WHANANAKI.

Northern Advocate, 21 August 1913, Page 3

WHANANAKI.

August 16

The recent warm rains are having a beneficial effect on the pastures. Young grass of last autumn's sowing is looking extremely well, being over a foot high in some places.

Housebreakers and petty thieves have been having a high time in this district of late. They are certainly not experts at the game, but evidently it requires experts to catch them.

The Auckland Farmers' Union held their annual spring cattle fair here on August 2. A good number of cattle of all sorts came forward. Owing to the severe drought experienced here for many months condition in most lots was wanting, but nearly all were quitted with satisfaction to the vendors.

The epidemic has been allowed full swing here, and until this week no trouble has been taken by the health authorities to investigate the many cases reported by the local school teachers. It is now a case of locking the stable door too late for the whole of the native population is, or has been, down with the disease, and in some cases it has been very severe. It is now the pakeha's turn. Several are infected already, but no effort is being made to prevent it spreading.

Steadily but surely new settlersy are coming to the district. A block/ of over 800 acres of good land at Lees Bay has been taken up by Mr. B. Rockel, of Mangaweka, King Country. Mr Rockel :is a practical backblocks farmer, and will be a decided acquisition to the place. He intends making a start in clearing land for a homestead next month, but will not bring his family here until the new year.

Whangarei and Hikurangl have both carried taxing unimproved values, and by the time of the next county elections 90 per cent, of the settlers will be ready to do likewise. We have heard several discussions at various meeting places of the farmers, and one thing that always strikes one as peculiar is that those against the proposal are men who own large blocks with little or no improvements thereon. That under our present system settlers are not doing good work on their holdings is true. One has only to travel a little way to prove this. In this district very little is being done at present in the way of improvements for the reason 'that a new valuation is about to be made for rating purposes, nor will there be until rating on unimproved values is carried. Before the new valuation was announced one settler had got the blocks in and had ordered timber to build a first-class house. Some bushfellers came along and told him they had been knocked off their job of CalUng 200 acres of bush, the owner giving them as his reason that this new valuation would mean an increase of rates for him v he put his land into grass, but not to his next neighbour, who was selling all his totara timber off his land and bleeding his kauri trees for gum—he would probably get a reduction as his property was decreasing in value. This was an eye-opener to this hard-toiling settler. The blocks now stand as they were, looking like a squad of dead marines. The order for th«> timber has been cancelled, and tho would-be progressive settler is now to be seen fishing for eels or gathering fungus in the bush.