FROM THE EAST COAST TO THE WEST.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 4087, 10 January 1878, Page 2

FROM THE EAST COAST TO THE WEST.

[by our special reporter."] preliminary. — east and west coast, settlements. — the point of meeting. From the East Coast to the West, in one sense, the distance is about 180 miles. There is another, however, in which it is only about a couple of hours' ride. Settlement has pushed inland, on the eastern side from Napier and on the western from Wanganui and Wellington, till it has now become almost — but not quite — continuous. Woodville is the extreme inland point of East Coast settlement, as Palmerston is of West Coast. The distance between them is only some 15 miles, and shortly, no doubt, the two localities will be most intimately connected in every respect. Already, if a doctor is wanted in Woodville, it is to Palmerston they send for him. If the Rev. Charles Clark lectures in Palmerston, as he was doing on. Saturday last, those of the Woodville people who are that way disposed go there, to hear him. In other ways, however, the two settlements are wider apart than are many settlements separated by a hundred miles of sea — than, for instance, are Gisborne and Napier. The Woodville people have all their connections and interests, social and political, in Hawke's Bay. The news which they care about hearing is, chiefly or exclusively, that which, the Hawke's Bay newspapers contain. In Palmerston, on the other hand, people know, and care^ very little more about the institutions, ; the celebrities, and the politics, of Napier than they do about those of Auckland,; and Napier local news would have no doubt little interest for them. < As the, narrow straits between two of the islands in the Malay Archipelago divide the. Flora and Fauna of Australia from those of Asia, so do the 15 miles of bush divide the East Coast and its belongings from the West Coast and that which appertaineth thereunto. This, of course, will not always be so., Indeed, I do not think it will be so very much longer. It is only one day's easy journey by train and coach from Napier to Palmerston already, and when we have the train all the way, it will be possible for us Napierites to go there in the forenoon and come back in the afternoon. We are likely therefore in the future to know and see a good deal more of that rising and progressive locality than we have known and seen in the past. Our forest-clad districts too, which comprise so large an area of the southern portion of Hawke's Bay, have very much in common with the vast forest-clad districts of the interior and the West Coast. The hundreds of questions that arise in connection with the timber industry and with the settling and clearing of the bush, are questions of equal interest to both. This community of interest and proximity of situation will in time make them all virtually one district, and ten years hence probably only a few old identities on either side of the Gorge will carry down the tradition of East Coast or West Coast antecedents. The progress towards this state of things will be greatly accelerated, too, by the settlement of the piece of country that now forms the liiatus. A township to be laid out half way between Palmerston and Woodville is already in contemplation, of which I shall have more to say further on. It is also worth while here to remark that Palmerston is not the only interior township, of which we have hitherto known little or nothing, that is just on our borders. Feilding is really no farther even now from Woodville, for horsemen and in summer, than Palmerston is. By coach and train it has now to be reached from this side through Palmerston, but eventually, if the railway is laid out as projected, it will be brought a few miles nearer to us than the latter township. Having said this much by way of stimulating the interest of your West Coast readers in the Hawke's Bay matters to be touched on and of your Hawke's Bay readers in West Coast matters, I will proceed with the sketch of what struck me as best worthy of notice between Takapau, the inland end of the Napier railway, and the town of Wanganui. TAKAPAU. The topics of exciting interest in the Takapati neighborhood when I passed, were all in one way or another connected with the extension of the railway line to Papatu. " The Napier and Papatu line " we shall have to call it shortly. In the immediate future its name, I suppose, will be the Napier and Kopua line. It is open already for ballast trucks, &c, to Popua, and will be handed over by the contractors in a few days. The extension to Papatu, some six . miles further on, involves some tolerably heavy bridging. Very exaggerated ideas were entertained along the line, I found, as to its probable heaviness in cost. It may, however, very likely involve an expenditure in the district of about £20,000 over a couple of years. Who might be the fortunate publican to have his house thronged on pay-nights, as Mr Fergusson's at Takapau, or Mr Petit's at Te Aute, used to be thronged, and to retire from the trade, perhaps, in a year or two a wealthy man, was one of the great questions of interest generally discussed. The Maoris, however, own all the land about Kopua, and hitherto all negotiations with them for a site have proved unsuccessful. The erection of one or more saw-mills in the neighborhood was also in the wind. Mr Firth was on his Avay to the spot where his mills are to be built when I was at Mr Reid's hotel on Saturday last. The timber that will be used in the bridging will, no doubt, be cut in the neighborhood by some one. There is abundance of totara there. ORMONDVILLE. The Ormondville people, I am happy to learn, are to have a station. The works will give a lift to that settlement. The railway is to run right through the middle of it, and ought to make the holdings very valuable. The land is not so good as that in some of the special settlements further south, but it forms the only ininstance in which the land adjacent to the proposed railway line has not been reserved from settlement for purposes of speculation. NORSEWOOD. At Norsewood a good deal of clearing has been done, and the Scandinavian population there are, I believe, well contented with their lot. The land is for the most part hilly ; much of it will never be fit for the plough. It is good soil, however, and appears to grow grass luxuriantly. A bush fire had recently taken place in the neighborhood, which had destroyed crops and fencing to a considerable extent. In the Wellington Provincial District they have a salutary ordinance making people who light bush fires, except during specified months of the year, responsible for the damage they may do. That or some more stringent regulation should be made generally applicable to the forest-clad districts. The dread of bush fires is the one great source of anxiety with the settlers all along the line at present. They have their crops just reaching maturity, planted and cared for with infinite toil. On getting them in safely their chances of tiding comfortably over the coming winter largely depend. The sight of smoke rising from the bush anywhere in the neighborhood just now is to them like the sight of a gathering tempest to the seaman nearing port, yet liable to be wrecked before reaching it. The Wellington regulation has not, of course, been successful in completely stopping bush fires out of season. No ordinance could be so. A great fire indeed, I heard, took place recently in the Kiwitea district, north of Feilding, which did great damage to the bush property of Mr Bryce, one of the members for Wanganui. The damage in that case consisted chiefly in its destroying the undergrowth and smaller trees, which, when all is felled together, and allowed to become thoroughly dry, kindle and consume the larger tinVber,

Getting rid of the the latter when the kindling material is gone is a work of tenfold difficulty. DANEVIRK AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD. The Danish settlement has, had one great' advantage over the Scandinavian in the abundance of- totara. The settlers have been able to clear their land and get paid for it too. It was generally^r©marked, T found, also, that they were thriftier, and that they paid their way better than the others. Perhaps it is that they have had more funds to pay it with. Mr Gaisford's mill, constructed by one of the station hands, is, I believe, worth a visit. The bad weather prevented from going round by it. It is worked by a turbine Avater-wheel, the only one so worked, so far as I am aware', in the district. At present it is engaged cutting timber for his house and woolshed, but it will also be used as a flour mill and for working a variety of agricultural . machines. WOODVILLE. Taking a survey of Woodville from the main road, there is of course some progress to be seen in the way of clearing and improving. It would be strange if there were not. On the whole, however, the view is sadly disappointing. The traveller passes through miles of rural land which is held by speculators, and reaches, at last, the township itself, which consists of a public-houae and two stores. Off the road, and behind the uncleared land, there is indeed a good deal of work done in the way of settlement, which, if! brought to the front, would give a very different aspect'to the' locality. Still, at the, least, things are not as they ought, to have been, very far from it. When there are hundreds and hundreds of people in this district, and in other parts of the colony, who are eager to get this bush land in order to make homes for them-' selves and their families upon it, one may surely ask with some show of reason — Why should a single acre of it have ever been sold to speculators, who could have no other object in purchasing it/ except to extract higher prices for it from bo?ia fide settlers than the latter would have had to pay to the Crown ? The question is one that those under whose administration the settlement was founded will not find it easy to answer satisfactorily. It may be said that it was desirable to bring wealthy and poor settlers together, so that the former might give employment to, the latter. So, perhaps, it would be ; but when such employment is not given, and there is no intention of giving it, how about this answer then 1 Not an acre of the land in the bush, I maintain, should ever have been sold without a guarantee being taken that the clearing and improving of it should at once be proceeded with. The mode of taking such guarantee is simple enough. Let no title beyond a license to occupy be given in any case, until such conditions as are held requisite are complied with. It might, I admit, be found desirable to omit the condition of residence in many . cases. • This would bring in capitalists like Mr Holder, who are employing a great deal of labor in clearing their land. Those other capitalists, who are, apparently, merely holding the land for a rise, should have been most carefully kept out. The fact is that the system under which our bush lands have hitherto been disposed of. is merely an extension of the system under which_ the open agricultural, lands | of the province have gone out of the hands of the public into the hands of capitalists. It did not occur, in the most ' distant manner, to most of us, when the bush was being first opened up and settled, that that was the true drift of provincial administration. It is clear enough, however, now, after the event, that it has been so. What was looked to, primarily, was provincial revenue ; secondarily, facilities for speculation, with just enough in the way of promotion of settlement to make such speculation profitable. Mr Ballance, it is reported, is to be the new Commissioner of Lands, and a more genuine enthusiast in the cause of true settlement could not have been found. I would earnestly submit to him the necessity, as regards the remaining forest lands in, the hands of the Crown — and there is still at least 20,000 acres of agricultural forest land in this district — of taking some such steps as that suggested for the rigid exclusion of speculators. Had such steps been taken when Woodville was founded, its population would now most likely have been many times what it is, and many times what it will be for a great many years to come. It would then have been a place manifestly worth pushing on the Masterton railway to. Now there is a strong party in favor of dropping it, and of taking the West Coast line from the Hutt to Foxton instead. - THE WOODVILLE SPECIAL SETTLEMENT. ' A visit to the settlement and a chat i with the settlers will repay the tourist for the half mile or so that he will haye to go off the main road to get there.' I have heard a great deal of talk in town, here about the folly of people leaving situations where they were getting good wages and going up into the heart of the forest, and abundance of cynical predictions that we should shortly hear of them selling out their holdings for less than half of what they had cost them in money and labor, and of theircoming back to work for wages again. Do not let any one believe such rubbish. It is the talk of the horse dealer who wants to buy your horse. It may have been the most favorable specimens of the settlers whom I chanced to see ; at any rate, I certainly never met any people less disposed to repineat their lot than they were. Ido not think we shall see many of them sell out, unless indeed at such prices as will enable them to take up larger holdings elsewhere. They have their hardships and anxieties, no doubt, the chief ground of anxiety at present being, as I before observed, bush fires ; but ail of them, even those who have not been accustomed to the life, say that it is thoroughly to their taste — and well it may be, in Woodville at any rate. I think if I were not a newspaper editor— the most blissful of all positions — I should like to be a Woodville settler. There are thirty-four families in all. Seventeen are already on the ground. Most of them are old acquaintances, and have a good deal in common in every way. The Methodist persuasion predominates. Neighborly feeling, sobriety, and a rough abundance of the good things of life are the order of the day. Of milk, butter, eggs, cabbages, and vegetables of all kinds there is no scarcity. They reckon up considerably more children among them, if I was correctly informed, than any similar number of families in the province. It ia natural indeed that they should do so. The bush is of all others the place for people with large families. A school is to be opened in the township shortly, which, no doubt, will be largely attended. Service is held regularly every Sunday in the homes of one or other of the settlers; The Rev. Mr White, from Waipawa, comes up once a month. On the intervening Sundays, some of the settlers take it in turns to preach or read sermons to each other. They seem to lead happy and healthful lives, and will find themselves, by the improvement and the rise in. value of their properties, growing richer year by year. Let any working man who — perhaps still dubiously— entertains the project of making a home for himself and his family in the bush, go and visit Woodville, and I venture to say that he will come back with his determination ten times confirmed. THE ROADS AND ROAD BOARD QUBSTION. One of the greatest difficulties that the settlers have to contend with is the state of the roads — or the bush tracks, it would be more correct to call them — between the main road and the settlement. Beyond the felling and clearing of the bush, they are in a state of nature, and in winter it is a matter of serious difficulty to get along them at all. There was, I believe, '

not very long ago an expenditure of the fag end of some provincial vote on bye roads in the district, but that was spent, it is currently stated in the neighborhood, on opening up the roads of speculators who are now outside the road board disf JpA. It' would be only right and fair, therefore, if that ia so, that the lands of these gentlemen should be brought within the district again, and rated to payjfor tihe roads of their neighbors. The... power <pjE readjusting road board boundaries lay with the superintendents while provincial institutions existed, but now, of course, lies with the Government, and I should think that the present Government would be only too glad— at any; rate if requisitioned by the settlers — to; re-gazette,, the East and West Woodville districts as one. .A general readjustment, of road .bqard boundaries ; throughout , the 'province J.is, indeed, one of .the pressing necessities H of the hour. . .