PIONEER FARMING

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 3 January 1931, Page 13

PIONEER FARMING

i Writing of early days on a. farm a pioneer settler says, inter alia: “We youngsters were usually conveyed in bullock wagons, sometimes in company with a poor little orphan suoking pig which had developed a determination to follow us wherever we went. Tlie teams of eight stalwart bullocks kept their eyes glued on the ‘ wayside herbage and displayed! a penchant for pursuing a devious course, necessitating a considerable amount of urging by virulence of tongue and lashing of thongs. Our drivers were certainly expert in the use of bull oak language. That reminds me of two bullock “punchers” who were taking shelter from a thunderstom on a station in the South Island, and engaging in conversation, when they discovered, to their mutual amusement, that one wais a double first Oxford and the other was a senior wrangler of Cambridge. The .pungent expletives usually bestowed on working bb I locks were usually rendered bv those learned scholars in be Creek language. I fancy- that they didn’t re-echo the sentiment expressed in James Thomson’s ‘seasons,’ viz., ‘With joy the impatient husbandman rt-th drives his lusty steers.’ ”