THE GOLDEN COAST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 285, 1 December 1932, Page 6

THE GOLDEN COAST.

WESTLAND'S ROMANTIC PAST. (By J.C.) . Westland makes holiday to-day for its anniversary. It is practically seventy years old as a white-settled district, but it remained officially a part of Canterbury through the height of the great gold-digging rush. It is curious to remember that some of the good old conservatives of Canterbury did not at all approve at first of the discovery of gold in their province. It would introduce a class of roving adventurers, an unsteady element, and upset the even and respectable course of settlement. But the- weight of treasure won across the Alps presently made the West Coast a more important place commercially than the East, and the producers of Canterbury found their best markets in the young boom towns, of Hokitika and Greymouth. The story of the land of gold and greenstone makes a peculiarly strong appeal to students of colonial history, and to all who appreciate the dramatic values in a record of frontier life, for Westland was to all intent a frontier for the first few years of its existence as a ifcreasureyielding region. Some day some cinema epic maker, with the necessary capital 'behind him, may build a great film story around the Golden Coast. I have often thought that the pageant of our West would lend itself admirably to the making of a screen thriller. Action is there, adventure and danger, tho lure of gold, the seeking and the finding, all the incident of rugged life in a wild and new land, all the play of man's struggle and rivalry, and there is the background of the forests, the lakes and the glittering glory of the Southern Alps. Consider from that angle some of the features of coast life in the breaking in and delving out period, 18(13-70. First the explorers and surveyors, making firiends with the sparse Maori population, paddling and poling dug-out canoes up the strong rivers, fording alpine torrents, swagging it through tho dense forests, climbing tho mountains in .search of passes between East and West, mapping a new, unknown land. Next the diggers, swarming in by sea and by precarious alpine ways; tho men of pick and shovel and wash-dish;" the young and tho strong from all corners of the earth. They saw tho snowy mountains roll'd And heaved along the nameless lands. They pitched their tents by shore and river bank, they washed out the heavy black sands of the surf-beaten coast, they prospected every creek bed, they need cradle and sluice, they sank on the rich alluvial drifts, they put mountain sides through their sluice boxes. For a hundred and fifty miles they travelled and toiled down through South Westland, until not a beach or a creek side from the Grey to Bruce Bay but had its diggers' camp. Towns followed the tents; there were ten thousand diggers in roaring camp towns with banks and stores and public-houses enough for a city. Gold for everyone, but most of all for the shrewd men of business who bought and sold with the diggers. Death by drowning in the enowy torrents was accounted a natural death on the coast in the 'sixties. But not every digger whose body was found in the wash-down of the creeks met that natural death. Tho thugs of the coast, the bushrangers who (some of them) met their just fate at the end of the 'sixties in Nelson, were abroad in the bush and on the tracks in Westland years before they were caught, and many a solitary traveller was done to death by strangling (the informer Sullivan said, "I put tho McGinnis on them") or by shooting, for the sake of the gold dust in his swag. There was a lighter side. Picture a Hokitika or Okarito dance hall on the screen, period eixtysix years ago. The bushy-whiskered diggers, the girl singers and dance partners. The gold hunters delighted in the old sentimental songs between the "lances. Those were tho days when they sang "Rosalie the Prairie Flower" and wept over "Gentle Annie," and there wero tremendous choruses. "Marching Through Georgia" was new then (lots of Yankee diggers on the field), and the rough-hewn rafters rang to "The Wearin , of tho Green" (lots of Irish, too). "Fred the Fiddler," the little wandering minstrel, or some other of the music-making tribe, sits "on the platform in his shirt sleeves and scrapes away for the polka mazurka and the Valse Vienna. And the last figure the M.C. or the fiddler calls for every dance is "Ladies to the bar," all for the good of the house. Look at the scene when the first gold was sent overland and was taken from Hokitika to Christchurch by the newly-opened Otira-Arthur's Pass coach road. (It was also tho last; after that all shipments—millions of pounds' worth—were by eea.) Trotting ahead of the wagon are two police troopers, armed with carbine and revolver. Another armed trooper is on the front seat with tho driver; and two more follow as rearguard. A digger, bound down the Otira from the Canterbury side, eases off his swag as he sits on a boulder to watch the escort climb the steep road. Hβ asks another swagger: "Why the divil do all thim polismen be wearin' Crimea whiskers that way?" (The long side-whiskers were all the fashion, which, was set by the Police Commissioner, Mr. St. John Branigan.) "Whr," says the other digger, "haven't ye heard about the new song that fellow Thatcher does be singing down in Hokitikky, 'Wβ All Shave Like Branigan'? That's the song, and it sets tihe boys roaring fit to split. And every man jack of the polis wears thim, and fine lads they are—not wan of thim under six feet, and they ride and shoot like the divil Hiimself." A symbolical figure stands in Hokitika town. It is a statue, not a great work of art, but possessing a certain rugged etrength and poetry. A typical digger of the 'sixties, with his gear; he looks far inland, his gaze is at tho mountains of the great divide. Before the statue a coaster staiids; his little son is by his side, holding his hand. "What's he saying, daddy?" the- boys asks; "what is he pointing to?" "'Have faith,' he says," is the father's reply. "There's gold in there still if you'll only go and look for it. Maybe we'll have a try for it yet, sonny." Westland has steadied down into the solid industrial age now. The hordes of diggers have passed on into the shadows, but for a very few white-headed old-timers. But the pioneering, prospecting spirit is not dead. They are winning good gold to-day by scientific methods, as witness the Okarito and other dredges—'the golden sands are there, for the searching and the working.