MEASLY BEACH.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17960, 29 November 1918, Page 6

MEASLY BEACH.

A TRAGEDY OF THE EARLY DAYS. (By WORKER, in ** Otago Daily Times.") Away south on the Otago coast, halfway between the grandeur of those great headlands, Capo Saunders and The Nuggets, lies Quoin Point. South cf Quoin" Point stretches a rugged,, rcckbound seaboard, mile beyond mile—the Akatore coast. Still further south, Cook's Rock stands sentinel, as it stood long years ago, when Cook first noted its strange appearance from tho deck of the Endeavour. South again, and just north of the great clay cliffs beneath which gleaming black among the sand at low tide lie the Kaitangata coal seams, lies a stretch of windtossed sand dunes, covered to seaward with coarse red sand grass and overgrown in its sheltered hollows with tussocks and dwarf flax. This is Measly Beach. Behind these sand dunes lies a sheltered, sand-bound lagoon, the outlet to tho Wangaloa Stream. Behind was enacted a tragedy —the tragedy of Measly Beach. And this, as it was told to me, is the story:—Long years ago, before there was any law, in the laud save that of might, wiien the only leavening of civilisation filtered, tainted and distorted, through a few pakeha sailors, deserters mostly from passing whalers, a fleet of canoes, manned by Maori warriors, was returning northwards. A few days previously it had reefed for one night at a small coastal settlement near Invorcargill. Here the chief bought some blue blankets from a whaling trader recently returned from Sydney. One detail the trader omitted to tell his customers: a short time before a Maori girl had died of measles between those very blankets—perhaps the first victim to that disease in New Zealand. Paddling on homewards, the coasting canoes passed across the great bay into which the Molyneux River throws its swirling waters, and here Maori after Maori was seized with cruel headache, and before the sheltered beach just north of the Wangaloa cliff could be reached manv were delirious. There was nothing for it but hurriedly .to beach the canoes and to set up wind screens in tho sheltered hollows beside the Wangaloa Stream. Next morning tho first patients were much worse, many of them delirious, and each hour added «F the number who were sickening. Some, in naked madness, rushed into the stream, where thev sat neck deep, to. obtain the relief the "cooling water afforded; others lay, in all attitudes, huddled together in the shelter of the flax bushes of raupo screen. After a day or two the rang trouble came; great powerful men lay coughing themselves into pneumonia, each cough piercing their sides like a knife. Others, coughing with like violence, brought on great gushes of crimson hemorrhage. Soon few were left alive. Fortunately, as the end 1 approached and the breathing ■ became heavier, pain ceased. Only comparatively tew made progress towards recoveiy, and many of those, starting too soon in search of mussels and flax root to relieve their growing hunger, brought on a return of tho hacking cough, doubly fatal in a relapse to tho Native constitution It was a small handful, indeed, that after many days returned to tell the tale. Little wonder that Measly Beach, peopled by. the grim ghosts of those tortured warriors, is ta-pu, tapu for-ever and ever. What a hopeless tragedy! JNo willin<r helpers to tell the Natives in good time that measlei, like influenza, often brings on constipation, that, unaided, the "constipated patient lies for days chocked with fermenting waste which poisons the system; no qualified doctor to proscribe fever powders, no aspirin and no quinine when the patients were in high fever, and required that relief which a cooling perspiration gives; no nurse to paint" iodine on sore chest or to see that cough sedatives were taken in sufficient strength and frequency to ensuro sleep and the early checking of hacking coughs; and, later..still, no kindly neighbours to bring food so that the convalescent's hunger might be appeased with a proper and suitable nourishment.

And now, after many days, from end to end of tho North Island, in the Native settlements scattered and hard to reach, and often, too, in those adjoining the towns, history is repeating itself: Daily 1 am visiting among tho Native and seeing the tragedy of Measly Beach again and again re-acted. The doctors,' the Health authorities and tho voluntary unskilled workers aro doing oKcellent. work. But with eo many of the workers down themselves, with the hospitals filled with, pakeha casos, what chance have the Natives? Often none; often help when it is days and days too late. The Maoris, as fat - as can bo seen, are no more afraid than the pakehas, but one does come upoa ■oases where the neighbours of sufferers are either too afraid or too indifferent to seek aid for tho sick or to send invalid food to the convalescent.

In a little settlement closely adjoining a, European village I found one young woman, the mother of six children, had just died, and that two other young mothers were suffering, the one from double pneumonia aud the other from congestion of the lungs and hemorrhage. In a back room crouched a Native grandmother, sickening herself, in sole charge of eleven coughing and moaning children. There was no one even to take me from room to room, but the sick husband of the dead woman, '

And m this manner, varying in differing degrees and detail, is tibia scourge working sad havoc in so many settlements. There is no time now to stand on ceremony; I know "of one helper who, having n se d all the prescribed medicine available, gave teaspoonfuls of weak chlorodvne and whisky to the cough-racked Natives. The result was rest and sleep. The Maoris being freed from pain, thought themselves better-, and, what is more, did get better. Ihe coughing can be, and especially at night, should be stooped Now to udorn my tale. This 'is no time to leave to others anything that we can do ourselves. Where no skilled workers are available, let us see at least that the Natives within a mile of -.is do not lack what the Natives lacked at Meanly Beach. Now, too, is the time to give our money freely: to let slue things that just now don't count and to give our time to wbat does matter—the- lessening of pain and the saving of human Ufa. Soon we phall all be busy, congratulating ourselves on what we have done—forgetting what we have left undone. Never in history, least of all to-day, has sympathetic thought "out any ice." W r o must turn our thought into action, "right action, right away*"