Stories of New Zealand.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 84, 10 April 1937, Page 3 (Supplement)

Stories of New Zealand.

(Continued from page 258.)

The presence of these soldierly keepers of the frontier and makers of roads gave a special life and colour to the far-out settlements. Many of the border townships had been founded as military villages at the end of the Waikato War. The veterans of that era were succeeded by a new order of - soldiers when the young Constabulary took over the redoubts and established new camps. Of their officers, some had been in regular British regiments, -others were colonial born. They were a splendid set of frontier soldiers, those stalwart leaders of men, who were able to turn their hands to many a pioneering job of work. Some became as skilful in laying out roads and building bridges as any engineer, though none had had professional technical- training. Some of them were map-makers and able designers of redoubts and blockhouses.

The Constabulary and Their Posts. In all kinds of bushcraft the veteran A.C. man was expert. He could build a house of raupo thatch as well as any Maori, in fact he improved on the Maori pattern. In my young days in the Upper Waikato, when the frontier was studded with the forts and camps, there was often a little township of raupo-thatched whares outside the earthwork redoubt or the stockade blockhouse. The married men of the Force lived outside the barracks, in their own houses. At Orakau the sergeant in charge at a period in my memory lived in a pretty, rose-embowered, thatched cottage, with all kinds of old English flowers in his tiny front garden plot. Behind the whare there was the necessary potato patch. Those raupo-thatch whares were highly inflammable, yet very few ever caught fire. There was just one fire I can remember, the first burning house I ever saw. It was only a cookhouse, but it made a glorious blaze. We were walking up from our favourite peach grove to the Constabulary post at Orakau, when up went the kitchen-whare aflame, and out dashed the A.C. cook, clutching his frying pan. It wa«, the only, article he saved. In another moment his bushy whiskers would have been on fire. That day's dinner for the dozen men of the blockhouse would be reduced to hard biscuit only. There was no time to get a bucket brigade to work at the well. Dry raupo thatch doesn't wait for that.