THE END OF THE ROAD

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 10, 11 July 1936, Page 8

THE END OF THE ROAD

The death of an elderly farmer and his wife, both septuagenarians, on the Bunnythorpe railway crossing, where iheir motor-car was caught by a train, invites comparisons of the days that are with those that are gone. The husband, n Scot, arrived in New Zealand in the eighties, and, as a man in his twenties, settled on bush In ml in almost roadless country. In the early nineties he married; and, without knowing them, one may readily fill in the * details of I heir steady rise, by slow degrees, from primitive bush-farming lo farming comfort. In the eighties and nineties thousands started in this way, and by the end of the first decade of this century a comfort level had been reached for most of them. Then came the motor age, with all its usefulness, with all its added comforts, and—with all its risks. Whether it is belter, at the age of 73 or 74, lo face the rigours •of the old pioneering life, or the risks of the new fast-moving motor age, is a matter of opinion. But when the toll of traffic accidents on human life, old and young, is summed up, one cannot help reflecting on the enormous changes which time has brought into the life of this septuagenarian couple, from the day when the bush farm was first attacked in the staid eighties. That decade presents the picture of a New Zealand that will not be seen again. An inevitable transformation has come and is accepted; but it is in noj sense without its price.