THE STORY OF MEASLY BEACH.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16382, 29 November 1918, Page 8

THE STORY OF MEASLY BEACH.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. (By "Worker," in "Otago Daily limes.") Away south on the Otago coast, half, way between the grandeur of those great headlands, Cape Saunders and Hie Nuggets, lies Quoin Point. Soutl of Quoin Point stretches a ragged, rockhound seaboard, mile beyond mile*—the Akatoro coast. Still further south, Cook's Bock stands sentinel, as it stood long years ago when Cook first noted its strange appearance from the deck of the Kndea.v«ur. South and just- north of the great clay chits beneath which gleaming black among the sand at low tide lie the Kaitangata coal seams, lies a staptch of wind-tossed sand dunes, covered to Beaward with coarse red sand grass and overgrown in its sheltered hollows -with tussocks and dwarf flax. This is Measjy beach. Behind these sand -dunes lies a sheltered sand-bound lagoon, the outlet to the Wang&loa Stream. Behind was enacted a tragedy—the tragedy of Measly Beach. And this, as it was told to me, is the 1 I story:—Long years ago, before there was any law in the land eavo that of might, when the onfy leavening erf civilisation, filtered, tainted, and distorted, through a few pakeha sailors, deserters mostly from passing whalers, a fleet of canoes, manned by Maori warriors, was returning northwards. A few days previously it had rested for one night at a small coastal settlement near InvercargilL. Here the chief bought some blue blanketa from a whaling trader recently returned from Sydney. One detail the trader omitted to : tell bis customers*, a short time before' a Maori girl had died of measles be-, tween those veiy blankets—perhaps the ■ first victim to that disease in New Zealand. Paddling on homewards, the coasting canoes passed across the great "bay into, which the Molyneux River throws ita swirling waters, and here Maori after Maori was seized with cruel headache,

and, before the sheltered beach just north of the Wangaloa cliff could be reached, many were delirious. _ There was nothing for it but hurriedly to beach the canoes, and to. set up wind screens, in the sheltered hollows beside the Wangaloa Stream. Nest morning the first patients were much worse, many of them delirious, and each hour added to the number who were sickening. Some in naked madness rushed into the stream, where they sat neck deep to obtain the relief tiie cooling water afforded jntherß lay, in all attitudes, huddled together in tho shelter of the flax boshes of raupo ' screen. After a day or two the lung trouble came; great powerful men lay coughing themselves , into pneumonia, each ccugh piercing' their sides like a knife. Others, • coughing with less violence, brought on great gushes of crimson hemorrhage, Soon, few were left alive. Fortunately, aa the end approached and the breathing became heavier, pain ceased. Only comparatively few made progress towards recovery, adtl many of tho so starting too soon in search of mussels and flax root to relieve their growing hanger, brought on a return of the hacking cough, doubly fatal- in a relapse to the Native constitution. It was a small handful, indeed, that, after many days, returned to tell the tale. Littfe wonder that Measly peopled by the grim ghosts of those tortured warriors, is tapu, tapu for ever and ever.

What a hopeless tragedy! No wining helpers to tell the Natives in goodl | time that measles, like influenza, often 1 brings on constipation, that, unaided, the constipated patient lies for days chocked with fermenting waste which the system; no qualified doctor, to prescribe fever powders, no aspirin; and no quinine when the patients were in high lever, end required that relief which a cooling perspiration gives; no nurse to paint .iodine on sore chest or to see that oough sedatives were taken in sufficient strength and frequency to ensure sleep and the early checking of) hacking coughs, and, later still, no kindly neighbours to bring food so that the convalescent's hunger might be appeased with a proper and suitable nourishment.

And now. after many days, from end to end of the North Island, in the Nativo settlements scattered and/hard to reach, and often, too, in those adjoining the towns, history is repeating itself. Daily'l am visiting among thf>'' Natives and seeing the tragedy of! Measly Beach again and again re-acted. : The doctors, the health authorities, and the voluntary unskilled workers are doing excellent work. But with so manv of the workers down themselves, with the hospitals filled with pakeha oases, what chance have the Natives? Often., cone; often help when it j& dajß and

dayß too late. Tha Maoris, as far u can bo seen, are no more afraid than tha pakohas, but one does oorae upon cases where the neighbours of Birtferera are either too afraid or too indifferent to seek aid for the sick or to send invalid food to the convalescent. . -

In a little settlement closely adjoin* ing a European village I found thiti one young woman, the mother of si* children, had just died, and that twai other jroung mothers wero suffering, the; one from double pneumonia and tha, other from congestion of the lungs 'fend: hemorrhage In a back room crouched, a Native grandmother, sickening her-r self, in sole charge of 11 coughing and. moaning children. There was no one,f oven to take me from room to room,? bat the sick husband of the dead!

And in this manner, varying in .'dif- - feting degrees and detail, is this scrarijt J working sad havoc in so to&ny. setui*.* ments. There is no tande now to gUalf on ceremony; I know of one helper having used all the prescribed' xnadirimf available, gaTe teaspoonfuls of VreaiCi ' chlorodyne and whisky to oough-ntcked * Natives. The result was rest andjdtep.' The Maoris, being freed from ! paip. thought themselves better, and, whatis pore, did get better. The coughing can be and, Especially at night, should.lra .. Now to adorn my tale. This is no' time to leave to- others anything that we can ,do ourselves. Where no pHllnA wtjrkere are available, let us see at laasti that the Natives within a mite of ua do not lack what the Natives lacked at i Measly Beach. Now, too, is the time ! to give our money-freely; to let dido 'i I things that just now don't count, antji r? S? 7 ® ou . r time to what does matter—% the lessening of pain and the saving of human life. Soon wo shall all be busy; congratulating ourselves on what wa have done—to use, too, forgetting what we hove left undone. Never in histqry, least of all has sympathetic thought "cat any ice.'' We must turn our thought into action, "right action, right away." '