BUSH TO RAIL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 264, 7 November 1932, Page 6

BUSH TO RAIL.

A PIONEERING JOURNEY. (By J.C.) One or two of our literary gentlemen profess distress at the lack of romantic material for their pens in New Zealand. They don't want either the Maori on the one hand or butterfat on the other. No bush for them, no tomahawks, none of this raw colonial stuff. And yet Scott might have found in the Maori a first cousin to the Highland clansman, and it is quite possible that Thomas Hardy would have discovered blended comedy and tragedy in many a backblocks settlement. It may even be that there is romance in the pioneering processes which lead up to the production of butterfat. To those critics who bewail the uninteresting life of New Zealand as they know it I ( would commend, by way of an eye-"opener, the_ "Stars recent excellent series of articles descriptive _of conditions on the Stratford railway line, which is bein<* opened to-day. That phase of life is passing; the breaking "in of the wild country is going; the big camps of the hewers and builders are giving place to the homes of the settlers for whom the transients .prepare the way. There is stuff there for the would-be writers if they only knew it; but, to vary Mr. Kipling's question, what do they know of New Zealand who only the city and the bookshops know? That is the essential between a growing, developing country like New Zealand and the over-populated, over-sophisticated lands of the Old World. The transition stage, the taming of the rough places, is here for the watching. Those "Star" articles, to-day's ceremony at Heao, bring memories of a time when the bush country where the new railway goes to-day lay as untouched as it was when man first came to New Zealand. The process of change from an unpeopled, nnroaded, unbridged, uncleared land to a home of thousands, and where there is room for many thousands more, a land ofi great engineering "works and of townships and factories and mines, ie well within one's own recollection. Forty years back, after all, does not seem long; the old camp life, the days of slasher and axe, tthe eel fishing and the .pigeon shooting, the clambering over steep forest ridges and the precarious crossing of bush rivers, are still vivid in memory. It is when the two pictures are contrasted that one who shared in the exploration of this North Taranaki route realises the really amazing changes that the passage of the years has brought about. In 1892, when nine of us—there arc only two left now —rode and tramped from T© ELuiti to Stratford, a ten days' journey, there was nearly a hundred miles of 6olid bush covering the country that the Taranaki railway link with the Main Trunk covers to-day. There vas not a pakeha farm in the King Country. It is curious to remember that we rode through the Poro-o-tarao tunnel on horseback, and a damp, unpleasant, boggy hole it was; it had been cut and lined and then deserted, waiting for tlie_ jails that -were slowly being laid from Te Kuiti; it lay like that for several years. Such were railwaybuilding methods fortj odd years ago. AVe sent our horses .back to Te Kuiti with a packer from the bush in the Ohara Valley; we foot-slogged through eighty miles of dense forest with only one break, a mysterious ancient Maori clearing, some broken tribe's refuge place, at Tahoraparoa. Only one or two surveyors, working from either ond of the forest, had been there before us; a packer and chainman with us was the only man who had been right through along that Ohura-Stratford track. Not a human being did we meet from Ppro-o-tarao to the outskirts of Stratford; a vast, lone forest land, its only life the pigeon, the kaka and the other birds of the bush, always around us. and now and then a wild pig, roving far from his fern-root grounds. We amused ourselves in camp now and again with speculations about the future; whether any of us would ever see that railway. It was a. pleasing dream, vague in the distance. Now the railway has come, forerunner ofi greater changes, for the pioneer still has work to do.