IN THE FAR NORTH

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3440, 8 March 1932, Page 3

IN THE FAR NORTH

N.Z.'S QUAINTEST WEDDING. SIDELIGHTS ON LIFE IN THE OUTBACK. Honours for the quaintest wedding ever celebrated in New Zealand go to North Auckland. A man who lives in the district told the story to a reporter recently. A minister in the district, inquiring about cases of distress, was told of a man on the gumfields who was living in utter poverty. He looked the man up, and found that till someone had taken pity on him he had not even had a house, but had, with his five children and their mother, been living in the scrub. The minister went into the house — courtesy title—that had been given the family, and found that the total of the furniture was one home-made table, a few petrol cases, and one blanket among several people. The man agreed that he was up against it, and was grateful for the groceries the minister had taken with him; and when the minister suggested that it was surely time he was thinking about getting married he agreed with that, too. He'd often thought about it, and would like to do it, but couldn't afford the license, he said. "Well," said the minister, "I'll shout you a license."

So next time he went into the district he took a license with him. He found the bride at a neighbour's house, got hold of the bridegroom, and the ceremony was performed then and there.

Maori Bride's Cigarette.

The bride, a Maori, wore, besides some sort of a dress, long lace up boots, but no stockings. In one hand she carried a lighted cigarette. The bridegroom' face was decorated with about four inches of whisker, and a layer of mud from the gumfields. The clergyman was in his shirtsleeves. On the bare mud floor crawled a number of half-caste youngsters, and on the parson, according to him, hopped a number of fleas which recognised him immediately as new blood. The wedding ever, the groom wandered back to his camp in the scrub, near the diggings. It was the same minister who married a couple at 2 o'clock one afternoon. The breakfast lasted till 3.30, and then the young couple began to go round their friends wishing them good-bye. They were sorry, they said, but they had to go. Go where? Why, to do the milking, of course! * According to the man who told the story, the Maoris, of whom there are plenty in the Far North, are losing their initiative, or rather, are not developing any, because there is always the Government to fall back on. Many of them prefer to sell their land, waste the proceeds, and then

live on the family allowance, rather than to farm. Some of them, he said,- had been provided with free seed potatoes by the Government this year, and had eaten them.

Sold Child for Pigs.

But a stranger story, not absolutely authenticated, but believed to be absolutely true, was of-the white settler who this year sold the elder of his two children —a two-year-old girl —to the Maoris for half-a-dozen pigs. He said he was hard-up. When the Ratana sect began to get a hold oh the Maoris, it was responsible for some amusing incidents. In one settlement there was a church built by the Maoris and used for Church of England services. Half the people in the settlement went over to Ratana, "and claimed their share of the church. The Anglicans agreed that that was only a fair thing, so with hammers, saws and chisels, the church was dissected, and the two halves set up on opposite sides of the village. In another settlement the cemetery was Church of England, and there was some quarrel about whether Ratana funerals could be held there. The quarrel became keener, and when a Ratana funeral was being held the gates were defended, a free fight followed, and the body had to be taken away, again. Now a gate has been put in in another part of the cemetery, the Ratana funerals go in by that gate, and everybody is happy.