NEVER COMPLAINS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3229, 19 February 1943, Page 6

NEVER COMPLAINS

NEW ZEALAND COCKIE

NO DUNGAREES, SO —- CLOTHES FOR THE FARMERS (By “Pansy”) Now, generally speaking, there’s no more placid, dammit-why-worry, un-ruffle-able creature in the world than the New Zealand cockie: positively he’s a lovable being for this (a biased friend of mine wants me to slip in here “but for no other!”) reason. You can steal the cockie’s produce (Governments do it under cover of a guaranteed price), trespass on his property, shoot his turkeys or pigs, abuse him and exploit him; you can even fleece him (as any shark about town will tell you with a grin) and although the time-honoured custom of fleecing involves interference with “that most sensitive part of any man’s wearing apparel, his trousers pocket,” the New Zealand cockie just smiles, tightens the piece of rope or discarded tie that supports his trousers and rises again—for more! Of course the cockie can take it and there’s something like a hundred years of New Zealand history to back up that contention. Honour Before Trousers! Yes, you can touch the cockie’s pocket but the entire pair of strides is a different matter. The dinkum cockie—-Farmers’ Union variety—will part with his honour even, before he’ll forego his trousers. But dungarees and kindred garments are not to be had (are the au'horities forcing them on to Japanese prisoners as a mild form of punishment?) and for the first time in history the cockies are becoming alarmed.

It’s all right for the smug townie —he’s never known anything 'better then tweeds, action backs and sports ccr.ts, but correct choice in whatever they wear means a lot to farmers. Rightly a speaker at the union meetii the other day summoned up all bx:. scorn in: “There are plenty of spor's trousers available but no working trousers.” It’s that work aspect wh’c’.x makes town and country

clothes non-interchangeable. What

self-respecting cockie is going to go feeding* out in a blazer, milking in a ■boater, or fencing in silk-knit underwear. Austerity! An obvious solution, of course, is to carry austerity to the limit. . But listen to the complaining' cry of another unionist: “I’ve got to that stage now where I can’t go without trousers!” And there are bound to be others in the same boat who find themselves unable to withstand, clad only in Nature’s epidermis, the rigours of a July frost.

Necessity, though, has mothered many things, so why not nakedness? It’s all very well for Bernard Shaw to say that the apparel oft proclaims the man, but I’m sure that manliness can be proclaimed every bit as effectively without the apparel!— “Courier.”.