The Auckland-Taranaki Connection.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 11340, 5 October 1898, Page 3

The Auckland-Taranaki Connection.

[By a Settler.] There is one aspect of the burning question — " the battle of the routes"— which has been almost overlooked : the only Berious reference to it baying been made in the Herald and Budget in one or two articles recently, and it is of such •vial importance to Taranaki that an old hand offers no apology for enlarging ami dwe ling on the subject - for he has seen the sun rise and sot in many parts ot New Zealand, and in many land?, and he knows " The Garden of New Z aland " from Dan to Beersheba, and from east to west. The point is this : If Taranaki were Wise, the railway wouM be left in abeyance for the time being, and a good metalled road " gone for," with good side roads to tap pdjoiuing country. For a good road means good times for the settlers in breeding horses, growing horse feed, and feeding travelling stock; good times for blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and other industries connected with waggon and horse traffic; good times for local storekeepers and for country towns. "While a railway means that everything will be pulled to either Auckland or "Wellington ; means that the country towns will be literally (not figuratively, snuffed ont; means for the conntry storekeepers that the furnace of competition will be heated to seven times; and means for a town like Stratford that, twelve months after the through traffic by rail is established with Auckland, one of the dow most promising towns in New Zealand will be languishing. Thi3 is no dreaming. Anyone who has seen the progress of the railways in New Zealand for the last 25 years knows that over and over again country towns and country districts have been spoiled. No doubt other advantages to the colony have resulted from the railways : the big centres have piospered. Auckland and Wellington business men know very well what the railway would mean for them— let them hive it, by Napier if they like. Taranaki can very well do without it for the next iwenty years. Let the result of through railway traffic in -other parts of New Zealand be' a lesson, and let the experiment be tried of opening up the country by good roads, tnti the railway will follow as a natural consequence in the course of time. Some of the best pnblic men New Zealand ever load advocated spending the money on good roads and bridges instead of railways, and who now, with 25 years' experience of country districts, will 3ay that these men were wrong ? Taranaki has now got the chance to pass a vote iv favour of roads and bridges versus the railway, and if she does she will never regret it How far would £250,000 go in roading Feranaki ? It would finith the Ohura Boad from Stratford to the point of connection, with the Auckland railway south of Mokao, and make two other roads of equal length. It wou.d open up Crown lands for settlement which a railway would only touch the fringe of, and it .would inaugurate a grand policy of making the roads first, and then offeis lDg the land for settlement. It is not too much to Bay that the policy hitherto followed so closely of offering land for settlement first, and miking the road afterwards, has just blasted settlement in Taianati. 'Desirable settlers will not take op land where they have to face a bog hole of a road for eight months of the year. During th<- past seven years scores of men \uth means and experience have come to Taianaki with a view to settling, and one look at the roads in the back blocks in winter time has been enough for them, and they have gone elsewhere. Does the general pnblic know what a cuTsa th< se awful bush roads have been to Taranaki ? Oh ! for the " ready pen ' to tell them It would take a dozen three-volume books to fill in the awiul, sickening details — the outrage these roads have been on man and beast. One illustration from our district will give some idea of what those horrors hive been, and are to-day : — When the Government started the Whangamomona Improved Farm Settlement, more than three years ago, 42 to 50 miles out from Stratford, fitty - four packhorses were killed the first winter, and packing cost about £12 per ton. Mark, this is no exaggeration, I and many others, counted the carcases. By way of explanation, one storekeeper said that it was impossible for him to pack horse feed on 30 miles of a bnsh track, and he had no choice but to let the horses work till they dropped on the road side. He said he bitterly regretted the cruelty, but he was not to blame, the settlers were there felling their bubh and must be fed. Could any language be too strong which would denounce all this. Where were the representatives of the Humane Society? I In the' town piiocipally, seeing that men Were fined who drove horses with a collar sore about the size of a half a- crown. There are hundreds of men in Taranaki to-day who will tell the settlers of ten years' experience thjt he does not know whet bad roads are.* They bay "You ought to have been here in the sixties or earJy.in the seventies." -md what have you business men of th&tawns to Bay to this — you, who tell us settlers to go away oucinto the bath and carve, out homes for ourselves. How far would £250,000 go in building a railway ? This quarter of a million which would, if expended on roads, set Taranaki on its legs. Will the business men of the town come forward and lead the way and get up meetings to endeavor to have the country opened up by roads before settlement. It is the case, that in the matter of the sort of country for making ioadt>, Taranak: is different -.from, man j parts of New Zealand. In the South Island, for instance, tracks can be used till thj roads are made ; but here a road is never a road till it is metalled. Ai;d then iC roads are ma c first, desirable settlers will simply rush I the land, and " the Garden of New Z. aland" will go ahead by leaps and bounds. _ The province has made wonderful \ progress in the last seven years ; but lee no one point to th.it and say " we are getting on VBry well without a roads before settlement policy." The fact h that progress has been made in the face of overwhelming difficulties which only Angio-^axon pluck and endurance could have hurmounted. In the da}s to come, when people have time to pau-e and look buck, the deeds of our hush settlers will rank with " the deeds that won the Empire," we have heard so much of recently in the English magazines. J^lfc has been a wanton waste of the- life and energy of man and beast ; and in actual money the price of good roids has been paid twice over — paid in carriage of -goods. When it is said that carriage on ' the Ohura Road, to the Wbangamomona, three years ago, cost about £12 per tou, it must be admitted as fairly cheap, considering the we <x and tear, and it would have been twice and three times as much had' there not been a large number of settlers to serve— about 200, counting women and children. The Milsom and Tanner settlers on the Junction Boad (who will be referred to more fully in aLOther article) 20 to 27 miles out from from the railway, paid as much, at odd times, as 28s ptr iOOlbs for packing from loglewood. And then the labour expended in " swaggirg ' tucker ; no one who has not h cii it, or gone through it, can realise it. Many of us have seen the women and children swagging tucker, as well as the men. ■**. Only the faintest murmur has reached the outside public, for the bush settlers are a long suffering people. They go into the bueh like the British soldier on the field of battle, and just as it has been said of the British Infantry, " they will die on the field before they will lose it," so it is with the bush settlers. And from their very position in the bush, they are unable, to any extent, to gee together and hold meetings and form a ring, to bring pressure to bear on the , powers that ba. The appeal, therefore, v mide to basiaess men to lead, and to push the question of roads to a successful

< issue. As to the matter of metal, ihere need be no anxiety ; the deposits of shell rook and limestone in the province will be referred to later on ; sufficient now to remind our readers that the cry .about suitable metal for roads in Taranaki has been almost continuous), yet when conntry came to be opened up and bush felled, shell rock (the very best of metal) has been found, and gravel deposits also. Take Toko, for instance. What a complain t came from Toko, and now we bear of people advocating the railway so as to use the grent shell-rock deposits of Toko for metalling the Ohura Road. I have no hesitation in saying that if shell rock has to be hauled six miles for metalling the Ohura Road, it will be the very utmost distance necessary, and the strong probability is - not even so much as that. And now as to the value, the worth of this country we propose to road before settling. The very first thought which will occur is : If the land will stand the gVeat expense of roads following settlement it will "boom" under the kinder policy. There has been many a sneer levelled at the "garden" from other parts of the colony, and it will not be out of place, here and now, to meet this criticism, and say a word for the " goodly heritage" we possess — for it is a goodly heritage. Take the official returns of the number of stock in proportion to the amount of land in cultivation, aad the amount of produce exported as per head of the population, there is no other part of New Zealand to compare with Taranaki. The reason is that there is practically no waste country in the province (will be none when the bush is down). Taking sheep as a standard, the average i 3 now close on three sheep to the acre. Contract this with the Auckland province, for instance, where it is not a question of how much waste countiy there is, but how much wilderness which won t feed anything to the acre. No doubt there is not in Taranaki any contilerable amount of the rich grain growing land of Canterbury and Otagp, but we have some of the finest, if not the finest, grazing land for both cattle and sheep in New Zealand ; and Canterbury and Otsgo have the setoff of trillions of acres which averages four and five acres to one sheepf and millions of acres of rugged hill tops which do not carry stock at all, and never will. It is as a grazing and a wool and butter producing country that Taranaki will, in the years to come as it doex now, hold its own, acre for acre, against the world ; and also in carrying a big population, for it is a land of flawing streams, good well-sheltered river flats, a soil that is < ininently suited to the country's position with regard to the rain, and moisture blown over from the tropics — it neither gets over-charged with wes (the drainage is good)noryetdoea it suffer in dry seasons as the land suffers in other parts of New Zealand—the atmosphere penetrates the ground to a good depth carrying moisture with it. Perhaps to the grass producing qualities of the land is due, in a great measure, the name " The Garden of New Zealand.", At least it is owing to the fresh and green appearance of the pastures that the name is keft up by outsiders, for many a weary traveller has been refreshed with a sight of green' grass iv summer when Auckland and Welling ton and the South Island have been suffering from a dry " • pell," Some time ago a prominent American had a lun through Taranaki, he is known to many of our readers — Yankee-like he said, " Ihey have a grand country hero but they don't know i\" « And so we want this gracd country opened up by roads, and we want first the Ohura Road formed, bridged, and metalled to the present terminus of the Auckland railway. £85,000 would complete it, may be 'less. Notb the position of the road on the map ; just the place for a great main arterial road running north and south through the length of Taranaki and right in che heart of the land, and placed so as to be at the very beßt advantage in taking in the traffic from Bide roads ost and west— .with the Wanganui River away to the west on Taranaki's furthest boundary ; which, with its branches which the road crosses in itß course northward, will be feeders for the road. It is beyond doubt now that the Wanganni cannot compete with the road. But this matter of the river carriage will be dealt with in another article. -.' An i now, commencing at Stratford, we will follow the Ohura Road, taking stock, en route, of the land, the settlement?, and all that makes this road now of such importance to laranaki. But before we start, just one word for Stratford. We settlezs are proud of Stratford. Yesterday, almost, she was but a roadside-pub-township, where one might get bogged in the main street ; to day she is a gooiaized country town with a great amount of " go " about her, and a general look as if she meant it, with two newspapers published alternate days, and many other etcetera&wbiehrepresentastateof flourishing progress ; and to-morrow, it is! sai 1, she will be the largest inland town in ew Zealand. Stratford is a credit to Tarauiki and the colony. The Bite is good, and Broadway- street is one of the best laid out streets in New Zealand.