“BUSH WHACKER’S STORY”

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 29 May 1935, Page 6

“BUSH WHACKER’S STORY”

NEW ZEALANDER’S HOLIDAY VISITOR FOR KING’S JUBILEE SPENDING “HIS 200 QUID.” (Our Own Correspondent—By Air Mail) LONDON, May 11. Nearly ‘650 Australians and New Zealanders arrived in London in time to see the jubilee—when they should not have done so. They came by the Moreton Bay, and—unprecedented in shipping history—the captain was instructed! while still at sea to “beat schedule” and get his ship in a day earlier. He did so.

The great procession was hold, with Australia House one mass of bunting, and for a week or more the whole city will remain in its gay dress. And here, from a London paper, published on jubilee morning under the heading, “A Bush Whacker Comes Home,” are excerpts from an article by a Now Zealander: “Going Home” we call it in the “back blocks” of■ New Zealand, where we spend our time “bush whacking” —cutting out scrub and felling the great pines and red-berried rata trees, where the bell-birds sing in the sun and the kiwis scratch in the shade. Bush whacking so that there may be fields of green grass to raise sheep to clothe and feed you folks at Home. At the age of 25 I have saved up £2OO. I am sitting in a large hotel eating some dish with a French name, and the waiter has just said, “I hope everything is all right, sir?” Sir! Yes, the boys would laugh. They laughed at my coming Home at all: “Spend your money on a section of your own—you’re mad travelling at your age.” “Mind the Beefeaters don’t get you.” “Give my love to the Duke of Londonderry.” “S’pose you’ll come hack with a bowler hat and your nails manicured.” What do I want to see? Everything that makes England England. I have read about it all. Again and again. In imagination I have driven through London a hundred times. Now I am going to see it in reality. And I am lucky that this is King George’s silver jubilee year. I’ve never seen royalty. And I want to watch the King and Queen and the Princes drive in their state carriages through the streets of London, oecause they alone hold together the greatest Empire ever known. And the King and Queen will bow to me, a colonial “bush whacker” in the cheering crowds, as they pass. And then I’ll wait outside Buckingham Palace, and hope that they will bow and smile again from the balcony. And I want to stand on London Bridge and watch the ships lowering their funnels as they glide up the Thames. I want to stand in the narrow old streets of the city, where there are still signs of the Great Fire, and to feed the pigeons in St. Paul’s churchyard. I want to meet Lord Lonsdale and George Robey and Madeleine Carroll and Winston Churchill and Jack Hobbs and Steve Donoghue and Fred Perry and the Prince of Wales. . . but I know I never will!

Then I want to hear the crack of bat against ball at Lord’s and to mingle with the gipsies on Epsom Downs at the Derby. I want to see the air pageant, the Trooping of the Colour on the King’s birthday, the Aldershot Tattoo, and the naval review at Spitheacl. All this England I want to see and more, until the day comes when my new suit and shoes are worn out, and my money gone, and I retrieve my return steamer ticket from the safe in New Zealand House. And my rough friends, who will welcome me heartily, will say slyly, ‘ Don’t you wish you still had the two hundred quid?” They will not believe me when I say “No!” They don’t realise that all my life, as i tramp among the tree stumps in mv gum-boots, I shall be striding down Picaddilly in my new shoes. . . that every time I see the pack horse lumbering into camp I shall be watching the glittering Horse Guards prancing down the Mall. . . that every time I ford the. swollen rivers I shall see Tower Bridge lifting its stately arms above the tramp steamers gliding up the Thames.