THE MOKOIA'S PASSENGERS.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11124, 17 January 1899, Page 3

THE MOKOIA'S PASSENGERS.

THEIE OWN -ACCOUNT OF THEM-I SELVES. i The Sydney Doily Telegraph had a Slumber of the mea— presumably those who; will arrive in Auckland by the Mokoia torijrorrow— looked up by one of . its representatives. last week. About' a dozen of them were assembled, and apart ' from their want of knowledge of English • (says the reporter) there was Very little to distinguish them from thfc ordinary style of foreign eea-govng men. Several •of them were fine-looking, upstanding ) fellows, with JrftnV, open counten- . ance, and- of ' intelligent appearance. Tho worst of them might have been taken for fairly comfortable laborers. Two or three of the immigrants — they were all Außtrians — wore gaudy shirts, crewelled round the collars, and at least one, who sported a neat cap, was distinctly, as the Americans put it, struck on his shape. They conversed readily "with, our representative in two or three dialects of the Slavonic tongue. They talked volubly, and though- none of them spoke the national language, such as it is understood at Vierfna, several amongst the number did not appear at all ignorant for their class. One, indeed, who was familiar with, Italian gave a most intelligent statement of their position, and he wss surjported in all his main facts by sevenu of those who conversed in the Slavonic tongue. I ■ The man who knew Italian was a fainter by trade, and he said the men knew nothing of the new restriction until they got to Melbourne, where they met two of their countrymen who had been refused admission. So far as they knew, when they left Trieste, New Zealand was perfectly open to them, and some of them had embarked the savings of years in the enterprise. ■ What had attracted them to , the far off, isolated British colony was news they had received from friends who lad been at the Antipodes for years. They estimated that a least 2000 people had emigrated from the district whence they hailed— Dalmatia — to New Zealand. Some of these had done very well financially, and the news they tent back to the homeland had encouraged others to look far afield and gather together the spare florins to pay the fare by steamer to the hind where milk and honey Sowed. "What were they in Dalmatia?"— He "was a painter, and others agricultural laborers, another an artisan, others laborers in the city, and so on. He earned four francs a day, and the agricultural laborers three francs and a meal ■in good seasons. They had not come to How Zealand because they were starving at home. They all had .their homes ; some had a little land, and they had enough to eat and wine to drink. Some even had wive 3 and tamilies. It was the prospfect of earning more money that had attracted them. If the difficulty with the New Zealand •Government could not be patched up they would stay in Sydney and see what they could do in New South Wales. None of them had enough money to pay their passages home again. There were eight of their companions on the steamer who were not allowed to land in Sydney. One was an Austrian who had been in New Zealand four times before. He had his son with him, and the son could hind, but the father could not. They looked upon their lot as very hard. A suggestion that they had come out to work on the gumfields under contract to some New Zealander was stoutly denied, and the painter, for his part, said if he could have got work at his.trade in Auckland he would have taken it, and would not have gone to the gumfie'lds. Now they would have to keep themselves from starving in Sydney as best they could.