AT WAR WITH NATURE.

Waikato Times, Volume 99, Issue 16545, 14 July 1925, Page 8

AT WAR WITH NATURE.

LIFE IN THE BACKBLOCKS.

MORTGAGES AND CARS.

How settlers in the back country of the North Island are called upon to struggle on in the face of a multitude of cares and anxieties is told by a woman in the King Country in a letter to a friend in Christchurch, says the Lyttclton Times. "Somehow it gets me down," she wries. "Once it used to be such a cheerful, go-ahead, optimistic place, everyone coming in full of hope. Now it's otherwise- There are abandoned farms everywhere. It's the curse of spreading fern and arrears of rent to ihe Government that's knocking the hearts out of so many, though most make a brave show of fighting. The fern might be fought, with money in the form of much fencing and regrassing and stocking, but there is no hope of it with a Goevrnment that thinks of nothing but rent. Even in th c worst years of the slump, when most private mortgagees bad the decency to keep ' quiet and wait patiently for their interest, Ibis Government Department was everlastingly sending out final notices, blue papers, black papers, and green papers, to people at their wits' end to know where to turn for money, and who couldn't possibly pay- All the while the newspapers were babbling about how the Government was standing by the farmers.

Very Costly.

"These places are proving very costly to break in—that is the trouble. They ought to be rent free for years and years, hot a petty four or five. Thc money saved that way could be put back in Ihe land. There will come a day when they'll be jolly glad to let anyone have the land rent free as long as it brings in some revenue to the country. I suppose they'll wake up to that fact some day, when thc present men are out and broken after putting in all their money and years of work. They arc everlastingly sending in commissions about this and that, which never seem to arrive at any helpful conclusions. The most helpful one, of course, would be to wipe out those arrears to everyone. The poor farmers didn't make the slump, after all, so why should they have to shoulder all the loss?

"Feeling Bolshie."

"Oh, dear! It makes me feci a bit Bolshie, but I hale this feeling, which oppresses one now. I used" to love this country—and still do—all the little prelty things, delicate ferns and mosses, and berries along thc banks of the road, little rushing creeks, the greenness of everything, and' the, smoky blue distances, and bclibirds' songs at dawn, as well as thc savage wildncss of it all. and the work and toil that had gone into thc semicivilising of it by the first settlers. At best;- man has a titanic struggle against nature in such places, and one hates to see nature slowly winning—especially when it is ably assisted by a penny-wise-pound-fooiish Government. Oh, dear! I could say a lot more, but will abstain."