Lot of old . . . boulders

Press, 29 June 1985, Page 19

Lot of old . . . boulders

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

Is there an etymologist in the house? We were talking about goolies in the pub the other night. I’d just bounced my rotary hoe off a few in a patch I was cultivating after having cleared away and grubbed out a huge old shrub, and the bloke down the road had struck a few beauties while ploughing up an old pasture. In case you haven’t come across goolies before, it’s a usage peculiar, as far as I can make out, to Canterbury (parts of Otago, too). Farmers who live out “on the stones” know all about goolies — they turn up all over the paddocks, and they’re pretty tough on machinery. Jet-boaters try to avoid hitting them in rivers; they don’t do a lot of good to the bottoms of boats. Goolies, as you may have guessed by now, are boulders, but not any old boulders, as I’ll explain in a minute. The word has another meaning, which causes townies to snigger, but we won’t worry about that in the meantime. A boulder becomes a goolie when it is concealed; i.e., buried in the ground or under water. There aren’t any hard and fast rules about goolies. They can be big ’uns or little ’uns; they are boulders, which means they must be . bigger than pebbles but not

necessarily smaller than rocks. The biggest ones I’ve seen were unearthed by the machines making the hydro canals across the Mackenzie Country: these were car size, but that isn’t significant, because the essence of being a boulder is not size but shape. A boulder is a piece of stone that is rounded or water worn. It’s not a rock; a rock is a large, broken or rugged stone or a massive and immovable lump of stone. This raises a difficult semantic point. In South Canterbury, some mountains have a curious feature known as boulder fields, large, barren areas on the upper slopes where broken stone has piled up in huge drifts. These are good places to avoid if you can. I fell over on one a few months ago, tore most of the skin off one thigh, and limped for a week. They didn’t feel like boulders to me — more like rocks. So how come we have rocks in our boulder fields? Trying to work out the implications of this is enough to give you rocks in the head. Something else-J haven’t worked

out yet is how boulders came to be called goolies. Aside from the normal flashes of brilliance that come after a few jars and don’t bear repeating the next day, we didn’t get very far with our researches in the pub, so I tossed the word at a few colleagues. Of course, according to Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang,” the word “goolies” refers to a characteristic portion of the male anatony, in which females are often urged to kick would-be rapists. This may explain why I got some odd looks, especially from female colleagues. Only one knew what I was talking about, but he’s a jetboater. Partridge says the derivation of “goolies” is from a dialect word, “gully,” meaning a game of marbles — which by a stretch of the imagination could, I suppose, he applied to boulders. But “gully” is also a slang word for the opposing portion of the female anatomy; it’s a place on the cricket field; or it’s a confidence trick (but that’s a different derivation, from “gullible”). In conventional English a gully is a shallow ravine, carved in a

hillside by a creek. It’s also a large, very sharp knife. They say Japanese is a confusing language! All of this has considerably sharpened my gulosity for more information about the derivations oi this versatile word. * * * A question for vegetable farmers: Mr John Palmer, of the Crop Research Division, D.5.1.R., Lincoln, would like to know when, and by whom, the so-called South American yam was introduced to New Zealand. The “yam” is actually the oca plant (prounced ok-a) and is a member of the oxalis family with bright yellow flowers. The edible part is the mass of wrinkled, reddish pink tubers which forms underneath the sprawling stems in late autumn. The plant has been grown in South America for centuries, in the Andes, and the South Americans have numerous named varieties, most of them with brownish or yellow skin instead of the familiar pink. It is now widely cultivated in New Zealand, in spite of the fact that because it is a short-day plant

its cropping ability is limited in some parts by low autumn temperatures which inhibit the formation of tubers. Unfortunately, the date of its original entry to New Zealand is not documented — or if it is, it is lost somewhere in the impenetrable fastness of the Ministry of Agriculture’s archives. Mr Palmer thinks it was probably brought in during the late 1930 s or in the post-war period in the late 19405. An interesting sidelight is that for research purposes (in the hope of finding a variety that will crop more willingly in the South Islanc climate) the D.S.I.R. imported s selection of named varieties of ocs tubers from South America. None of them, according to Mr Palmer proved to crop as well or to have a flavour comparable with that oi the good old New Zealand pink. * » » Now it can be told (with nc names, no pack drill): the leaky gumboot prize for responding tc the most futile fire call of the summer goes to the rural brigade which turned out to a fire in a

riverbed. The alarm was given by a resident who wasn’t taking any chances when he saw smoke and flames near his boundary. What he didn’t know was that his neighbour had deliberately lit the fire to clear up an unproductive area of long-dead fallen trees, brambles, and scruffy undergrowth. The neighbour was quite indignant. “I’ve been waiting for 30 years for a summer dry enough to get that lot to burn,” he said. When the firemen arrived he was elsewhere on his farm, setting alight a stubble paddock. The moral of the story, if it has one, is this: if you’re going to light a fire, tell your neighbour. The incident didn’t happen, by the way, during the closed fire season.