The Brief Pageant Of Transport In New Zealand

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

The Brief Pageant Of Transport In New Zealand

THAT change was not effected in a day. Our western civilisation has itself only in a generation perfected its transport methods. The first white-comers, to New Zealand had no choice but to follow the example of the Maori and go afoot. Bishop John Augustus Selwyn, that great traveller, first prelate of the Anglican communion in New Zealand, visited every corner of his tremendous See, and in his letters and journals left a very concise picture of the travel facilities of his day. Horse and foot, canoe, sailing cutter or rowing boat, coastal schooner, and on rare occasions a rude litter carried by a couple of burly Maoris, were the only facilities at his disposal. Most of all he used his own gaitered legs, for he was a great and indefatigable walker. By slow degrees, at first merely around the towns, and later linking town and village and back-block homestead, rough clay roads were driven. One of the first was that along Wellington Harbour shore, linking Petone village and Pipitea. Bullock drays and buggies were the first wheeled vehicles to move in a land where even the simplest machinery was until then unknown. Roads improved. Horse transport became universal. Every man, even the Maori himself, travelled in the saddle. Like a network of white ribbons looped across the land, the complex maze of roadways covered the islands. Along the highways rattled in clouds of white dust the fast mail coaches with their relays of four and six smart horses. Draught-horse and wagon carried the stores in, and the produce out, along the farm lanes. Patient bullocks yoked two and two in front of the heavy wain, whip cracking and oaths crackling behind them, brought the wool-clip from the back-country to market.

When the railways started, in the 'sixties, folkdeemed that the height of civilisation. New Zealand was up-to-date, they said. At first short lines, privately owned, were constructed 'between Lyttelton and Christchurch, Bluff and Invercargill, Auckland and Drury. Later they were taken over by the State, and extended throughout the Dominion. But in the meantime. 40-odd years ago. a new and startling development took place.

A new and curious contraption, ingenious, but at first regarded as no more than a toy, made its appearance on the road. A kind of carriage, it chugged and panted along under its own motive power, with its driver sitting grim and begoggled at the tiller, and a horseman trotting in front waving a red flag. The motor age had begun.

Hard behind motoring came flight. The first aeroplane flew in the Dominion only a decade or so after the first motor-car drove across the colonial scene. But New Zealand was sceptical. Only in the past three or four years have commercial air-lines become firmly established in New Zealand; even now they are popularly regarded to some extent as an experiment, a hazardous and novel mode of travel that has come but not necessarily to stay. Even the complete absence so far of a single airway fatality involving passengers has not served to make the nation air-minded. Until the elder genera’ion overcomes its unfounded prejudice against air-travel, development is bound to lag. Yet already a vast and growing body of younger men and women prefers, when occasion demands, to borrow the magic carpet of modernity and ride on the wings of the wind.