MANUKA SMOKE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20958, 22 August 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

MANUKA SMOKE.

CAMP FIRES AND MEMORIES,

BY TULI'H H. WARD.

Yesterday 1 made one of those discoveries that bring into the ordered passing of the days the little touch of wholesome excitement which so pleasantly leavens life lived away from the busier haunts of men. Following the quiet footsteps of my custom I came, by way of a faintly marked track, down a hill slope of fern and manuka toward a road beiow. Usually my rambles take me away from roads, but yesterday 1 had gone further afield than usual and was tired. The aversion of many trarnpers to formed roads is right and proper, but I hold that their easier going may justifiably be enjoyed when weariness creeps on and one is far from home. Reaching this foot-tempting road, then, I stood for a moment's rest, and thus made my discovery. From a pine tree a few yards away a branch had been torn by a recent storm, a great branch whose main stem and offshoots alike were covered with clusters of gree.i cones. There they were in hundreds, easily accessible, awaiting the hand of the gatherer. My step became lighter as I set out for home, my mind dwelling irresistibly on future evening | fires and on plans for garnering this at ! once figurative and literal windfall. I Prehistoric man's discovery of fire-mak-ing marks one of the greatest advances in the upward progress of the race, and the gatherer of wood engages in one rf the most anicent of human tasks. In the collecting of cones this primitive necessity is, for me, transmuted into one of the pleasures of life. To-day has been enriched by it, and now from my fireplace the cones dispense a ruddy warmth and freshen the air with sweet unobtrusive incense. A pleasant smell, but no real rival to that of manuka burnt in the open, such as I enjoyed this afternoon from the fire on which I boiled my tea billy after gathering my cones into sacks. Odours of a Sweet Smell. A meditative mood is well employed in the recollection of such odours of a sweet smell. They range from the resiny perfume of pine cones to the fabled aroma of the famous mixture in Barrio's " My Lady Nicotine," and must always include the delightful tang of burning manuka. I find a whiff of this most potent of them all, both in its intrinsic pleasureableness and in its instant opening of memory. There is a peculiarly distinctive flavour, so to speak, always associated in my mind with the thin blue wisp of smoke that will rise perpendicularly, in the cool air of a calm evening, from the last charred ends of dry manuka sticks in the ashes of a camp fire. As you approach the air will suddenly be full of this delicate tang, but it is as elusive as it is characteristic, and on reaching the fire you will often find that in reaching its source you have lost it. This elusiveness might well be investigated by manufacturers of perfumes, for the mitigation of that horrid strength which many of them gain with propinquity. Somewhere there grows a wood the flavour of whose smoke strangely resembles that of dry manuka. Years ago, near Ypres, I passed by a dug-out from which an improvised chimney protruded a couple of feet above the muddy ground, end in passing caught a whiff of smoke that in one fleeting instant transported me to New Zealand. The smell of manuka smoke! So violent was the unbidden welling up of rushing memories that 1 found my eyes moist with half-shed tears. 1 have often wondered what wood it was the magic of whose burning so unceremoniously compelled my emotions. Green Leaves and Drift-wood. I cannot hope to catch the essential aroma of manuka smoke in the net of accurate description, arid to present it so that, once read, it may thereafter be recognised when experienced. But from this delicate, elusive smell of dry sticks there is to be distinguished the equally characteristic smell of the burning of green manuka foliage. Throw an armful of branches on a hot. fire and as the flames roar through the prickly leaflets you will smell their resiny pungent richness. It is a more robust and penetrating aroma than tho other. Stand facing the wind a few hundred yards in front of a scrub fire, black fragments of scorched foliage failing round you, and you have it at its best. It suggests to me the clean, gummy smell of crushed green leaves, as it has come to my nostrils on many a blazing hot summer day when T have pushed through an almost impenetrable patch of scrub.

The changes and chances of life have associated these scents of manuka smoke in my memories with the strong tang of burning drift-wood collected from a seabeach. All my boyhood holidays were spent at Mount Maunganui, where firewood calne either from the scrub which then covered the isthmus between ocean and harbour, or from the drift-wood of the Ocean Beach. Every morning during the long summer holidays we set out, towels round our necks, and padding barefooted along the crusty sand at the top of the beach kept a iookout for bits of driftwood of suitable size. The morning swim over, we hurried breakfastward, competing in a zig-zag race for tho scattered wood. The pieces were piled across our towels, by the gathered, ends of which the loads were swung over our shoulders and duly delivered at the cook-house.' Those days arc years away but a liveliness lingers in the memory of them. No walk on the Ocean Beach but found us on the return journey collecting what wood wo could carry. Some similarity in the pleasure associated with the two things links those drift-wood hunts with the cone gatherings of later years, and yesterday's discovery of the fallen pine branch has sent me, not unsuccessfully, in quest of vanished camp fires of other days. Fires on the Beach. The cook-house was a small shed, about ten feet by eight, with an open fireplace in one corner, and many a night we gathered there round a drift-wood fire. The only opening in the shed was the door. With it shut the fire smoked, with it open it smoked more. Accordingly, our evenings were spent in an atmosphere that appalled the uninitiated, but some mysterious fascination inevitably drew us from the comparative luxury of the house to immerse ourselves in the smoke of saltsoaked wood. Even now I can recall its acrid taste.

My grown-up camp fires have been lit. on the fresh-water beaches of Taupo. Here, too, is drift-wood for tho gathering. Washed up along the winter lake-levels summer finds it scattered in curving lines round the kowhai-fringed bays, sun-dried and inflammable'as no salt drift-wood can ever be. Starting a fire is thus a simple matter, and when you return to a tireless camp this is something to be grateful for. But I think it will not be accounted perversity if 1 confess that I have often longed for that smell of the salty wood. Some years ago I spent three weeks or. the western shores of the lake with friends who had also spent many days along the white sandhills of the Ocean Beach, and fished the Mold Hole in sunny hours when flood-tide brought the fish into its quiet, eddy. As wo sat one night by our friendship fire my thoughts wandered back to those younger days. Suddenly one of the others said, quietly, " I was just thinking of the Mount." The magic of the fire smoke had led us both down the same path. While there are cones to gather, manuka to burn, or camp fires to sit by when Taupo niglits grow keen, that path will invite me. Along it arc camp fires that never die and round them sit those who never grow old.