FRINGES OF TRUTH

Southland Times, Issue 18969, 16 June 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

FRINGES OF TRUTH

BURIED SOUTHLAND.

(By

“Rufus.”)

To-day there are few people, who ever take up geology as a hobby, evidently for fear of incurring the stigma of pedantry which is so much dreaded in this smart and commercialised age. Another objection to geology is, I suppose, that it is neither useiu! nor remunerative and therefore not to be considered beside radio and politics. Yet geology is really a science apart, neither ary nor prosiac, not confined within the four walls of a malodorous laboratory and not requiring a vast and expensive array of cumbersome apparatus. But its best feature is that it is essentially an open air pastime that can be taken up or dropped at will. And moreover it has a peculiarly broadening and widening effect on the mind, for in the eye of geology the apparently solid landscape is something transient and fleeting, an element that rises and falls and is tossed about with the easy mutability of the waves of the ocean, while time is computed in spans of a million years much to the horror of orthodox religion. The history of these eruptive changes is told from the imprint of a leaf in a piece of slate or a fossilised shell in a piece of limestone.

Southland is an ideal field for the geologist, by reason of its varied rock formations, some of which are among the oldest in the world. The petrifeed forest at Waikawa is, of course, widely known, perhaps even more so abroad than in Southland. Here the action of the sea has stripped off the upper layers of rock and laid bare the remains of a forest that has been entombed in the silt of some bygone age. The whole beach is littered with silicified logs, some of them over fifty feet long, lying just ,as they fell aeons of years ago. Most of them have the smooth, even ends of logs that have been sawn off. Here and there the stumps of giant fern trees jut out of the sand, so life-like that they might have been growing yesterday. A freshly broken piede of the rock is perfect in every detail and shows clearly the grain and texture of the original wood. The slaty rock that encloses some of the trunks splits easily and shows the clear imprint of numerous leaves, some of them ferns, others bearing a resemblance to the birch of to-day. The locality is certainly unique in New Zealand and is visited every year by scientists from the Old. Country and from America. Deposits of limestone are also of frequent occurrence and apart from their commercial value they are of particular interest from the fact that they abound in relics of the maritime life of the past. The lime quarry at Browns yields a particularly varied assortment of shells of every size and form. Some are small and fragile and bear a faint resemblance to the mussel that is found on the beaches to-day, while others are fan shaped and nearly a foot across. As a rule the state of preservation is perfect and after, the limestope has been scraped off they look as if they had just been picked up on a beach. In some cases, however, the terrific pressure of the rock masses has acted unevenly,, and the shells are crushed and twisted out of all recognition Thb -limestone cliffs and caves that are such a prominent feature of the scenery in the Waiau district, near Clifden are of still greater interest as they embody the remains of the larger fish life which infested the prehistoric seas. With the aid of a cold chisel one may extract sharks teeth over two inches long, still quite smooth and sharp, Protruding from the rock in all directions one sees peculiarly shaped bones and large pieces of vertebra, evidently the remains of some sea-mammal. But apart from their scientific interest the limestone caves of the Waiau district are very fine from a scenic point of view, the stalictite forms being in some cases particularly well developed. One or two of the caves are noted for their extreme length and are reputed to pass right under the Waiau river itself.

The coalfields of Southland and especially those of the Nightcaps district yield a rich store of fossils and plant impressions. In the coal itself one finds lumps of resinous gum about the size of a cricket ball that have evidently been formed in the forks of trees. The strata above the coal usually contains the twigs and leaves of the trees and also an, assortment of fresh-water shells that evidently flourished in some bygone age. But for remains of a more recent interest the collector could not find a beter fidld of investigation than the low lying stretch of sandhills that extend between the Oreti river estuary and the Riverton beach. On a casual inspection nothing could be more uninteresting that this tumbled waste of sand with every hillock crowned with a fringe of tussocks tossing forlornly in the wind. Yet after each gale has shifted the jands a wealth of hidden treasure is uncovered. Here and there heaps of reddish, burnt stones appear, unmistakable traces of Maori ovens. The fortunate wanderer, probing among the ashes and fish bones that tell of early feasts will come upon fragments of rudely chipped rock and perhaps even a properly polished chisel. There is a legend to the effect that a battle once occurred in this vicinity and in support of this a man once showed me a human skull that he had found under a sandhill. The top of the head had a rather fine stone axe sticking in it. The finder of this relic assured me that he had shSwn the skull to experts and some of them inclined to the opinion that’it was (he skull of a Moriori, the race that came to New Zealand before the Maoris. But the region is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it abounds with the remains of that problematic bird the moa. Every few yards or so one comes upon heaps of white quartz pebbles about the size of a pea which arc supposed to have been used by the moa as crop-stones. This may or may not be so, but it is at least a fact that under each of these heaps one finds some part of the bird’s skeleton. Some of the bones run to an astounding size, the lower leg bones being frequently over a yard long and thick in proportion. The large bone known usually as the “saddle,” that forms the back of the bird, is sometimes as thick as a man’s body. It is also interesting to note that in many cases the bones are found in a charred condition in the Maori ovens, a circumstance which calls to mind that ancient controversy as to whether the Maori was the contemporary of the moa, which space will hot permit to be discussed here. Enough that Southland is not the prosiac and commonplace province that some would have us believe. Under its damp and sometimes muddy. surface lie the relics of strange and romantic past that is written for whoever would regd in the rocks and mutable sands.