The Port of Timaru.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17882, 1 October 1923, Page 8

The Port of Timaru.

It is no doubt time, as Mr Bitchener and other members of the Timaru Harbour Board pointed out on Thursday, that improvement schemes running into hundreds of thousands of pounds would have a poor chance at present with the ratepayers. They would hare a poor chance in the country because the average ratepayer there feels, and feels justly, that his bttrdens are a big enough worry now, and they would not bo welcomed in the borough unless" there were 9 much better prospect than there actually is that the result would be s substantial increase in trade. The port, of Timam does now, for its size and facilities, a very big business indeed. It has been admirably managed and jealously nursed, with the result that its balance-shoet is the envy of harbours much more generously endowed by nature. But the ' fact is, it is a second-class port,l

To make a first-class ' port of it would involve spending far more money than South Canterbury could afford or tho possible business would ever pay for, and it is far from certain thatthe "very costly projects" of Mr Clark© and Mr Dobson,' outlined broadly in Saturday's 'Tress," would bring much new traffic at all. They would, of course, facilitate tho handling of the traffic that goes to Timaru now, and it ia for the Board 'and tho ratepayers to say whether tho greater conveniences would bo worth £390,000, or £290,000, or any sum less than that by which the depth could be increased, tho "range" controlled, or tho enclosed area enlarged. It is not unnatural, too, that there should bo some anxiety in the borough of Timaru itself lest the charming watering place which has been made by one mole should be destroyed by another. But it certainly can and ought to bo said about theso two reports that the Boards has shown characteristic enterprise in having them prepared. The natural port of Canterbury is Lyttelton, but if the province a 8 a whole had shown half as much energy and imagination in improving what nature has provided as the- southern end of the province has shown in supplying nature's deficit, the annual reports of the Lyttelton Harbour Board would be a strangely different story. Not, that the Harbour Board is responsible (except indirectly, through an excess of patience) for the R&ihvay 'Department. Though the harbour itself is far from the thing it ought to bo, the very costliest improvements imaginable will bo nullified, wholly or in part, as long as traffic must pass through a single tunnel, behind steam engines, into a railway yard a generation out of date. Only when Canterbury as a ,whole awakes as thoroughly as that part of Canterbury which has made itself an outlet at Timaru will it compel the Railway Department to open the gates of Lyttelton.