A NEW ZEALANDER AT HOME.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XII, Issue 1220, 5 June 1919, Page 2

A NEW ZEALANDER AT HOME.

(By Godfrey Turner.) 1 li:ul my lior.se, my shield. my banner, And ;i boy's heart, .so whole and free; But now I Mog in another manner —Hul now England hath taken me! —Kipling. And it is only five years since I came here with the tools of my adventuring —a pen, a typewriter, and ;l wad of paper. I wrot«' then, but Ido not know that 1 wished to sing. London was rny place. I saw things so vividly thai they hurl. Strange ways, strange customs. a poverty thai was new, and pleasures often sordid. Those were grey days, and nights intolerably long during which one might imagine he heard the city breathe heavily, like a drunkard or a person gorged and apoplectic.

Had I not broken my slav, that might have been my idea even to this present. Back in my own country, I had leisure to think—to learn to think differently. "England hath taken me. ..."

A year ago I was fencing at a place called Cow Creek, which is 12 miles from a homestead, which is 10 miles from a township. Hot summer weather, and camped in a tin hut with a mate called Peter—a grim and silent man much battered by the years. In a month 1 cannot remember that we talked at all. We were our own masters, so that we worked eight hours a day. 11 might be a year before anybody inspected our job—the manager of two hundred thousand acres cannot keep an eye on everything. We would eat our luncli and rest during the two noon hours. Peter, I thought, slept while I lay back in such scant shadow as we could find, listened to the river, watched the bare hillsides where they leant against the sky, and saw, far up, little pufTs of dust, like smoke, raised by winds we could not feel. Peter said very slowly, "I think the lark is the sweetest whistling bird there is. . ." I had never heard the larks until then. Afterwards they were with me always, through the long summer. Your English skylarks. Up there in the ranges, for a mcnth or so about Christmas, there are great dragon flies with swift beating opalescent wings, many-coloured as any Queensland gem. They have great bodies, banded black and silver, thick as my fountain pen; and the sound ef their flight is like the throb of aeroplanes in elf-land. My pony was swinging along at an easy canter, and I was as happy as a healthy man can be, when—at a blow!—one insect came smack against her ear. It was a minute or so of whirling activity before she came lo rest again, as breathless as I was myself. . and, while we waited, I heard your English skylarks singing.

You would notice it, almost anywhere in Canterbury, how our native birds have given place to yours. The thrush and the blackbird, the sparrow and the yellowhammer: these arc our birds now. About Christchurch you may even hear the cawing of the rooks. At one place I know, the stolid peacocks trudge stately throu Mi a rose garden which was tussock not so long ago. But we have not the swallows nor the swifts; and few of us have seen your "little hunchback of the snows," the robin. Nor have we heard the cuckco or the nightingale. Most of all, when we go back, we shall miss the frees and the hedgerows of England. Even in this winter weather, when llie bare limbs show stark and gaunt against the sky, they are there will the promise of the shrill green of spring. With us trees give way before civilisation, so that it is only far out tnat one sees the bush, sombre, sullen, always leafy, always of a darker green than you know, holding almost to its edges a wet and sheltered twilight. The wire fence replaces the hedge, mostly, in the country. In the towns we grow English trees, so that they stand, not naturally, but like things planted in a garden. But there are many gardens there —towns you can never know while your houses huddle to the streets, while your folks hero in tenement dwellings, while they dock to Ihe inisly cities that rest beneath fold upon fold of low-lying smoke. To the deuce with three acres and a cow—the man who would be content with three acres would be too lazy to milk the cow! But there's sense in a house for each family and an eighth or a quarter of an acre to each cottage. Mostly our city dwellers have that.

Yot from a selfish standpoint, I might wish it were otherwise. Lately I walked in the early morning through a quiet Hampshire town—a small, ridiculous, forgotten place on a beastly half-forgotten branch line —and the comfortable red bricks were kindly to mc. Homes lay beneath the steep roofs of thick thatch. I knew there was comfort behind the brick walls which hid the gardens that one felt held hollyhocks. Being serious, I felt that the only places necessary there were the store, the post-ofTlce, the public-house, and the smithy. They might have been built more cheaply of corrugated iron, or of weatherboard—and roofed with rubberoid. That would have done for such a place in New Zealand; but I like your English township better. Presently, when I go down a road through Canterbury, watching the sunlit cocksfoot shimmering like shot-silk, I shall think back to the moors with their warm browns and shadowed purples, the red tracks and the wisps of silver mist. In a week, as I lie awake in London, and wonder if the fog will set me coughing again, I shall wonder if I ever went down the West Coast in a ship, watched the Pacific rollers break •lead while on a pewter-coloured beach which was but a line between the dark hush lliat. ran up, it seemed, to the snow peaks—if I have seen the rata running red as blown llame about the big trees. Never again can those of us who have had eyes to see and ears to hear, say that we arc of England or of New Zealand. They are not two countries, but one. Some creek in the back will set us thinking of Lydford Oorgc, in Devon, which is Hie only place I have seen with New Zealand colouring. Some lawn, perfect as we can make it, will remind us of those which have been rolled for .'{oo years. Then we shall laugh; but we shall not have time to dream ofT to a land of thaleli and hedgerows, where there are poppies amongst the wlhml. or if we lin«<*r hero, some day in Ihe misl. a woman will sell us wattle, and all thai is within us will call loud for sunlight, and clear skies, for tall hills, for the very southern stars and all lh.it lies beneath them, over there, under the bulge of the wrrld.

According to a Boston dispatch io the New York World, Mr. R. A. Cram, a member of the Boston House Planning Board, announces that -the record for a working - man's war wage goes to a die cutter at the Fore Ricer shipbuilding yards, Boston. The die cutter was given a new machine which permitted a great increase in the output of his work, while at the same time he remained on the piece-work basis of pay. In consequence of this he made £44 daily for four mont'ic. When coalmining commenced at Mount Reira (N.S.W.), upwards of 60 years ago, the small coal made in driving the 4ft seam was thrown out on the mountain-side as so much waste (says the Sydney Evening News.) In this way was formed a slack heap which ignited by spontaneous combustion. Later on a new tunnel was driven on the lop seam (which is still being j worked), anfl the original slack heap was abandoned. Mr. James Emery, a deputy employed in the Mount Keira Colliery, was gathering some firewood on this hillside recently, when bis foot sank in the ground. He withdrew his Jp?r as quickly as possibly, but not before it was so severely burnt that he has since been incapacitated. The only feasible explanation is that the old slack heap fire has been smouldering away at the core for 60 years, and has commenced to break through to the surface in patches. It was undoubtedly such a patch or vein, covered by a thin crust of earth, that Emery had the misfortunte to walk upon. Some of the men decided to examine the slack heap at close quarters, but there was some trepidity about advancing too far from the solid ground, and the heat radiating from the ash beds was so intense, that they were easily persuaded to retreat.