290 TUTIRA 



to Petane it consisted of a narrow line of clay blinding superposed on 

 loose shingle. From Petane, still following the general line of the 

 coast, drays could be taken to Tangoio over natural flats and strips 

 of sand, except when after heavy weather the pressure of lagoon water 

 had burst the beach and temporarily blocked all wheel traffic. From 

 Tangoio for two miles a switch-back riding-track sprawled over the 

 hills roughly parallel to the sea. At First Fence the way degenerated 

 into a trail faintly marked by the Tutira pack- team. 



About the early 'nineties, however, Government determined on 

 a dray-road to connect Napier and Gisborne. Natural difficulties of 

 the more formidable sort were attacked simultaneously in many sectors, 

 swamps were drained, cuttings blasted and picked out of ravines and 

 gorges. Within a short period the road -line became open after a fashion 

 to riders and pack-teams, with the completion of six-feet cuttings aliens 

 began to move inland in larger numbers, with cuttings widened into 

 fully-formed sections of dray-road they reached us yet faster. Traffic 

 increased enormously, contractors' camps sprang up along the route, 

 pack-teams multiplied, a weekly mail-coach was subsidised by Govern- 

 ment. Finally, almost the whole of the stock traffic that had formerly 

 followed the coastal pack -trail was diverted ; the invasion of the station 

 by road weeds was facilitated and accelerated by vast mobs of cattle 

 and sheep that poured themselves along the new road. A living 

 stream flowed through the whole length of the run from both north 

 and south. 



There remain to be recorded the chief recruiting-grounds, con- 

 valescent camps, cities of refuge, and multiplication centres of our 

 pedestrian weeds. To begin with, all of them have reached the 

 Dominion through one port or another. Most of the Tutira settlers 

 have of course disembarked at Napier, or, as it used to be called, 

 " Scinde Island," within the memory of man an isolated block of several 

 hundred acres connected with the mainland, north and south, by 

 shingle spits. Long prior to my arrival Napier had been thickly set 

 with gardens and orchards ; there were broad spaces, too, of beach, 

 dumping-grounds for ballast, waste lands along the railway track and 

 along roadsides, and wildernesses of reclaimed ground. Every such 

 spot maintained its wild alien. 



Scinde Island then, twenty-eight miles distant, was the first and 

 foremost of the spots where weeds have germinated and multiplied ere 



