New Zealand from an Australian’s point of View.

Fair Play, Volume I, Issue 9, 30 December 1893, Page 22

New Zealand from an Australian’s point of View.

(By Henry Lawson.)

About the first thing that strikes an Australian on coming to Wellington is the quantity of alluvial soil packed up all round. It would seem as if the Lord had a lot of waste dirt left over when he finished the North Island and stacked it on this end.

Wellington looks like a good place for a workman to be in. Auckland has about it an atmosphere of conservatism not here apparent to the intelligent southern workmen’s nose, which has become sharpened to such things in these hungry times. About the first thing an Australian does in Wellington is to have a beer, then he goes to look for lodgings, falls into the hands of an unprincipled hash-house tout, and gets run into the worse “diggings” in the city; then he has another beer. New Zealand beer is far superior to the stuff we get in Australia. Wellington pubs, have generally two or three openings on to the bar ; if you go in the front door you pay Bd. or 4d., if you go in through the side entrance it costs you 6d. for the same drink, and if you go into the private bar you pay 6d., and it costs you about 15s. in the end. If you stay out you get thirsty. Some of these things puzzle Australians.

It is said that there is less drunkenness over here than in Australia, but we think that there’s just as much drinking going on, in comparison, and more gambling connected with it. You seldom see the dice-box in Sydney bars. The Sydneyite drinks to get boozed and happy, not to gamble. Wellington has a good harbour, bold scenery, splendid climate, and perhaps the most Liberal Government and the biggest wooden building in the world. The Government will make the biggest blunder, by-and-bye, and the building would make the biggest fire. Wellington is also the seat of the National Joke of New Zealand, for New Zealand has a national joke. So has Scotland. The Scotch joke, which is “We are nae foo,” has been immortalized by Burns and also by a Bulletin poet—- “ Banjo ” —who says : “ Gude faith, they made the whusky fly Like hielan’ chief tans true,

And when they’d drained the beaker dry, They sang we ai’e nae foo.”

They sang the only Scottish joke which is “ We are nae foo.”

The National Joke of New Zealand, which has not been immortalized yet, is that you can always tell a Wellingtonian by the way in which he grabs for his hat when going round a corner. Sometimes you hear it on the boat coming over; the boarding house runners tell it you as soon as you step ashore; men to whom you have letters of introduction will fire it at you as soon as they decently can ; chance drinking acquaintances will tell you; perfect strangers will take you aside and try the damned old joke on you; and, if you meet an old friend over

here, you will find him bursting to introduce you to the National Joke of New Zealand.

Another thing that strikes a new chum is the way the footpaths are half-paved. There are flags from the kerb to a line ■running along the centre of the path, and the rest is gravel. The stranger is told that the Council agreed to pave one half, if the ratepayers did [the other. The city fathers fulfilled their part of the contract, but the respected citizens didn’t come up to time: they declined to shell out. They walked on the paved half and chuckled.

The harbour and city are in a basin which looks like the bed of an old crater —and it’s to be hoped it don’t blow up. The hills have the advantage of not reminding an “ Othersider,” vaguely, yet painfully, of some other hills that he has seen somewhere before. There ought to be more rock cropping out in those hills. There’ll be a landslip some day in the vicinity of Wellington—and Auckland too, for that matter—and a good many respected townsmen and their families will be buried before they’re ready. ■ Boys in knickerbockers, and tall strapping girls of fourteen, and intelligent women, and earthquakes are peculiar to Wellington. There have been four earthquakes since a friend of mine has been here, and he says the fun of it is that he didn’t feel any one of ’em. But, then, he’s a solid citizen in every sense of the word, and it would take a good oldfashioned earthquake to shake him up to any considerable extent. There are no earthquakes now-a-days like there were when our grandmother was a girl. At least she says not. We only feel the weak dying kicks of the volcanic age, with a last convulsive kick now and again—like the one up at the terraces lately. - But there is always a chance of the earth yawning and swallowing Welling,ton, together with the biggest wooden building in the world, the women’s franchise, the most Liberal Government, the National Bank and the National Joke of New Zealand—and E. M. Smith with his jam tins full of sand and cement. What a chance it would be for that gentleman to study minerology—if he survived.

There is always a likelihood v of New Zealand cities being taken into the bowels of the “ yearth;” and, therefore, we would suggest more churches, and more people going to them oftener, and more Sunday schools, and less cricket and cigarettes for the boys in knickerbockers, and more prayers said generally and less dice boxes in pubs. Up on the top of the hills behind the city there is good scenery, a good view, and a pretty little town called Wadestown. A Sydney man tramped up there on a hot day, and struggled through the heat and dust until a thirsty voice from the bottom of his soul cried out aloud for a long shandy. Then he reached Wadestown, and made for the Post and Telegraph Office under the impresssion that it was a pub. But his companion told

him that the town was called “ Prohibition town,” and explained that the name was a joke which was kept on hand to relieve the National Joke .when the National Joke got tired and wanted a spell—a sort of relief-duty joke in fact. He further explained that the National Joke would die if it didn’t have a rest now and again.

But the name of the town wasn’t a joke, and the Sydney man was so disgusted that he packed up his traps and took the next boat back to Sydney. He should have gone out to Kaiwarra first. The Botanical Gardens, Wellington, are a relief after the painfully artificial gardens of Sydney. There’s an Australian emu up there somewhere, but we couldn’t find him. We would like to have had a yarn with him—for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. But perhaps he’s dead.

They say that an Australian wrote recently to one of your local papers complaining about the way in which the emu was lodged and fed. He said that he objected to a native of his country being treated like that. A blackfellow, a kangaroo, or an emu can always find a big place in the heart of the Australian abroad.

But there is a fountain in Wellington with a little trough on each side for the dogs to drink at, and a town that’s good to dogs can’t be such a bad, hard-hearted place, after all. Over in Sydney the dogs have to take their chance for a drink, and are sometimes driven by thirst to sneak in behind bars and lap up the droppings from beer engines. This demoralizes ’em.

We might as well state, for the benefit of outsiders, that Wellington is mostly built of wood, because of the earthquakes —or rather the fear of them. But a good many brick buildings are going up round now, (the Times Office for instance) and things are getting nicely ready for a big sensation when the next volcanic kick comes. We wouldn’t advise New Zealand papers to build their offices of brick—because they are the most unprincipled pirates on the face of the earth.

This reminds us that the last big earthquake here happened when Wellington was born. It raised the settlement four feet and the hair of the population as high as it would go, • They got on board the only ship in the harbour, intending to go away, but there came a big tidal wave which washed the ship up on the beach and wrecked her. So the people had to stop. They “ batched” together in the wreck for a while, or until someone said they might as well go home. So it might appear that Wellington owed its origin to a tidal wave. The Wellington Museum is interesting and the Maori carvings less startling to the modest stranger than those in Auckland. But there are a lot of things outside the Wellington Museum that ought to be in; and—and, well we don’t believe in that big fossil egg. We’ve studied the bones of the extinct New Zealand fowl, guessed her size, and compared it with the size, of the egg, but we couldn’t swallow it. There

is a cast of a foreign egg in the same museum, and it mates us wild to think that anyone (except an Australian) had the cheek to lay such a big lie in New Zealand,

In conclusion, Oh, men of Wellington! Your literary men are good sorts and just aboiit as sinful as their brothers in any part of the world; your artists are promising, ambitious young fellows, and I’m sorry to hear that their ideas and style are paralyzed, or stolen to such an extent by men like Hopkins and. Phil May; your scenery is a relief, after Australia; your climate good; your leading men are liberal, broad minded men, and your action with regard to your women has immortalized the land and will, perhaps, revolutionise the world —only you don’t seem to know it. Aid now, if you only put the Upper House and a few other things into the National Museum, and cease to blow about the big wooden humpy, and abolish the National Joke—and provided you don’t get taken into the bowels of the earth by a ’quake—you stand a grand chance to lead the nations.