From Bullock Wagon To Motor Car And Aeroplane

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 65, 9 December 1938, Page 24 (Supplement)

From Bullock Wagon To Motor Car And Aeroplane

OLD folk still living, children of the pioneers, have seen New Zealand change m - - time from the savagery of the last Stone Age to the most advanced culture of the Machine Age, the latest phase of the greatest civ lisation ever attained by man—change almost beyond belief. No sphere of man’s activities more plainly reflects the magnitude of that change and that advancement than the development of transport in the Dominion. Where a century ago no roads ran, to-day cars roll along magnificent highways at speeds undreamed of by their drivers’ fathers, express trains speed travellers from city to citv, many-thousand-ton steamers ply between the island ports, and down the unsurveyed pathways oi the sky wing the silver argosies of flight. In three or four hours a man can travel from one end of New Zealand to the other, accomplishing without effort or fatigue a journey which would formerly have required a month of hardship and endeavour. For hundreds of years the sole methods of going from one place in New Zealand to another were on foot along tortuous and difficult bush tracks, worn by the bare feet of many passers-by, or by canoe up and down the rivers, along the coasts, and across the lakes of the New Zeland country-side. For hundreds of years the sole methods of transporting goods and chattels across the country- were men’s anti women’s sturdy backs, and keels propelled by their muscular arms. No change wrought by the white man in his brief tenure of these islands has been more sweeping and complete, or has so greatly affected the daily lives of the people of the land. For to-day, after a century of settlement, the Dominion claims the finest transport system in the world, taking into account the small size of her population, the acreage of her ibroad domains.