INVADERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

INVADERS.

THE UNBIDDEN GUESTS.

VANDALISM AND THEFT.

(By M.E.S.)

In the backblocks we rather flatter verselves upon our hospitality, accept it as one of our duties and privileges to keep what used to be called "open house" fox all who come. But we do like that hospitality to be free and spontaneous; we resent it deeply when it is enforced. It is a strange anomaly that makes a certain type of townsman believe that he "can do as he likes" in the country, can enter your property without permission, camp on it if the spirit moves him or his car refuses to do so, help himself to your wood —if nothing else offers to your fencing battens—to boil his billy and, if the luck is with him and the time of year permit, provide for his meal and his family by shooting the game that has been reared on your land. Now, we happen to have certain prejudices. One is that we do not allow any shooting upon the farm. We have a foolish love for the pheasant and quail that invade our vegetables and have grown so impudently tame as to be easy prey for any "sportsman." We have notices to that effect planted here and there on the road frontage of the bush, and have found that the only use to which town invaders put them is to turn them upside down—this is a witticism of the subtler kind suited to our backblocks intelligence—or to use them as fuel. Because land is not cultivated, because we have idiotically and unpractically left it in the native bush that we love, it- appears to be common property. One neighbour had a worse experience. In the nearest town they have lately erected rustic fences and summer houses of the- native punga trees. Very cool and pleasant they look on the smooth lawns of the park—but his pleasure in them was considerably alloyed when he found that for years the borough supply had been bought from a lorry driver who had persistently plundered his own bush. Such is the penalty for possessing a tract of bush upon a metalled road. Vandalism. "It is just a nice distance from town. We go out on Sunday and fill the car with ferns; you know, we simply love the bush." That, of course, is one way of loving it. Nor is that the worst. These Sunday picnickers have a casual way of leaving you the aftermath of their feast in the form of empty beer bottles and pineapple tins. Your most beloved and secluded fern grove wears an air of looseness and "the morning after" too often on Monday morning. } But far worse in my opinion is the trespassing for shooting purposes. Last . winter I heard the sound of guns on one of the many wild parts of the farm and rushed out. But I was not soon enough to prevent an outrage. The previous summer a pheasant had curiously elected to lay her eggs in the nest of one of my wandering hens and had then fickly deserted them. The hen had painstakingly reared the baby pheasants —and had retired, a nervous wreck at the end of the season. Her mental system—never the strong point of a domestic fowl —had been permanently deranged by the enforced care of a family that took long and unexpected flights from her maternal side and returned thereto half an hour later. The little pheasants had remained remarkably tame. I could still pick them up and let them loose in the air; they would inevitably return, eat all my fowls' food, and then partake of a light, but wholesome, dessert of strawberries and tomatoes. In short, they were one of the many pleasant and profitable pets of which the farm boasts. Now, three lay dead, just where they had stood inquisitively to watch the newcomers. We ha.ve a regular succession of these self-invited guests, according to the time of year. In the winter there are the shooting parties and those passersby who are attracted by the sight of a field of turnips and decide to take home a sackful. In the summer the picnickers are ever with us, and now that early autumn is here we have the niushroomers, the Wackbcrry-pickcrs, and those who like a few maizo cobs for tea. The lengths to which these marauders would go sounds almost incredible to your ordinary lawabiding townsman. It is nevertheless a fact that a poor and very struggling dairy farmer about ten miles out of town lost almost the whole of his pumpkin crop in this way. Parties of people came out actually in lorries and raided the few acres on which his cows were depending for winter feed. "Why couldn't he look after them?" His cottage was a quarter of a mile off the road, and even a dairy farmer likes to snatch a few hours' sleep. However, when his maize cobs were disappearing in the same wholesale fashion he was forced to inform the police, and then received an indignant anonymous letter complaining that "the kindly old backblocks spirit of friendliness and generosity was a thing of the past." Mushrooms we can spare and, if we allow blackberries upon our land we must expect to have picnickers. No one objects to the peaceable and lawabiding picnicker; it is the person who loaves your gates open, wrenches the battens off your fence, and forgets to put his fire safely out in a dry summer when we all walk daily in terror of fire, who is apt to prejudice the farmer and destroy "the! fine backblocks spirit." Retaliation. Some day we shall be forced to retaliate. Some day a party of country folk will descend upon the towns and pick flowers where the spirit moves them, camp on trim lawns and expect unlimited boiling water for their needs. How brief would be our liberty, how bitter the comments upon country manners and backblocks boors! And really we would be being sadly misjudged. Kind hearts do still beat under our dark shirts and we would be glad enough to see outsiders from town with fresh news and original opinions—but we are tired of the "type that has invaded us lately. The worst of it is that it is not a representative type. It is no more true to the ruling spirit of the town than the much-caricatured, abysmally ignorant and be-whiskered farmer is true to that of the country. Yet there are some of the more ingenuous of our country men and women who allow themselves to be prejudiced by the conduct of this offensive minority. "What do they care about us? They think we're fools because we live in the country." Very often one hears the complaint and there is a touch of bitterness behind it. "Only lit to be a farmer"; haven't you heard it said of the stupid member"of the family? With the growth' of scientific farming, with the easier intercourse made possible by improved roads and transport, the feeling is disappearing. The town understands the country better and gradually, slowly, a ti-i/le sceptically, the country is coming at last to appreciate the town.