THE BREAKING-IN.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 41, 16 February 1918, Page 13

THE BREAKING-IN.

WHERE THE MAIN TRUNK RUNS

(Written for the "Star," by "ORAKAU")

"There," eaia Nlnlan, and pointed to the north, "Is the start of what my father — peace be with him!—used to call the Wicked Bounds, where every man you'll meet bas got a history, and a dagger in below bis coat—Camerons, Clan Kanald's men, Clan Chattan, and the Krasers—lt stretches to the Firth of Inverness for sixty miles the way a kite would fly."

The break of day was spreading fast, the mist, like sapple of the sea, was lying in the gullies of tbe hills that lifted up their •heads above tbe night like a herd o£ seals. To Aeneas Is looked a deadful place, all heaved together in confusion. The mounts of It were giants. —Neil iMunro. in "Tbe New Road." There was a surveyor by the name of Rochfort who typified for some of us on the Old Frontier tlie spirit of adventurous duty, and whose name, seldom heard nowadays, deserves a thought from those who travel comfortably along the main railway route in this island. Rochfort stood for the sturdy virtues which we associate with the genus explorer. He was an unobtrusive, quietspoken fellow, who now and again came out across the northern border of the King Country—it was really the King Country, then in the early eighties—and stayed awhile in a little Government cottage at Kihikihi, working up his survey plans and plotting out the work which he had covered in his last bush traverse. He was already a veteran in the explorations of New Zealand; he had carried swag and theodolite over much of ttie terrifically rough country in Westland and South Nelson, ana it was he, if 1 mistake not, who discovered the great Coalbrookdale coal measures in Westport district. Down there in the West Coast country, however, he had only savage nature to contend with. In the Rohcpotae the natural difficulties of the wild country, unroaded and unbridged, lying for the most part in its ancient dress of forest, fern and raupo, were accentuated by complications with a sullen, warseared native people. When Rochfort was entrusted by the Government, well nigh forty years ago, with the task of running a flying survey for a railway through the heart of the island, from Jlarton to Te Awamutu, he cheerfully set out alone into the wilderness to vcarry out a mission Involving not merely

professional technical skill and calling for uncommon powers of physical endurance, but requiring in superlative degree the exercise of diplomacy and the supreme quality of courage.

The beginning of the eighties was a highly critical epoch in the affairs of the Waikato northern frontier. For policy reasons the Kingites were left pretty much to themselves, so when Rochfort the "Kai-ruri" carried hie flying survey through the forests and over the ferny ridges of the Rohepotae, the state of the country from Puniu for a hundred miles southward was not very different in essentials from that of the Scottish Highlands in the period described by Mr. Neil Munro in his amazingly adventurous romances that carry a tang of Stevenson's "Catriona." THE SURVEYOR'S DEFIANCE. Some years after the completion of this survey, several of us riding down through the Ongarue Valleu to Taumarunui—then a purely Maori settlement, an incredibly solitary shut-in spot in the shadow of the ranges—camped in one of Rochfort's old halting-places, and from the natives heard much of the plucky "Kai-ruri" —the "man who rules lines." It was over yonder on the Matapuna Flat that a party of the Taumarunui men, all armed, stopped the surveyor and i his Maori chainman and ordered him back. They levelled their guns at him and him with death if he attempted to drag chain or take levels on their lands. Rochfort, always cool in the face of threats, and a little .contemptuous, calmly faced the Hauhaus, and flinging out his arms said, "Here I i am—my breast is unprotected—shoot ;ine!" The very coolness of his chali lenge disarmed the Kingites. They I knew, moreover, that the shooting of a J Government surveyor would be a more ' serious matter than the killing of MofFat, j the gunpowder-maker, which had oci curred at almost the same spot four or j five years previously. There would be an j armed invasion of their remote valley ; and various other unpleasant happenings. So Rochfort passed on; and the success which his quiet courage won at [Taumarunui attended him right through ;to the white-settled lands on the Waipa , border. ROCHFORT'S TRAIL-MARKS. It was a survey of desperately arduous character away up there on the headwaters of the Wanganui from the vaet dripping forests blanketing the elopes of Ruapehu across unexplored

canyons to the ranges that looked down on the meeting of the waters where the Ongarue comes in, the river junction where a bustling European town has wiped old Taumarunui almost out of recognition. Rochfort pioneered a track, but it was many a year before even a sure-footed Maori pony could be taken over the Taumarunui-Waimarino route. Rochfort's Track, it came to be called. We found, on a journey years afterwards, on the blazed trail of the pioneer, remembrances of his travels in more than one lonely spot. Every while and again there was a little clearing in the alldominating and enormous bush, and in the clearing stood a "pataka," one of the Maori-style storehouses perched on stilt-like legs, for safety of provisions from the rats. Rochfort and his men had built it at their camps; the trailmaker's tent no longer whitened the tiny cut in the Maori woods, but his mossgrown pataka and his narrow but wellgraded track remained. That first survey route was improved upon in certain details in later explorations, but in the main Rochfort's Track held good, and the Main Trunk traveller to-day, in his cushioned chair, rolle easily along over the way painfully sought out by the danger-despising Greatheart of the young Eighties. A KINO COUNTRY PROSPECT. Looking out southward from the Waikato Confiscation Boundary in those early 'eighties, we saw ac far as the eye could range a land altogether given up to the Ivingite rule —an untamed country painted in the dark purple of vastly broken mountain rangee, merging into the vague misty blues of great distance, the sombre green of ferny hills and plains, and the yellow of deep flax swamps. Over all an aspect and air of solitude inexpressible; a suggestion of mystery and of waiting, waiting for the touch of civilised man which was to transform that far-stretching waste. Mystery-haunted it was everywhere. There was mystery lurking in every deep-set little village of raupo thatch, with :ts near-by eel weir in some slowmoving creek of dark brown water; mystery in the ruined hill-castles, with their cabbage-trees among the limestone rocks; mystery in the narrow tracks, the way of the old war parties, that wound along the ridge-tops for safety from ambuscade. There were such queer places as Patokatoka—"The Rock Fort"—that we came upon once when out hunting for stra3'ed horses in the Majiiapoto country; a great volcanic

rock built up by Nature in. curious terraces, which carried a little soil and had been cunningly improved upon by the warriors of lang-eyne; a great trench half hidden by tie fern and flax, about its lees abrupt slope; at its base, by the edge of a deep swamp, a tiny hamlet of raupo huts, just six huts, arranged in three eides of a grassy hollow equare, facing each other. Not a soul in the place; not a sound in the hot, windless, midsummer air, but the clack and hiss of the sun-loving cicada. The deserted village seemed to lie under a spell; w« imagined it suddenly abandoned because of the ban of Tapu. And that, indeed, as we afterwards discovered was the case.

Miles away to the west, on the beautiful slopes of Hikurangi, giving on to the fertile basin of the Waipa and overlorded by the Fairy Mountains with their mystery-forest, there was the great camp of King Tawhiao and his exiled Waikatos, many hundreds of them; looking down with many mournings on the good lost lands and the lost battlefields of the Sixties. Later, they moved down to Te Kopua, yonder by Kakepuku's fern-shod heel, and then to Whatiwhatihoe, the Place of Broken Paddles, on the level banks of the Waipa. Then, in the pid Eighties, they migrated in their canoes, a picturesque tribe flitting, down the Waipa and down the Waikato, back to their old ancestral homes, or what was left of those homes. But they never had a more lovely or inspiring home in all their wanderings than that eun-bathed, gently sloping ! domain of rich volcanic land on the higu shoulder of Hikurangi. That was something of the old King Country. Now the once wild region has become the highway of the motor-car, has become dotted with scores of lively European settlements, with large towns, with electric light and asphalted footways, and churches and police-stations and tennis lawns and Stock saleyards and all the other varied furnishings of our advanced day. Hauhauism is a far-off tale of the past; descendants of old king-like Wahanui have fought beside King Country white soldiers on the fields of Gallipoli and France. Yet the I names of men like Rochfort and Wilson, Hursthouse and their like, the trailbreakers of the Main Trunk, should not Ibe forgotten by those who look out from their carriage windows or from their comfortable farmhouses upon a land rapidly coming to conform to the prosperou? conditions of longer-settled countryside. . ■