LIFE IN THE BACK BLOCKS

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 July 1927, Page 8

LIFE IN THE BACK BLOCKS

BATTLE AGAINST ADVERSITY. The tendency to think in retrospect of the pioneering days, with all their trials and hardships, is general. A page from modern back-blocks’ history written by a Kumeu settler who, after 25 years’ battling against adversity, finds himself little past the starting 'point, reveals that there are still those to whom accounts of life in the eighties do not read like fiction. Twenty-five years ago, states the writer in a letter to the Herald, he was a land-hungry builder in Tasmania. Imbued with the land sense and attracted by what New Zealand was said to offer, he sold up to make the voyage across the Tasman Sea. landing in Wellington. To use his own words, he found the procuration of a holding in the Dominion a “game of chance.” and while awaiting his turn of fortune in a Government section ballot. resumed his old trade. Purchasing two acres near Johnsonville, he subdivided and built houses there, and elsewhere, until the welcome news arrived that he had drawn a bush section 12 miles from Owhango, in the King Country. In due course, directed by the surveyors, he found his “section” pegged out in the native forest and became “bushed” in the process spending the night in the open. For a space the narrator’s own version may be quoted: “Returning to Wellington,” he writes. “I told the commissioner of Crown lands that the section was too rough for dairying; that some of the hills were straight up and down and that the cows would break their necks. ‘We know that, but you all want land, and we had to give you something,’ was the commissioner’s reply. ‘We had to cut them up small to make them go round.’ I told him I would take it on.” The story proceeds: "I took two tents, my wife and four children to the selection and they lived under canvas, while 1 built a dwelling in the township, working at times in Gin of snow.” The house finished, the pioneer aided by his 12-year-old son, set out to cut a track through the bush to his block. That day and night it rained heavily and in the darkness they unwittingly camped on a watercourse, all their belongings being saturated by morning. Weeks of ceaseless toil, broken only at week-ends, when he walked back six miles to the house.' were involved in clearing operations. Later, the residential clause compelled the erection of a “residence” on the section. This took the form of a four-roomed slab whare with round logs for rafters. The walls were lined with bags and papered with copies of the Auckland Weekly News. Oilcloth gave a more homely appearance to the pumice floor. For four years this served as the domicile of the family, and never in that period did the settler’s wife see the township. “It was impossible to walk more than 20ft from the house for timber and vines.” The writer states: “Twice I walked over the hill to the settlement and carried a ‘fifty’ of flour home, for at times the track was not even fit for the packhorse which used to carry our cream out and stores in. “When I packed out a bundle of fruit trees, the Crown ranger made fun of it and asked me was I going to plant them on stumps, but I set them out in rows and cleaned up the middle parts afterwards. Many a weary day I worked till midnight, stumping and burning off. There was the cow to milk and road work to do. In time I built a school and a decent house, only to find that our cows would not keep the family going.” An unhappy experience of the farming venture was when the pioneer took home 10 heifers, ‘but they never got more than 10 chains up the hill, so mountainous was the country thereabouts. We struggled on. My heart was in the place, and by dint of work on roads and splitting posts we kept going.” Then, he writes, came the long-look-ed for chance to buy out his neighbour’s 110 acres, with some flat land, hut the Minister of Lands told him the Government had set its face against land aggregation, and that returned soldiers needed sections. Subsequently he sold out for £l4 an acre, less than was realised than by some of the soldiers when they quitted their less improved properties, and his second mortgage proved valueless. Descriptive of a visit to the scene of his old labours, the writer states pathetically: “It nearly broke my heart to see my work wasted; the fruit trees and raspberry vines broken down by stock. ... It was hard to leave the place, but it was worse to return and find that.” He trenchantly criticises the policy of a Government which refused him the chance to make his hold-

ing big enough to be a success, but which at the same time reduced the State mortgages encumbering subsequent settlers, although many of these too, failed. Little better success attended subsequent farming adventures, and the narrator .mentions that the assistance of the only one of his sons still standing by him is the sole means by which he remains a farmer. This record of fruitless endeavour concludes with the hope that some business man will advance £5OO to enable the now aged settler to improve his present farm, in which case “New Zealand would be the richer by the return from 15 cows, four brood sows and 100 fowls.”