HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

Manawatu Times, Volume XL, Issue 14068, 26 November 1918, Page 6

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

! THE STORY OP MEASLY BEACH. ! (Communicated by "Worker.") •Away south, on the Otago coast, halfway, between the grandeur of those groat headlands, Cape Saunders and The Nuggets, lies Quoin Point; south of Quoin Point stretches a rugged rockbound seaboard, mile beyond mile, the Akatoro coast. Still further south Cook's Rock stands sentinel as it stood years ago when Cook first noted its strange appearance from the deck of the Endeavour. South again and just north of the great clay cliffs which overlie the Kaitangata coal seams, lies a stretch of wind-tossed sand-dunes, covered to seaward with coarse red sandgrass an overgrown in dits sheltered hollows with tussocks and dwarf flux. This is Measly Beach. Behind these sand-dunes lies a sheltered sand-bound lagoon, the outlet to the Wangaloa Stream. Here 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 land save that of night, when the only leavening of civilisation filtered, tainted and disorted, through a few pakcha sailors, deserters mostly from passing whalers, a fleet of canoes manned by Maori warriors was returning northwards. A few days previously, it had rested for one night at a small coastal settlement near Invercargill. 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 pased across the great bay into which the Molyneux Biver 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, many were delirious. There was nothing for it but to beach the canoes and to set up hurried wind screens in the sheltered hollows beside the Wangaloa Stream. Next morning the first patients were much worse, many of them delirous, and each hour added to the number who were sickening. Some in naked madness rushed into the stream, where they sat neck deep to obtain the relief the cooling water offered; others lay, in all attitudes, huddled together in the shelter of flax bushes or raupo screens. After a day or two the lung trouble came; great powerful men coughing themselves into pneumonia, each cough piercing their sides like a knife. Others coughing with like violence, brought on gushes of crimson hemorrhage. Soon, very few were left alive; fortunately as the end approached and the breathing became heavier, pain ceased. Only comparatively few made progress towards recovery, and many of these starting too soon in search of mussels and flax root to relieve their growing hunger, brought on a return of the hacking cough, doubly fatal in a relay>se to the native constitution. It was a small handful indeed, that after many days returned to tell the talc. Little wonder that Measly Beach, peopled by the grim ghosts of these tortured warriors, is tapu, tapu for ever and ever. What a hopeless tragedy! No willing helper to toll the natives in good time that measles, like influenza, often brings on constipation; that unaided the constipated patient lies for days choked with fermenting waste which poisons the system; no qualified doctor to prescribe fever powders, aspirin or quinine when the patients were in high fever ami required tliat relief which a cooling perspiration gives. No nurse to paint iodine on sore chests or to see that cohgh sedatives were taken in sufficient strength and frequency to ensure sleep and the early checking of hacking coughs; and later no kindly neigh hours to bring food, etc., that the convalescent hunger might be appeased with a proper and suitable nourishment. And now, after many days, from end to end of the 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 the Natives and seeing the tragedy of Measly Beach again and again reacted. The doctors, the health authorities and the voluntary unskilled workers are doing excellent work. But with so many of the workers down themselves, willi the hospital filled with pakcha cases, what chance have the Natives? Often none; often help when it is days and days too late. The Maoris, as far as can be seen, are no more afraid than the pakohas, but one does come upon cases where the neighbours of sufferers are either too afraid or too indifferent to seek aid for the sick or to send invalid food to tin 1 convalescent. In a little settlement closely adjoining a European village. I found that one young woman, the mother of six childn n. had just died and that two other young mothers were suffering the one from double pneumonia and the other from congestion of the lungs and hemorrhage. Tn a back room crouched a native grandmother, sickening herself, in pole charrre of eleven coughing or moaning children. There was no one e\*e?i to take me from room to room,

but the sick husband of the dead woman. And in this manner, varying in different degrees and details, is this scourge working havoc in so many settlements. There is no time now to stand on ceremony; I know of one helper who, having used all the prescribed medicine available, gave teaspoonfuls of weak chlorodyne and winskey to cough-racked natives. The result was rest and sleep. The Maoris, being freed from pain, thought themselves better, am! what is more did get better. The coughing can be, and especially at Tiight should be stopped. Now to adorn my tale. We must not leave to others anything that we can do ourselves. Where no skilled workers are available, let us se,-. at least that tin- Natives within a mile of us do not lack what the Natives lacked at Measly Beach. Now, too, is the time to give our money freely; to let, slide things that, just now don't count and to give our time to what does matter—the lessening of pain and the saving of human life. Soon we shall all be busy, congratulating ourselves on what we have done, forgetting too what we have 'eft undone. Never in history, least of all to-day, has sympathetic thought "cut any ice." We must turn our thoughts into action, "right action, right away."