OUR MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 303, 23 December 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

OUR MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL

The Spirit Of Nature Worship iirarii£r*ri£c->er&^-i£ntrs£ntt-ii

The Old-world idea of Christmastime as a religious festival is quite overshadowed in these lands of midsummer holiday by the spirit of the great out-of-doors. The church bell calls and big dinners are eaten, and the orthodox are overwhelmed by the afternoon stuffy somnolence. Christmas Day obeervanoe in city and town is a kind of rite in homage to ancient tradition. But next day and the next are devoted to the worship

8y.... JAMES COWAN

of fast horsey and the gods of chance, and to a whirligig of motoring. The really wise people are those who have shed their collars and their long skirts and are off on the holiday trail, or who have already pitched camp in same favourite spot or some new place of leafage and cool waters and music of the bush. School and college holidays give thousands of young New Zealanders an opportunity of getting into their fresh-air quarters well in advance of the Christmas Eve rush. Some of us who have had our fill of holiday travel, and who want simply a rest from the desk and the telephone,, are content with the unwonted quiet and the leisure to potter about in gardens or the bit of bush where tui and belibird have confidingly taken to the company of the food-providing friends and native bird life. If we go pleasuring by motor car we wait for the get-away rush to subside. Perhaps we have seen so much of New Zealand in our tinje that we have come to the conclusion that we are fortunate to have been there or wherever it is in a less hurried and less sophisticated uge, and we are content with our memories. Christmas Fare and Holiday Cruises. The Christmaees that stand out in one's recollectibns are those in which the life was simplicity itself, joined to a reasonable amount of physical toil, just enough to give us a zest for the generous bush or seaside fare, a snap of healthy hunger that we

could not bring to a Christmas feast at the home table. What one has to eat plays an important part in holiday time. . There Was, by way of exempla,r, a long ago Christinas Day about the islands and passages of CoroinandelHarbour. The rival church bells were clanging—you could not call it ringing—in the little town of the old gold diggings, when we sailed out from our anchorage off Preece'e Point and made for the historic Herekino Bay on Beeson's Island, where Big Webster, the Yankee trader in Campbell's "Poenamo" had established his wha/re-hoko and brought to his doOr the canoe of the Hauraki tribes. There was little to indicate the capital of the King of Waiau, but the topography had not altered, and the grand old pohutukawa groves shaded the shore as of old. That Christmas dinner of ours was eaten under the blossom-red trees on a little gTeen tongue of land on Beeson's Island, where a spring of clearest, coolest water welled out just a/bove sea-level. We boiled the freshly-caught snapper, New Zea-

land's best fbsli, in salt water, with tlie potatoes; we ate oysters from the rocks at our 'back door, through the £ittle Passage—there was no interfering Oyster Fisheries inspector in those days—and a kit of cherries from the native-planted groves on this old pakeha-Maori camping ground. And to crown the feast a delicious duff from home, which tasted twice as good as it would have done at the familiar dining table. Our table was , the smooth turf beside that spring that once supplied the boat builders' camp in Big Webster's time a hundred''years ago. ' ; . The sleepy little town, did not see us that week when we cruised around a score of islands and islets and pohutukawa-crowned headlands from Wailieke and Ponui to Cape Colville's rainbow cape. Hundreds, thousands of Auckland sailing yachtsmen and power launch crews know all about that kind of Christmas. There is not a bay or cove or islet that they have not prospected from the North Cape to Taurariga. This Christinas there is the added "stingo" of adventure in the knowledge that they are some of the mariners of New Zealand who guard our "native shores. There are sliarp-eyed young riflemen who may ■be excused for indulging the fancy that that dark shark sharply cutting the dancing blue is a periscope.

. ■ m< Chant of the Northern Summer-land. The beauty and the pleasure of Die out-of-doore once drew from an old -riend of mine, a Maori of the lir«t family of Ngapuhi, a true paean of praiee, a hymn of Nature. He continued it in his Kaikohe home, in the heart of lovely Northland. I translate from his poem, which he sent to me and others as a Christmas-New Year greeting; the original began with the summer-time call of the pipi-wharauroa, the shining cuckoo from over the tropic seas, whose call is heard in every highland: —

"Kn-1, Kii-i, will 11 will 11 orn, tl-o !" "Shine, shine and live!" It blithely crlei, It greets the summer and the light. 'J'lmt cheering whistle rings again, Bright herald of the year, A song of farewell to the old, Kejoiclng with the new. Ited glow the quiet beneath low-bending boughs. The pohutukawa smiles to tee Its likeness In the tide ; The forests have arranged themselves in all their summer robes, The twining vines with flower* like stars Adorn their woodland chiefs, Deep In the bush all things are glad, The thousand wild birds' song. The purlrl trees of Talsmai are laughing on the plain. My heart is singing with the bird*, It Is uplifted like the trees. All things are sweet, the scented breeze, The breath of ferns and moss, and Tane's rugged skin; The soft wind from the eastern sea, The dew that glistens In the abade— All things are sweet; The feast time of the year baa come. The time when love and kindness now. And memory's cord draws far friends near. That piece of free verae, so much, better in the original mueical Maori, cnune to me not only with memorial of happy days on the shore* and hills of the north country, but like a tangi from the other side of the dark river. Like the trill of the little riroriro it carries a note of hidden sadness that cannec be expressed in words.

That wm the "mihi aroha" of th« last Hone Heke, who, until hit death, represented hi* loved' Northern Maori country in Parliament. It goes well on a soft and melodious Ngafuhi tongue. "The puriri wood* of Taiamai are laughing" ("£ kata ana nga puriri o Taiaijiai") is a felicitoiu proverbial expression of Ngapuhi, "ispecially from those who, like Heke, were born and bred in the heart of that region where the plains are embossed with the most graceful of conical hills, and the treea that adorn the ancient volcanic mountains across the breadth of Northland are chiefly puriri. In these summer days the voice of rejoicing Nature is all about one in the North. Not only the voice of the birds; the tarakihi or cicada raises a ceasele*» click-clatter in every tree and in all the small bushes on the roadside; no wonder the Maori includes it in the bird tribe. •<- However, there are a thousand places this summer time with as great an appeal to the fortunate New Zealander. The mountains, in yearly increasing measure, exercise a magnetic influence on the young and ablebodied. The ice-axe that sticks out from so many camp packs in the South sufficiently indicates holiday destinations.