Like the province of the Netherlands the name of which it bears, New Zealand is a green land where water meets the eye everywhere. There the resemblance ends. The dull grey tones of the atmosphere of old Zealand, the deep, unchanging green of its pastures, the dead level and slow current of its shallow and turbid waters, are conspicuously absent at the Antipodes. When the New Zealander thinks of water his thoughts go naturally to an ocean, blue and restless, and to rivers sometimes swollen and clouded, sometimes clear and shrunken, but always rapid. Even the mountain lakes, though they have their days of peace, are more often ruffled by breezes or lashed by gales. In a word, water means water in motion; and among the sounds most familiar to a New Zealander’s ears are the hoarse brawling of torrents, grinding and bearing seaward the loose shingle of the mountains, and the deep roar of the surf of the Pacific, borne miles inland through the long still nights when the winds have ceased from troubling. It is no mere accident, then, that rowing and sailing are among the chief pastimes of the well-watered islands, or that the islanders have become ship-owners on a considerable scale. Young countries do not always carry much of their own trade; but, thanks to the energy and astute management of their Union Steamship Company, New Zealanders not only control their own coasting trade, but virtually the whole of the traffic between their own shores, Australia, and the South Sea Islands. The inter-colonial trade is substantial, amounting to between £5,000,000 and £6,000,000 a year. Much larger, of course, is the trade with the mother country; for our colony, with some success, does her best to shoulder a way in at the open but somewhat crowded door of London. Of her total oversea trade of about £37,000,000 a year, more than two-thirds is carried on with England and Scotland. Here again the colonial ship-owner has a share of the carrying business, for the best known of the four ocean steamship companies in its service is identified with the Dominion, and bears its name.
With variety of scenery and climate there comes, of course, an equal variety of products. The colony is eleven hundred miles long, and lies nearly due north and south. The latitudes, moreover, through which it extends, namely, those from 34° to 47°, are well suited to diversity. So you get a range from the oranges and olives of the north to the oats and rye of colder Southland. Minerals, too, are found of more than one kind. At first the early settlers seemed none too quick in appreciating the advantages offered them by so varied a country. They pinned their faith to wool and wheat only, adding gold, after a time, to their larger exports. But experience showed that though wool and wheat yielded large profits, these profits fluctuated, as they still do. So the growers had to look round and seek for fresh outlets and industries. Thirty years ago, when their colony was first beginning to attract some sort of notice in the world’s markets, they still depended on wool, gold, cereals, hides, and tallow. Cereals they have now almost ceased to export, though they grow enough for home consumption; they have found other things that pay better. They produce twice as much gold as they did then, and grow more wool than ever. Indeed that important animal, the New Zealand sheep, is still the mainstay of his country. Last year’s export of wool brought in nearly £7,700,000. But to the three or four industries enumerated the colonists have added seven or eight more, each respectable in size and profitable in the return it yields. To gold their miners have added coal, the output of which is now two million tons a year. Another mineral—or sort of mineral—is the fossil resin of the giant Kauri pine, of which the markets of Europe and North America absorb more than half-a-million pounds’ worth yearly. Freezing and cold storage have become main allies of the New Zealand farmer, whose export of frozen mutton and lamb now approaches in value £4,000,000. Almost as remarkable is the effect of refrigerating on dairying in the islands. Hundreds of co-operative butter factories and creameries have been built during the last twenty years. It is not too much to say that they have transformed the face of whole provinces. It is possible to grow wool on a large scale with but the sparsest population, as the interior of Australia shows; but it is not possible to grow butter or cheese without multiplying homes and planting families fairly thickly on the land. In New Zealand even the growing of meat and wool is now chiefly done on moderate-sized land-holdings. The average size of our flocks is but a thousand head. But it is dairying that is par excellence the industry of the small man. It was so from the first, and every decade shows a tendency to closer subdivision of the land devoted to producing butter and cheese. Within the last few years, again, yet another industry has seemed to be on the road to more scientific organisation. This is the manufacture of hemp from the fibre of the native flax. One cannot call this a new thing, for the colonists tried it on a fairly large scale more than thirty years ago; but their enterprise seemed again and again doomed to disappointment, for New Zealand hemp proved for a long while but a tricky and uncertain article of commerce. It was and is a kind of understudy of manilla, holding a place somewhere between that and sisal. For many years, however, it seemed unable to get a firm footing in the markets, and when the price of manilla fell was apt to be neglected altogether. During the last decade, however, the flax millers have decidedly improved its quality, and a demand for it has sprung up in countries outside Great Britain. It is said that Americans use it in lieu of hair, and that the Japanese can imitate silk with it. Certainly the Germans, Dutch, and French buy it, to spin into binder-twine, or, may be, to “blend” with other fibres.
To the ordinary stranger from Europe, the most interesting of our industries are those that bear least likeness to the manufactures and agriculture of an old country. To him there is a savour of the strange and new in kauri-gum digging, gold-mining, timber-cutting, and saw-milling, and even the conversion of bushes of flax into bales of hemp. But if I were asked to choose two industries before others to describe with some minuteness, I think I should select the growing, freezing, and export of meat, and the application of the factory system to the making and export of butter and cheese. Though my countrymen have no monopoly of these they have from the first shown marked activity in organising and exploiting them. In one chief branch of refrigeration their produce stands first in quality, if not in quantity. I refer to the supply of mutton and lamb to the English market. In this they have to compete with the larger flocks of Australia and the Argentine, as well as, indirectly, with the huge herds and gigantic trade combinations of the United States. Of the competitors whose products meet at Smithfield, they are the most distant, and in their command of capital the least powerful. Moreover, they are without the advantage—if advantage it be—of cheap labour. Yet their meat has for many years commanded the best prices paid for frozen mutton and lamb in London, and the demand, far from being unequal to the supply, has been chiefly limited by the difficulty of increasing our flocks fast enough to keep pace with it. In the contest for English favour, our farmers, though handicapped in the manner mentioned above, started with three advantages—healthy flocks and herds, a genial climate, and an educated people. The climate enables their sheep and cattle to remain out all the year round. Except in the Southern Alps, they suffer very little loss from weather. The sunny air helps them to keep disease down, and, as already said, the best artificial grasses flourish in our islands as they flourish in very few countries. The standard of education makes labour, albeit highly paid, skilful and trustworthy. The farm-workers and meat-factory hands are clean, efficient, and fully alive to the need for sanitary precautions. The horrors described in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” are impossible in New Zealand for many reasons. Of these, the first is that the men employed in meat factories would not tolerate their existence.
There are thirty-seven establishments in the colony for meat freezing and preserving, employing over three thousand hands and paying nearly £300,000 a year in wages. The value of their output is about £5,000,000 a year, and the bulk of it is exported to the port of London. The weight of meat sent to the United Kingdom last year was two hundred and thirty-seven million pounds avoirdupois. Then there are about three hundred and twenty dairy-butter or cheese factories, without counting a larger outer circle of skimming stations. To these the dairy-farmers send their milk, getting it back after skimming. That completes their share of the work; expert factory hands and managers do the rest. As for meat-freezing, from beginning to end the industry is scientifically managed and carefully supervised. At its inception, a quarter of a century ago, the flocks of the colony were healthy and of good strains of blood. But they were bred chiefly to grow wool, and mainly showed a basis of Merino crossed with Lincoln or Leicester. Nowadays the Romney Marsh blood predominates in the stud flocks, especially in the North Island. Lincoln, Leicester, Merino, Border Leicester, Shropshire, and South Down follow in order. For five-and-twenty years our breeders have brought their skill to bear on crossing, with a view to producing the best meat for the freezing factory, without ruining the quality of their wool. They still face the cost and trouble of importing stud sheep from England, though their own selected animals have brought them good prices in South America, Australia, and South Africa. Flocks and herds alike are subjected to regular inspection by the veterinary officers of the Department of Agriculture; and though the slaughter-yards and factories of the freezing companies are models of order, speed, and cleanliness, the Government expert is there too, and nothing may be sold thence without his certificate, for every carcase must bear the official mark. From the factory to the steamer, from one end of the earth to the other, the frozen carcases are vigilantly watched, and the temperature of the air they are stored in is regulated with painful care. As much trouble is taken to keep freezing chambers cold as to keep a king’s palace warm. The shipping companies are as jealously anxious about the condition of their meat cargoes as they are for the contentment of their passengers and the safety of their ships. At the London Docks the meat is once more examined by a New Zealand official, and finally at Smithfield, as the carcases are delivered there in the small hours of the morning, they are scanned for the last time by a veterinary expert from the Antipodes. Moreover, since our meat goes now to other British ports as well as to London, and since, too, nearly half of what is discharged in the Thames no longer finds its way to Smithfield, our inspectors have to follow our meat into the provinces and report upon the condition in which it reaches such towns as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. Furthermore, they do their best to track it a stage farther and ascertain its fate at the hands of the unsentimental retail trader. Most New Zealand meat is now honestly sold as what it is. Some of the best of it, however, is still palmed off on the consumer as British. On the other hand, South American mutton is sometimes passed off as New Zealand. The housewife who buys “Canterbury Lamb” because she likes all things Kentish is not yet altogether extinct. For all this the clumsily-drawn English law, which makes conviction so difficult, must be held mainly responsible. New Zealand butter, too, suffers at the hands of English manipulators. It is what Tooley Street calls a dry butter—that is to say, it contains on an average not more than some eleven per cent of moisture. This renders it a favourite for mixing with milk and for selling as “milk-blended” butter, a process at which makers in the colony can only look on wrathfully but helplessly. Otherwise they have little to complain about, for their butter has for years past brought them prices almost as high as those of good Danish, while during the butter famine of the first few months of 1908 as much as 150 shillings a hundredweight was paid for parcels of it. Before shipment in the colony, butter and cheese are graded by public inspectors. Every box bears the Government stamp. In practice the verdict of the grader is accepted by the English purchasers. Relatively the amount of frozen beef which we export is not large; but our climate and pastures are too well suited for beef-growing to make it likely that the discrepancy will continue. Probably frozen beef will give place to chilled; that is to say, improvements in the art of chilling will enable our beef to be carried at a temperature of, let us say, 30° Fahrenheit, instead of 12°. It will then arrive in England soft and fit for immediate use: thawing will not be needed, and a higher price will be obtained. But, however far behind New Zealand may as yet lag in the beef trade, enough has been done in other branches of refrigeration to show how scientific, well-organised, and efficient colonial industry is becoming, and how very far the farmers and graziers of the islands are from working in the rough and hand-to-mouth fashion that settlers in new countries are supposed to affect.
WELLINGTON
The purpose of this sketch, however, is not to dilate upon the growth of our commerce and industry, remarkable as that is in a country so isolated and a population only now touching a million. My object, rather, is to give something of an outline of the archipelago itself, of the people who live there between the mountains and the sea, and of the life and society that a new-comer may expect to see. Mainly, then, the most striking peculiarities of the islands, as a land undergoing the process of occupation, are the decentralised character of this occupation, and the large areas, almost unpeopled, that still remain in a country relatively small in size. New Zealand was originally not so much a colony as a group of little settlements bound together none too comfortably. Its nine provinces, with their clashing interests and intense jealousies, were politically abolished more than thirty years ago; but some of the local feeling which they stood for and suffered for still remains, and will remain as long as mountain ranges and straits of the sea divide New Zealand. Troublesome as its divisions are to politicians, merchants, ship-owners, councils of defence, and many other persons and interests, they nevertheless have their advantages. They breed emulation, competition, civic patriotism; and the local life, parochial as it looks to observers from larger communities, is at least far better than the stagnation of provinces drained of vitality by an enormous metropolis. For in New Zealand you have four chief towns, large enough to be dignified with the name of cities, as well as twice as many brisk and aspiring seaports, each the centre and outlet of a respectable tract of advancing country. All these have to be thought of when any general scheme for opening up, defending, or educating the country is in question. Our University, to give one example, is an examining body, with five affiliated colleges; but these colleges lie in towns far apart, hundreds of miles from each other. The ocean steamship companies before mentioned have to carry merchandise to and from six or eight ports. Singers and actors have to travel to at least as many towns to find audiences. Wellington, the capital, is still not the largest of the four chief towns, rapid as its progress has been during the last generation. Auckland, with 90,000 people, is the largest, as it is the most beautiful; Wellington, with 70,000, holds but the second place.
Decentralised as New Zealand is, large as its rural population is, and pleasant as its country life can be, still its four chief towns hold between them more than a quarter of its people, and cannot therefore be passed over in a sentence. Europeans are apt to be impatient of colonial towns, seeing in them collections of buildings neither large enough to be imposing nor old enough to be mellowed into beauty or quaintness. And it is true that in our four cities you have towns without architectural or historic interest, and in size only about equal to Hastings, Oxford, Coventry, and York. Yet these towns, standing where seventy years ago nothing stood, have other features of interest beside their newness. Cities are, after all, chiefly important as places in which civilised men and women can live decently and comfortably, and do their daily work under conditions which are healthy and neither degrading nor disagreeable. The first business of a city is to be useful, and its second to be healthy. Certainly it should not be hideous; but our cities are not hideous. What if the streets tend to straight rigidity, while the dwelling-houses are mostly of wood, and the brick and stone business edifices embody modern commercialism! The European visitor will note these features; but he will note also the spirit of cleanliness, order, and convenience everywhere active among a people as alert and sturdy as they are well fed and comfortably clad. The unconcealed pride of the colonist in material progress may sometimes jar a little on the tourist in search of the odd, barbaric, or picturesque. But the colonist, after all, is building up a civilised nation. Art, important as it is, cannot be the foundation of a young state.
DUNEDIN