Cabbage Tree Swamp

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21462, 8 April 1933, Page 4 (Supplement)

Cabbage Tree Swamp

60 YEARS AGO ■ i 4 By GRANDAD MASON, 88 Granw Road. How many of yon children have been living in Cabbage Swamp without knowing it! When I, now a grandfather, came to Auckland with my parents, there was an old gentleman, Corporal Gladding, who had served in the army in India, and had come with the 63rd Regiment to Auckland to help to fight the Maori, whose time, forty years, was up. He had a pension, but he had just lost his wife, and the pension was not enough to keep his six children, now the housekeeper was gone. My father could give him no money, but once he took him a bunch of onions, to serve for a while, and they became fast friends. Mr. Gladding leased a 40-acre paddock, full of stones, to make a dairy farm in what is now Owairaka. The tram now runs past it, but the road was then bo bad and uneven that when he took the milk to town at four o'clock on dark winter mornings the water would often be up to the axle-trees of his cart. At Christmas, my father, who knew that a bit of hard work was just the thing for his rather spoilt boy of ten, after a year shut up in school, would pack me off to the farm for the holidays. There were, of course, the cows to be milked twice a day, but I was of no use for that, except to help bring them home. But at six we were all up and at work. After breakfast our usual v.'ork was, with crowbar, pick and spade, to pry up the stones, many of them heavier than ourselves, and sunk deep in the ground. There were several piles of these, perhaps fifteen feet high, but thousands more had to be shifted.

There were potatoes to be harvested. Five of us boys and two girls, not counting Bruno, the Newfoundland dog, followed the plough, and bent our backs, picking them up in' buckets, and bagging them. At night time I reckoned up how far we Jbad tramped, and mind, we sank at each step up to our ankles in the dusty volcanic soil. I made it twelve miles. But working in company, with a bit of fun thrown in occasionally, and the help of some oatmeal and water, we managed it without grumbling. When haymaking came, just before Christmas, we were busier and hotter than ever. We had to turn the hay and pile it into haycocks, finally stacking it to feed th 9 cows in winter when grass was short.

Just before Christmas the hardest of the work could be dodged for a while, and there were enough of us to have two or three days of sports. They were very simple, races on the flat and in sacks, jumping, and, above all, bobbing for apples. But what fun we made of it. What appetites we had been getting ready for the Christmas good fare. After a fortnight of such work and fun it was time for me to return home, and very proud was I when Corporal Gladding, before taking me home, in his milkcart, gave me two shillings, the first money that I had ever earned. Let rSe finish this story by saying that when I was playing damming up a gutter not far from the Town Hall I found a nugget, which was sold for 12s 6d. I must not tell you where the gutter was, for your mothers do not; like you to play in gutters, and besides, I am sure, there are no more nuggets there now. You don't know what a nugget is ? It is a lump o[ pure gold.. There is plenty of gold in the hills at the Thames, and when you are men, if you have nothing else to do, you might ,do than to look for it there, unless your fathers find it all before you are grown up.