In the matter of climate the islanders are certainly the spoilt children of Nature; and this is not because the wind does not blow or the rain fall in their country, but because of what Bishop Selwyn called “the elastic air and perpetual motion” which breed cheerfulness and energy all the year round. Of all European climates it resembles most closely, perhaps, that of the coasts of France and Spain fronting on the Bay of Biscay. Round New Zealand are the same blue, sparkling, and uneasy seas, and the same westerly winds, often wet and sometimes rising into strong gales. And where France and Spain join you may see in the Pyrenees very much such a barrier of unbroken mountains as the far-reaching, snowy chains that form the backbone of the islands of the south. Further, though mountainous, ours is an oceanic country, and this prevents the climate from being marked by great extremes. It is temperate in the most exact sense of the word. The difference between the mean of the hottest month and the mean of the coldest month is not more than fifteen degrees in most of the settlements. Christchurch is an exception, and even in Christchurch it is only twenty degrees. In Wellington the mean for the whole year is almost precisely the same as in St. Louis in the United States. But the annual mean is often a deceitful guide. St. Louis is sixteen degrees warmer in summer and seventeen degrees colder in winter than Wellington; and that makes all the difference when comfort is concerned. Wellington is slightly cooler than London in midsummer, and considerably warmer in winter. Finally, in the matter of wind, the European must not let himself be misled by the playful exaggerations in certain current New Zealand stories. It is not the case that the experienced citizen of Wellington clutches convulsively at his hat whenever he turns a street-corner in any city of the world; nor is it true that the teeth of sheep in the Canterbury mountain valleys are worn down in their efforts to hold on to the long tussock grass, so as to save themselves from being blown away by the north-west gales. Taken as a whole, our land is neither more nor less windy than the coasts of the English Channel between Dover and the Isle of Wight. I write with the advantage of having had many years’ experience of both climates.
TE-WENGA
On the map of the world New Zealand has the look of a slim insular strip, a Lilliputian satellite of the broad continent of Australia. It is, however, twelve hundred miles from the continent, and there are no island stations between to act as links; the Tasman Sea is an unbroken and often stormy stretch of water. Indeed, New Zealand is as close to Polynesia as to Australia, for the gap between Cape Maria Van Diemen and Niue or Savage Island is also about twelve hundred miles across. In result, then, the colony cannot be termed a member of any group or division, political or scientific. It is a lonely oceanic archipelago, remote from the great centres of the earth, but with a character, attractions, and a busy life of its own. Though so small on the map, it does not strike those who see it as a little country. Its scenery is marked by height and steepness; its mountain ranges and bold sea-cliffs impress the new-comer by size and wildness. The clear air, too, enables the eye to travel far; and where the gazer can hold many miles of country in view—country stretching away, as a rule, to lofty backgrounds—the adjective “small” does not easily occur to the mind. Countries like Holland and Belgium seem as small as they are; that is because they are flat, and thickly sown with cities and villages. In them man is everything, and Nature appears tamed and subservient. But New Zealand submits to man slowly, sometimes not at all. There the rapid rivers, long deep lakes, steep hill-sides, and mountain-chains rising near to or above the snow-line are features of a scenery varying from romantic softness to rough grandeur. Indeed the first impression given by the coast, when seen from the deck of an approaching ship, is that of the remnant of some huge drowned continent that long ago may have spread over degrees of longitude where now the Southern Ocean is a weary waste.
DIAMOND LAKE
Nor, again, is this impression of largeness created by immense tracts of level monotony, as in so many continental views. There is none of the tiresome sameness that besets the railway passenger on the road from The Hague to Moscow—the succession of flat fields, sandy heaths, black pine woods, and dead marshes. For the keynote of our scenery is variety. Few countries in the world yield so rapid a series of sharp contrasts—contrasts between warm north and cool south; between brisk, clear east and moist, mild west; between the leafy, genial charm of the coastal bays and the snows and rocky walls of the dorsal ridges. The very mountains differ in character. Here are Alps with long white crests and bony shoulders emerging from forests of beech; there rise volcanoes, symmetrical cones, streaked with snow, and in some instances incessantly sending up steam or vapour from their summits. Most striking of all the differences, perhaps, is the complete change from the deep and ancient forests which formerly covered half the islands, to the long stretches of green grass or fern land where, before the coming of the settlers, you could ride for miles and pass never a tree. Of course many of these natural features are changing under the masterful hands of the British colonist. Forests are being cut down and burned, plains and open valleys ploughed up and sown, swamps drained, and their picturesque tangle of broad-bladed flax, giant reeds, and sharp-edged grasses remorselessly cleared away. Thousands of miles of hedges, chiefly of gorse, now seam the open country with green or golden lines, and divide the surface into more or less rectangular fields; and broom and sweetbriar, detested weeds as they are, brighten many a slope with gold or rose-colour in spring-time.
Plantations of exotic trees grow in number and height yearly, and show a curious blending of the flora of England, California, and Australia. Most British trees and bushes thrive exceedingly, though some of them, as the ash, the spruce, the holly, and the whitethorn, find the summers too hot and the winters not frosty enough in many localities. More than in trees, hedgerows, or corn-crops, the handiwork of the colonist is seen in the ever-widening areas sown with English grasses. Everything has to give way to grass. The consuming passion of the New Zealand settler is to make grass grow where it did not grow before, or where it did grow before, to put better grass in its place. So trees, ferns, flax, and rushes have to pass away; with them have to go the wiry native tussock and tall, blanched snow-grass. Already thirteen million acres are sown with one or other mixture of cock’s-foot, timothy, clover, rye-grass, fescue—for the New Zealand farmer is knowing in grasses; and every year scores of thousands of acres are added to the area thus artificially grassed. Can you wonder? The carrying power of acres improved in this way is about nine times that of land left in native pasture; while as for forest and fern land, they, before man attacked them, could carry next to no cattle or sheep at all. In the progress of settlement New Zealand is sacrificing much beauty in the districts once clad in forest. Outside these, however, quite half the archipelago was already open land when the whites came, and in this division the work of the settler has been almost entirely improvement. Forty years ago it needed all the gold of the sunshine and all the tonic quality of the air to make the wide tracts of stunted bracken in the north, and even wider expanses of sparse yellowish tussock in the south, look anything but cheerless, empty, and half-barren. The pages of many early travellers testify to this and tell of an effect of depression now quite absent. Further, for fifteen years past the process of settling the soil has not been confined to breaking in the wilderness and enlarging the frontiers of cultivated and peopled land. This good work is indeed going on. But hand in hand with it there goes on a process of subdivision by which fresh homes rise yearly in districts already accounted settled; the farmstead chimneys send up their smoke ever nearer to each other; and the loneliness and consequent dulness that once half spoiled country life is being brightened. Very few New Zealanders now need live without neighbours within an easy ride, if not walk.
ON THE BEALEY RIVER