FIFTY YEARS AGO

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22694, 5 April 1937, Page 6

FIFTY YEARS AGO

SETTLERS IN THE NORTH' The conditions in the farming industry in the North 50 years ago are revealed in a paragraph in the Xew Zealand Hebald of April 5, 1887, as follows: — ''During his trip northward, the Minister of Mines, the Hon. Mr. Larnach, does not seem, judging from some remarks that have fallen from him, to have been very impressed with the energy and agricultural industry of some of the Northern settlers. After leaving Whangarei, he and his party had for the most part in their travels in the country districts to subsist on preserved meats and Swiss preserved milk. It is hard to say what he would have thought or said had he known that at one Northern settlement they fried Canterbury bacon, spread their bread with Taranaki butter, fed their horses with oats shipped from land, and imported a Chinaman to raise vegetables for the hotels of the ioraship. It was apologetically esptad to Mr Larnach that the Northern settlers lived among a native population whose indolent ways were catdiuig, and that the former could not be expected, under a seductive and semitropical climate, to work as hard as their brethren in the cold, bracing air of Otago, where they had to moT# around to keep themselves'warm.