The Dominion SATURDAY, JANUARY 22, 1927. ANNIVERSARY DAY

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 100, 22 January 1927, Page 8

The Dominion SATURDAY, JANUARY 22, 1927. ANNIVERSARY DAY

♦ The birthday of a community is different from that of an individual. With the individual it may mark the nearer approach of maturity, of the prime of life, and, in the later stages, of the Great Adventure to that bourne from which no traveller returns. Men fall by the wayside, but the community marches on. To any but the oldest inhabitants it must be difficult, after surveying the extent and activities of the city, to realise that as a community, we are, officially speaking, but eighty-five years old. “For about 16 months (1841-2),” says the Official Year Book of the Wellington City Council, “Wellington was a borough, the first in Ne\y Zealand. It was then altered to a Town Board, which was finally abolished in 1870.” After that we became a borough once more, and, finally, a full-blown city—the capital city of New Zealand. . / Eighty-five years ago Lambton Quay was a beach, Maori canoes were pulled on the shore at Pipitea, where to-day is a vast accumulation of wharves and shipping. Newtown was a manuka-clad valley, Oriental. Bay was “Round the Rocks,” Karori was a more or less distant hinterland, while the Miramar Peninsula' was given up to sheep, rabbits, and sand dunes. What a contrast there is today! It is a remarkable bound from a primitive community to a modern highly-civilised city, with a well-organised system of transport, municipal services, and ‘ a population, the increasing size of which is rapidly devouring for housing accommodation every available inch of space.The people who comprise the population of the city tf-day will probably be thinking more of the races at Trentham and various outings and occupations to which their moods and temperaments may incline them, than reflecting upon the significance of what has been accomplished in those eighty-five years of civic progress. The occasion, however, has its opportunity and its appropriate moral. In the first place, the striking achievements of this comparatively brief space of time are an impressive tribute to the British instinct and capacity for colonisation. In the second place the development of the city itself furnishes a remarkable testimonial to the ability of its citizens to overcome the obstacles and solve the problems, which all through have impeded settlement and progress. It is probably correct to say that no other city in the Dominion has been so heavily handicapped in its business expansion by the topography and configuration of its landscape. Hill-sides and gullies which in the beginning were regarded as hopeless wildernesses are now thickly studded with dwellings, well roaded, and well served with the necessities and amenities of civilisation. The major portion of the central business area, as it stands to-day, was originally in the sea. A little over thirty years ago Kclburn and Brooklyn were farms; Seatoun, Miramar, and Lyall Bay were either being farmed or were barren lands; an odd house or two had begun to dot the hillsides of Roseneath; horse trams served the city in a long, straggling trunk line; mobs of sheep and an occasional bullock train could be seen on Lambton Quay; hitching-posts for riders from the Hutt and other outlying rural districts were familiar objects; the eastern side of the harbour was a wilderness frequented by week-end yachting parties. It is really an astonishing record. The city has extended in what thirty years ago would have been considered impossible directions. What of the future? To the average eye, further expansion in most directions would seem-to offer new difficulties. It is not given to mortal man to envisage the future with any degree of certainty, and not even the most optimistic land speculator could be trusted to depict the appearance of this city in another eighty-five years. Progress, in its movements, is an entirely unknown quantity, but that in the case of Wellington City its future advancement will far outstrip its past achievement is a fairly safe prophecy.