of smart, blue-uniformed Constabulary—a tiny fort, but one that came large and grim enough on the eye of childhood.
The nearest farmer neighbour was the farthest-out settler of all—Mr Andrew Kay—and very far out and lonely his home seemed, on the verge of the confiscation boundary. Maoris were more numerous than pakehas; many a savage-looking and tattooed warrior, wearing a waist-shawl—for the Maori had not then taken kindly to trousers—called in at the home from one or other of the large villages just over the border; and native labour was employed at times on the farms.
That was long before the day of the dairy factory and the refrigerator, and while living was cheap there was little ready money in the country. No monthly cheques for butter-fat then; no competing buyers coming round for crops or stock. When a mob of cattle was ready for the market it had to be driven all the way to Auckland; and often there was mighty little profit for all the long hard work. Wheat was one of the staple crops, and in the early years it was threshed by hand with the old-fashioned flail and the grain carted to the nearest flour-mill. There was a water-mill on the Manga-o-Hoi, on the old swamp road between Kihikihi and Te Awamutu, and further south in the Waipa-Waikato country there were several wind-mills. I think I recollect two wind-mills of that old type on the road from Te Awamutu to Hamilton; one stood at or near Ohaupo.
For many a year after the War periodical scares of a Maori invasion were raised in the border settlements, from Alexandra and Te Awamutu around the confiscation line to Cambridge. The shooting of the surveyor Todd on Pirongia Mountain in 1870, the tomahawking of the farm-hand Lyon on the Orakau side of the Puniu in the same year, and the murder and decapitation of Timothy Sullivan near Roto-o-Rangi, on the Maunga-tautari side, all set alarms going. Every settler was armed, and the old Militia organisation presently was supplemented and made mobile by the formation of a fine body of frontier horse, the Te Awamutu and Cambridge troops of Waikato Cavalry. Well mounted, armed with sword, carbine, and revolver, able to shoot accurately and ride well, and thoroughly acquainted with the tracks, roads, and river fords, these settler-cavalrymen could not have been surpassed for the purposes [[87]]of border defence. Formed in 1871, the troops remained in existence until the introduction of the mounted rifles system in the beginning of the Nineties, and many hundreds of young fellows passed through the ranks during that time. In the early years, when the two troops were a real bulwark for the frontier, Major William Jackson, the veteran of the Forest Rangers, commanded the Te Awamutu troop; his lieutenants were Andrew Kay and William A. Cowan (the writer’s father), the two furthest-out settlers of Orakau. Captain Runciman commanded the Cambridge corps. Te Awamutu was the usual drill-ground of Jackson’s troop, and the shooting-butts were on the Puniu side of the settlement.