OLD NEW ZEALAND.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 15, 18 January 1905, Page 6

OLD NEW ZEALAND.

LADY BROOME'S REMINISCENCES.

(From Our Special Correspondent.)

LONDON, December 10.

I have been reading with much interest the pleasant little sketches of old New Zealand, which Lady Broome has embodied in her "Colonial Memories," published last week in book form by Smith, Elder and Co. The romance of pioneer life in the early days of the colony lives again in these* pages. A young country like New Zealand springs so rapidly into the forefront of civilisation that one finds it difficult to realise how primitive and humble an outpost of Empire was this colony less than 50 years ago. Yet it called for very real courage on the .part of the emigrants of those days, women as well as men, who left home and friends, and all the comfort of English life, to carve out a new destiny on those far-off, unknown shores. Amongst the first settlers in the Canterbury district was Mr Napier Broome, a young sheep-farmer, and he, while visiting England in 18(55, married the widow of Sir George Barker, X.C.8., and took her back with him to his station in the Malvern Hills. "I often wonder," says Lady Broome, "how I could have had the courage to take such a step, for it entailed leaving my two little sons behind as well as all my friends and most of the eomforis and conveniences of life. But at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do." Even in those early days the new arrival in the colony was struck by the familiar air' of eeyryfhing in the infant townships. Christchurch was then, as now. distinctly English in appearance. The Cathedral had not yet risen above its foundations, but*there were well-paved streets, gas-lamps, drinkingfoun tains, and even red pillar-boxes such as you see in every busy London street. "It seemed all the more marvellous to mc," says our authoress, "who had just gone through the lengthy and costly experience of dragging my own little possessions across those stormy seas round the Cape of Good Hope, to think of all these aids to civilisation having come by the same route." The country outside the township of Christchurch was in those days a sort of rolling prairie, an ideal run for"sheep. Great have been the changes since then, but the hot "nor'-wester" which sends the dust flying in clouds through tne Christchurch of to-day is an interesting link with the past. The early settlers liked the hot winds no better than do their descendants. In the Malvern Valley the soil was magnificent, but the difficulty was to protect the seeds from the north-west wind. Mrs Broome would plant a lawn, and presently discover a luxuriant patch of "English grass" about a mile down the flat, where a dip in the ground had made a shelter for the flying seed. And the melancholy part of the stoiy was that English grass-seed cost a guinea a pound! The authoress tells a quaint story of a little New Zealand girl of that period who. beholding the Isle of Wight for the first time, exclaimed. "How rich they must be! Why. it's laid down in English grass!" The New Zealand sketches in "Colonial Memories" deal chiefly with the lighter side of pioneer life—the amusements, the sports and excursions that beguiled the tedium of a lonely and a hard existence. There were glorious days after wild cattle, when the party would camp in the bush for a week at a time. In summer there was eel-fishing, and in winter boar-hunting, and for the evenings Mrs Broome started a maeazine and book club in connection with a London library, to the great delight of the shepherds. Her pupils—she taught some of the men how to read—were desperately shy. One gigantic Yorkshireman would only read, or rather attempt to read, with his broad back turned to the lady teacher. Others almost wept over their difficulties. And yet they would ride for miles over trackless hills and swamps to attend these reading-lessons. Their enthusiasm for knowledge, in fact, was greater than their capacity. "Certainly the seeds of knowledge are very difficult to plant in later life," says Lady Broome, "for intelligent as thesf men evidently were, and most eager to learn to read and write, they made but little progress under my tuition. Perhaps,'' she suggests, "I was a bad teacher, for I had only the experience of my own little boys' very first lesson to guide mc." Two of the shepherds who attended the class used to affect shepherd's plaid cheeks of a startling pattern. They lived toe-ether in a lonely hut up the gorge, but Mrs Broome noticed that they always took.turns to come to the homestead. She hesitated to say a word for fear she should frighten them away, but one day she asked one of theni why they could never come together. "You see, it's this way, mum," was the answer. "We've only got one suit, and we got a between-size on purpose. Joe he's too tall, and I'm too short* so I turns it up, and Joe he wears leggin's and such like, and so we makes it do till after shearin'." One chapter of the "Memories" is devoted to the great snowstorm of 18C7, which robbed Canterbury of nearly all its live stock. Lady Broome gives a graphic picture of the miserable days they spent, snowed up in the homestead, with, the larder empty and six mouths to feed. On the third day breakfast consisted of hot water and a couple of biscuits each; for dinner there was a little rice and salt. Next day the maids declined to get out of bed, declaring that they preferred to "die warm;" so Mrs Broome took them in a sardine each, a few ratafia biscuits and a* spoonful of apricot jam—the day's rations. A heap of discarded flour-bags were shaken out on the following day, and a plateful of flour was thus collected, while the lining of old tea-chests yielded some tea leaves. After that there *as literally nothing left to eat, so next morning the three men roped themselves together, and sallying out into the darkness tunnelled through the snow to the fowlyard. They captured a few half-frozen birds, and the famishing garrison dined off stewed fowl that day. At the end of the week the snow ceased to fall, but a gale sprang up from the north-west —the warm quarter —and by the following night every creek had overflowed its banks and was running over the fast-melting snowfields. It was the rain that did most of the damage. The sheep had found refuge from the snow under the projecting banks of the creeks,, but when the waters rose the poor things, weakened by exposure, could not struggle out of danger, and most of them were drowned. This gale, following jipon the snowstorm, cost the province something like half a million sheep. Lady Broome's memories carry the reader to many oprners of the world besides New Zealand. Sheeprfarming having resulted in financial loss, her husband and she returned to London and took up journalistic work till 1875, when Mr Broome became Colonial Secretary to

Sir Garnet Wolseley in Natal. Afterwards Sir Francis Broome (as be became) held the position of Governor < m Mauritius, Western Australia, and Trinidad, till death cut short in 1896 a career full of promise. Through all his wanderings Lady Broome accompanied her husband, 'and her volume of reminiscences is the record of a happy and eventful life. But in the evening ol her days it is the memories of old New Zealand that shine brightest through the mist of years. "I fear " she says, "it is an unusual confession for a staid elderly woman to make but I certainly enjoyed those unconventional— what might almost be called rough—days more than the long years of official routine and luxury which followed them. But then one looks back on those days through the softening haze of time and, distance, of youth and health; and one realises that after all 'the greatest of these is Love.'"