THIS NORTHLAND OF OURS

Northern Advocate, 5 January 1938, Page 6

THIS NORTHLAND OF OURS

(By Rena id Vine.)

There passed through Whangarei yesterday Mr Ronald Vine, a freelance journalist, of Papatoeioe, who, since Christmas, has been holidaying in Far Northern fields familiar to him. His father, Mr H. G. Vine, was headmaster of the Te Hapua Native School for the 10 years ending 1922.

For the “Advocate” Mr Vine employed his facile pen in depicting the atmosphere and spirit of Northland.

John Mansfield tells the story, he writes, of a certain man who was about to be hanged. On the day before that on which the execution was to take place, a kindly warder approached him and asked if he had not one last request that might be granted. The man pondered the suggestion and then said; “Well, what about learning the violin?” Could I say what I think about the North? Well, yes, but not in a few hundred words, or many hundred, or many thousands. A volume might touch the fringe of the subject, but this peninsula north of Auckland is too wide a scene to be taken in at a glance.

Shuttle of Magic Loom. It is the shuttle of a magic loom that gathers the threads that make a nation —the sparkling threads of history and romance, the tenuous threads of legend and mythology, the golden threads of grim endeavour and the travail of men at grips with nature — nature first kind, and then cruel, nature here in prodigality, there in parsimony—and weaves of them a splendid fabric —splendid like homespun, not spectacular, but beautiful and strong. Gumlands Transformed,

In the North I have watched operating an industry that is unique in all the world. Kauri gum from the hills and valleys of the North is an inestimably valuable heritage of the people of New Zealand, and after half a century hundreds of thousands of pounds still lie beneath her swamps and hillsides, always ready for the harvesting. And the Northern gumiands—folk south of Auckland talk a little sardonically of the “poor northern gumlands”—indeed, a Minister of the Crown, whose specialty was agriculture. once said that a certain area was “not worth a shilling an acre." A day or two ago I went there and stood on richly pastured hillsides, while a splendid herd nearby made gold from grass.

Once timber was New Zealand's greatest industry, and you can't talk to a timberman of the old school in any part of New Zealand who has not known the mills and forests of the North. On New Zealand’s biggest waterway, where the ghosts of great timber ships meet from the corners of the earth, I stood by rotting piles where >men still living can remember five tall ships abreast and stacks c-f a million feet of timber.

Well, the piles are well rotted now, and the ships there are only ghosts, but the good earth whose forests men have swept away is grown rich again with gras?, New Zealand’s green gold. Gold From Grass.

Grass is bringing more than wealth to the people cf the North. Grass is a magic carpet that will usher in a new era of beauty. No practical man will labour the subject of the farmer’s

privilege—how he is always near to Nature, and how his husbandry is of the things that are truly beautiful and enduring—all this is already prone to ‘too much lip service, as a well-known agricultural man has lately said, but the people of the North are truly privileged. They have a job cf work to do. and a powerful spur to their endeavours in the certain knowledge that, while the barren hillside of a gumfield may bo an unlovely thing, a green field is beautiful in every way.