MONUMENTS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 94, 22 April 1935, Page 6

MONUMENTS

"The monuments are of all kinds —remains of abbeys, castles, bridges, etc." In these words a British Official Wireless message sums up the over 4000 monuments in Britain now under the care of the Office of Works. An abbey, or a castle, or a bridge is a work of man; but in recent times the word "monument" has been made to coVer natural objects, such as remarkable boulders or other geological features, forests' of historic or scientific interest, and scenic features. The wider conception of what is a monument has been current for many years in Germany, where the hand of official protection was laid on the beautiful and remarkable things of the countryside at a time when, in other countries, such protection rarely strayed outside of the nian-made structures of city and town. A book on the monuments of a German district is a very diverse book, touching most of the natural sciences, and by no means merely architectural and antiquarian. Even in 1929 the Oxford Concise Dictionary gives a quite narrow' meaning to "monument," which, it says, is anything (structure, or building, or written record) that "serves to commemorate." But natural monuments are in a different category. As a rule they commemorate nothing that man has done. They ask to be commemorated (which means' protected) for their own value. In many cases their preservation is vital to man's own needs and exactly in line with his highest requirements, utilitarian and artistic.. But even that is no guarantee of conservation, or yet of orderly utilisation. Forests that today might almost pay New Zealand's National Debt went up in smoke. The same thing is still happening to forests whose usefulness is not conversion but control of waterflow.

New Zealand, it is-obvious, has no abbeys, or castles, or bridges. But New "Zealand is rich in' natural monuments, notwithstanding the aforementioned hand of destruction —sometimes commercial? sometimes wanton. New Zealand is also rich in relics of the race that came Ijere before us. Our castles are old pas, with earthworks and palisades, many of which are well worth preserving for historic interest as well as for being monuments (in every sense) of the wonderful skill in military engineering of a race that did not write or read. Our abbeys are old Maori meeting houses, one of which was deemed by a former Governor to be of sufficient artistic value to be removed from Te Wairoa after the 1886 Tarawera eruption and placed on his English estate. A good sample of a natural monument can be,found in huge, aged kauri trees ante-dating Columbus; in wonderful rock pinnacles and rock piles resembling castles; in such nature-study institutions as the nesting place of the gannets; in huge sea-defying cliffs adorned wilh giant pohutukawa. Individual trees may have a natural as well as a historic value, like the tree at Otorohanga that a few years ago waa assaulted by a power board. To a limited extent only the Maori War is monumented (for example, Bugler Allen's monument in stone, and the perishable wooden monument of the ambushed soldiers' graves on the Taupo-Rangitaiki road). But the commemoration of the whaling, the missionary, the gold-rush, and the war periods, also the railway-build-ing period (including the King Country epic) is generally inadequate; and conservation of morfuments (in the wider sense of the word) is still, more behind-hand. Meanwhile sites are being altered and destroyed, links of identification with the past are being lost, and the everlasting hills that might have been thought indestructible are themselves being eroded and scarred because people cannot recognise that an ancient forest is a monument and one of the greatest of, monuments.