After all, we have no great cause for complaint. Some trivial annoyance is the worst we have to suffer in this way. We have no scorpions, snakes, poisonous centipedes, or any other vile thing of that sort. I have told the worst of our indoor plagues. Rats and mice we have, of course, as they swarm in the bush; but our dogs, and a cat or two, keep the shanty fairly clear of them.
Our commissariat is plentiful and varied enough. With slight exception we are our own providers, living almost entirely on our own produce, as farmers should. Sometimes the pressure of work leads to carelessness in catering and cooking, and we are consequently reduced to short commons, for which there is no sort of need. In the worst times of poverty we should not starve. The river is always full of fish; and things must be more than bad if one could not get credit for a sack of flour or potatoes with the Mayor, or with some other storekeeper on the rivers. And, after the first year, the garden ought to produce enough vegetables, potatoes, kumera, taro, pumpkins, and maize, to keep the family going, even if everything else failed them.
Pig-meat, in its various forms, is our staple article of food. We breed and fatten a large number of pigs on the clearings round the shanty. These we butcher in batches of six or eight, as required, and turn into salt pork, bacon, and ham. We have occasionally sent a cask or two of pork, some flitches or hams, to market; but as a rule we consume our pigs on the farm. Pig-meat is most reliable as a staple. One does not tire of it so utterly as one does of either mutton or beef, if one of these be the invariable daily food.
Beef we rarely see in our shanty. The steers we breed are too valuable to be used by ourselves; they have to go to market. Only occasionally we find it necessary to slaughter some unmanageable rusher, a cow, or bullock, and then we have beef, fresh and salted down. Mutton was just as scarce for several years, as we could not afford to kill out of our small flock; and mutton is not good to salt down. Now, we kill a sheep every week, sometimes a couple, as the township will take the surplus meat, and so it pays us.
We keep a great number of turkeys on the clearings, as also a less number of ducks and poultry, to diminish the crickets, caterpillars, and other insect foes. These birds are now practically wild, and give us something like sport to shoot them. There are hundreds of turkeys, as they thrive amazingly, consequently we often have them at table. Eggs, too, are plentiful enough, whenever any one takes the trouble to hunt up some nests.
As to wild game of any sort, we get little enough of that; for we cannot spare time to go after it. Sometimes we may shoot some of the splendid wild pigeons, some kakas, parrots, tuis, wild duck, teal, or the acclimatized pheasants. Wild pig is nauseous eating, so that is not sought after.
Every now and then we go in for fish. There are schnapper, rock-cod, mullet, mackerel, and herring, or species that answer to those, to be had for very little trouble. There are also soles, which we catch on the mud-banks and shallows at night, wading by torchlight, and spearing the dazzled fish as they lie. When we make a great haul we salt, dry, or smoke the capture for lasting use. The endless oyster-beds, and other shell-fish, we rarely touch, they are not worth the time and trouble, we consider.
Tea is the invariable beverage at every meal, and almost the only one, too. Milk is generally available in our shanty as a substitute, but somehow we stick to the tea. We drink quarts and quarts of it every day, boiling hot, and not too weak. Throughout New Zealand and all the Australian colonies this excessive tea-drinking is the universal practice. Even the aboriginal races have taken to it just as kindly. It is such a good thirst-quencher, every one says, so cooling in warm weather, and so warming in cold seasons.
We had an earnest medico on a visit to us lately. He inveighs strongly against tea-drinking, which he says is the curse of these countries. I think he would preach a crusade against it if he dared; for, of course, he would have to join issue with Good Templars, Sons of Temperance, and all the fanatical anti-alcoholists. These zealous reformers are so blindly infatuated with their hatred for alcohol, that tea seems to them its natural antithesis, and they vaunt it as if it were a celestial boon. And such people are a political power out here—worse luck!
The doctor declares—"Tea-drinking is one of the most serious mistakes of our age and race in these new countries. It produces, first of all, a low form of chronic dyspepsia, whose effect is immediately perceived in early decay of the teeth. It often seriously affects the great organs—the liver, kidneys, stomach, and heart—predisposing them to derangement, and aiding the progress of organic mischief in them, should that arise from other causes. It affects the nerves, causing irritability and debility in them. Nervous power becomes impaired, reacting with evil effect upon the ganglionic centres and the brain. Hence the mind must become insidiously affected also. I am quite sure that the character of our colonists is being modified by their practice of excessive tea-drinking, and I cannot believe that the change will be for the better. I believe that we may trace to tea, gloominess, misanthropy, loss of cheerfulness, a restless energy without fixity of purpose, a sour temper, a morbid and abnormal simplicity, leading to intellectual retrogression instead of progress, and to a tendency to yield to superstitious fancies, with loss of control over reason and its advancement. What will be the future of these young tea-drowned nations?"