The contrast between the station of the back-ranges and the country place of the wealthy freeholder is the contrast between the first generation of colonial life and the third. The lord of 40,000 acres may be a rural settler or a rich man with interests in town as well as country. In either case his house is something far more costly than the old wooden bungalow. It is defended by plantations and approached by a curving carriage drive. When the proprietor arrives at his front door he is as likely to step out of a motor-car as to dismount from horseback. Within, you may find an airy billiard-room; without, smooth-shaven tennis lawns, and perhaps a bowling-green. The family and their guests wear evening dress at dinner, where the wine will be expensive and may even be good. In the smoking-room, cigars have displaced the briar-root pipes of our fathers. The stables are higher and more spacious than were the dwellings of the men of the early days. Neat grooms and trained gardeners are seen in the place of the “rouse-abouts” of yore. Dip and wool-shed are discreetly hidden from view; and a conservatory rises where meat once hung on the gallows.
For a colony whose days are not threescore years and ten, ours has made some creditable headway in gardening. The good and bad points of our climate alike encourage us to cultivate the art. The combination of an ample rainfall with lavish sunshine helps the gardener’s skill. On the other hand, the winds—those gales from north-west and south-west, varied by the teasing persistency of the steadier north-easter, plague of spring afternoons—make the planting of hedgerows and shelter clumps an inevitable self-defence. So while, on the one hand, the colonist hews and burns and drains away the natural vegetation of forest and swamp, on the other, in the character of planter and gardener, he does something to make amends. The colours of England and New Zealand glow side by side in the flowers round his grass plots, while Australia and North America furnish sombre break-winds, and contribute some oddities of foliage and a share of colour. In seaside gardens the Norfolk Island pine takes the place held by the cedar of Lebanon on English lawns. The mimosa and jackarandah of Australia persist in flowering in the frosty days of our early spring. On the verandahs, jessamine and Virginia creeper intertwine with the clematis and passion-flower of the bush. The palm-lily—insulted with the nickname of cabbage-tree—is hardy enough to flourish anywhere despite its semi-tropical look; but the nikau, our true palm, requires shelter from bitter or violent winds. The toé-toé (a reed with golden plumes), the glossy native flax (a lily with leaves like the blade of a classic Roman sword), and two shrubs, the matipo and karaka, are less timid, so more serviceable. The crimson parrot’s-beak and veronicas—white, pink, and purple—are easily and commonly grown; and though the manuka does not rival the English whitethorn in popularity, the pohutu-kawa, most striking of flowering trees, surpasses the ruddy may and pink chestnut of the old country. Some English garden-charms cannot be transplanted. The thick sward and living green of soft lawns, the moss and mellowing lichens that steal slowly over bark and walls, the quaintness that belongs to old-fashioned landscape gardening, the venerable aspect of aged trees,—these cannot be looked for in gardens the eldest of which scarcely count half a century. But a climate in which arum lilies run wild in the hedgerows, and in which bougainvilleas, camellias, azaleas, oleanders, and even (in the north) the stephanotis, bloom in the open air, gives to skill great opportunities. Then the lover of ferns—and they have many lovers in New Zealand—has there a whole realm to call his own. Not that every fern will grow in every garden. Among distinct varieties numbering scores, there are many that naturally cling to the peace and moisture of deep gullies and overshadowing jungle. There, indeed, is found a wealth of them—ferns with trunks as thick as trees, and ferns with fronds as fine as hair or as delicate as lace; and there are filmy ferns, and such as cling to and twine round their greater brethren, and pendant ferns that droop from crevices and drape the faces of cliffs. To these add ferns that climb aloft as parasites on branches and among foliage, or that creep upon the ground, after the manner of lycopodium, or coat fallen forest trees like mosses. The tree-ferns are large enough to be hewn down with axes, and to spread their fronds as wide as the state umbrellas of Asiatic kings. Thirty feet is no uncommon span for the shade they cast, and their height has been known to reach fifty feet. They are to other ferns as the wandering albatross is to lesser sea-birds. The black-trunked are the tallest, while the silver-fronded, whose wings seem as though frosted on the underside, are the most beautiful. In places they stand together in dense groves. Attempt to penetrate these and you find a dusky entanglement where your feet sink into tinder and dead, brown litter. But look down upon a grove from above, and your eyes view a canopy of green intricacies, a waving covering of soft, wing-like fronds, and fresh, curving plumes.
TREE FERNS
The change in country life now going on so rapidly has not meant merely more comfort for the employer: the position of the men also has altered for the better. While the land-owner’s house and surroundings show a measure of refinement, and even something that may at the other end of the earth pass for luxury, the station hands are far better cared for than was the case a generation or two ago. The interior of the “men’s huts” no longer reminds you of the foc’sle of a merchantship. Seek out the men’s quarters on one of the better managed estates, and it may easily happen that you will now find a substantial, well-built cottage with a broad verandah round two sides. Inside you are shown a commodious dining-room, and a reading-room supplied with newspapers and even books. To each man is assigned a separate bedroom, clean and airy, and a big bathroom is supplemented by decent lavatory arrangements. The food was always abundant—in the roughest days the estate owners never grudged their men plenty of “tucker.” But it is now much more varied and better cooked, and therefore wholesome. To some extent this improvement in the country labourer’s lot is due to legal enactment and government inspection. But it is only fair to say that in some of the most notable instances it comes from spontaneous action by employers themselves. New Zealand has developed a public conscience during the last twenty years in matters relating to the treatment of labour, and by this development the country employers have been touched as much as any section of the community. They were never an unkindly race, and it may now be fairly claimed that they compare favourably with any similar class of employers within the Empire.
At the other end of the rural scale to the establishment of the great land-owner we see the home of the bush settler—the pioneer of to-day. Perhaps the Crown has leased a block of virgin forest to him; perhaps he is one of the tenants of a Maori tribe, holding on a twenty-one or forty-two years’ lease; perhaps he has contrived to pick up a freehold in the rough. At any rate he and his mate are on the ground armed with saw and axe for their long attack upon Nature; and as you note the muscles of their bared arms, and the swell of the chests expanding under their light singlets, you are quite ready to believe that Nature will come out of the contest in a damaged condition. It is their business to hack and grub, hew and burn, blacken and deface. The sooner they can set the fire running through tracts of fern or piles of felled bush the sooner will they be able to scatter broadcast the contents of certain bags of grass seed now carefully stowed away in their shanty under cover of tarpaulins. Sworn enemies are they of tall bracken and stately pines. To their eyes nothing can equal in beauty a landscape of black, fire-scorched stumps and charred logs—if only on the soil between these they may behold the green shoots of young grass thrusting ten million blades upward. What matter the ugliness and wreckage of the first stages of settlement, if, after many years, a tidy farm and smiling homestead are to be the outcome? In the meantime, while under-scrubbing and bush-felling are going on, the axemen build for themselves a slab hut with shingled roof. The furniture probably exemplifies the great art of “doing without.” The legs of their table are posts driven into the clay floor: to other posts are nailed the sacking on which their blankets are spread. A couple of sea chests hold their clothes and odds and ends. A sheepskin or two do duty for rugs. Tallow candles, or maybe kerosene, furnish light. A very few well-thumbed books, and a pack or two of more than well-thumbed cards, provide amusement. Not that there are many hours in the week for amusement. When cooking is done, washing and mending have to be taken in hand. Flannel and blue dungaree require washing after a while, and even garments of canvas and moleskin must be repaired sooner or later. A camp oven, a frying-pan, and a big teapot form the front rank of their cooking utensils, and fuel, at least, is abundant. Baking-powder helps them to make bread. Bush pork, wild birds, and fish may vary a diet in which mutton and sardines figure monotonously. After a while a few vegetables are grown behind the hut, and the settlers find time to milk a cow. Soon afterwards, perhaps, occurs the chief event of pioneer life—the coming of a wife on to the scene. With her arrival is the beginning of a civilised life indoors, though her earlier years as a housekeeper may be an era of odd shifts and desperate expedients. A bush household is lucky if it is near enough to a metalled road to enable stores to be brought within fairly easy reach. More probably such necessaries as flour, groceries, tools, and grass seed—anything, in short, from a grindstone to a bag of sugar—have to be brought by pack-horse along a bush-track where road-metal is an unattainable luxury, and which may not unfairly be described as a succession of mud-holes divided by logs. Along such a thoroughfare many a rain-soaked pioneer has guided in days past the mud-plastered pack-horse which has carried the first beginnings of his fortunes. For what sustains the average settler through the early struggles of pioneering in the wilderness is chiefly the example of those who have done the same thing before, have lived as hard a life or harder, and have emerged as substantial farmers and leading settlers, respected throughout their district. Success has crowned the achievement so many thousand times in the past that the back-country settler of to-day, as he fells his bush and toils along his muddy track, may well be sustained by hope and by visions of macadamised coach roads running past well-grassed, well-stocked sheep or dairy farms in days to come.
A MAORI VILLAGE
Predominant as the white man is in New Zealand, the brown man is too interesting and important to be forgotten even in a rough and hasty sketch. The Maori do not dwell in towns: they are an element of our country life. They now number no more than a twentieth of our people; but whereas a generation ago they were regarded as a doomed race, whose end, perhaps, was not very far distant, their disappearance is now regarded as by no means certain. I doubt, indeed, whether it is even probable. Until the end of the nineteenth century official returns appeared to show that the race was steadily and indeed rapidly diminishing. More recent and more accurate figures, however, seem to prove either that the Maori have regained vitality, or that past estimates of their numbers were too low. I am inclined to think that the explanation is found in both these reasons. In past decades our Census officers never claimed to be able to reckon the strength of the Maori with absolute accuracy, chiefly because the Natives would give them little or no help in their work. It is not quite so difficult now as formerly to enumerate the members of the tribes. Furthermore, there is reason to hope that the health of the race is improving and that its spirit is reviving. The first shock with our civilisation and our overwhelming strength is over. The Maori, beaten in war with us, were not disgraced: though their defeat disheartened them, it did not lead their conquerors to despise them. Again, though they have been deprived of some of their land, and have sold a great part of the rest, the tribes are still great landlords. They hold the fee-simple of nearly seven million acres of land, much of it fertile. This is a large estate for about fifty thousand men, women, and children. Moreover, it is a valuable estate. I daresay its selling price might be rated at a higher figure than the value of the whole of New Zealand when we annexed it. Some of this great property is leased to white tenants; most of it is still retained by the native tribes. So long as they can continue to hold land on a considerable scale they will always have a chance, and may be sure of respectful treatment. At the worst they have had, and still have, three powerful allies. The Government of the colony may sometimes have erred against them, but in the main it has stood between them and the baser and greedier sort of whites. Maori children are educated free of cost. Most of them can now at least read and write English. Quite as useful is the work of the Department of Public Health. If I am not mistaken, it has been the main cause of the lowered Maori death-rate of the last ten years. Then the clergy of more than one Church have always been the Maori’s friends. Weak—too weak—as their hands have been, their voices have been raised again and again on the native’s behalf. Thirdly, the leaders of the temperance movement—one of the most powerful influences in our public life—have done all they can to save the Maori of the interior from the curse of drink. Allies, then, have been fighting for the Maori. Moreover, they are citizens with a vote at the polls and a voice in Parliament. Were one political party disposed to bully the natives, the other might be tempted to befriend them. But the better sort of white has no desire to bully. He may not admit that the brown man is socially his equal; but there is neither hatred nor loathing between the races.