To Have and to Hold.

Feilding Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2032, 26 March 1913, Page 2

To Have and to Hold.

} Right here we can give a recent I experience of our own. We were I undergoing the necessary shave in a- Wellington shop the other day. The barber was a young Australian, with aspirations above the shop. He wanted to go on the land. No, he had not had any previous experience On a farm. Had been a city-dweller all his days. But he had been yearning for years to take up a section. Hβ had been learning all he could in the meanime. Took a job in a shop in Palmerston solely for the purpose of attending the shearing classes, at tho Technical School there. And came out on top, too, in a .sheep-shearing contest. Went back to the city, and there joined the wool-classing class at the Technical School. Secured honours again. Two demonstrations of his keen desire and earnestness for the land. Then he thought it was about time ho ( looked out for a section. Made up his niiiicl he would .settle in the Wagga district in New South Wales. Tho wife and children had gone over at the Christmas holidays to sue their people. Ho was to follow Inter, undergo -months' training at one of tlfe experimental farms which the N.S.W. Government has estab- | lifilied. But there came that very hot spell over in Australia, with the result that the wiiV and children would not .stay. They came back to the cool side of Tasman Sea. Not in the least discouraged, the wouldbe farmer put in an application for a suction in tho Wellington, district that was going to the ballot. And he won it! There is a policy note in tho lament he uttered to us when he told this interesting bit of his life story: "The \wo ret of New Zealand is that it doesn't offer chaps like me the chance of learning about the land either before going on to a section or when land is taken up. If your Government had experimental farms all over the place, fellows like me could put in a few months at them, and so we wouldn't be as ignorant as a fellow has to be." The moral is obvious for our statesmen who genuinely desire to get young men and their families on j the land—and keep them there. j